Paul McKey - Synergistic Design

Redbean - This is a comment from Dan Holloway, a US based author trying to shake up the book publsihing industry. I thought it deserved a blog of its own:

Dan - I’m trying to drag writers into the twenty-first century but it’s hard - they’re a pretty reactionary bunch - as a result, as a collective we look rather unradical to the outside world because we have to keep pace in our publicity with our slowest members out of respect, but I think the future is in grass-roots community building, and that means direct engagement with the fans, which is what I’m trying to do with the Free-e-day festival (www.freeeday.wordpress.com) - it’s interesting to see so far the reaction I’ve had from filmmakers and musicians has been more positive than from writers, who are a deeply suspicious bunch (convinced you’re trying to do them out of a living, rather than trying to create a larger interface between readers and writers - in the new landscape the ones who’ll be done out of a living are the publishers not the writers!).

Here’s my post:

The publishing industry’s main failing is that it refuses to be reader-centred (hence the lack of engaging experiences – what we need to do is learn to listen, to offer up models, and respond to the feedback – which is what I’m trying to do with my interactive Facebook novel The Man Who Painted Agnieszka’s Shoes). It is also uniquely badly placed by being so cumbersome and keeping everything in house – the future will bring, I am sure, flatter models where editing, design, printing, logistics are directly outsourced by writers or their PRs. Social media work bottom-up, which is why traditional businesses suffer – they have to listen and not impose – which ties in with the last of your four points – great networkers would be an invaluable asset to publishers, but impossible for them to justify in the current economic climate.

All of which is great news for the likes of us, because unless the publishers stop looking down their noses at the newbies and realise sometimes we can do it better, some of us newbies will before too long be buying them up and asset-stripping them.

I wrote a long article on this in May if anyone would like to take a look:
http://streamwriting.com/blog/?p=116
Best
Dan

http://www.yearzerowriters.wordpress.com

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Redbean - I recently spent way too much time in camera stores across the USA discussing features and functions of digital cameras. I was looking for the Flip camera and as I told the store staff how I was attracted by its simplicity and capability to do one thing well - take a video and get it on to my computer and online - they either stared, laughed or threw me out. But not before they had told me why any camera with only ONE BIG RED BUTTON on the back could never outsell their multifunction, benefit-laden, engineering marvels from the likes of Sony, Canon, Panasonic etc.

Well they were wrong. Recent estimates have put the Flip market share at 20-25% of the camcorder market. And that is why Cisco bought the company for US$590M in March.
http://www.theflip.com/

What’s going on here? First the iPhone with a single button and now a camera. And people are loving it. People that is other than the (mainly male) geeks and gadget heads who love to back you into a corner at parties and spray tech specs at you all night.
Real humans who only give a minor damn about specs but a major one about functionality are buying these ’simple’, sexy devices in droves.

Last week at an art gallery I saw the famous ad that launched the Kodak camera in 1887. It stated “You press the button, we do the rest”. So it has taken about 120 years to go full circle and build what George Eastman described as ” The only camera that anybody can use without instructions.”

It is so difficult for these monolithic manufacturers of cars, cameras and washing machines to compete in a manner other than feature wars. It takes an upstart to come along and show them the way, confirming once more Clayton Christensen’s theory of disruptive technology that he set out in “The Innovator’s Dilemma”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disruptive_technology

The same can be applied to software. Look at Google’s One Button and here is a Sydney startup example. http://pickmylunch.com.au/

Read why that same entrepreneur went from feature-laden to a single button here -
http://www.technation.com.au/2009/06/03/success-in-failure-episode-1-7-lessons-learnt-from-letting-donttellcomau-expire/

So if you are designing the next big thing try thinking simple instead of saturated and you may just design a winner.

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