Building 20 [a scene of incredible innovation at MIT] and brainstorming came into being at almost exactly the same time. In the sixty years since then, if the studies are right, brainstorming has achieved nothing—or, at least, less than would have been achieved by six decades’ worth of brainstormers working quietly on their own. Building 20, though, ranks as one of the most creative environments of all time, a space with an almost uncanny ability to extract the best from people. Among M.I.T. people, it was referred to as “the magical incubator.”
The fatal misconception behind brainstorming is that there is a particular script we should all follow in group interactions. The lesson of Building 20 is that when the composition of the group is right—enough people with different perspectives running into one another in unpredictable ways—the group dynamic will take care of itself. All these errant discussions add up. In fact, they may even be the most essential part of the creative process. Although such conversations will occasionally be unpleasant—not everyone is always in the mood for small talk or criticism—that doesn’t mean that they can be avoided. The most creative spaces are those which hurl us together. It is the human friction that makes the sparks.
How drinking vodka makes you more creative - The Week
New study shows that a moderate amount of alcohol actually makes people (at least men) more creative, or at least respond creatively more quickly, than those abstaining. “A moderate buzz loosens a man’s focus of attention, thus making it easier to find connections among remotely related ideas,” says Bryan Nelson at the Mother Nature Network.
Basecamp UI Preview
37signals have come up with some very unique although simple user experience patterns that should make using Basecamp easier than ever. Jump into the video at 3 minutes to see a demonstration of how they are allowing for you to easily navigate into a project.
via aparticularpath, 37signals
Clever sort of ‘stack’ UX, where content in basecamp is treated as an outline, and clicking on an item — like a to do in a project — creates a new ‘sheet’ for the to do that hovers over the project sheet. Closing the to do exposes the project, and so on.
Need to get access to the beta and find out if 37signals have finally fixed the federated identity bug. I bet they have.
What Makes The Most Creative Teams? – Stowe Boyd via Nexalogy Environics
I am glad to say that I going to be working with Claude Théoret and the nice folks at Nexalogy Environics over the course of the year. Claude and I met at a conference in Montreal, and found an immediate common ground in social networks. Claude is a physicist turned social media analytics entrepreneur, and I am a computer scientist turned social tools weenie. We share a belief in the value of developing a ‘physics of humans’ and we both are certain that a key part of that science must be understanding how social networks do what they do.
So I am going to be collaborating with Claude on an investigation of those ideas, and trying to surface those topics on the Nexalogy blog. Nominally, I am a research fellow at Nexalogy, and Claude is a research fellow at Work Talk, my new research commons (about more which next week). We also hope to derive a primer on social networks principles as an outgrowth of this project, too.
In essence, we are trying to promote social network literacy, and hope that a broader and deeper understanding of the science underlying social networks will help us all understand the world better, and adopt business practices that are reality-based instead of ideological.
My first piece digs into some fascinating research by Brian Uzzi, of Northwestern, who looked deep into Broadway to find a pattern for creative teams: What Makes The Most Creative Teams?
@stoweboyd: Microsoft is now an enterprise software company, with dwindling revenue from Windows http://t.co/5B8pf2zx not a major OS player in future
I’ll be doing something innocuous — reading a magazine, playing a game, something with a relatively low (but not zero) cognitive threshold, so that my brain is working but not focused — and a phrase will pop into my head. It’ll be novel (to me), typically a combination of terms that don’t usually go together, yet seemingly something meaningful. I’ll hop onto whatever digital device I have handy to see if someone else is already talking about the topic, to see if it’s already a real thing. Often it is, and I can return to whatever I was doing. But sometimes, it’s not — it’s a combination of terms that hasn’t before been seen by the mighty eye of Google.
“Forensic Futurism” was today’s term. And aside from a few pages including the two terms in an alphabetical listing, it’s a term without a pre-existing presence. So the rest of my afternoon was spent trying to figure out what the hell forensic futurism might be, and why it sounded like it should mean something useful and/or important.
- Jamais Cascio, Forensic Futurism
Jamais wants to analyze failed forecasts that we make, and determine what premises or other factors led to the mistaken outcomes.
With Clik, Your Smartphone Can Control Screens Everywhere - Anthony Ha via Techcrunch
Kik has released a new experiment in smart remote control of computer screens — and maybe a foreshadowing of smart remote control of internet-connected TVs. The system is called Clik — clikthis.com on the web side and an app called Clik on the smartphone. By synching a QR code from the Screen via the mobile app, the mobile user can control what is being displayed on the computer (or TV) screen:
Anthony Ha via Techcrunch
You point your desktop browser at ClikThis.com, which generates a unique QR code. Then you open the Clik iPhone or Android app, aim the camera at the screen, and the app uses the code to figure out which device you’re trying to control. Once it’s synced up, you can select YouTube videos from your phone, and they’ll play on the screen.
Right now it’s only YouTube videos, but this is simply the start of something big. The CEO of Kik, Ted Livingston said, ‘Every screen just becomes a dumb output for your smart remote.’
For social sharing, Apple turns to Twitter again - Om Malik via GigaOM
Om Malik is right when he says that the most important aspect of the prominent role Apple has handed to Twitter in the upcoming Mountain Lion release of OS X is the developer API:
I think the biggest news from my perspective is the developer API.
Developers can take advantage of the Share Sheet API to let users tweet seamlessly from their apps. With the API, developers can leverage Twitter single sign-on and Tweet Sheet, so users can tweet with comments and locations, right from within their apps.
As I have said in the past, Apple plans to make OS X and iOS social, and their current strategy is to build on top of Twitter as a platform.
Twitter is really a protocol, one on which the most important social information network lives. Why Apple hasn’t acquired Twitter escapes me.
Mountain Lion by John Gruber via Daring Fireball
Nothing could have prepared me for Gruber’s description of his one-on-one demo of Mountain Lion, Apple’s next version of OS X. It wasn’t the software, but the way that Apple is approaching folks like Gruber:
This is an awful lot of effort and attention in order to brief what I’m guessing is a list of a dozen or two writers and journalists. It’s Phil Schiller, spending an entire week on the East Coast, repeating this presentation over and over to a series of audiences of one. There was no less effort put into the preparation of this presentation than there would have been if it had been the WWDC keynote address.
What do I think so far, Schiller asks. It all seems rather obvious now that I’ve seen it — and I mean obvious in a good way. I remain convinced that iCloud is exactly what Steve Jobs said it was: the cornerstone of everything Apple does for the next decade. So of course it makes sense to bring iCloud to the Mac in a big way. Simplified document storage, iMessage, Notification Center2, synced Notes and Reminders — all of these things are part of iCloud. It’s all a step toward making your Mac just another device managed in your iCloud account. Look at your iPad and think about the features it has that would work well, for a lot of people, if they were on the Mac. That’s Mountain Lion — and probably a good way to predict the future of the continuing parallel evolution of iOS and OS X.3
But this, I say, waving around at the room, this feels a little odd. I’m getting the presentation from an Apple announcement event without the event. I’ve already been told that I’ll be going home with an early developer preview release of Mountain Lion. I’ve never been at a meeting like this, and I’ve never heard of Apple seeding writers with an as-yet-unannounced major update to an operating system. Apple is not exactly known for sharing details of as-yet-unannounced products, even if only just one week in advance. Why not hold an event to announce Mountain Lion — or make the announcement on apple.com before talking to us?
That’s when Schiller tells me they’re doing some things differently now.
I wonder immediately about that “now”. I don’t press, because I find the question that immediately sprang to mind uncomfortable. And some things remain unchanged: Apple executives explain what they want to explain, and they explain nothing more.
My gut feeling though, is this. Apple didn’t want to hold an event to announce Mountain Lion because those press events are precious. They just used one for the iBooks/education thing, and they’re almost certainly on the cusp of holding a major one for the iPad. They don’t want to wait to release the Mountain Lion preview because they want to give Mac developers months of time to adopt new APIs and to help Apple shake out bugs. So: an announcement without an event. But they don’t want Mountain Lion to go unheralded. They are keenly aware that many observers suspect or at least worry that the Mac is on the wane, relegated to the sideline in favor of the new and sensationally popular iPad.
Thus, these private briefings. Not merely to explain what Mountain Lion is — that could just as easily be done with a website or PDF feature guide — but to convey that the Mac and OS X remain both important and the subject of the company’s attention. The move to a roughly annual release cycle, to me, suggests that Apple is attempting to prove itself a walk-and-chew-gum-at-the-same-time company.
And all of this without any rumors — like those swirling about the iPad 3. Apple comes across as deadly serious, very carefully moving forward, one major battle at a time, pursuing a grand strategic vision, and unconstrained.
Gruber’s description of Mountain Lion — specifically the close integration with iCloud — is also worth a long read.
On one end of the wedge, there is an individual’s news feed, and their level of attention to it; that’s a small place, and there isn’t room for a lot of different media organizations to speak to people there. On the other end, the number of people who rely on those feeds to tell them what to view on the web—to use it as not just their main but really their only portal to the wide web—is constantly increasing. Right now is the time to kick everyone else out of there. That, I believe, is what BuzzFeed is being built to do.
- Tom Gerevan, Some best-guesses about what BuzzFeed is up to, and why it is in fact about Arianna, a little via Capital New York
Buzzfeed is trying to live in the stream, a liquid media play.
(via underpaidgenius)