MITPressLog

Talking Innovation

The OpenBusiness blog posted an interview with Eric von Hippel, author of Democratizing Innovation.  They discussed how corporations are making use of  new user-centered innovation to improve the design and manufacturing of new products and services.  In the interview, von Hippel describes what the democratization of innovation means for traditional business models and how larger corporations can adopt the practices of smaller ones to get ahead:

OB: In your book you highlight that the modus operandi of businesses is changing and give as an example Open Source development. And even though it seems a great example of democratized innovation the question remains how business models work, if the core product – software – is distributed for free. What will drive innovation in this space?

Eric von Hippel: I think in the first place motivations are non-commercial. Users who innovate do so basically because they have a need that they cannot fill with available commercial products. Their major reward is the in-house use of what they have developed and recognition by their peers. Innovators in the open-source field gain reputation by publicly reporting their innovations. Its true the core product is free, but its wrong to assume that this means there is no economic activity. Just look at the case of the Apache server, which is used by major corporations. They pay developers to participate in the process, because they benefit from the product. To put it differently: economic activity moves from the Microsoft layer – controlling every step in the development and distribution process in a closed way – to the Open Source or Linux layer. It is still economic activity, just the business models are different.

The entire interview can be read here.

Art Meets Science

You have to wonder why, on a recent trip to MIT to give a lecture, radical poet/performance artist Vito Acconci visited the offices of many of the institutes engineers and scientist.  And why was he asking about "dynamically reconfigurable" buildings, 3-D structures, and small-batch production techniques?  None of this seems to have anything to do with his art, or his soon-to-be-published book, Language to Cover a Page.  In a recent Fast Company article, Ted Smalley Bowen looks into Acconci's visit to MIT.  It seems he and a few other members of Acconci Studio designs, a collective of architects and designers who work to create spaces and buildings using ideas and designs originated by Acconci, wanted to collaborate with some of the brightest minds at MIT. Bowen looks at how their unique styles blended together, providing some interesting results:

Acconci Studio designs spaces for clients ranging from the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority to a Tokyo boutique. But in the '60s and '70s, Acconci made his body the focus of his work, in one piece biting himself, inking the tooth marks, and making prints.

You'd expect a disconnect between an out-there conceptual artist-designer and archetypal straight-ahead engineers and scientists. But Acconci has morphed into something of a chief creative officer, working through and with more conventionally trained designers. For its part, MIT may be the most entrepreneurial and interdisciplinary university around. So Samir Nayfeh, an associate professor of mechanical engineering who has collaborated with artists before, had no trouble relating. Acconci and company picked his brain on advanced weaving technologies to turn out 3-D structures and on small-batch production techniques that could allow designers to create their own custom materials.

Being a Successful Voice Interface Comedian

Humor has been underutilized in voice interface design.  However, designers should not blithely include witticisms: jokes are powerful and must be used judiciously.  Many types of humor have huge downsides. 

[snip]

No joke will be universally loved.  What happens when, despite rewriting and testing, jokes fall short?  Research by John Morkes directly tested this by creating additional interfaces with known unsuccessful innocent jokes.  Although people wrote more negative comments (called "flames") to the computer that provided bad jokes than to the computer that provided no jokes, no negative effects were observed on user's performance, effort, or perceptions of the interface.  Hence, the risk of failure is not as large as the benefits of success.

How can ineffective jokes be avoided?  If there was an easy answer to this question, everyone could be a successful comedian.  Nevertheless, here are some useful guidelines from Vktor Raskin:

• Give exactly as much information as is necessary for the joke.
• Say only what is compatible with the world of the joke.
• Say only what is relevant to the joke.
• Tell the joke efficiently.
• Avoid jokes that are highly dependent on timing, as many users may have divided attention.

Books of jokes can be effective.  Many of them are organized by topic, enabling the designer to select a joke to fit gracefully into the interaction. It is also useful to remember that jokes that were considered overused in a given generation may seem startlingly original for a new generation.

- Excerpted from Wired for Speech: How Voice Activates and Advances the Human-Computer Relationship by Clifford Nass and Scott Brave. A previous excerpt can be found here.

Learning from Bob and Denise

It looks like Slavoj Zizek is not the only MIT Press author finding fame on the big screen.  James Venturi from Light from Light Films is producing Learning from Bob and Denise, a feature-length documentary exploring the complex and contradictory world of his parents, the architects, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. 

In the 1960s, their rule-breaking architecture and the theories espoused in Complexity and Contradiction and Learning from Las Vegas shocked the architectural establishment.  Still controversial today, their work at VSBA has profoundly directed architectural thought in the later half of the twentieth century.  Alternately vilified and idolized many times over in the course of their careers, theirs is a story that is part biography, part art history and part sociological survey of the past half century.  James Venturi hopes Learning from Bob and Denise will inspire those whose ideas go beyond what the dominant culture promotes. 

More information about the project and a ten minute preview of the film (and t-shirts) can be found here. 

Lessons from 2005

2005 was quite a year.  Yossi Sheffi, Director of MIT's Center for Transportation and Logistics and author of The Resilient Enterprise:  Overcoming Vulnerability for Competitive Advantage, has some helpful tips for companies and business leaders who want to avoid many of the painful disruptions that plagued businesses and communities in 2005.  Looking forward to 2006, Sheffi warns that we must be resilient, flexible, and we must not only prepare for the unexpected, we must expect it. 

The year that started with the Christmas 2004 tsunami, continued with the London bombing, Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and the devastating earthquake on the Pakistan-India border. The year ended with Russia abruptly halting the natural gas supply to Europe because its price dispute with the Ukraine. At the onset of 2006,the critical message to businesses worldwide is: your survival may depend on how prepared you are for the unexpected. In the next few years businesses should learn not only to expect the unexpected, but to get ready for it.

At a minimum, companies should review their safety stock policies for parts and finished products, their supplier relationships and the extent to which they have access to redundant capacity. They should also make sure that their information and detection systems are such that they can discover an unfolding problem quickly and act on it - be it a failing supplier, deteriorating labor relations, a worsening political climate, or meteorological warnings. Given the expected potential disruptions that are currently in the news, including a possible avian flu pandemic and the continuing threat of more terrorist attacks, and those that are unexpected and may take the business community and the government by surprise, enterprises should take bolder steps to increase their resiliency. Leading companies are reviewing their entire supply chains to determine whether the ability to respond flexibility in a crisis situation is built into the extended enterprise.

Companies can take a number of steps this direction. For example, they can redesign products and processes for postponement - stocking parts and semi-finished products, so they can be finished into any one of several variants - depending on where and when demand materializes. Companies can also reduce the number of parts they use in their various products, as well as standardize parts and processes so they can be interchangeable.

The Complexities of Suspicion

In her recent review of Suspect in the Los Angeles Times, Karrie Higgins praises both the book and the contents of the latest Alphabet City volume:

Unlike other Sept. 11-inspired books, this one does not seek to witness or interpret the attacks so much as to account for the philosophical, moral, ethical and legal complexities of suspicion in a time of terror and war. It challenges us to consider not only what it means to be suspicious, but also what it means to suspect — as individuals and as nations. In that sense, it may be the most sweeping Sept. 11 volume to date.

And

Even the design of Suspect challenges readers. The size of the book — fat and square, about the width of a spread hand — creates the sense of something intimate, or perhaps contraband. The collection begins with a series of images: close-ups of an eye, a retinal scan, the eye printed on the dollar bill, a video camera lens. It's as if the book is literally looking back at readers, a silent surveillance. It looks so certain on the outside, but the inside churns with doubt.

Higgins also mentions that the unique design of Suspect reinforces the stories, essays, and art in the book.  For example, Simon A. Cole’s essay on the case of Brandon Mayfield, who was (wrongfully) imprisoned after one of his fingerprints matched one at the scene of the 2004 train bombings in Madrid, is printed in white on black paper.  As she read the essay, Higgins wondered if the black ink would rub off on her fingers, allowing someone to trace her fingerprints back to the book at some point.  Suspicion is everywhere.  Even book reviewers are becoming suspicious.  Following is a brief excerpt from Cole’s “Brandon Mayfield, Suspect”:

Let us imagine for a moment that the Mayfield fingerprint attribution did stand.  Even the tentative initial press reports put forward the emerging narratives: Mayfield, either working from inside the US or traveling with false documents, provided the demolitions expertise for a plot involving mainly Moroccan labor.  Despite the seemingly absurdity of orchestrating a post-9/11 bombing in Spain from inside the United States—why not from Spain itself, of Morocco, or Algeria, or anywhere where the glare of surveillance would be less than it is in the US?—it is difficult to doubt that the vast majority of the American public would have viewed this scenario as plausible.  Imagine for a moment the implications of the American public believing in such a plot: the US, it turns out, does indeed, as government officials have been claiming, harbor Al Qaeda cells within its body politic, not merely in the form of suspicious-looking recent Middle Eastern immigrants, but even in the form of White Muslim attorneys.  These cells are so frighteningly sophisticated that they are able to orchestrate massive surprise attacks outside the country.

What would the implications of such a scenario being “real”?  How would the world we live in be different from the one we inhabit today?  What differences would have been realized in the debate over the renewal of the USA PATRIOT Act?  How would we think differently about crime, terrorism, suspect individuals, and suspect populations?  When we suspect falsely, using suspect evidence, we do more than misjudge an individual; we spin a false reality.  Mayfield gives us a glimpse of one such reality that we narrowly escaped.  But within how many are we already cocooned?

Gender and Technology-Generated Voices

When the “gender” of a synthesized computer voice “matches” the gender of a user, people exhibit social-identification effects.  Specifically, people conform more to synthetic voices whose gender matches their own and find matching voices more trust-worthy.  Furthermore females like female voices more than male voices, even when they know that they are machine-generated, while males like male voices.  These results suggest that people automatically assign gender, determine whether it matches their own, and follow the basic principle of “similar is better.”

It is impossible to live in or even contemplate the social world without gender.  These biological, social, and cultural constructs are automatically manifested by voices, both real and artificial, and automatically recognized by listeners’ brains.  A careful leveraging of gender identification can make users feel positive and supported, while ignorance of gender identification can unintentionally drive users away.  No matter how unnatural or unclear the voice, voice gender is at the heart of interfaces that speak.

- Excerpted from Wired for Speech: How Voice Activates and Advances the Human-Computer Relationship by Clifford Nass and Scott Brave. A previous excerpt can be found here.

Why the Sky Isn't Violet

Think again if you believe that a degree from MIT will help you answer many of the questions that children ask about their environment.  In a recent article in the Boston Globe, Anthony Doerr tells of his brother Chris, who was asked why the sky was blue during his oral doctoral examination at MIT sixteen years ago.  He didn’t know the answer. Doerr points to many before Chris who did not know the answer either—Aristotle, DaVinci, John Tyndall, just to name a few (though they all tried).  However, Doerr does find some help for them:

If only Tyndall could have put his hands on an advance copy of science historian Peter Pesic's luminous new book, Sky in a Bottle.

In 10 cleanly written, well-paced chapters, Pesic traces the progression of our understanding of atmospheric hue through dozens of scientists, philosophers, and artists. His smartest move was to structure Sky in a Bottle like a mystery story, coaxing us puzzle by puzzle through the (very) uneven advances of knowledge over the centuries. You find yourself forgetting what you think you already know. What is air? What is reflection? Is light a particle or a wave, anyway? Why is the sky red at sunset? What role, if any, does interference play?

Frampton Comes Alive (sort of)

Fans of the American artist and filmmaker Hollis Frampton are no doubt champing at the bit waiting for the March publication of Rachel Moore's book on his 1971 film (nostalgia), part of our new series with London-based Afterall Books . But if you're in or near Boston and looking to get a Frampton fix before then, you can head to the Harvard Film Archive this Monday, January 16. HFA will be showing sets of Frampton films at 6:30 and 9. Each showing will include Magellan, one of his longest and most ambitious films, and a selection of shorter works.

Details are available here.

The Prank Phenomenon

Everyone loves a good joke or prank.  Pranks,  malicious tricks, surprise attacks and mischevious frolics have been around forever.  We've all done it.  The Homeric age was full of pranks.   Hermes was called a "prankster of dreams."  Hitler claimed to be quite the prankster in his youth.  Children, students, and siblings have long been performing pranks on their peers, parents, and teachers.  60s prankster Abby Hoffman found that there were three kinds of pranks:  "good" (amusing but harmless), "bad" (mean and vindictive), and "neutral" (surreal and soft on the victim).  A recent article in The Economist takes a hard look at the prank, finding that the college campus is where you can find the best pranks:

The best pranks have always blurred the lines between legality and illegality, good and bad taste, right and wrong conduct. Festivals like Saturnalia appeared to undermine the social order, but paradoxically helped to reaffirm it, by allowing people to act out their frustrations in a harmless way. The nearest thing to this today is April Fool's Day—“the day we remember what we are the other 364 days of the year,” as Mark Twain gently put it—though the best April 1st jokes tend to be media hoaxes, rather than traditional pranks. A classic of the genre is a 1957 BBC “documentary” on Swiss spaghetti farmers. Many British viewers asked where they could buy pasta trees.

Some of the best April Fool's stunts are those that send up national characteristics. To prove the point that Germans who break even minor rules struggle with their guilt, a few years back a newspaper in Tübingen announced a new experiment by the traffic authorities. Local drivers who had knowingly exceeded the speed limit in recent days were to turn themselves in, pay a fine and take lessons in safe driving. More than 60 sinners obliged.

For the most impressively elaborate pranks, however, go to a university campus. Take thousands of bright young things with too much time on their hands, itching to achieve, amuse and misbehave, and splendid acts of delinquency will follow.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, “hacks”, as the MIT crowd calls them, are more serious. So serious, in fact, that in 2003 the institute's best hacks were assembled in a 178-page book, “Nightwork”. The pranks at MIT tend to be feats of engineering. They are positively encouraged, because they teach students to work in teams, solve complex problems and, sometimes, get a message across. Mr Peterson's book includes an 11-point code for pranksters: leave no damage, do not steal, do not drop things off a building without a ground crew, and so on. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, at least, student pranks have become an establishment activity.

Do you know of any good pranks? We'd love to hear about them!  But also, The Economist is inviting readers to nominate their contender for the finest prank in history.  Explain in 750 words by you think your prank is worthy.  The entire article and more information about the contest can be found here.   And, Slashdot also posted a bit about the article.  The post and comments can be found  here.