Report: Local man finds Wisdom of Crowds making him crazy, turns off computer

Fresh on the heels of the Information Age, quiet and solitude, an "ability sit quietly in a room alone" - Pascal's bar for a healthy mind - have emerged as the contemporary idyll. Hearing its incessant whistling, we now know, for instance, that information can be positively debilitating because far from freeing, choice can be a paradox. In an essay that I keep going back to, William Deresiewicz argues that it's particularly important, and particularly important in this day and age of mediated automata, for leaders to cultivate solitude in order to know their own minds. The always thoughtful On Being recently recently pointed out that its most popular blog posts feature the words "major news events" and "meditation," which makes intuitive sense to me. The one leads straight to the other.

The Joy of Quiet is trending:

In barely one generation we’ve moved from exulting in the time-saving devices that have so expanded our lives to trying to get away from them — often in order to make more time. The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug. Like teenagers, we appear to have gone from knowing nothing about the world to knowing too much all but overnight....

So what to do? The central paradox of the machines that have made our lives so much brighter, quicker, longer and healthier is that they cannot teach us how to make the best use of them; the information revolution came without an instruction manual. All the data in the world cannot teach us how to sift through data; images don’t show us how to process images. The only way to do justice to our onscreen lives is by summoning exactly the emotional and moral clarity that can’t be found on any screen.

If you've been here for a while, you know that I can relate. "Quiet" is not something that I fall into exhausted when all else fails, but a reserve that I go to continually for the energy that a majority of others find in the company of people. That's the basic introvert - extrovert distinction. So I'm not completely surprised that introversion - solitude - quiet - is trending now, having recently become cultural watchwords, if not something of a commodity. Susan Cain's "Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking," for example, is pre-ordered on my Kindle. And as the linked piece from Pico Iyer underlines, organizations will now gladly take your money just to leave you alone, which, I have to admit came as something of a surprise. I'll do it for practically nothing.

Wayne

Business metric: Will they touch it?

Fast Company's best innovation essays from 2011 including several thought provoking business reads, including "branding isn't about repeating messages, but of creating patterns" and "creating products for The Lady Gaga Generation."

Luke Williams, a fellow at Frog Design, penned one essay on how to spot markets ripe for disruption, and suggested a couple of ways that are both simple and profound. One method is to patiently observe how customers behave as opposed to asking them what they want, which may be one reason why Intel employs perhaps the most famous corporate anthropologist in the world, Genevieve Bell. As patient observers of culture, anthropologists document the exchange of value in intimate settings.

There a world of difference between looking and seeing; keen observation is the one creative act most accessible to each of us.

The other insight is the importance of touch. In a world suffused with too much data and too few ways to evaluate it, good industrial design has become more important than ever. Apple's willingness, for example, to invest in pleasing and sensual products when everyone assumed that the value in computing was in the operating system, also known as Microsoft software, was a key to the company's resurrection from market afterthought. I'm typing this on a precise notebook milled from a single blog of aluminum, which really pleases the geek and maker in me. Remember those beige boxes?

Williams:

All the Apple designers I’ve met share this awareness of context, which may explain why they’re often sensitive to critical details that their competitors overlook. They examine the context for themselves rather than having it described by someone else. Jonathan Ive, Senior Vice President of Industrial Design, describes his observations of people interacting with Mac computers in an Apple store: 'When people are looking at Macs in stores, they’re drawn to them in a very physical way. They don’t mind moving them around or touching them.' That observation lead him to an important insight: 'You’re seldom intimidated by something that you can feel. If you’re intimidated by an object, you tend not to want to touch it.'

So, for Apple, there was an opportunity to give people a tangible sense of control over the technology by establishing an immediate physical connection between the user and the computer. Think again about the statement 'people are seldom intimidated by something they want to touch.' That’s an insight that wouldn’t have been possible without close, unobtrusive observation of people interacting with technology. To cultivate insights and uncover opportunities, you need to observe the telling moments that reveal what consumers actually feel and do (as opposed to what they say they feel).

Wayne

End 2011 with these Great Reads

If, like a lot of people, you're feeling particularly lonely in the office today, or are just looking forward to some time off between now and the New Year, Longform.org has posted its best of 2011 in non-fiction. It couldn't be easier to transfer them to your Kindle, or take in clean, uncluttered text with Readability right there at Longform. 

For other curated lists, check out the selections from the editors of Mental Floss, Salon's Best Books of 2011 and the 10 Best Books from the New York Times.

The IdeaFestival blog, like many of you, will be taking a short break until Jan. 2. But please follow us @ideafestival on Twitter, or on our Facebook page for a few links between now and then. We'll see you next year!

Wayne

Gladwell: Innovators "take social risks"

Innovation may not require a big bank account, but it surely demands a different kind of personal capital - a willingness to disregard criticism. Malcolm Gladwell, speaking in advance of a book due out in 2013:

In all the instances he cited, innovation came from people who are on the fringes and that enabled them to make this difference. Gladwell's theory seems simple, the way he explains it. While most people dwell on the genius of innovators, the real risk they take is social, he said.

'Innovators need more than idea; they need a thick skin,' he said, illustrating the point with anecdotes spanning breakthrough in cancer treatment, the sub-prime crisis and the making of furniture retailer IKEA. 'Being an outsider gives you the motivation. I see this time and again in periods of innovation,' Gladwell said.

His upcoming book will also address the "unexplored dangers to elite education," according to the linked piece. The thick-skinned essayist and former Yale associate professor William Deresiewicz has written on the same topic, wondering if answering all the little questions equipped his students to ask the big ones.

A bit off topic, but when you're done with that read Deresiewicz's Solitude and Leadership.

Wayne

From Borges to the Borg Queen: Prototyping a future

Imagination is more important than knowledge. For while knowledge defines all we currently know and understand, 
imagination points to all we might yet discover and create - Albert Einstein

Has science and technology come to a point where what we can create is only constrained by our imagination?

Produced at the Creative Science Foundation conference last July, this video explains how cross-disciplinary thinking, and in particular "science fiction prototyping," may help supply a positive context for technology and a technology-suffused future that we'll all share.

Because science and technology do not exist in isolation, the point is not to free associate, but to tease out the implications of current and near-future technologies, and to put a story to them.

Related, creatively approaching the future was also at the top of IBM tech evangelist David Barnes' mind at IdeaFestival 2011, and while he discussed literature and the arts as a method for thinking about positive change, he also recommended an unusual approach that IBM regularly encourages its employees to take to nurture their individual creativity - unplugging.

If you like this kind of thinking, check out the interviews with Cory Doctorow (Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom) and Will.i.am at The Tomorrow Project.

Wayne