The more I learn about creative thinking and about teaching, two subjects of great interest, the more depressing organized education in the U.S. becomes. I’m familiar with Montessori, Waldorf and various other well known private school brands, as well as public school programs here and there, but it’s all vaguely disappointing. I’m often left feeling there is no substitute for parents and extended family: they are the best hopes young minds have for learning what it means to think free. Perhaps that’s as it should be.

Two bright spots I’ve found are these two programs, aimed at giving kids exposure to creative problem solving in team environments. I’ve yet to see these things in action but I’d love to visit and maybe even help out with a local chapter.

Odyssey of the Mind - An international program that focuses on creative problem solving projects. It’s a world-wide competition with regional finals and programs.

Destination Imagination: Similiar to Odyssey of the mind, but offers 5 different tracks each with a different creative focus, from technical, to artistic.

If you know of other resources for parents who want to augment their kids exposure to creative thinking and problem solving skills, or have experience with either of the above programs, please leave a comment. I’d love to hear more.

Posted in Teaching/Training, creative thinking | 9 Comments »

Rube Goldberg was an engineering student who quickly realized he preferred making fun of engineers more than engineering things himself. His legendary cartoons of bizarre, over-engineered devices for trivial tasks have lived on well past his own lifetime.

So what do we make of people who actually try to make Rube Goldberg machines? Are they simply creative enthusiasts with a sense of humor or are they entirely missing Goldberg’s point? You decide.

This year, at one of four Rube Goldberg Machine Contests, a team from Purdue won with a 156 step machine for making hamburgers.

Video highlights of the event on gizmodo.

And you can see photos of the winning machines from the last few years on the Purdue website.

Posted in Innovation, Teaching/Training, creative thinking | No Comments »

In 2003 I quit my management job at Microsoft to try to live by writing books, teaching and public speaking. It was the scariest decision I’d made in my life and here on the other side, about 4 years later, is what I’ve learned. If you believe life is to be explored, here are notes from a work adventure. There’s no amazing new theory - you may have heard all this before, but here it is, in first person.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Teaching/Training, personal, philosophy | 13 Comments »

I had a secret. Back as an undergraduate at CMU, I’d see authors visit and lecture in the Adamson wing, this cool auditorium style room in Baker Hall. When bored, I’d imagine what I’d have to do in my future to earn an invite and speak to students in that same lecture hall.

Last week I got my chance. The magic day started with an invite from Paul Gould at MAYA design to stop by their swanky South side office for a tour, and a fun brownbag lunch. They have these awesome meeting rooms called Kivas, which are round, have floor to ceiling whiteboards, and invites the kind of communication and interaction that makes for great design sessions. I met some great folks and got warmed up for my afternoon talk at CMU.

Here’s me in MAYA’s Kiva:

And at the Adamson wing lecture hall at CMU:

The kicker was I got to see David Hounshell, the professor of the amazing history of engineering class I took as an undergraduate, that planted the seeds that led to writing the Myths of Innovation.

And to finish off the day, dinner with friends Faisal, Aleecia, and Eden Fisher, the latter being the prime mover in bringing me out to CMU this year (Thanks Eden for a most special experience).

Thanks to Paul for the photos of a magic day.

Posted in On Tour, Teaching/Training | 6 Comments »

One highlight of webstock 08 was the fantastic design of their handouts, badges and bags. Most conferences, including design conferences, spend little effort on crafting the things they give attendees. The bags, swag, and badges are typically afterthoughts, rarely made with love, and infrequently reflecting any of the values espoused at the conference itself. Webstock kicked ass on all counts: an example for other conferences to follow. Here are some notes:

The badge

• The schedule is upside down. Since the badge hangs on your neck, the schedule, one day per page, is printed upside down so you can read it. Nice (first saw this at GEL).
• Not made of plastic . Is it just me, or is there too much laminated plastic at conferences? These badges are made of cardstock and heavy paper, with a natural hand-made feel. It has soft edges and fits comfortably in a shirt or back pocket.
• Cord made of fabric for easy reuse. Most conference materials have limited reuse and don’t recycle well: those plastic lanyards aren’t good for much. But since the cord isn’t the standard plastic clip-on cable, but a nice length of fabric, I can use it for something else.
• The only major design ding is the name is hard to read. I’ve yet to see a badge that was truly easy to read from conversation distance: they’re always crammed with affiliations and job titles making them not only ugly, but worthless (Here’s a good example for reference (scroll down to second picture)).

The bag

• Looks like a high-end hipster bag. Nothing says inauthentic faster than a design conference that gives 500 people ugly, black, generic, ‘50-zillion compartment but none that fit the things you actually need when traveling’ conference bag, replete with a garish logo carelessly glued (yet impossible to remove) on the front cover. Well the webstock bag doesn’t look like a conference bag: it looked so good I had to ask twice to make sure it was the conference bag, and not some special prize.
• Is made of canvas! I’ve been to dozens of conferences, yet this is the first bag made of a sturdy, high-quality, non-synthetic material. It feels like a well made thing to hold and gives the vibe it’s meant to be used, not just a token gift to make you feel better about the fees you paid to get in.

The t-shirt

• Looks like something from threadless. The front has, I believe, some of the public art from the city of Wellington, with the words Webstock underneath. It’s a nice yellow on grey, soft tones, and looks good with a pair of jeans. Unlike the dozens of conference t-shirts I’ve given away to goodwill over the years, I’m keeping this one.
• Came in women’s and men’s versions. Why should I care as a man? Well, I confess: I like to look at women. Especially when they’re wearing clothes meant to fit their curvy figures. I always hear people complain about the low numbers of women at design and tech conferences. Well, maybe if they followed some of webstock’s ideas, more women would be interested in finding out about their conferences.

Other bits

• Did not dig the food. I’m a foodie, I cook for myself all the time, and the food here was a problem. I admit it was awesome to see an entire vegetarian table and other special diets accounted for, but the food I grazed at at the regular tables didn’t have me coming back for more. I didn’t see anyone else complaining and everyone seemed to be eating tons, so perhaps it was me. That said, I gave up on the conference food part way through as F Inc, just across the street from the venue in Wellington, was great. I had some of my best meals of my two weeks in the country here.
• An agenda that took risks. I missed most of the first day, but what I did at the conference included: powerpoint karaoke, where speakers had to talk for 5 minutes with someone else’s slides, and an 8×5 session, where 8 speakers had 5 minutes each. These things mix up the pace of a long conference, give people a different way to communicate, and make interesting mistakes possible. The social hours had awesome live music, craftstock was fun: it was clear, all over the place, that the organizers get what good experience design is all about.
• I didn’t use the conference program. You can see it in the photo above of the bag, but I didn’t refer to it much. I’d read the basic agenda online and had the badge program. I can’t say much about its design, though it certainly looked great. My only gripe was that it had a page per speaker, making the book quite big, yet I struggled to find the specific speaker I was looking to track down (Mark from the 8×5 session). Do we need these big program guides anymore? This one sure looked good, but I don’t think I saw a soul with one at the actual conference.

If you get a chance to speak at or attend Webstock, don’t miss it. You’ll feel the love if you go.

Posted in Design, On Tour, Teaching/Training, Travel | 6 Comments »

The Overcoming bias blog has a post about the author’s favorite professor, who had a habit of intentionally lying in class. Why? To force people to both pay attention and to think critically about what the professor was saying.

This might have been inspired by a favorite author of mine, Neil Postman. Who in his 1995 essay ‘The error of our ways’ wrote:

“All that is necessary is that at the beginning of each course, the teacher address students in the following way:

During this term, I will be doing a great deal of talking. I will be giving lectures, answering questions, and conducting discussions. Since I am an imperfect scholar and, even more certainly, a fallible human being, I will inevitably be making factual errors, drawing some unjustifiable conclusions, and perhaps passing along my opinions as facts. I should be very unhappy if you were unaware of these mistakes. To minimize that possibility, I am going to make you all honorary members of Accuracy in Academia. Your task is to make sure that none of my errors goes by unnoticed.

At the beginning of each class, I will, in fact, ask you to reveal whatever errors I made in the previous session. You must, of course, say why these are errors, indicate the source of your authority, and, if possible, suggest a truer or more useful or less biased way of formulating what I said. Your grade in this course will be based to some extent on the rigor with which you pursue my mistakes. And to ensure that you do not fall into the torpor that is so common among students, I will, from time to time, deliberately include some patently untrue statements and some outrageous opinions.

There is no need for you to do this alone. You should consult with your classmates, perhaps even form a study group that can collectively review the things I have said. Nothing would please me more than for one or several of you to ask for class time in which to present a corrected or alternative version of one of my lectures.”

(Hat tip: kottke.org & vitamin briefcase)

Posted in Teaching/Training | 6 Comments »

Hi folks - you may know I make most of my living performing lectures and teaching workshops. I love to teach and it provides a solid income to support all the writing I do here and in books.

After 4 years of doing this exclusively for hire by fancy companies, universities and big conferences, I’m exploring offering my best courses to the public, so anyone interested can throw tomatoes at me in person.

What I’m looking to find out is:

1) Are there enough people interested in Seattle?
2) Which course I should offer first?
3) How much would you (or your company) pay for a day of training?

If you live in the Seattle area, please give the short survey a spin. Will take you exactly 45 seconds. Cheers!

If I can get this running here in my hometown, I’ll happily take the show on the road to other cities if, and where, there’s enough interest.

Posted in Seattle, Teaching/Training | No Comments »

The Times Online has a short piece about the dangers of Google dominance for education, called White bread for young minds. It quotes a professor, Tara Brabazon, concerned about the trends:

Google offers easy answers to difficult questions. But students do not know how to tell if they come from serious, refereed work or are merely composed of shallow ideas, superficial surfing and fleeting commitments.

It seems unfair to blame Google for this. But in reading the article and some background on Brabazon, it doesn’t seem she blames Google either. It’s the author of the Times article who focuses the blame on Google.

In truth school textbooks are notoriously poor sources of information on history - as are television and films, mediums children spend as may hours getting educated by as their classrooms. Really what it seems she wants, is to teach children how to interpret all kinds of media. According to the article:

Her own students are banned from using Wikipedia or Google as research tools in their first year of study, but instead are provided with 200 extracts from peer-reviewed printed texts at the beginning of the year, supplemented by printed extracts from eight to nine texts for individual pieces of work.

I get the ban - but the article frames this wrong. The ban is to help people to understand what’s being banned, not to ban it forever. As best I can tell Brabazon is trying to teach a kind of
media literacy for research. The highlight of the article for me is this quote:

We need to teach our students the interpretative skills first before we teach them the technological skills. Students must be trained to be dynamic and critical thinkers rather than drifting to the first site returned through Google

And no technology can do our critical thinking for us - we have to depend on our brains for that one. However, there have been advocates of mandatory media literacy education for a long time. The core theme being to teach children how to compare sources, deconstruct advertising, and be savvy about what they read & see, instead of wasting time training students in rote research methods devoid of critical thinking.

Given the context, I’d hoped Tara Brabazon, the professor quoted in the article, had a blog, perhaps to respond to the thin, biased tone of the article. But her site lists only her books and CV.

She writes quite well and I’m intrigued enough by her smart, funny articles like Socrates in earpods: the i-podification of education to read more of her work.

Her most recent book is called the University of Google, which from the description advocates the teaching of research, but I couldn’t find a table of contents or even a review of the book. The best sumation of Tara’s own thinking on the issue was from these notes on a lecture she gave about the book.

Posted in Teaching/Training, creative thinking, philosophy | 9 Comments »

On my first trip to London in 1996, on a whim from a blurb in some guidebook, I checked out Speaker’s corner @ Hyde Park. I just could not believe the blurb: a place where anyone could stand up on a box, preach or rant to their hearts desire, and throngs of people would come to listen, all for free.

Inconceivable!

In NYC, we had a name for public speakers - crazies. We’d ignore them, or as a gang of kids, terrorize them. As adults, who has the time to stop and listen? The notion was absurd, and in my then fully charged American arrogance I figured if such a form of free speech were possible, surely I’d have seen it before in America.

So I went to see for myself - It was true and it blew me away.

1. It’s self-organized. Anyone can stand anywhere and start going.
2. People get interactive. There’s lots of yelling and heckling.
3. It’s mostly peaceful. No one is forced to speak or listen.
4. Some of the speakers are amazing. They own their crowds without microphones, podiums, powerpoint - just them and their voices.

Many speakers were political or religious, but many weren’t. Some were pros who seemed to be regulars at the corner, but many were just working people interested in debate. The experience redefined what a public speaker meant. It’s one thing to speak at a conference or in an office where there are rules of conduct, but entirely another to speak where no one has any obligation to even listen to you.

I can’t say what goes on at the corner is a good way to debate issues, but it sure is an experience and any thinking person can’t observe what goes on there without some kind of opinion.

I’ve been thinking more about speaker’s corner lately for two reasons. First I now make a living as a public speaker, but also because of the rise of informal presenting, from un-conferences, Pecha-Kucha, and 99 second or 60 second university talks.

Surprisingly youtube comes up short on capturing the experience. But here are a few to watch if you’re curious (which you should be):

• Speaker’s corner / mad world. The best video of the bunch. It takes a sad view of the corner, but it does the best job of capturing the variety of speakers, formats and confrontations.
• A debate about oil, no doubt a popular one these days. Watch the first speaker lose control to a better speaker in the crowd.
• Race, drugs and politics. An excellent speaker who has his crowd captivated, heckle-free, for nearly 10 minutes. Wow.

The question I’ll ask you is the same one I ask myself:

• Would you have the guts to speak at speaker’s corner? (I chickened out in ‘96)
• If yes, what would you speak about?

Posted in Teaching/Training, Travel | 2 Comments »

When doing talks about creative thinking and innovation, I often ask the crowd how they know what they know - How do we know Edison invented the lightbulb, or Newton got hit by an apple? By far and large the most common answer I get to that second question is Schoolhouse rock. Funny how we dismiss things by saying “it’s just for kids”, but what happens when those kids grow up?

Now I loved Schoolhouse rock as a kid, and it’s probably the only reason I know what a conjunction is. But in watching a local performance of the musical based on the tv show, I found some problems with the stories we’re telling.

• Newton did not get hit by an apple - at best he watched one fall in his grove decades before he completed his treatise on gravity (From the song Victim of Gravity).
• Robert Fulton didn’t invent the steamboat. He was, however, one of the first Americans to make a successful business of it, much like Edison and the light bulb. (From the song Mother Necessity)
• Galileo most likely did not perform the famous falling bodies experiment at Pisa (From the song Victim of Gravity).
• It’s disputed whether Franklin ever flew his famous kite, though he did have the idea (Electricity).
• Elias Howe did not build the first working sewing machine. He was the first American to do so, but that’s not the same thing. Same for Ford and the automobile. (From the song Mother Necessity).
• Betsy Ross may not have sewn the first U.S. flag, as most claims come from her relatives. (From the song Sufferage).

The story of Newton, and epiphany in general, is the subject of chapter 1 of the Myths of Innovation, so if you like this kind of stuff, check out the book.

Posted in Myths of Innovation, Teaching/Training | 2 Comments »

This is it. This is the big one. It’s the best, simplest advice I’ve ever heard about public speaking: Videotape yourself speaking and watch it.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing.

This is not new (title says best tip, not the most original), but most people are terrified of this and never do it. Well guess what - if you’re afraid to do it, how should your audience feel? Would you hire an accountant that doesn’t do their own taxes? Well, if you’re a speaker, you should, once in awhile, be your own audience.

We’ve all seen thousands of professional speakers, actors and presenters on tv and in the workplace making us all excellent critics of presentations. But what most of us lack is the most basic feedback on how we perform ourselves.

If you watch even 5 minutes of yourself presenting, you can catch:

• Lazy speaking habits, like ummms and aaaaws.
• Lack of eye contact (reading isn’t presenting) and presence.
• Body language issues and distractions.
• Moments when you’re confused by your own material.
• Energy level (do you seem to care about what you’re saying?).
• Personality - are you indistinguishable from a presentation robot?

Watch yourself and take notes. After you’ve caught things like above that distract you as a viewer, videotape yourself again - on the same material - with the goal of doing less of the above, and more or the things you did well. As you repeat the material with these things in mind, more and more of your material will come through. Still think you suck? Do it again and again and I promise you will get better nearly every time.

With the video, you can ask friends to review and give feedback - but pick your presentation minded, critical friends, not the ones who, like your Mom, will just tell you how great you were.

This requires no training, no special Powerpoint voodoo, just your willingness to swallow your pride for an hour or more. Believe me - your audience will appreciate it.

Posted in Teaching/Training | 3 Comments »

We all knows it’s true - most of the time, at most conferences, most speakers won’t be very good. Public speaking is hard, but the low quality of speakers is strange given how most conferences focus on their agenda of speakers. It’s not like they market their event based on free beer or tasty food - they pitch the potential for learning from experts as the primary reason to buy tickets. That’s the fundamental premise, and often it’s broken.

Here’s why:

• Organizers have 3 tough criteria: 1) find experts on a topic 2) who are good public speakers 3) and who are available and cheap. It’s hard enough to nail 2 of the criteria, but 3 can be impossible - organizing is a tough job. That said, organizers are typically rewarded for #1 and #3, and only hear about #2 when the conference is over. If attendance is good, concerns on #2 are easy to ignore.
• Speakers are hired based on knowledge, not performance. Most speakers are invited based on books, blogs or job titles, rather than their ability to communicate or teach. Public speaking is a kind of performance, yet it’s rare for organizers to have seen their speakers speak before the event. The biggest gamblers are academic conferences, like CHI, where people are invited to speak solely because they had a paper accepted. What does writing a paper have to do with being a good public speaker? Almost nothing.
• Confusion between entertainment and value. Some speakers gain reputations for being funny or charismatic, but that’s not the same thing as teaching. Even speakers who are known as “good speakers” often fail to provide the value suggested by their talk/workshop descriptions.

What can be done:

• Performance based pay. Speakers should earn part of their fees (if they are paid at all) based on feedback from the audience. This forces them to pay more attention to the value they’re providing and places greater power in the audience to recommend future speakers. UIE 12 is the only conference I’ve ever been paid performance based pay as a speaker and I wish more would follow their lead. If I suck, I want to be paid less. And if I do a great job, I want to be paid more. Even an audience favorite vote, where the winner gets a $1k bonus or something is easy to do and in the right spirit.
• Request video samples. It’s rare I’m asked for this, despite how easy it is to provide in the youtube era. Conference organizers should sample what they’re paying for, instead of reviewing slides or other trivia. And why not put the samples on the conference website? Then attendees can sample the speakers, instead of guessing blindly from the descriptions.
• Give speakers their real feedback . Most conferences do some kind of audience survey for the event, but rarely does the feedback make it back to the speaker. And sometimes when it does, it’s filtered - all the rants and complaints are filtered out. Who but the conference organizers can point out to speakers that there is a problem or room for improvement? Human nature dictates that most of the informal feedback speakers will get will be polite and positive, not balanced or constructively critical. Someone has to fill in the feedback gap.
• Train speakers at the event. Serve speakers and the audience by offering speakers voluntary coaching at the event itself, the day before the conference. Most of the presentation mistakes I see at conferences, even by expert/guru types, are basic: unfamiliarity with own material, monotone delivery, unreal name dropping and pretension, no examples, unclear goals, slides crammed with 25 bullets in 8pt type, etc. I’ve volunteered to do this at CHI and other conferences, but no one has taken me up on it, and I’ve yet to hear of it being done.

What else can conferences do to improve the quality of conference speakers?

Posted in Teaching/Training | 9 Comments »