One perk of an independent life - I’m more free than most to travel the world and see amazing things.

Last week I was in Brussels to give a lecture at Namahn, a wonderful design consulting firm, and Joannes, the company founder, was kind enough to take me to Rene Magritte’s house, which is now a small museum. He’s one of my favorite artists of all time - to see where he worked was a very special thing for me.

One of his most famous paintings is The Treachery of Images (La trahison des images). You may have seen it before:

The text in the painting reads “This is not a pipe”.

It seems like a joke.  First time I saw this painting in college I just snickered and moved on. But later I’d realize he’s reminding you that pictures of things are not the same as things. That movies about things are not the same as the things they are about (e.g. Twittering about something is not the same as doing that thing). It’s deep, funny, interesting, philosophical and simple all at the same time, which is what I hope my work to be like.

Walking around the house he lived in, many of the objects that appear in his paintings can be found, including the pipe:

I also saw his bowler hat, the fireplaces and stairs that appeared in many of his paintings.

Here’s what I learned:

• You can be creative with anything. He worked with simple objects and made profound statements . You don’t need complex things to think complex thoughts or make important points.
• You can be serious and funny at the same time. There’s a sense of play in many of his paintings, and also various inside jokes to his wife and friends in his work.
• No one gets a free ride. I didn’t know he spent many years making advertisements and posters to make a living - many of them were on exhibition in the house. It wasn’t until later in his life that his paintings were worth enough to focus on them.
• You can work anywhere. His studio was between the only kitchen and only bathroom on the first floor of his house.  It’d be the last place I’d want to work for hours, but it clearly worked well for him.  Apparently it had the best light in the house, and he prefered working there to the much larger studio out in the back. Here’s a pic of his studio. It’s a tiny little cramped space.

Sadly I just missed the opening in Belgium of the Rene Magritte museum, which will be the largest exhibition of his works anywhere in the world. It opens June 2, 2009.

You can see many of his works here - I suspect you’ve seen some of these before even if you didn’t know the name of the man who made them.

Posted in On Tour, creative thinking, history | 5 Comments »

Of all the stories in the web world, the story of the Opera web browser is one of the most interesting, and least frequently told when it comes to understanding innovation.

Today they’re celebrating their 15th year, and it’s clear they’re going strong, claim to have market share growth and still have a sense of humor.

They’re a fascinating story because in the early browser wars (’94-’00) they were the third horse, but they consistently took larger risks, made bigger bets on design changes, bet heaviest of all players on web standards,  and were the first of the major browsers to implement now standard features like tab browsing.  But they rarely got much credit for their innovations or their intensely progressive attitude then, or perhaps even now.

Why? Did they not innovative enough? or too much? Do they need to be in the U.S. to get more attention? Or are  there other issues? There are tons of lessons to be learned from the case study of Opera, both for the 90’s and for the present.

Until someone writes one, you can do a small, fun one of your own.

If you’re interested in UX design or understanding innovation, I highly recommend giving their latest release a spin: it will be the most interesting software you’ve installed in some time.

Download Opera 9.6

Related:

• Here’s my older review of Opera 9.02
• My other posts about web browser design, including reviews of major browsers
• I’ll be speaking at Opera next month and look forward to learning more from these folks

Posted in Design, Innovation, history, web browsers | 3 Comments »

Microsoft recently announced the end of the product known as Encarata. Way back in the day Encarta was cool. It was one of the few things made in the CD-ROM era that, looking backwards, made sense (Yes, I owned a copy of both Art Gallery and Microsoft Dogs, and as idiotic as it seems now, the later actually got good reviews) - and was actually designed quite well.

It’ was also a curiously successful work of innovation by Microsoft on several counts. Few people remember, but Microsoft bet big on CD-ROMs and consumer software, and of those efforts, many of which flopped, Encarta was a gem.  In 1994 it demonstrated many of the things people had been promising PCs would be good for (multimedia, education, instant access to information, etc.). There were other encyclopedias, but (I don’t think) anyone else invested as much in the design and technology as Microsoft did.

Many forget, or were still in diapers, but in 1994, years before web design would be something you could say at a bar without people thinking you were into spiders, Encarta demonstrated much of what we call information architecture, interaction design and consumer aesthetics, all in one high profile consumer product. Many, many companies and software teams used Encarta as a reference for not only what was possible, but for what a good experience should be like. Microsoft didn’t invent many of the technologies involved, but the encapsulation of so many into a well designed experience is similar in some ways to the success of the i-pod.  Both are examples of innovation through superior user experience and integration of various technologies made mostly by other folks.

And most importantly, when Netscape and Internet Explorer began the browser wars, many of us looked at Encarta as an approximation of what a great web experience should feel like, with rich media, consumer appliance simplicity, and great search and navigation. In the hallways on the Internet Explorer team we had screenshots of some of the Encarta team’s work, among various other bits of software inspiration, up on the wall. It was definitely a reference used in designing features like Explorer bars,  Favorites & History.

Kudos to Bill Flora, Adrienne Odonnell, and Sheila Carter (who are listed here as the design team) and other folks who worked on this thing over the years.

Encarta also was one of the best product names Microsoft has ever had. Sure, that’s not saying much given how notorious MSFT is for lousy names, but like Excel (also a good name, at least it was in 1985, compared to Lotus 1-2-3) it somehow fit the vibe of the kind of thing the product was.

Can’t say I miss loading CDs into my PC (I can’t remember the last time I did that), but Encarta definitely deserves a notable place in the history of software design. They helped raise a bar many people still use today.

Posted in Design, Innovation, Microsoft, history | 2 Comments »

Few people know that Ada Lovelace was likely the first computer programmer in history. She worked with Charles Babbage, a man who is most famous for making a machine that didn’t quite work. A testament to the role of failure in the making of every success.

One challenge she faced is that given that his computer, known as the Babbage engine, wasn’t quite working, she had to write a virtual program. That’s right. She wrote code for a system that didn’t quite exist yet (To be specific, she translated a paper from French to English and in doing so added notes, which included a program - her actual translation, and notes, are here). Not too shabby.  If you complain about your compiler being slow, or about web standards not being followed, take a humility pill. At least the stuff you hate actually exists.

I just try and imagine the conversations she must have had with her friends in 1843.

Friend: So Ada, what did you do yesterday? I went for a horse ride and picked some flowers.

Ada: “Oh that sounds fun. Well, I translated a paper about a lecture, written about a new application of math to make a machine that can do complex computations on its own  and just for fun and I wrote up the instruction set to compute Bernoulli numbers automatically on this machine. Which doesn’t exist yet.”

Friend: <silence> That’s nice. Go for a horse ride?

Perhaps if you’re truly an innovator, you often have trouble explaining what you’re doing.

Sadly Ada died young, at age 36. The programming language Ada was named after her.

One of my favorite quote from her famous note is this:

It is desirable to guard against the possibility of exaggerated ideas that might arise as to the powers of the Analytical Engine. In considering any new subject, there is frequently a tendency, first, to overrate what we find to be already interesting or remarkable; and, secondly, by a sort of natural reaction, to undervalue the true state of the case, when we do discover that our notions have surpassed those that were really tenable.

The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. It can follow analysis; but it has no power of anticipating any analytical relations or truths.

She was writing about Babbage’s machine, but boy does it seem relevant to all the technologies we make.

Ada was born on March 24th -  Some folks celebrate March 24th as Ada Lovelace day.

Posted in Innovation, history | 4 Comments »

Working on a little list for inspiration. Do you know stories of companies that started, or thrived, during economic down times?

Here is the list Ive found so far. Looking for more please! You can find a history of U.S. recessions here to help sort things out. Here’s a partial list of world economic crises. If you have better lists, leave a comment.

• Toro lawnmowers. Formed late in WW I right before the post war recession.
• Trader Joes. Formed in 1957, during the recession of 1957 and 1958.
• Target. It’s on the borderline. Wikipedia claims Target formed, seeded by the Dayton department store, in 1962. The 1960/61 recession officially ended about a year before.
• 3M. Started in 1902, and despite major setbacks, survived the panic of 1907, eventually gaining new investors around 1910.
• Google. This is also a technicality. Google first got funding in 1998, before the 2001-2003 dot com bubble burst. And had it’s IPO in 2004. But belongs on the list for having it’s major growth at the same time period the rest of the tech sector fell apart.

Posted in entrepreneurship, history | 5 Comments »

Here’s a good one from about this time last year: debunking thanksgiving myths.

It’s a great example of how much we confidently assume we know is true as adults, based simply on what we were told as kids.

Posted in history | No Comments »

45 days to go. We’ve got wars, bailouts, and natural disaster zones galore. What’s the best way to decide how to vote? Here’s my take on advice for how to pick a president in 1400 words.

Essay #59 - How to pick a president.

Posted in history, politics | 5 Comments »

I watched a great episode of PBS’s Nova the other night about the design of the Parthenon. Heard lots of surprises of interest to designers and creators. It’s another example of how many innovations from history we take for granted without even understanding what they are.

What’s also amazing is how many different uses the building has had over 2500 years. It was a temple for Athena, a Christian church, a mosque, and an ammunition depot. It was bombed in several different wars, was stripped of marble and artwork by both the Turks and the British, and was seriously damaged by the first attempts to restore it in the 1890s.

• They cheated on symmetry. Their understanding of aesthetics was so good they realized at the scale of the building several non-symetrical elements had to be added to make it look symmetrical. The middle section of the ground level is curved, and is six inches higher than the sides. Also the columns are tapered and few elements actually use the golden ratio.
• We can’t replicate their quality of work. A $100 million renovation project is underway to repair 2000 years of damage, but they’re struggling to replicate the precision of craftsmanship. What took the Greeks ~9 years to build has already taken more than 30 years to repair, and is not finished yet. Without a computer or electric power, the Greeks had many clever innovations that were lost and are being rediscovered.

You can watch the video online and I highly recommend it if you’re into design history, architecture as technology, and the history of innovation.

Posted in Design, architecture (real), history | 3 Comments »

During research for the The Myths of Innovation I read tons of history books, particularly those trying to revise or debunk misnomers from the past. Books like a People’s history of the United States and Don’t know much about history, provided much guidance on how to tell true stories in the face of popular falsehoods.

With the big U.S. Holiday of Thanksgiving next week, here’s some fodder for fun dinner conversation:

• The success of the Mayflower settlement depended more on smallpox than the Pilgrims. Years before the Mayflower landed, Europeans had already brought smallpox to America, killing most of the indigenous population (An event the Pilgrims called “an act of god”). This made the early settlements possible, and forced the remaining natives (most notably Squanto) to consider cooperation with settlers, teaching them many survival skills. The Pilgrims stole corn and other supplies from natives during their first year.
• Half of the Pilgrims died in the first 5 months. They were untrained, unprepared, did not know how to farm or hunt in America, and chose a difficult location for their first settlement (they wandered off course crossing the Atlantic). By the time of the first thanksgiving those still alive were happy not to be dead - the fact that they had food to eat was more than worthy of celebration.
• The pilgrims did not eat turkey, mashed potatoes or pecan pie. Thanksgiving was not an official U.S. holiday until the 1860s, and we are celebrating the eating habits of people from the 1860s, not the 1600s. It’s not documented what was eaten on the first Thanksgiving, though it’s pretty certain they ate their meal with their hands.
• Thanksgiving is an ancient native concept, not Pilgrim or American. As you’d imagine, the folks who actually knew how to work with the land, the natives, had their own set of customs for giving thanks back to nature: some tribes had 6 festivals every year dedicated to giving thanks, only one of which we know as Thanksgiving.
• The Pilgrims were not Puritans. Both groups were radicals who wanted to escape persecution in England. But the Pilgrims were more egalitarian and tolerant - they had non-believers on the Mayflower, and even more in their settlement (they came over later). The Puritans wanted reform, but wanted the Church to change to reflect their views (whereas the Pilgrims abandoned the Church entirely). The Pilgrims were on the Mayflower, but the Puritans didn’t arrive in America until several decades later.
• The Indians and Pilgrims did not get along very well. Around the time of the first thanksgiving, The Plymouth settlement was converted into a fort, hardly an act of thanks or giving. As you’d imagine, the relationship between these two groups was complex, with different skirmishes and crimes by factions on both sides. While there were times of peace, tension grew over the years and led to King Phillip’s war, the end of any pretense of peace, a few decades later.

There certainly are some things to celebrate in the true story: the leadership and struggles of the settlement, some of the motivations of the Pilgrims themselves, and the acts of peace by parties on both sides, but these aren’t in the mythologized version most American’s know.

References:

• Top 10 Thanksgiving Myths
• The Myth of Thanksgiving
• The Mayflower: Courage, Community and War, Nathaniel Philbrick
• A People’s history of the United States, by Howard Zinn
• Don’t know much about history, By Kenneth C. Davis

Posted in Myths of Innovation, history | 4 Comments »