Paul McKey - Synergistic Design

Redbean - In my ongoing fascination with the book industry - because it is a litmus test for digitising existing ‘analogue’ industries - here is a blog post that neatly spells out the converging forces at play.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/bits_of_destruction_hit_book_publishing_part1.php
by Bernard Lunn over at ReadWriteWeb

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Redbean - I recently attended another coffee-meetup in Sydney of young, and not so young entrepreneurs, involved with Tech startups. The energy at these gatherings is palpable.

Below is a short video of the ideas on display.

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Redbean - One of the common themes we hear after dominant players in any industry suddenly lose the plot is that their leaders were getting just the advice they wanted to hear - but not the advice they needed. When bosses in the car industry surround themselves with BIG car people they invariably make more BIG cars regardless of what the market wants.

And so it seems with News Ltd. Richard Freudenstein, CEO of News Digtital Media, was quoted in this week’s press as saying “For a lot of the things people want to do, the broadband we have now is probably quick enough to allow that to happen… it will just be an extension of what is already happening.” (20090730 - SMH - Broadband revolution fails to excite News)

For me this rates right up there with the lack of foresight, denial and other bad predictions of the visionless. You wonder whether these people actually use the services they sell. Or maybe it is just the vested interests talking, seeing that Fraudenstein is also a director of the pay TV operator Foxtel?

Pay TV and free to air TV are both under threat from increased broadband speeds and using denial of that fact as a strategy doesn’t sound too smart to me.

Note to Mr. Murdoch. I am available to advise you at exorbitant rates of pay but there is a caveat - I may not tell you what you want to hear.

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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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Redbean - My sometimes partner in all things design, Joel Flom, has been doing a bit of navel gazing of late and has come up with an insightful and honest view of the whole design field.

He has noticed that the user-centred/interaction/experience/service/information design field can be a bit self-interested at times which leads to what I call Digital Noise. This noise gets the hip young things doing groovy design sites and products extremely excited and leaves their clients stone cold. Why? Mainly because they are speaking different languages. The former is focussed on the means and the latter is focussed on the end.

If you know the current version numbers to more than three or four applications and you can rattle off arcane designer speak (like iterative redundancy like) you are living in a sea of digital noise. To survive you may need to stick your head out and see what the humans are up to (that is the people who pay for your services). Then if you want to be successful build some bridges between the technical and the client needs without swamping them in noise. Simplify, simplify, simplify!

Google did a bit of street research recently where only 8% of people they asked knew what a browser was. They think Google is the browser because that is where they start. What that means is 92% of your prospective clients don’t know or care about how you do, only what you do, or really, only what it means to them.

http://elavision.typepad.com/elavision_insights/2009/06/design-is-a-verb.html

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Recently at the Australian Human Resources Institute (AHRI) annual conference I got talking with some eLearning vendors re the state of play in content development. Here is Katy Morriss from Sydney company www.cadre.com.au telling us about the maturing of the eLearning customer.

If the embed doesn’t work you can view the video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EnZsrSM8nY

Where do you think the eLearning custom market is heading? Leave a comment!

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I love this question. Is design too important to be left only to designers? It is a question that has been posed by Bruce Nussbaum at Business Week. http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/NussbaumOnDesign/archives/2009/06/is_design_too_i_1.html

In this post he quotes Anne Burdick who takes up, quite eloquently, that if designers don’t expand their thinking about design then others will do it for them. This is the same threat to a particular herd that has been felt before by, for instance, artists are threatened by patrons buying primitive art, ‘real’ musicians are threatened by folk music and so on. Now Designers are being threatened by sites promoting non-designers.

So if you can get around the absolutely whacko design of yellow and orange text and reverse video colour schemes then you should find the speech and supporting movies on the place of design pretty interesting.
http://www.burdickoffices.com/Design-wo-Designers/

So here is a question for you. What is the difference between a designer and a non-designer?

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New York - I am in the Big Apple to attend Book Expo America - one of the largest book fairs in the world. This trade only show brings together nearly everyone in the biz from the big six publishers to many of the independent publishers and bookstores across North America. It is quite a gathering of the literati.

My attendance was primarily as an author, hawking a new book currently titled “Smart Business Design - How to gain competitive advantage in the 21st century”.
The book deals with a fundamental concern of what Chris Anderson of Wired magazine has this month called the New new economy. That is that the majority of business people struggle to develop in all four areas critical to the success of a 21st century business - areas outside their experience which include:
* understanding and developing business models
* designing and delivering compelling experiences
* understanding how to leverage new media and social networks
* developing the skills to attract and nurture great people

Unfortunately, nowhere was the above problem more apparent than in the book publishing industry.

They are seeing their business model being eroded by online sellers and they have virtually no answer. Amazon are releasing their books for USD9.99. Far below the $25 or so the industry requires to maintain profitability.

They are seeing their well developed marketing channels being eroded by a lack of understanding about online tactics. Tactics their ebook competitors and smaller publishers are quickly mastering.

They are seeing their independent booksellers suffering in most markets. With fewer people browsing their shelves there is little they can do. Their best tactic is to develop and promote their local community of readers yet few have the skills (and as was pointed out, the personality) required to utilise social networking techniques.

While the demise of books and the book industry is slow and inevitable there appears to be no demise in reading. If anything we are all reading more these days. It’s just that it is in other forms to a physical book. Hence the online market is developing at breakneck speed driven by digital readers such as Kindle, Sony Reader and even the iPhone.

Yet the industry hangs on tight to its structured, physical distribution model. As the president of one major publisher told me “there is still a lot of money to be made behind the front line”. Yet digital is growing rapidly and starting to really eat into traditional channels. As one presenter pointed out there is some hope and he said the companies to watch are Wiley and O’Reilly.

http://www.wiley.com/

http://oreilly.com/

And the publishers look like dinosaurs caught in the spotlight. They have little to no constructive response. One panel session which included three CEOs of the big six publishers spent most of their time arguing over how to deal with Amazon and Google. They had little insight into how to deal with a shifting demographic and industry in confusion.

And it comes down to the people. Unfortunately the book industry is an older population of literate folk who don’t really get online that much. And that is out of step with their market.

What is concerning is that they are not spinning off innovative smaller companies to test and develop new channels. They are unwilling to adjust while watching their US$28B industry erode before their eyes. They are terrified of going the same way as the music industry, where all the major labels have lost market and influence due to online forces, yet seem incapable of responding.

This is an industry in crisis. The irony is it may be where I can realise the best sales of my book, which is designed to help individual organisations and even industry sectors migrate into the modern world. I know of at least six CEOs who should be reading it.

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The Australian Prime MInister Kevin Rudd this week announced an AUD43 billion plan to deliver high-speed fibre-to-the-node broadband to 90% of Australian homes within 8 years.
CNet News

I congratulate the government which has had the vision and is providing the funds, and is taking the risk. They have had to step in since the private sector was providing none of these elements and waiting for them to do so was a classic case of market forces failing to deliver.

Australia has several unique problems when it comes to delivering telecommunication services. Firstly it has one of the lowest rates of population per square kilometre in the world. And even though most cling to the coast like barnacles the expense of delivering physical services to a very spread out population is rarely cost-effective.

The second problem is that it is resource rich so it hasn’t seen the above problem as a problem till now. Australia just crushes more rocks and turns that into money.
Until of course the resources boom finally came to an end. Until of course the Global Financial Crisis left it clambering for new ways to turn a dollar. Until of course it compares itself with the rest of the world and finds it has not kept up with investment in infrastructure.
International Telecommunications Union Statistics

So here is some news Australia. The resources boom is over and the knowledge boom is just beginning.

Many struggle to see what spending all this money on some fibre cables is going to do for them. This infrastructure is long overdue.

It can be argued that the countries like those of the G20 have had little vision in the past ten years other than to make money. That’s fine but as we know, money has this capacity to disappear and we see few benefits of the ‘good times’.

The benefits of this initiative will flow to the three core areas of economic, social and environmental improvement for many years to come.

I am much happier to see the money going to fibre cable than some of the choices that face the USA right now. For instance spending the equivalent amount on bailing out General Motors. GM is an industrial age dinosaur. Its products don’t fit with the economic, social and environmental future yet they still persist in making brands for numbskulls like the Hummer. Bankruptcy is the best thing for them.

These challenges are echoing around the world and the question is when do we finally give up on the industrial age, bring it to a graceful close and start facing and investing in the knowledge age that is out inevitable future?

Embracing a knowledge rich and sustainable future is now becoming our responsibility. It also just makes plain good sense. The time has come for a new mindset.

The economy of the future will revolve around the exchange of ideas not commodities. The social fabric of the future will benefit from knowledge based services in diverse areas like finance, education and medicine (such as the ability to deliver high quality diagnosis in the home) with the use of simple and existing technology (except for those missing pipes). The environment will win in a multitude of ways as we remove the drudge from our lives and concentrate on improving the planet.

So thanks Kevin Rudd for getting the ball rolling into the future.

Phew I think I’ll go and have a soy/chai latté down at the Internet café after that rant!

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