I’ll be blogging occasionally, along with the rest of my experience design, digital strategy, and emerging technologies brethren, over here at Molecular Voices. My first post, about the New York Times as a Service Platform, is up!

Frightening? Yes. But also interesting.

Thanks to the wonders of DVR technology, I might have missed Larry Lessig publicity stop on The Colbert Report last Thursday. Lessig was there to promote his new book Remix: Making Art and Culture Thrive in the Hybrid Economy.

It was a brief but enjoyable interview; Colbert clearly gets the value of the hybrid economy (he of the Green Screen Challenges), but he’s still Stephen Colbert, so he behaves badly as he always does. Does Larry look a little frazzled?

Continuing today’s theme of sarcastic experience design raillery, and in light of MacWorld Expo wrapping up, the always reliably funny Onion brings us Apple’s announcement of the MacBook Wheel:

Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard

(Note: it’s worth watching twice for the news ticker at the bottom of the screen. Blink and you’ll miss priceless headlines such as “For live weather coverage, stock quotes, and up-to-the-minute headlines from around the world, log on to basically any news website” and “Study finds that horseback riding just an expensive form of sitting.”)

I love questions that start with the words “what if.” What if dogs suddenly gained the power of logic and rationality? What if the moon were made of cheese? What if we had no thumbs?

“What if” questions spawn the greatest conversations.

With a tip to Ad Freak, this video asks the question “What if there were no stop signs?”

What if a corporate, groupthink agency designed the stop sign?

Happy New Year!

It’s time to spend some time reflecting on 2008 (and some time relaxing in Vermont).

In the meantime, a small but important announcement: I’ve made the decision to rededicate myself in 2009 to publishing here (and elsewhere) on the web about my professional and personal efforts and endeavors. Expect to see some changes around here very shortly, but more importantly, expect to hear (and see) more of me.

A few weeks ago I shared the story of Studio Wikitecture with a number of architect friends of mine. Studio Wikitecture is a group of professionals from diverse backgrounds dedicated to bringing the core concepts of the open source movement (crowd sourcing, shared IP, decentralized intelligence) to the architecture of physical spaces. The group recently won the Architecture for Humanity’s Founder’s Award for their design for a health facility in Nepal, submitted through a challenge issued by the Open Architecture Network. The kicker is that the majority of folks involved in the Studio Wikitecture project aren’t architects at all:

Studio Wikitecture assumes the principles of good design are universal enough that they can be learned in one discipline and applied in some fashion to another. Through Studio Wikitecture, we are trying to provide a channel where these individuals can apply these skills to the design of a building. This does not negate the fact that a certain foundational knowledge is still necessary to design a building that will actually function and stand up, but SW feels that this knowledge can be acquired through a number of channels and should not be restricted to just architects and their particular educational path.

What did my architect friends think about this?

There was significant unease — accompanied by some outright skepticism — with the concept that good design can be had by committee. Kelley says:

I do agree that architectural design benefits from the input of other design realms - and input from non-design realms, like the end users - that’s why we spend so much time asking questions & listening at the beginning of a project. But why does everyone seem to believe that anyone can sit around and come up with a good building? People don’t seem to think that about a lawyer’s closing argument or a doctor’s research paper.

In my response to Kelley I noted that no one was arguing that “just anyone” can produce good design on their own — Studio Wikitecture is a classice example of Jame Surowiecki’s thesis on The Wisdom of Crowds, specifically his definition of a “wise crowd,” which requires

• Diversity of opinion (to capitalize on narrow but deep vertical knowledge)
• Independence of thought (to prevent groupthink)
• Decentralized location (to capitalize on local knowledge)
• A method to aggregate or vet each individual contribution into a final decision

In the case of Studio Wikitecture, each participant contributes his own independent design ideas based on their own background and capabilities. The key to the system is the “wiki tree,” a doric-column like structure within their collaborative environment (Second Life) which allows all participants to view all contributions and vote on them.

The wiki tree in Second Life

Of course, any crowdsourced building design would likely fail — structurally and aesthetically — if educated planners and designers aren’t part of the crowd. Kevin Kelly But it’s nice to see that socially-enabled technology allows design massively collaborative design efforts in almost anything. Earlier this year, Kevin Kelly states in “The Bottom is not Enough” that “the bottom-up hive mind will never take us to our end goal. We are too impatient. So we add design and top down control to get where we want to go.” Obviously SW has mastered this approach. The result: a design that incorporated innovative design elements, examples of which are provided by the O’Reilly Radar:

• Adobe and gabion wall construction was suggested as among the most viable design material given the exact (and remote) location and the ability to utilize local labor. Other materials would not only cost more but could even be prohibitive in terms of shipping into the area.
• In Nepal an odd number of steps is considered inauspicious so all stair plans were designed for even numbers.

Designers in all fields should take several things away from Studio Wikitecture’s success. First, the emergence of technologies that enable social interaction permit egalitarian participation in the design process, allowing stakeholders or other interested parties — like consumers — to contribute. Second, the environments, platforms, and frameworks that are necessary for these types of projects to be successful will need to be designed as well — in short, it’s a good day to be a designer.

Studio Wikitecture’s submission panels for the Nepalese Health Facility can be found below.

Randy Pausch, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, virtual reality pioneer in the realm of virtual reality, human computer interaction, and design, died today. He was 47.

Aside from being a passionate advocate for the commingling of computer engineering and the arts — a topic that I hold dear — Randy movingly spoke about both living and dying well in his Last Lecture at CMU. His speech had in some ways pushed me on a slightly different course in life. The themes he talks about are the same ones that come up when we talk about how to succeed in our new world of openness. He will be remembered as a man who stood up and spoke directly to the inner desire in all of us to be better tomorrow than we are today.

There’s no better person from whom to hear it then Randy himself. The video is over an hour long, but it’s worth it.

We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand. If I don’t seem as depressed or as morose as I should be, sorry to disappoint you.

I spent this weekend “geeking out” at a PodCamp Boston 3, the social media “un-conference” held at the Harvard Medical Center. The organizers – Chris Penn, Chris Brogan, Chel Pixie, Sooz, Steve Sherlock, Doug Haslam, and Whitney Hoffman — deserve a great deal of kudos for putting such great event together.

This was my second PodCamp, and already the differences have been noticeable. The diversity of attendees — from the marketers and PR folks that dominated the last event in October, to designers looking to understand new methods of value creation on the web, to a teacher looking to use co-created media to help troubled students learn to communicate — was matched only by the passion and enthusiasm we had as a a whole to learn from each other and take what we have found back with us, to use and experiment with in our own ways.

A Few Highlights of PodCamp:

No Experience Necessary: A number of folks — some who traveled a significant distance — came to learn about how they can use social media within their organization without having been associated with the “social media space” (a term I particularly loathe) up until this point. What many of them quickly learned is that they have been a part of the global conversation that is happening — they just didn’t realize that it can be harnessed.

The Value Isn’t (Always) In the Sessions: No one is really an expert at PodCamp — The sessions, while engaging and thought-provoking for the most part — were not the highlight of my PodCamp experience. The most fun I had was sitting upstairs in the BrainTorrent rooms  having ad-hoc discussions with presenters, attendees, and organizers. (Another highlight: Chris Brogan covering “Pork & Beans” and “Round Here” on guitar, with varying degrees of success. I occasionally helped Chris cover up his guitar gaffes with my terrible vocal prowess).

Chris Brogan on Guitar, Jeff Fisher on Lyrics

Sponsors Who Understand: The sponsors of the event — mDialog, Blue Sky Factory, mZinga, Utterz, Blip.tv, blubrry.com, ooVoo, matchmine, marketingprofs, and Marketwire — deserve a great deal of credit for participating in the general conference conversations. They all understand that the best PR is when you become a member of your own public. Well done.

A Few Things I Hope to See Improved at PCB4:

Encourage Outside Participation: The social media community in Boston is small and tightly connected, and it seemed at times that the event was just another event for folks to get together again. While I met more folks from outside the social media community this year, the only way our community will truely keep learning is to continue to open the door for other to share their ideas.

This Stuff Doesn’t Make Itself: An number of folks — like myself — came to the conference as experience designers. We are the people who are designing social media products and recommending that our clients use them to grow or transform their business. I had several very good conversations in the BrainTorrent room around designing for social spaces — I’d like to see a presentation or two about social design principles at the next session (I already have Keynote open).

All in all, it was a great camp, and I’m looking forward to following up with all the great folks I got a chance to meet.

I returned from vacation to Nantucket earlier this week I believe I’ve finally cleared my head ehough to blog some of the photos taken in 5 days of absolutely nothing.

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