Gamification of the crowd

I recent article I read highlights some of the power of crowds and mixes in some gaming concepts to make a novel use of crowdsourcing to help scientific progress. The amazing claim is that the power of the crowd actually came up with an enzyme that was better than anything the scientists working in the field had come up with on their own. The new crowd produced enzyme is 18 times more effective than it was before the crowd got involved.

The crowd playing this game are logged into a system called FoldIt, that basically requires folding proteins to form a correct solution. It is like a biological version of Rubik's cube. It has rules and systems, that can be learnt and lend themselves to crowdsourcing. The power of the crowd is the ability to tackle these complex objects in bite sized pieces and problems. One of the fascinating things is that the crowd are not all experts in protein folding and in fact do not need to be to play. The rules of gene folding are like the rules of a game that can be learnt and played with.

The lesson to be learnt here is that by creating a compelling game that has easy rules and ability to experiment without consequence has not only grown a large interested group of game players, but has actually enabled time and effort playing the game to be turned into something practical in the real world. This fails nicely inline with the whole concept of innovation and working on bite sized problems, using a growth mindset and playing in safe environments. Nice confirmation of some of those concepts.

You can read some more about some of my crowdsourcing discoveries here and here.

Branding is a longterm investment

Liked this quote on branding from an article on Yves Behr found here he also puts forward an interesting idea of being invested in the companies you design for, especially start ups. It is good see recognition that some great companies have had dedicated often amazing designers heading up the vision, for example Jonathan Ive and Apple as well as Dieter Rams with Braun.

The Work Is Never Done

Creating a brand, of course, isn’t a project with a beginning, middle, and end. There are myriad decisions to be made over time, and it requires constant vigilance--if the creative leadership changes, it’s all to easy for the message to drift. "You can’t do good work on a short-term contract," says Behar. "You need to be engaged over a period of time."

Retailing an Experience

In an article found here IDEO turns it's focus on retail and the future of the physical store. So much talk these days is about how brick and mortar stores are disappearing and becoming obsolete with the rising of internet purchases and consumer shopping habits. As this article suggests in is probably very premature to assume that that consumers are completely over physical stores and transactions. People like to connect with people and from a branding stand point and engagement with consumers the store still leads the way, and probably won't be replaced anytime soon with a digital alternative. So what things should be considerations for the stores of the future? This the article goes on the explain, is where a store needs to evolve to the new needs and expectations of consumers.

Considerations include.

Design stores that are more than places to buy stuff.
People still visit stores, people still go out at weekends and shop around, even if they ultimately do not buy from the store they are wandering and touching real products. Stores can use this to their advantage, making casual browsing, enjoyable, the goal should be brand experience.
Employ brand enthusiasts
Today more than ever, people share their opinions about things they buy, people love reviews and ratings. Stores should be hiring brand enthusiasts that are like evangelists to the products. These are people that care about the products they sell and want others to join their joy in ownership.
Target existing users of your product
People that are already consumers of your brand, have most likely bought into the dream and vision. Building in-store experiences that focus on education, trials and membership to these users of your product are going to build longer term relationships, and advocates. It's much more about open relationships than before.
Make shops into R&D labs
If one thing differentiates a physical store from a digital store it's the physical face-time with the consumers. This is an opportunity to speak directly with people and gauge honest feedback on new initiatives or products. This allows the physical space to become a feedback loop directly with customers.

Nice article and some interesting value adds to physical stores of the future. The internet has certainly empowered the consumer, but really people still want those physical interactions and feelings of belonging that brands promote, these ideas are definitely inline with those thoughts. These future stores could add huge brand value and loyalty, and I think Apple stores already show the way and how well it works.

Little bets

Just finished reading Little Bets, by author Peter Sims. A very nice book about the process of innovating through making small investments in time and effort towards large goals. The book is an easy read and I found it quite inspiring with it's examples from companies like Google and Pixar. I liked some of the nuggets of information about entrepreneurial thinking and how these personality types think and take risk. I also liked the stories of how Pixar took risks early on and didn't even start out as a film production company but actually produced hardware. The animated shorts were originally used to sell the hardware and software they produced. If it wasn't for little bets and the ambitions of the Pixar team to keep pushing for full length animated films then who knows what might never have been. Of course equally Steve Jobs' investment in Pixar was a little bet by him in the domain of 3D graphics, and that certainly turned out well. The rest of course is history.

There are some nice references to the work by Carol Dweck on growth mindset versus fixed minds, that was encouraging and insightful about how your mind affects how you perform, I have written a brief post on this already here that I recommend checking out. What is clear from the book is that making little investments towards anything is going to eventually with enough time and focus in the right direction yield results. I think the book is nicely written and makes you want to find ways to apply it to your daily life. I have always liked the quote from Louis Pasteur, that opportunity favors the prepared mind, well this adds an little twist to that concept that good ideas favor little bets.

Are we domesticating ourselves?

Whilst driving through Seattle, I was listening to an interesting broadcast from a local radio station (88.1 KPLU), in which they were discussing an experiment that was still going on in Russia that had been started over 50 years ago. Dmitri Belyeaev, a Russian scientist had setup a breeding project in 1959 to see how the domestication of dogs may have occurred, from Wolves. They went on to describe the experiment and some of the interesting results, of the domestication of Siberian foxes over 50 years. More about the experiment can be read here. I do not necessarily agree with the experiment but, the results are facinating

What is most fascinating to me about this experiment was less that indeed the foxes could be bred to be domesticated and not afraid of people, but I was intrigued by the results of what it had done to the foxes as a result of the domestication. It seems that as a result of the selective breeding of the foxes that exhibited the correct responses to good behavior, that other aspects of their physiology altered too. Their teeth became smaller, their ears were more droopy (less cartilage), their tails less straight and their bones smaller and lighter. It seems that the selective breeding had focused not only the desired character traits but has also funneled certain genetic mutations that altered their appearance and structure. Through the filtering of good behavior and removal of the otherwise necessary aggressive traits that would keep them alive in the wild the foxes had begun to alter to suit their new temperament. So of course this is very interesting, from a scientific stand, and definitely goes along way to explain how Wolves may have become domestic dogs. The next thing the talk moved on to thinking about humans and our own evolution. This was when I started to get interested what was proposed.

The premise was put forward that humans too have through group behavior and social exchange actually evolved themselves and arguably domesticated themselves. The thought is that once we were like apes in small groups and the strongest mostly survived and a strict hierarchy could be seen. Then as time moved on and we became wanders and probably grew larger groups we had more people fighting for the top spots, soon it was necessary for progress to get along the friendlier males would have more success with females than the fighters and aggressive males. Jump forward a few thousand years and today we see that we are in large groups and in very close proximity and getting along is a very valuable trait to have to survive, aggression will only get you so far. They mentioned how if you placed 100 chimps on a long haul flight across the Atlantic not many would survive they would definitely kill each other, being so close for so long. We however, have learnt to get along and can tolerate such closeness and are generally friendly. Does this mean as the radio show suggests that we have domesticated ourselves into a more passive and friendly animal just like the Siberian Foxes. Certain it is suggested that we have altered genetically in a similar way, we have smaller bones, smaller teeth than our ancestors. The concept of become a domesticated species is interesting to me, not so much that the idea of a "pet" human, but because it shows that as we grow as a society and population that lives in closer and closer proximity, we are having to alter how we react and respond to each other on a daily basis and it seems it would be fair to suggest that we are altering not only our personalities but potentially our physiology as well.

Of course this may all be an interesting parallel and really we of course are far more complex creatures with our ability to rationalize, but none the less it was an interesting radio talk show. As a follow up I discovered there is a book on the subject by Peter J Wilson called interestingly enough "The domestication of the Human Species", it is now waiting in my Amazon wishlist.

Growing your mind.

Brain Coral

I have been looking into some research that Standford psychologist Carol Dweck has done into achievement and success and what it has to do with how you think about yourself. She describes people as having basically two mindsets, a fixed mindset and a growth mindset. These two mindsets can greatly affect how you approach problem solving and how likely you are to take risks and potentially go about innovating. Your frame of mind can greatly affect your self esteem and affect your likely success at a task or venture. Mindset is something very insightful and worth considering if you are in any task that involves some risk and possibility of failure.

Looking firstly at the fixed mindset, it is described as simply having a point of view that talent and intelligence are fixed traits that cannot be changed. These types of people spend their time and effort documenting their abilities and talents instead of expanding them, they are primarily looking to prove themselves to others. They believe that talent leads to success. This mindset is formed through interactions with other people that respond to situations like testing, with attitudes about success and winning. It can be an outside influence such as a parent, boss or teacher, that creates this feeling and mindset in the individual or something that a particular person feels inside themselves that is reinforced through repetition. In children this mindset is formed with statements like "Good job, you are very smart" are more likely to develop a fixed mindset. This mindset is of course can be great when things are working and all is performing well, the problem really arises when something goes wrong or fails to meet expectations. The negative feelings that emerge can be inhibiting to later activities, as the fear of failure can make someone become more risk averse.

A growth mindset, on the other-hand, is someone that believes their abilities can be improved and expanded through practice, experimentation and physically performing tasks. In this mindset, learning and acceptance of failure is critical to success. This mindset has been shown by Carol, to increase motivation and productivity. This mindset is encouraged through positive reinforcement of the effort that has been put into a project rather than the results. In children this can be encouraged with words like "Good job, you worked very hard", this can make all the difference in how they percieve themselves if things go wrong, and willing they are to take risks later. What can be learnt from what went wrong is seen as something valuable to gain from what is done as well as what worked. This mindset, of course, is exactly the mindset you would need as a creative thinker, where often experimentation and discovery into unknowns will produce failures as well as successes.

The great thing about these mindsets is that they are not born into us, they are something learnt, and as a result we can alter our mindsets to the more positive growth mindset with an attention to how we perceive ourselves and what we do. It just takes practice in how we deal with failure and how we learn from mistakes. In my role as a creative director, this work is very insightful and valuable to how I approach projects with an open  mind to the risks and possibilities of some failure. It helps make sure the team understands that things can go wrong in development, especially if our assumptions are wrong. If I am wrong   then this is okay, what really matters to me and the team is what we can learn. What is most valuable is to evaluate what went wrong and how it can be improved towards a successful outcome. The ability to make and learn from mistakes, without retribution,  is what differentiates the successful companies and projects from the doomed to never work ones that will probably never innovate. Even beyond the practical use of this mindset in work, it is a good way to consider all aspects of you life and journey, with openness to unexpected opportunities and adventure. Sometimes following an unexpected path can lead to amazing new discoveries, that just needs a willingness to adapt and keep a mind that wants to grow.

7 Sins of Innovation

Ryan Jacoby, head of IDEO NY is quoted in an article found here on 7 deadly sins he sees that affect innovation.

They are summarized as:

1: Thinking the answer is in here, rather than out there.

2: Talking about it rather than building it.

3: Executing when we should be exploring.

4: Being smart, afraid to be wrong.

5: Being impatient for the wrong things.

6: Confusing cross-functionality with diverse viewpoints.

7: Believing process will save you.

This list is definitely very pertinent to the creative design thinking process, it promotes prototyping, and building as well as risk and taking, without fear of failure. It also raises the issues with unrealistic expectations from management on innovative new products and encourages diversity in teams that are there to innovate. I like this list and it touches nicely on the major aspects of good design thinking methodologies and implementations.

Also in his talk at NYU Poly Ryan refers to a prototype as being a single question embodied. He then goes on to describes a pilot (study) as a collection of many prototypes embodied all at once, like asking many questions at the same time. What is important to innovation is to ask questions constantly in production, then trying and tweaking those results. Ryan thinks it is important to always be in Beta, constantly exploring new ideas and keeping what works. Of course this is hard to adopt because people are afraid to fail, and can be difficult to prove somethings effectiveness, does the idea scale and how much does it cost. These concerns make innovating difficult in a corporate setting. Ryan quotes that Innovation is fundamentally a human endeavor. Avoid the sins and innovation should get easier and more productive.