February 2006

There were 14 posts published in February 2006 (this is page 2 of 2).

A valentine from (for?) Adaptive Path!

A few weeks before our 5th anniversary, the news is metastasizing across the blogosphere — Google has acquired Measure Map. And with it, one of my business partners for the last 5 years, Jeffrey Veen. So, this is definitely a bittersweet moment.

I’m remarkably excited about the acquisition. It’s validation for the work we did, and, importantly, for the philosophy underlying our inaugural attempt at a product — that good design redefines categories and opens opportunities that hadn’t been realized. It’s what we saw Google do with Maps — people had pretty much considered the map space finished before then. I discussed this a bit back when I talked about enterprise apps being eaten from below – there was definitely an opportunity to approach analytics in a new, user-centered way, which is what Measure Map did.

Jeff’s departure will take a long time to sink in. Over 5 years ago, when I first was talking up the idea of a “user experience” company, Jeff was one of the first people I got in touch with. We had spoken at conferences together, and he had even brought me in to do some work at Hotwired, so I knew we had similar notions. Jeff has been instrumental in the evolution of Adaptive Path — his efforts lead directly to our events line of business, and then, two years later, to our first product. He has been probably our most public face (though Jesse is gaining fast), speaking around the world to a variety of audiences. He developed some of our best speaking material — his knack for storytelling helped communicate the value of user experience, whereas my overly analytical approach tends to leave people scratching their heads.

And within the office, day-in and day-out, we won’t have him to lead the charge for burritos, coffee, or beers at (House of Shields, Nova, _insert bar here_), to cut through the bullshit we occasionally find ourselves getting worked up over, to, well, to be so tall.

That said, this is clearly a remarkable opportunity for him, and I’m thrilled I could help make it happen. Jeff isn’t someone you can replace, and Google is getting a remarkable person to join their ranks.

I’m eager to see what’s next, and looking forward to him doing great things there.

(Re-)Mixing Culture – Homogeneity, Recombination, and Infinite Possibilities

One of the fears of globalization, and the hegemonic spread of certain powerful cultures, is that everything will end up being the same. Visit Tokyo and you can eat at McDonald’s or KFC. Visit Russia and they’re all listening to Britney Spears (or some such).

While such forces certainly exist, they are not the only, nor, I suspect, even the predominant ones. My experience is leading me to think that what’s much more likely than a prevailing homogeneity is recombination — memetic splicing that leads to something different from the elements that contributed to it.

Food is an obvious example… Here in the Bay Area the idea of a “fusion” restaurant is becoming passe, because chefs are drawing from all manner of sources to develop culinary products. I had dinner at a neighborhood restaurant in Berkeley where the salad was vietnamese-inspired, the soup was thai-inspired, Stacy had a delightful Mexican-inspired dish, and we all enjoyed tapioca pudding for dessert. The restaurant didn’t make a big thing out of the cultural progenitors — the chefs simply decided to pick and choose and create a menu that made sense.

Another obvious example is music. Take The Punjabi Rapper. Actually, that’s it. Does any more need to be said?

An example closer to my professional work life. Stacy, who is getting her Ph.D. in anthropology (archaeology, specifically) attended a design ethnography workshop at the American Anthropological Association conference. There, she learned about affinity diagrams (aka, playing with sticky notes), and realized that her practice could benefit from this method that had been developed in HCI as a way to make sense of user data. And, of course, HCI had long been drawing from anthropological practice to understand user populations.

This is a trend affecting society at every level. And it’s not simply a matter of taking two distinct things and having them combine to make a third. It’s a matter of taking a part of two distinct things can now be recombined in any number of ways, because each of those original things can be broken down, and have its elements combined with elements of the other, leading to an explosion of possibilities.

The best example of this process is molecular biology, and it wasn’t until we understood genes, combination and recombination, mutation, and selection that we could really have a framework to appreciate what’s happening in our cultural world.

So, I guess I’m saying — don’t get down in the face of global sameness; relish the opportunity for recombination to lead to infinite cultural possibilities.