Teaching + Digital Communications = Multidisciplinary Fusion!

On the subject of radical interdisciplinary design, we discussed in class the fusion of music and engineering, something I’m sure we will see posts about in the upcoming days. What I would like to talk about is the fusion of two disciplines which I have personally spent a lot of time thinking about before vital ideation, and am really excited to share with others. At first glance pedagogy and digital communications seem to have little in common. In fact, the notion of pedagogical research going hand in hand with network signaling and digital communications research seems outlandish and foreign at best. The thing is, any two disciplines must overlap in potentially powerful ways, and these two are no exception.

You can see from Figure 1 that the transmitter/receiver model is at least at a very basic level analogous to a teacher/student model where a lesson is transmitted to a student via some sort of signal. In this model a student’s receptivity to lesson X is based off their receptivity to specific teaching techniques. These techniques are used to varying degrees by a teacher, which can be depicted as the power spectral density of said teacher/transmitter’s transmit power, which in turn represents the amount of time teachers spend using a specific type of teaching technique. Figure 2 is a visual way to represent this last paragraph. You can see from the graph on the left, which shows professor “transmit” power as a function of the amount of time (shown on the vertical axis) they spend covering any material using different teaching techniques (shown on the horizontal axis.) Likewise the graph on the right shows student receptivity to different teaching techniques.

What a mouthful. To attempt to explain how this model might be useful, we consider the simple case of 30 students and a choice between two possible teaching techniques, Q_a = Auditory Learning and Q_b = Visual Learning. You can plot a student’s receptivity to these two teaching “techniques” on a two dimensional grid, where one axis is Q_a and the other is Q_b. The axes would range from 0->1 for each technique, where 1 is the hypothetical scenario were you as a student understand EVERYTHING that you learn using a specific technique. The ideal student would of course have a receptivity of 1 for both these values, but that wouldn’t make our model useful. The vector G₁ would represent the 2-D vector representing these two student receptivities. We can create 30 students with randomly generated receptivity vectors [G₁, G₂, …G₃₀] such that each student’s total receptivity||G|| is within an arbitrarily-defined range such as 0.3 < || G|| <>

Now, in the digital communications world you represent the power spectral density of a signal by multiplying the transmit power and channel receptivity. For us this means that in order to determine amount learned we can multiply the learning technique time distribution vector (in our 2-d example) for a professor by a student’s receptivity vector (for the two techniques) to give the amount “received as a signal” by a student from each “technique” The sum of the area under this student curve is the “amount learned”!

I will conclude the following post with an explanation of the following figure, which shows the example case of our 30 randomly generated students and the imaginary teacher who hypothetically could teach them any possible range of two specific techniques. What this translates to in the end is the following choice for a teacher: How much time do I spend say, watching videos as opposed to lecturing? Now, this case is obviously ideal because we can’t assume that we will know the exact “receptivity” of each student to a specific technique, and that this directly translates to amount learned, but in this end this is just a model of a teacher/student system. Every model is broken right? The only perfect model of a classroom environment is the classroom itself!

Each parabola shown in the figure above represents the projected learning efficiency E for a given student across the different mixes of auditory and visual learning techniques output by a professor. The vertex of each parabola corresponds to the student being taught by a teaching style that most perfectly matches his(her) receptivity G_n This value corresponds to the mix that represents that student’s highest learning efficiency. If we were teaching only one student, we would therefore choose the Auditory-Visual mix to coincide with the student’s vertex in this plot. However, we must teach to the entire class; so how can we select the direction of T_x? If our goal were to teach at a rate that did not exceed any student’s learning efficiency, the plot above implies that we should select about an equal mix of Auditory and Visual techniques, and we should choose a teaching rate (i.e. learning efficiency) of approximately 0.27. Qualitatively speaking, this corresponds to the highest learning efficiency in the plot that is below every parabola (or, the teaching rate below every student’s maximum learning efficiency). Instead of choosing this “lowest common denominator” approach, we may elect to forgo the few students with the lowest receptiveness in order to increase our teaching rate. Based on our understanding of the figure, any intelligent selection will exist at either the intersection of two parabolas or at the vertex of a parabola. We therefore limit our search to these points. You could envision a graph where you highlight only these two types of points and as you eliminate students you would move further up on the graph and around to different points to maximize the learning efficiency for the remaining N students.

The process for choosing this path up the graph can also be described intuitively as follows. Imagine you pressed a single finger up from the bottom of the last image shown. It would naturally center itself at the highest vertex or parabola union, which corresponds to the teaching technique mix (and the maximum learning efficiency threshold) that you would use to teach all 30 students. Next, say you wanted to exceed this threshold; you would effectively “ignore” one of the lowest parabolas and move to the next highest available point. This would be akin to teaching above the maximum learning efficiency for one of your students. This allows your technique mix to adjust itself to find the next maximum point. We can also plot the learning efficiency threshold height as a function of the number of students above the threshold; as discussed above, you can expect the maximum available threshold to increase as the number of students above the threshold decreases. With one student, assuming of course that our professor can transmit something perfect to that student’s receptivities, you achieve a learning efficiency of 1. With a decreased number of students under the threshold you achieve a lower perfect teaching efficiency for those students.

You could envision a scenario in this model where you chose your teacher signal at a point along this “path” up the vertexes and parabola union points that would maximize the overall amount of learning in the classroom. The “perfect learning efficiency” model up to this point hasn’t taken into account the fact that in the end the choice of a teacher’s T vector will lie somewhere on the 2-D student receptivity space for each student, and that on this space each student has their own perfect learning receptivity point. A teacher wanting to optimize his signal output would first decide an acceptable threshold for student learning, and then determine which of these points minimizes the distance between all the students he(she) is trying to teach for.

I welcome others to come up with two other seemingly random disciplines and merging them together somehow! I'm sure you can think of something in a quick 10 minutes. The basic idea for this post came about after a discussion asking the question "What if all knowledge could be plotted on a n-dimensional grid?" Without meaning to this successfully put linear algebra and digital communications in the same discussion space as pedagogy and learning. There are many more questions where this one came from, the real question is, do you ask yourself silly questions often enough to find real value in some of them?

Interdisciplinary? What isn't?!

The adjective interdisciplinary is most often used in educational circles when researchers from two or more disciplines pool their approaches and modify them so that they are better suited to the problem at hand.

--Wikipedia

We live in the 21st century. The things that surround us are the artifacts of hundreds of years of people making stuff. We have language, literature, art. We have physics, electricity, and televisions. We have roads, stop signs, and crosswalks. We have plastic bottles, Gatorade, and recycling plants.

How many of these things could be produced by a sole practitioner of a single discipline?

Hard Problems

It turns out most of the simple stuff got solved a long time ago. There was an age when a carpenter, using nothing but his knowledge of woodworking, could crank out a furniture set for a family. I guess that's still true, but how much furniture is hand made anymore? Now we design for manufacture, design for shipping, design in line with the popular stylistic tastes. If you're going to be your own carpenter you probably also need to have a good business sense and understand how to file your taxes.

How many people does it take to design something of larger complexity - a car, for instance. The construction of the frame to deal with stress and crunch zones to protect passengers, the chemical composition of the tires to resist wear and grip the road in inclement conditions, the programming of the microcontrollers that fire the airbags and blink the turn signals, the optimization of the drive train to maximize fuel economy, the design of the body of the car to be aesthetically pleasing. Designers talk to electrical engineers talk to mechanical engineers talk to chemical engineers talk to machinists talk to salespeople and marketing talk to customers talk to plant operators talk to governmental regulation agencies.

It's All a System

We live in the most complicated system man has ever produced. I have borrowed a picture of it from Wikipedia. Pretend the part that says "System" means "everything man has ever created or done" and the part that says "Surroundings" means "stuff not on Earth" and you have a rough idea of it.



Now, we can of course define smaller sections of the System that encompasses humanity and its endeavors, but if we draw anything sufficiently large, we are going to draw a box around people with fundamentally different fields and views. The era of "Mechanical Engineer" vs. "Electrical Engineer" and "Producer" vs. "Consumer" is fading away. Nowadays, people have a stronger understanding of more fields. Biology involves Chemistry, Chemistry involves Physics, Physics involves Mathematics, Mathematics ground Computer Science, Computer Science drives the computer you're reading this on now.

If you wanted to do disciplinary design, it's too late.

Targeted Advertising

One of the ways that advertising has fundamentally changed in the last few years is the introduction of online targeted advertising. In the past, if I wanted to reach a certain target audience, I would have to find magazines or television shows that I knew were popular among my target group and place advertisements in them. Obviously, if I want to reach cat lovers because I am selling a new and improved scratching pole, a pet magazine is a better place than a sports magazine. Online advertising lets this go even a step further, because now it is possible to target people based on even more specific criteria and without as much knowledge of what is popular in the group.

Google AdWords is an advertising product that lets advertisers display their ads next to Google searches for related things. "Your ads appear on Google When people search on Google using one of your keywords, your ad may appear next to the search results. Now you're advertising to an audience that's already interested in you." This is taken a step further with Google AdSense, which places ads from advertisers on other websites based on contextual analysis of what a site is about. "Google AdSense is a fast and easy way for website publishers of all sizes to display relevant, unobtrusive Google ads on their website's content pages and earn money. Because the ads are related to what your users are looking for on your site, you'll finally have a way to both monetize and enhance your content pages." Advertisers want to reach people who like flowers, you run a website about flowers, their ads go on your site. That makes sense.

Facebook is taking the equation up even another notch. Advertisers can purchase ads on Facebook targeting people at specific schools, with specific interests, of specific ages and genders. If you ran a pizza shop and wanted to have a special promotion for students from a nearby college during the Superbowl, you could target people who specifically have said they like football who attend that college. Here I create a Facebook ad that probably only targets me. That's not creepy at all.



What all of this means for me, the consumer, is that I am getting ads that I actually like. No longer do I get ads for X10 wireless cameras and lawnmowers, now the ads I see are for web design, photography, and other things I care about. Obviously the technology isn't perfect - and it'd be creepy if I got no irrelevant ads at all. Still, the advantages to this system are obvious for both advertisers and customers, and things are just going to keep heading in this direction. Facebook has announced that they will enable "social ads" on other sites. Interesting technology, but where will it go?

Obviously, all of this raises privacy concerns, and how much do I really want to see advertisements, even if they are for things I like? I like fun and amusing ads about things I like, and I have actually clicked some of the ads Facebook has showed me since they started getting relevant. I think relevant ads are great, but we need to make sure we don't do things that jeopardize individuals privacy.

Playgrounds

I loved playgrounds when I was little. I lived across the street from my elementary school, and frequently went to play on the playground it had. It wasn't that big, and I got used to it, so when we traveled across town to the other schools' playgrounds it was a big adventure. They were unknown and half of the fun was exploring them. Sometimes we even went to really big playgrounds that schools in other towns had.

Ultimately, what makes playgrounds awesome is that they're a place with no rules, and you have to invent them for yourself.

Playgrounds for Adults

Last summer I visited the Ontario Science Center, which features an area called the Weston Family Innovation Centre. While a somewhat vague name, the actual place is a giant room with all types of activities geared at people roughly ages 14 to 22. There's an area to take apart and put together electronics, making your own paper airplanes, comparing friction of different materials, and more. While it's full of "exhibits", most of them are entirely free-form and you have to figure out what you're going to do with it to play. Being presented with a set of tools and toys and having to figure out how you want to combine them is a very different experience than walking through a flat 2D museum.

Similarly, when I visit LEGO stores, I notice that it's just as often parents playing with the LEGOs as kids. Fathers and sons both build little cars out of LEGO and race them down a ramp, or bored parents put things together while their kids run around looking at all the different kits in the store. Opportunity in the form of supplies, but with no specified direction.

What Should I Make?

Lately I have been playing with an Arduino microcontroller. The Arduino sites defines an Arduino as "an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It's intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments." I borrowed a bunch of electronics parts (LEDs, resistors, a breadboard, connectors, etc) from my friend Brad and have been putting little things together to try out the different functions of the Arduino. So far I have replicated a red-yellow-green traffic light and written some stuff to a SerLCD I had laying around from last semester.

I am finding it lots of fun to make all these little things, but I am just doing it for fun. I have no class project, no goal I am trying to attain, and I don't know what I should make next. I am in a sandbox - what is the next cool thing to build? I'm going to keep poking at different things so I can figure out all of the Arduino's capabilities, but then I will probably bring it all together into some bigger project. Why? Why not.

No Rules, No Requirements

I feel like the major advantage to free form playing with ideas and tools is that everyone can put a different spin on what it is that they are making and doing. Everyone has a unique view on the world, and everyone finds different things fun. Giving people tools lets them do and lets them make. I like this concept, and want to try to figure out how to engage more people in this creative playing and making.

How can we build more sandboxes for "grown ups"?

Who says what Fun is anyway?

A distraction

I know you really want to read this blog post, but here, play this game first.

Google Image Labeler

I'll wait - don't worry about me.

Wasn't that fun?

Congratulations, you just spent your time, for free, improving the quality of Google's image search projects. I bet you don't feel ripped off or cheated at all. In fact, you may have even enjoyed it so much that you played a few rounds. So Google, a big company, is getting you to do work for them by disguising it as a game.

Disguising? They pretty much flat out told you what you were doing.

Who says what's Fun?

Tom Sawyer, that's who.

I think that this concept of turning things normally considered "work" into "fun" is a really powerful idea that can change the way people view certain tasks. Google's Image Label game is one example, and Tom Sawyer convincing his friends that whitewashing a fence is a fun activity - even getting them to pay him for the privilege - is another, but they seem relatively isolated. What are other ways our society promotes "fun is work is fun"?

Look at Toys

Toys are fun, right? We make balls, puzzles, and action figures, and all of these are great "non-work" things to do. But what else do we make?

Oh man, I love chores and yard work! They're the best! I can't wait till I get some free time, I am going to go vacuum every room in my house! While I, as a budding young adult, may not enjoy these activities, the sense of 'helping out' and the fantasy play that children get out of these toys are what make them fun.

Skewed Perspective on Fun?
Ultimately, what I think everything boils down to is a misguided sense that work and fun must be separate activities. People who love their jobs find them enjoyable, and people who don't can't wait to get home to do something else. Notice that retirees tend to play golf and work on hobbies instead of continuing to do what they were doing professionally? This implies that there were things that they wanted to do while working that they didn't get to do. If someone totally completely loved their job, why would they ever leave it?

Make it Fun

Here is a list of businesses that work because the products they produce are fun.

• Hollywood


• Music Industry


• Apple


• Soap Bubble Companies


• Board Games


• Bowling Alleys


• Laser Tag

When was the last time you got really excited about your thumb tacks, your stapler, or your forks?

What about glow in the dark thumbtacks, those big twisty straws, or bowls with cartoon characters on the bottom?

Make the experience fun.

Accessible Technology

A few weeks ago, Olin professor Brian Bingham spoke with us about Art and Engineering. He talked to us about his friend's art project, Ingram Clockworks, and some of the "whimsical engineering" projects he has worked on with his friends.

One of the points that he emphasized was the idea of "communication" and the different vocabularies used by artists and engineers. He pointed out that people don't go to art school to learn how to paint - they go to art school to learn about different frameworks and styles and this underlying language to communicate ideas with other artists. This isn't purely it - you get better at painting by painting, but learning the vernacular of your trade and how you fit into the world it encompasses is an important part of an education.

In the modern day and age, many artists are moving past traditional mediums and into spaces that formerly didn't exist. For instance, check out LED Throwies, which repurposes LEDs into temporary (guerrilla) art installations. Kinetic Sculptures are another genre of art that incorporate technologies like motors and microcontrollers to create a piece that can move on its own, turning a sculpture into something alive. There's one big barrier with these forms of art though - if you're not a technically inclined person, figuring out how to program a microcontroller or wire a circuit can be a tremendous roadblock.

It's rather daunting to stare down a 500 page PIC microcontroller manual, teach yourself how to use a circuit layout program, or learn how to program even a simple software application. These are skills engineers often take for granted, because we like them to start with and we're specifically taught how to do them in school. The 'curse of knowledge' prevents us from seeing things from the other perspective. Earlier today I was digging through Facebook's documentation of its application platform, and if I weren't comfortable with web application programming and markup languages, probably would have no idea what anything meant. This isn't conducive to convincing people to incorporate technology into their works.

So the question is, How can we make technology more accessible for whimsical, artistic applications?

There are some products being developed specifically for this purpose. The Arduino is an open source microcontroller designed to be easy to use for a variety of prototyping applications. Check out this cool light fixture powered by an Arduino. Additionally, sites like Instructables offer step-by-step tutorials to teach people how to put together their own projects. People from all over the Internets post their projects here for others to learn from, building a vibrant community of Makers.

I think it is important that product manufacturers keep their audience in mind. Even if you're making something that you expect to be used in one certain application, how can you keep things open so that other people can easily engage with and build on top of your product? There are many opportunities for visually stunning and beautiful mashups of traditional art and cutting edge technology - we just need to make things easy to use so that artist-engineers can turn their ideas for works into realities and not get caught up on technical snags along the way.

Let people play, and they will make amazing things.

A Mash-Up

Our guest speaker for "Ecomimicry", Nina Fefferman, told us about her research into the World of Warcraft "Corrupted Blood" 'virus'. Specifically, as an epidemiologist, the studied the insights that a digital outbreak of a contagious disease could shed onto how social systems (like thousands of gamers) respond to an epidemic. She backed observations about how the real world worked out of a crude approximation of the real world with thousands of players controlled by real people.

In our discussions of Ecomimicry, we talked a lot about how these large social systems online can emulate real social systems. We also talked about how one could intentionally design a system to take advantage of these parallels and behavioral mechanisms that emerge. In the case of online communities, people coming together creates an emulation of the real world. But the opposite is possible - we can create a system that emulates the way people work, without the people.

I did some quick Google searches for demos of particularly neat swam robot behaviors. I came across this site, which seems to be a slightly abandoned page by a research group investigating using the idea of "pheromones" to let the swarm robots communicate and work together toward goals. Insects use pheromones to signal to each other, so this team has taken the idea from the biological space and used it to establish a set of rules about how these robots should all behave. It is this emergent behavior from simple rules that is going to keep pushing what large groups of autonomous agents are going to be able to accomplish.

So here's my idea for a mash-up: Groups of people from all over the world are cool, albeit somewhat limited in their ability to physically affect the same place. Swarms of robots are cool, albeit somewhat dumb. What if we created a system where individual people were able to take control of a swarm robot to accomplish some task? It could be something as useless as "spell out a word" or as complex as "sort these boxes on the factory floor." If you could drop 10,000 robots on a disaster scene and volunteers could drive them around and flag distressed people or dangerous sites, how useful would that be? Nothing can improvise solutions to complex problems as well as the human brain, but it's hard (and expensive!) to get a lot of human brains together in the same place. Amazon's Mechanical Turk does the same things for purely-digital mundane tasks (Is this a picture of 79 State Street?), but imagine harnessing the same mechanism to do things in the real world.

Thousands of people, thousands of robots, useful telepresence work.

Online Relationships Mirroring In Real Life Relationships

After hearing Nina Fefferman's talk about the World of Warcraft virus, our group discussion focused a lot on how virtual worlds can replicate the real world. The WoW Virus gave epidemiologists an opportunity to study how virus transmission works. This is very difficult to study in real life, but the virtual world closely mirrored how things work. We brainstormed a few areas where virtual worlds also resemble real life. E-commerce is obviously a major part of how people purchase goods these days, and e-mail is similar to real mail.

However, one area where we had some contention among the group was how well online social networks emulate real life social relationships. Some others in the course felt that relationships forged entirely online could never replicate those made in the real world. Others felt that there was no difference between the two. Since we are all in college, many of our friends from High School live much too far away to stay in touch with in person, and are relegated to the realm of Facebook wall postings, e-mail, and phone calls. Can a social relationship start and thrive merely through these non-real-life mediums?

Major Distraction

To isolate the issue of electronic vs. long distance, let's look an experiment I conducted when I first came to college. Intriguied by the idea that my friends and I were about to disperse from my hometown and meet hundreds of new people, I decided it was a pretty good situation for everyone to make some pen pals. On the premise that it would hinder productivity, I named the experiment "Major Distraction", and created a website where my friends could sign up to get a pen pal. Everyone who signed up (including a few people that had no immediate connection to anyone in the group) was paired with someone else, and both people were told to write letters to each other.

It worked great. Everyone wrote to their penpals, and vibrant new relationships were formed - for an average of two letters per pair. Then communication died.

Why did no one stay in touch beyond the initial few letters? I think that the ultimate problem was the activation energy required to communicate. You had to write a letter (slower and more time consuming than a quick IM or wall post), find an envelope and stamp, and get it to the USPS. That meant a non-trivial time investment that most people just didn't want to make as they were starting college. Taking the time to explain to someone we didn't know how our lives were going on paper was just too much effort. Is a high-effort friendship with a stranger not worth it?

Natural Selection

To constrast this "I'm not willing to put time in" situation, let's look at another experience I have had. While I was in high school, I played Natural Selection, a first-person-shooter meets real-time-strategy online multiplayer Half Life modification. In online gaming, it is common for players to organize themselves into team groups called "clans". Clans play against each other in organized matches as part of online leagues. I was a member of a clan called BS, which didn't really stand for anything, but occassionally stood for "Brotherhood of Steel".

We had a rather sophiscated organizational system. We all hunt out in an IRC channel (#nsclanbs on gamesnet, I think), scrimmaging against other teams during our free time. For a little while, we even had access to our own practice server, where we could play against each other to improve our skill and refine our strategies. We weren't the best players at the game by any stretch of the imagination, but our creativity in strategy is what stood us apart. We were ranked in the Top 8 among NS clans for a little while, and were able to hold our own.

Since we chatted online so much and played intense games together, we all become what one member of the group called "e-friends". Since voice chat was a big part of the game, I grew to recognize everyone's voice, and understood each member of the clans specific play styles, strengths and weaknesses. The guys from the clan I remember are: bit, un lapin, amelek, the giving tree, the killing tree, riotingnerd, ev0x, and deimos. There were definitely more, and people wandered in and out of the group over time, but we were definitely a cohesive entity. I've met ev0x in real life, and am Facebook friends with a few others.

Are these people that I still have close friendships with? Not really, but I definitely look back on my days playing NS with them fondly. We still talk occassionaly, and I would say I am as close with these people as anyone else that I stopped being friends with during early high school. Just because I met them and knew them online doesn't mean that my relationships with them are any less real than anyone else I have ever met.

In Conclusion

I think that "e-friends" can play just as large a role in someone's life as real friends. They may only exist on the other side of copper, but you actually get to know these people as you play or work with them. It isn't as though you chat with someone once online and you're instantly best buds, but over the course of years, you definitely establish a real relationship between real people.

Mine

Stickiness

Steve Gold gave us a wonderful talk about stickiness for Vital Ideation. He focused on a fundamentally different idea of what “sticky” meant than the book “Made to Stick” did, but Steve’s thoughts encompassed a whole new set of ideas than I had previously considered.

One of the key points that Steve made was asking whether ideas are sticky, or if it is their implementation that makes them so. Arguably, there are ways to package up things that will make them more attractive, no matter what they are.

Furthermore, Steven questions whether things stick to people, or people stick to things. In fact, the stickiness is bi-directional.

What makes them stick?

Steve argued that the thing that makes people and ideas stick together is a two-way flow of value. The thing you are stuck to is giving you value somehow (an iPod, for instance), and you are giving it value (a reason for being, money, time, etc). It is because of this two-way flow that there is this Velcro effect.

But what causes this two way flow? One of the most interesting concepts Steve mentioned is the idea of “mine”.

Mine

There are lots of objects we interact with every day. Cars, food, facebook profiles, rooms, water bottles, pens, shoes, shirts – the list is endless. However, some of these objects we think of specifically as “mine.”

Some things are obvious. These are my shoes and those are yours. This house is my house and that house is your house. Give me my pen back when you are done with it.

Still, some things possess greater degree of “mine”-ness as others. You probably wouldn’t feel weird if you lost your pen and had to borrow someone else’s, or ate at a restaurant instead of your house. You would probably start to feel weirder if you fell in a pool and had to borrow clothes from a friend. A sense of “not mine” would start to creep up on you. If you lost your iPod or your cell phone, someone else’s is almost an entirely useless replacement – you simply can’t do with someone else’s what you can with yours.

Irreplaceable

I feel as though the stronger this concept of “irreplaceable,” the stronger the feeling of ownership. When I use other people’s laptop, I am much less efficient than when I am using my own, because it is somehow foreign and uncomfortable despite being exactly the same. The programs aren’t in the same place and the keys feel a bit different. My laptop has the top row rearranged to spell “MARRA” and has stickers on it that I recognize it by. It goes with me almost everywhere, and finding a thirty minute block where I don’t need it so I can give it to IT to replace my speakers is difficult.

You can get a new stapler very easily. You won’t miss your old stapler. A stapler is a commodity good.

You can’t get a new iPod in the same way. It is not a drop-in replacement. The difference will be tangible.

People are more comfortable with and take care of things that are theirs. I would feel no remorse snapping my pencil, I can just get another. I will edit my Wiki page to say what it should, but I am afraid to edit other people’s pristinely marked up pages. When I have ownership I am not an outsider. Ownership is comfort. People care about and take care of things that they feel ownership of. No one wants to see their toy break, their idea get shot down, or their essay get an F.

But this feeling of ownership is not a permanent one. Toys that I cherished in my childhood I now donate to charity. My MySpace page went from being checked multiple times daily to being deleted. The laptop I carry around with me daily now will be replaced by another in a few years. It is something that comes and wanes, and perhaps something that can be harnessed.

Creating Ownership

So as budding entrepreneurs, designers, and engineers, the question is: how do I make you feel this powerful ownership over the things I make?

Customization creates ownership. My Build-a-Bear has a green shirt and cool hat. My iPod has gem rhinestones around the screen. My Webkins has a different name than yours. Your thing is no longer a commodity; it is its own unique entity. There is a book I intend to read called “FAB: The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop--From Personal Computers to Personal Fabrication.” It is about how some time in the not-too-distant-future everyone will be able to customize products in the same way that we can print custom party invitations today. As technology enables more and more individualization of products, people will become more aware of the differences between mine and yours.

Ability to affect change creates ownership. If I let you comment on my blog, then maybe you feel like you are part of a discussion. But if I let you all the way on the inside and let you post to my blog, then you are now an insider with control over its direction. These sorts of small viral communities have popped up all over the internet, and there is no barrier of entry to joining. You simple can participate and become part of the crew of “regulars” and feel part of the place belongs to you.

These are just a few of the many ways to create ownership in the way that makes ideas and products “sticky.” More and more, we will see these trends of personalization and viral communities, among others, influence people’s perceptions.

Take Home Messages

You would care a lot more if someone erased your iPod than stole your stapler.

You would rather sleep in your own bed than a hotel bed.

Mine and yours aren’t interchangeable, and that is critical.

Sticky Notebooks: Part 1

We've had two talks thus far-Matt Jadud on Notebooks, and Steve Gold on Sticky Ideas. It's actually kind of a good thing that I'm late on my first post, because the topic of sticky ideas ties in well with the ideation notebooks we're all carrying around for this course.

Most of what Matt talked about was his /own/ notebook-or notebooks, and what he's used them for, how he's felt about them. He highlighted how a lot of the information in them was just scribbles-the notebook wasn't some pristine space that he had to keep neat and clean. This made me think about my own notebook-

Right now it's lined..that's the first thing that comes to mind. And having lines makes me want to stay inside them. It structures my notes and ideas, and tends to limit them. Occasionally I'll realize the lines are there, and purposefully write against them.

That wasn't what I intended to talk about though: The story of my notebook starts last semester-before I knew about this class. I decided that I needed some kind of notebook to carry around with me, just for those little things that come up that I don't want to forget (like when a song I don't have in my itunes comes on the radio, or someone mentions a website or book that I might find interesting). I also decided that I'd write my thoughts in it. I didn't know yet what I'd do with them after writing them down, but I just had this feeling that putting them on paper would make them go somewhere. So I bought a nice little book at CVS for a dollar. It's spiral bound (the sprials are annoying already), and has a green plastic cover.

I lied, actually. I bought two. One's more pocket sized than the other, so it's easier to carry around. The conflict here? I have two notebooks. What am I going to do with them? I started writing tasks in the smaller one-I rip them out when I'm done (I usually can't seem to finish the tasks I wrote down though, so more often than not they stay in the book for a while). Even when I don't finish them all though, I find it helps to have everything written somewhere-like the planners we used to get for free in high school. I stopped carrying a planner once I came to Olin, but my planner was something I couldn't live without a few years ago.

In the larger one, I started taking notes. About anything. I've got notes about both Vital Ideation talks, notes and comments to the person sitting next to me on a robotics lecture I attended, and notes I took about Cafeteria workers for a design course. I’ve never had a notebook that served quite this purpose before-usually things get written on the last page of an existing notebook (who ever uses every page in their notebooks, right..? )

This is starting to get a bit long, so this post'll be continued in a few days :).

The World in Color

In his presentation last week, Matt made a point about the use of color in notes. In Software Design last semester, he also made a point to use different chalk colors to more effectively illustrate points. I recall being frustrated at how poorly these multi-color diagrams translated into my notebook in boring old black. Somehow, the idea of using more than one color to copy down a picture containing more than one color never struck me.

Since last week, I have been using two or three different colors of pens when taking notes. I find it tremendously useful to be able to draw a graph's axes in one color, the plot of a function or two, and comment on various aspects within the graph without having to worry about losing clarity to "too much black ink." Small tangential notes, or comments on math steps are perfect to do in another color. They don't interfere with the flow of the notes, but add additional information.

This combines with another observation about note-taking that I made recently. For a long while, I unconsciously took notes as densely as possible. I tried to write on every line and only really skipped lines between sections. This meant that all of the information I might need was all in one place, but it made it veryr difficult to access again later. Frequently I will remember where on a page I wrote something, but not on which page, and will have to hunt around my dense notes to find the bit of information I am looking for.

What I am doing now is leaving much more white space and intentionally making my notes more logically organized on the page. I'd rather that I spread things out in a way that makes sense to me and is easy to go back to later and reference. This seems somewhat obvious, but it still feels weird to have some pages in my notebook that contain only a few individual pieces of information. However, they contain the information in a way that is very easy for me go back to and quickly understand, rather than being mushed up with everything else.

Rather than use flat words to illustrate how I've changed my note-taking style to use color and organization, it seems like pictures might be a better option. (copy color diagram, use color. easier to understand, spread notes out. show concept, use photos. Maybe I'm improving?)

An Illustration

Here I was able to plot several difference graphs without getting them mixed up, as well as include comments without "ink overload"

Again, I was able to write something and mark it up with comments without interfering with the readability or flow of the "non-comment" notes.

I drew the base circuit in one color, comments in another color, and a formula for impedence in another.

For me, this is a pretty low note content for a page. I normally draw much smaller graphs and don't spread things out this much, but by arranging my notes and using color I am able to more easily understand them, which is good, because they are my notes.

A Wrap
I am a big fan of this new style of note-taking I am using. I suspect I will get better at it, since I've only even started to think hard about how I organize notes a week ago. Note-taking had become so second nature that I just did it on autopilot. This new "structure and semantics" thing is such a great idea.

Why didn't they teach me this in 6th grade study skills?

P.S. - I'm probably going to keep posting all of my deliverable photos into my Vital Ideation Flickr Pool, because it's rather easy to do.