Last night, on the train ride back from the city, I found myself thinking about the last post on ignorance and empathy.
The reason for the trip was a semi-annual get-together that Pip Coburn hosts. There were several sessions built around themes and I tend to go to a few where I might know a little as well as others - like story telling and marketing - where my ignorance is great in hope of picking up a bit in case I want to start down those paths. Ignorance is a fine thing as long as it is a conscious and even a cultivated ignorance.
It reminded me of the period when I was trying to learn a bit about sociology, psychology and anthropology in order to interact with my Human Computer Interface department at AT&T Research a decade and a half ago. That was a wonderful time. You know so little that the possibility space is great and I had several wonderful tutors to help me as I played. I knew that most of the engineering problems were solvable, but the social problems were deeper - this interaction of the social and technical worlds was really interesting.
One of the anthropologists who worked there got in touch a few years ago and asked if I knew Sam Richards of Penn State. I didn't, but ended up getting in touch and talking and visited.
A fascinating guy. He's a sociologist and was called one of the "101 Most Dangerous Academics in America" by David Horowitz.
sweet
One of his core notions is that empathy is at the heart of sociology if you want to be really good at it. Rather than bore you with my filtered version of what I learned from him, I'll point you at his TEDx talk.
Trust me - it is well worth your time. He'll challenge you.
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ok - I took the easy way out and put up a video, so I owe you something. Last night two people needled me about not posting any recipes in awhile, so here is one that worked out wonderfully. And please write if you have any positive or negative comments. I get very little feedback and, as a result, tend to treat this as a weekly journal rather than a conversation.
A note on my recipes. I have a tendency not to measure, but keep rough track in the event something works (I do carefully measure when baking and usually start with a recipe as a guide - cooking is so incredibly different from baking). I also tend to weigh rather than use volume measurements and the kitchen is metric.
Roasted Sweet Potatoes and Parsnips
ingredients
4 parsnips (about 750g total for me)
4 medium red onions
150g really good extra virgin olive oil
2 sprigs rosemary
4 sprigs thyme
1 head of garlic (let how much you love garlic be your guide on what a head means)
2 medium (or one really big) sweet potatoes - about 600g
24 to 30 cherry tomatoes (they weren't in season, but they seemed necessary)
2 tbl lemon juice
4 tbl capers roughly chopped
1/2 tbl maple syrup
1/2 tsp Dijon mustard (pick a good one)
salt and pepper
method
° Heat the oven to 375°F
° Peel the parsnips, cut horizontally in half and then lengthwise a few times. I aimed for about 2 x 1/2 inch pieces.
° Peel the onions and cut into 6 or 8 wedges
° Put the parsnips and onions into a large bowl and add about 3/4 of the oil along with the rosemary, thyme and garlic (I cut the cloves about in half). Mix well with a fair amount of salt and some pepper. I like a good sea salt here (Maldon). Spread on a baking pan and roast for about 20 minutes
° Take the top and bottoms off the sweet potatoes and then cut in half across the middle and then wedge each of them - maybe about 8 wedges from each half. Add them to the baking sheet with the heated parsnips and onions and bake about 45 minutes more. You are looking for a golden color.
° Now they have cooked mix in the halved tomatoes and continue roasting for another 10 minutes or so.
° During the last roast whisk the lemon juice, capers, maple syrup, mustard and the remaining oil and salt it with a sea salt.
° Take the veggies out of the oven and drizzle with the dressing. Stir and fool with the seasoning just in case.
° You can dress it up with roasted chopped walnuts or pecans - I like pecans:-)
Finally I had to do a cake for a very colorful friend's 60th birthday. Thinking about the tune from the Stones made me realize white cake and a bit of food coloring might work out pretty well.
My guess is kids woud really love this too. Make nice scratch white cake (much better than the mixes) and a good buttercream frosting. I think coloring the frosting would be overkill, but use the person as a guide:-)
no pantones were harmed in the making of the cake...
Some night when it is clear enough to see a lot of stars look up and let your imagination wander. Even if you don't know the constellations - perhaps especially if you don't know them - your mind starts assembling patterns. Even though the background image is close to being random for this purpose, you find patterns. For good and for bad this apophenia is deeply wired into our species. It takes a lot of work to logically confront it and know when it can get us into trouble. Often it is something to ignore. Of course there are many types of information we shouldn't be ignorant of.
As I age one of the more delightful realizations is that my state of ignorance is not only intact, but is becoming sharper and more refined .. it is slowly becoming something of a wisdom.
Most people think of ignorance as being unaware and unschooled, but there may be another way to look at it. With the explosion of information that continues to accelerate, we have to be mindfully ignorant of most of it - even in areas we specialize in. We can be conscious of our ignorance and use it to guide us.
Thoroughly conscious ignorance is a prelude to every real advance in knowledge
- James Clerk Maxwell
The richest questions I ask are not those that directly produce an answer, but rather a deeper set of questions and puzzles. If science is asking an increasing number of questions and getting some results along the way a much larger product of the sport is a set of questions that is growing at an even faster rate. We have to be ignorant of most of it, but this ignorance can be finely developed. With practice one gets a sense of what are the new questions that are most ripe for asking. This new level of questioning often involved connecting some dots and discovering new patterns that are newly emergent. If we are deep enough with our questioning and are working in a rich set of questions there are times when our own questions unfold and lead to new questions. There are few delights that beautiful other than solving that original question and finding where it leads.
This creative form of selective ignorance and curiosity is a fantastic way to deal with our natural apophenia. There are a lot of useful tools - curiosity, an open skepticism, a bit of statistics and logic and an education of what others have learned in your field and how they have come to learn it. At some point you learn how to learn and the training wheels come off. At that point you begin to realize how ignorant of the universe you are, but you see a pathway to find local areas that can be illuminated.
When I was a teenager I was under the impression that learning science involved learning facts to be recited on a test or used to calculate something. At the same time two of my mentors were patiently helping me build tools that would get me to a place where I would realize that view is completely wrong and there was great sport in recognizing what you didn't know.
About the time I got my Ph.D. I began to realize the way to solve a problem was not to tally up what I knew about it, but rather to think about areas where I had no idea what was going on. It lead to a delightful state of confusion for awhile, but when you get good at picking your problems you can often find challenges that have a shot at being answered. These are the areas that produce the new and often richer questions that you - and perhaps no one else - has imagined.
In the meantime the answers that come along the way can be terrifically useful. They may not be what drives the person who originally discovered them, but they have done much to support and advance civilization. Not a bad byproduct.
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
- Richard Feynman
This sort of approach works in many disciplines for uncovering fundamental problems that may have been elusive or unknown. There are some similarities to how Jobs et. al. worked at Apple on clarifying the major issues. It gets you beyond the textbooks and conventional knowledge.
But back to physics for a little fun... these insights and new questions rose from many chains of questions that led to new unimagined questions ... only by using a refined selective ignorance and relentless curiosity combined with connecting dots here and there is progress made. (this, by the way, is how real science works - it is nothing like the Hollywood version)
My new iPad arrived last Friday at around 4PM. Normal FedEx deliveries are much earlier, but our delivery person said this was the "Apple holiday" and they were under huge strain delivering "boxes" from Apple. She also noted an unusual percentage of recipients were home to sign for the packages.
This is my first iPad - white, 32GB and WiFi only for what its worth. Sukie has an original model from early on and is a heavy user. She doesn't see the need for anything newer or better as the old one, with its current software, is just fine as far as she's concerned. She uses her a lot for almost anything you can imagine and I rarely get to use it. That wasn't a big deal to me - I didn't see a big need for one until I learned about the new model.
no - it wasn't the display
I sketch quite a bit. This is an important piece of how I think and I'm rarely without my pad and pencils. I also sketch recreationally doing bits of what barely passes for art, but it is fun and relaxing and something I wouldn't give up.
A digital sketching interface is something I lust after. I have a Wacom tablet for my Mac and have done some sketching and photoediting using it, but there is a disconnect between the stylus and image. Wacom "solves" this with a very expensive display tablet - but they cost much more than a Mac and have some problems.
iPads don't support a pressure sensitive stylus, although some hacks have been made - but they had issues. It turns out the new iPad supports Bluetooth 4.0 which allows you to make such a device that would have good enough performance and interface with the iPad fairly transparently. I had been talking to a small company that does a fantastic drawing program as well as another that will be doing the right sort of stylus. The pieces aren't here just yet, but they'll be on sale within a few months.
So I ordered the iPad about ten minutes after the announcement event ended
There is something deeper going on which may give a bit of insight into Apple's direction. Over the weekend I sent a note about that to a few people and here is a slightly edited version:
I've been playing with the new iPad for over a day and have a sense this is something that will identify a major new direction for Apple.
Apple is very careful with product evolution. Of course they aren't perfect at the game, but they stay away from checklists of features that trip so many in tech, preferring to focus on real form and function.
The core of the Mac was the notion of the Mac as a hub. Their new major direction is not iOS devices, but rather the cloud (iCloud in their case) as core with Mostly Apple products attached.
The cloud is not evenly distributed for a variety of reasons. A difficult part is what to do at a very local scale - what is the notion of cloud within a home and how is it distributed? I suspect Apple intends to crack this with WiFi and Bluetooth 4.0.
The new iPad has BT 4.0 which frankly is what pushed me over the top into a purchase. I do a lot of sketching and need a pressure sensitive stylus. The best approach without resorting to piano wire and chewing gum engineering is BT 4.0. It enables very simple lightweight short range communication links at very low power drains. Simple essentially means auto pairing. I'm doing that now with a prototype piece of kit I can't talk about - it just works and gives a sense of how all of your stuff can interact with apple devices in your house, office or factory. Sensors in everything at very low cost and Apple can deal with much of the difficult data management with the cloud let sharing structure they've developed.
Already I can get at all of my digital photos, video and music and play it on any of my Apple devices using AirPlay - our home has become a tiny WiFi interconnected ground fog that links directly to iCloud and indirectly to other public and private clouds. BT 4.0 will make this *much* less expensive and I expect explosive third party development. It looks like the new Apple TV "hobby" box has a BT 4.0 capability in addition to WiFi.
Apple's challenge is to make sure this works transparently - so far they seem to be on the right path. This is really big - forget little things like Apple TV - they are a proper subset...
Oh yeah - the iPad is a excellent by itself - there are enough reviews that I won't waste your time with mine. But it is only part of the story and watching our little Apple fog expand so much showed me a bit of the possible future - a manifestation of something I worked on a decade or so ago.
This patchy but locally dense fog is a natural extension of the cloud idea and is also a natural play for Apple at this point. You could execute it with any number of standards - just pick one or two and make them work. Apple will do it with WiFi for the heavy lifting and BT for the lightweight and inexpensive communication with enabled devices - perhaps hundreds of them in your house. It is just the beginning, but it is pretty stunning seeing how well sharing already works to TVs and stereos from any Apple device. Just wait for the next level - the BT level - to take off. There is incredible potential if they can pull it off and this goes way beyond the scale of much smaller markets like entertainment.
I hope others can offer some serious competition - the dream of what is needed and a few of the uses have been known for a long time, but Apple is the first company with a shot at it and there are signs they are engaged. I suspect there will be uses we can't dream of now and this thing we call the Internet will become much more useful.
Jon Gertner's new book on Bell Labs has just been published and a few people have written to ask what I think about it. I haven't read it yet, but am very curious as I was part of that organization from the end of its golden years through its demise. It was a unique and amazing place - a fundamentally different approach to "innovation" than what is common today. It isn't clear to me which approaches are better or worse - the old Bell Labs approach doesn't square with how companies work these days.
The old AT&T was a regulated monopoly divestiture in 1984. A few percent of its income was channeled into running the labs - known as the Bell Telephone Laboratories and, through a series of regulatory consent decrees - funding was incredibly stable and sufficient to insure very long term research and development projects. After a decree in 1956, inventions were licensed under very liberal terms to the rest of the nation and the Labs had become something of a national laboratory.
I won't go into the history of the place and will be interested to see how it is charted in Gertner's book, but the core DNA of the place needs to be explained.
Innovation had a very specific meaning. It didn't mean invention or discovery, but rather was discovery taken through stages of development and finally implemented at a scale that would change society.
The Labs was primarily advanced and applied development with a core basic research arm (area 10 - later renamed area 11 about the time I joined it). Fundamental researchers were presented with an amazing array from curious problems. The notion was not the standard approach of engineering where you attack a problem by tallying your resources and try to build an optimal result, but rather something a bit more zen.
In the research unit you defined and attacked problems by looking for the unknown and then trying to understand as much as your could about it. You had to go deeply into uncharted territory not knowing if your efforts would pay off or if you had the right intellectual tools for the job.
This approach - solving a jigsaw puzzle not by identifying your pieces and putting them together, but rather looking for the missing pieces and trying to solve a puzzle by understanding what was missing - required a multidisciplinary approach. It is close to the approach of physics and basic research had a high percentage of Ph.D. physicists. Really good ones. Their specialties were not as important a their taste in problem solving. I was an experimental particle physicist. Bell Labs never dabbled in particle physics, but that was "the right stuff" and they saw an immediate match.
We worked with computer scientists, mathematicians, statisticians, mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, opticians, chemists, acoustics experts, material scientists, psychologists, neurologists, biologists, musicians and artists to name a few backgrounds. The central laboratory at Murray Hill, New Jersey was built around a five story corridor a quarter mile long with a sometimes maze-like structure of smaller buildings. Going to lunch or visiting someone else's lab would force interaction with others. It was said a researcher going to lunch was like a magnet rolling by iron filings. It was a brilliant architecture and aspects of it have been duplicated elsewhere.1
Some of the projects had very long horizons - digital communications took about four decades and thousands of researchers years of effort. This type of time frame is only seen universities and national laboratories these days and is rarely directly coupled efficiently with commercial development.
But the next step in innovation - and one where the majority of Bell Labs people worked - was development research and engineering. This is enormously difficult to get right. Most of the projects were defined by either Bell Labs management based on needs of the Bell System or by the government for national defense. Many were difficult projects that advanced the state of the art by an order of magnitude and this was something of a model for DARPA, which came about in the 1950s with a clearer focus on military needs.
As the applied research and development proceeded it was productized and turned over to Western Electric - the manufacturing arm. People in the various units spent time with each other. Small branch development labs were built into Western Electric factories and the development folks often worked directly on the lines to understand the problems.
The approach wasn't as clean as I describe it and there were tensions that had to be dealt with, but it was an innovation engine that changed the world. It even paid a lot of attention to education creating everything from science and engineering ciricula to identifying promising students - mentoring them and getting them through their Ph.D.s in the best universities at no expense.
A very different approach than what is used, and perhaps needed, today. The model today has universities and national labs doing the basic work with companies mostly engaged in short term development - real corporate research is not common. Even long term development is rare.2 True corporate research is mostly dead as is an integrated multi-disciplinary approach.
Companies identify the pieces of the puzzle they have and try to build something optimal rather than trying to understand the missing pieces deeply.
As the Labs started to crumble in the late 80s I switched my focus from physics to something more applied - broadband to the home. The problems were how do you do it and why do you do it. The later lead to work in digital music and both led me to the notion that I *really* needed to understand social research. I immersed myself in a human computer interaction department and hopefully helped out a bit with a bit of experimental rigor, very different thinking and a lot of naïve questions that turned out not to be so naïve. I learned a lot in the process, but the efforts of the group were never coupled to the company at that point. We did a lot of neat stuff that is finally beginning to be realized now.
I still try to search for projects that are looking for a bit of deeper understanding when I consult. There are a lot of diamonds on the beach these days - as there probably always are. The approach is rare and I find it odd that I'm sometimes seen as much broader than I see myself. It is really just a bit of curiosity and the luck of having an amazingly rich chance to work in an environment that makes places like Apple and Pixar look lame when it comes to "multi-disciplinary". I think there is great value to bits and pieces of the approach as suspect we'll see more of it as the tech world matures and energy becomes a more pressing issue.
I don't know what picture the book will paint. I was witness to an amazing dinosaur and hope some of the better features of the place can be replicated.
We had a crisp definition of innovation. The physics people had a crisp definition of data and information. I find the physics defnition at odds with common usage and I'll post on that in the near future - I've hinted at it before. Data isn't basic...
Om recently commented on creativity talking about John Maeda of RISD. This caused me to think of some comments from the professor of a graduate physics course I took as an undergrad. The professor was famous for his creativity having been sprinkled with Swedish holy water. Somehow he wanted to get over a few points on being creative - he thought you could inspire it.
from my notebook:
° be curious about anything and everything. expose yourself to different people and ideas
° don’t be frightened to try the unknown. Many solve puzzles by figuring out what they can do with the puzzle pieces they have. A better approach is to figure out the missing pieces and solve a puzzle you don’t know anything about by learning about them.
° remember it must be play
° the delight is not in finding the answer, but in coming to it yourself
° be totally honest
° deeply know everything about your problem
° real creativity simplifies – aim for simplicity as it is beautiful
° get into something so deeply you forget everything else. you need large pieces of uninterrupted time
much more on these later, but back to the old Bell Telephone Laboratories for a bit. When I first started I was delighted to learn that my first director was something of an aurora expert. He was invovled in the Telstar communications project and was involved in the beginnings of creating the field of what is now called space weather. He would have loved this time lapse of the aurora taken from the ISS a few days ago...
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1 Pixar uses centrally located washrooms and has a design that reminds me of Murray Hill on a much smaller scale.
2 IBM, Intel and Microsoft do longer term work in the tech sector. Apple has a ten year horizon for some projects, but anything longer than three years is very rare in industry. One of the longer term interests was video telephony. Here is something on developments in color video telephony .... in 1930.
A few years ago I helped a young relative learn how to operate a manual transmission. The idea was that used manuals were inexpensive and it isn't that difficult. It turns out there was a bit of serendipity as far as she was concerned - none of the guys she dated knew how to use one and this fact gave her enormous pleasure.
In 2010 only 6.7% of cars and light trucks sold in the US had manual transmissions.1 As manufacturers continue to drop manuals from their lines a backlash of sorts has developed and a few niche models are doing very well with people who love to shift by themselves.
Cars are fascinating examples of user experience and user interfaces. Development is glacial by the standards of the consumer electronics industry - most manufacturers are well into design of models four and five years out and there are ideas that reach out nearly a decade. Power trains are enormously expensive to engineer and are not only used in several platforms of a maker, but are sometimes used in other makes. The laws of countries and physics both weigh heavily on design. Mix into this economics and an attempt to create a desirable looking vehicle and a good user experience and you are left with an optimization process with thousands of variables.
Automobiles and light truck are remarkable examples of industrial design. They are Fantastically complex pieces of engineering, they represent the most complicate mechanical objects most of us own. Over the years they've become more trouble-free, safer and, at least by some metrics, more efficient.2 We take it for granted, but the interface is very similar and predictable. Furthermore most cars can accommodate a wide range of human body types - generally from the 5% female to the 95% male, but some expand the range on one side or the other. I was impressed that Colleen could get into my smallish Audi Coupe as she's at the 99.99% male level in height. She can't drive it as her right leg can't get past the steering wheel, but there are cars she can drive and someone who stands more than a foot and a half less can easily drive the same car after fiddling with the seat a bit. In theory both configurations offer protection from crashes.
Small badges can craft brilliant vehicles for specific niches, but the costs of low production runs mean the buyers have to be well heeled. A few years ago I had the pleasure of meeting a few of Ferrari's top engineers including the engine guy who was largely responsible for the user experience of the drivetrain. His title was very different, but he was in charge of how it felt to the driver - a defining feature of the brand. Even the exhaust note of each model is carefully tuned and part of the art of engineering compromise.
As production volumes of a model increase this complex design process and comes with a cost. Two years ago I was thinking of trading my 2001 TT for the current version. I test drove one. A lovely engine and transmission, but the cockpit displays and user interface were jarring and, in a word, wrong. It had a frightening array electronics and several byzantine interfaces. Compared to my simpler cockpit was like fingernails screeching a path across a chalk board. It was like using Windows XP after having used an iPad. I decided to keep my current car and worry about keeping it running for a long time.
There is very little flexibility and major change comes slowly. The industry tends not to optimally modularize. Electronics constitute 20% to 30% of the production cost of a car and that figure is increasing rapidly. But the electronics that are part of the user interface are rarely optimal and the pace of car design evolution is not in synch with consumer electronics. It probably makes sense for the makers to user modular assemblies that are swapped out regularly to refresh the car, but to date efforts have been lame - witness the Ford/Microsoft effort. There is an enormous opportunity for innovation and partnership in this area, but there would be a clash of engineering culture. Steve Jobs told Walter Isaacson that he'd love to work in this area if he could start fresh. My guess is he would have had to start his own car company to make it work - or at least to have complete freedom over interior design at the bare minimum.
In addition to cockpit electronics, this decade will offer fantastic opportunity for fundamental change as the nature of power trains is shifting for the first time in nearly a century. At this point pure electric cars are basically a platform that is closely related to a conventional car powered by an internal combustion engine - largely because radical change would be too expensive and volumes are currently to small to allow creativity. But the ability to move battery packs and motors around will allow a much richer set of possibilities.3
It seems likely that the US, Europe and Japan will not be the primary drivers of design. Indeed the next billion cars are likely to be destined for use in China, India and some rapidly growing third world countries. These cars may be much smaller than what we are used to and may have less range and much lower price points. Serious work is only in its infancy and will roll out over the next three or four decades. All of the big manufacturers see this as perhaps the core piece of their long term strategies. The megacity car or the post-internal combustion car... Population growth and the need to leave fossil fuels behind will be powerful forces.
Of course there are some of us who believe human power and human electric hybrids have a place in the mixture. It will be interesting to see how all of this evolves and if it changes the notion of where people live and what mobility means as much as the automobile did.
So I'll be using a mixture of human power and an IC/manual transmission car for awhile. At some point the IC vehicle won't be practical for me and I'll get a pure electric. Hopefully there will be a niche that couples me to the act of driving as well as a stick shift and a clutch does now.4
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1Government figures show automobiles came in at 9.0%, but light trucks were much less and manuals are non-existent in SUVs and minivans. In Europe the numbers are nearly reversed and automatics are comparatively rare.
2 Engine efficiency per unit of displacement, power to weight ratio, fuel consumption per unit of power, and overall power train efficiency. Where they have fallen down is in overall efficiency for moving people and payloads. There have been improvements, but nothing like the other improvements suggest - it turns out cars and trucks have also become much heavier and this erases many of the technological gains.
3 Designers tell me that the potential for a much greater life of an electric car and the ability to have greater design freedom may mean you'll buy a car for 15 or 20 years and remodel it when you need to along the way. Some of the concepts are very clever indeed.
4 The highly peaked power curve of an IC engine and its torque characteristics demand the use of a multispeed transmission. People on bikes have similarly narrow characteristics. Electric motors have much broader ranges where they are efficient and usely can get by with a single speed gearbox.
Earlier today Om penned a delightful note on his and, more important, his mother's experience with the iPad. It sparked a bit of thinking about my feelings towards the device and to technology in general..
but first consider a bit of physics....
Imagine that you can watch the movement of water molecules an ordinary ice cube. Cold ice. Perhaps -20°C or so. The water molecules are locked into a fairly rigid crystalline form. There is a bit of jiggling motion that gets more intense as heat is added to the ice. Temperature is a physical property of matter that turns out to be related to the intensity of the motion of the molecules. The greater this motion - this kinetic energy - the greater the temperature.
Without becoming formal it is important to note that heat is not directly related to temperature. To understand this turn keep transferring energy to the ice - heat it up. As you transfer heat energy the temperature of the ice begins to increase:
-14°, -8°, -2°, 0°, 0° ‚0°, 0°, 0°,0° ...
Hold on .. something seems wrong. We're adding heat energy to the ice and the temperature stopped increasing at 0°C. Looking at the molecular scale you notice something else is taking place. The nice crystalline structure is beginning to break down. There is just enough motion that some of the bonds that have been locking the water molecules into a rigid body begin to break. As the process continues order continues to break until almost all of the molecules have taken on a new order where a few of them link up and then break apart in an incredibly complex and chaotic dance. The water molecules have a natural attraction to each other, but there is enough jiggling that they can only hold together in small group, typically about four or five water molecules at a time, for about a thousandth of a billionth of a second - a picosecond.1 The resulting mass of water is no longer a crystalline form and is now a liquid. The heat went to change the structure of the ice cube from a jiggling crystal to wildly dancing groups of water molecules. The liquid water has a motion that corresponds to 0°C. All of that energy being transferred to the ice crystal went into changing the structure of the ice rather than raising its temperature.
Now with the 0° liquid water, begin adding heat to the water and measure its temperature:
0°C, 6°, 12°, 18°, and so on
The change of physical state of the water from a solid crystal to a liquid that can easily flow is called a phase change. It turns out that water requires a lot of energy to move from solid to liquid form, but to the naked eye you really don't notice much is going on other than you have to keep transferring a lot of energy to get the cube to completely melt.2
So what does this have to do with the iPad?
Nothing physically, but it is an interesting metaphor for me. I'm very interested in transparent, some would call them liquid, interfaces where the machine seems to melt away and you find yourself directly manipulating information and concepts. Such interfaces allow you to get deeply into a task and become oblivious to the machine. Take Yo Yo Ma's cello as an example. In his hands it is really an extension of his body - perhaps an extension of his soul - as he enters a flow and wonderful music comes from them. The interface, for him, is perfect and he doesn't think in terms of playing an instrument.
I've had these experiences of flow with good paper and pencils sketching things or doing physics. Colleen has had them playing volleyball. You can probably make a list of interactions where you've had them. They are enormously important for creative work and I find myself trying to create conditions that allow them. I find, like Douglas Adams, that distractions can destroy flow and send you crashing back to the local reality.3
So a really good interface - more than that - a really good user experience does not distract as you move through the boundary into flow. In a sense it has supported a phase transition in how you think.
The iPad has a very good user experience. I don't own one, but I use Sukie's original iPad regularly. I frequently find myself doing things and not realizing I'm using a computing device. It has begun to melt away. I've also noticed the retina display on my iPhone 4 makes displayed objects seem like they are on the surface of the glass and that I am directly manipulating them through touch. The illusion can be quite strong in well designed programs. But to date neither device supports the type of program that would cause me to rush out and drop five or more Benjamins to have my own.
About a month ago I found myself sketching a gift for a dear friend. I tend to make gifts rather than buy them for those who are close and this one involved a trace-like flow as I sketched out the design. At one point I realized I was really hungry and noticed six hours had gone by in a blink. Then it became time to work on the final design using my Mac and a drawing tablet. The fact that I am drawing on a surface that is disconnected from the display makes it very difficult to achieve flow and the result wasn't quite what I was getting with the paper and pencil.
The iPad 3, or whatever it is called, may have enough computational power and resolution to achieve the level of transparency that allows my creative phase transition to kick in and bring flow. I'm going to be very excited if it is demoed with some killer drawing applications.4 To me a transparency of user experience that allows me to seemingly directly interact with information is the core of the post PC dream. The price point won't be terribly important to me. It would probably support any of the creative things I do with a pad and pencil and has the potential to go far beyond.5
The Mac was the first computer good enough to criticize. I want something good enough to give my mind a bit of freedom. I suspect we're very very close to the beginning.
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1 The chemistry and physics involved is *really* interesting and I recommend further study if you want to understand the nuts and bolts! Basically the water molecules are attracted with a special class of dipole-dipole interaction known as hydrogen bonding. Note that a picosecond is about the distance light travels in a thousandth of a foot - about a hundredth of an inch.
2 Water has a very high heat of fusion (solid to liquid) and heat of vaporization (liquid to gas). It turns out to be very important for weather and many other systems.
3 From The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy where he describes how to fly. Look up the text or listen to him read the section.
4Procreate is probably the best iPad drawing program to date. Add what I think the better display might give and some additional power to let the objects flow easily combined with iOS and a pressure sensitive stylus and it can happen.
5 Consider what Garageband and some other music creation programs for the iPad have allowed .. as well as transparent interfaces for music for Macs in general. Just ask Björk.