Today on stage I had the pleasure of interviewing Caterina Fake, co-founder of Flickr. What I didn’t relate was how Caterina met Stewart Butterfield, her husband (and co-founder of Flickr) at a party in my house (I think it was 2001).

You’re welcome.

Adam recently wrote how “You can no longer safely assume that your product will stand alone”, and how it needs to recognize the ecosystem in which it is placed.

This accords with my “Stop Designing Products” presentation (which I’ve since updated and gave at UIE’s Web App Summit).

There are two ways that products can take advantage of systems. The more obvious way, which Kodak pioneered in the late 1800s, and which Apple has executed of late, is to control all aspects of the system, and parcel functionality where appropriate. In my talk, it looks like this:

Few of us have the ability to control a system in such a way. When Adam says that your product will not stand alone, he’s talking about the reality that so many things are going to be out of your control. Still, a systems view of the situation can help you develop a successful product. Take digital photo sharing. The success of Flickr is how it fits within an existing digital photo ecosystem, and adds value by helping coordinate these disparate elements of the ecosystem.

The challenge, which Adam’s comment suggests, is that product designers tend to focus on the stand alone. They tend to get so wrapped up in the Thing they are creating that they lose site of the environment in which it will be placed. For further reading, I suggest The Other Adam’s Why Designing Systems Is Difficult.

Now, why is this systems view important? Well, it ties into the other thing I’ve been thinking about, which is how we need to take an experiential perspective in our product development. If you want to deliver on an experience, as opposed to simply a set of features, it’s becoming clear you must take a systems view. When Eastman launched Kodak, he pledged, “You push the button, we do the rest.” When Apple launched iPod, it wanted to deliver the experience of ‘A thousand songs in your pocket.” Delivering on these promises requires going beyond any single component toward appreciating how an entire system can be orchestrated to deliver this experience.

Brandon’s post on Target’s ClearRX demonstrates this brilliantly. There as a desired experience (exemplified in the redesigned pill bottle), and that required a massive restructuring of systems in order to deliver it.

Anyway, these are among the things I’m thinking a lot about. I’d love any pointers for further reading on such topics.

I don’t think I’ve mentioned it here, but last September, I became President at Adaptive Path. (Jesse is President, too. But we don’t call ourselves “co-Presidents.” It’s just that neither of us is *the* President. Anyway.)

I’ve had quite a few conversations about what it’s like to be President, how my responsibilities and activities have changed, thoughts and advice on management. All of which is a little strange, because I’m totally making it up as I go along — I’ve got some instincts as to what will work, and taking it from there.

The thing that I’ve said more than once to folks about being President is that in the role, I become intimately familiar with how the sausage gets made. A professional services firm is all about the people who work there, and so presidency is all about engaging with the people.

And when you’re engaging with people, no matter how great, respectful, and delightful those people are (and the people at Adaptive Path are all those things, and more), things get messy. You put any group of people together, and messiness emerges.

And dealing with that messiness is the most challenging aspect of the job. It can lead to feelings of defeat. I suspect a lot of people would buckle when faced with the perfectly normal messiness that is dealing with a team of people. The president’s job is to not get defeated by knowing how the sausage gets made, realizing that once you get through it, it’s going to taste great. Wait. Did I just compare Adaptive Path’s work to tasty sausage? Perhaps I should stop now. But you get the point.

This is a bit of a lark. I’m at the Computer History Museum, and I’m being taped for a show called the “Joy of Lex,” which will be about the coining of different words. So, I’m blogging while talking about “blog.” Sometaithurts.

I’ve been thinking a lot about experiences and the systems that support it. So I was excited to read my colleague Brandon’s blog post on Target’s ClearRX prescription system, best known because of the iconic (and smartly designed) pill bottle.

The thing that I find most gratifying is how the pill bottle (created as a student project) served as an experience strategy, a vision to drive the design of Target’s system.

Diagram from Brandon’s post:

Over on metafilter was a link to In My Language, a video of an autistic woman’s expression and interaction with her environment. The video’s creator, Amanda Baggs, appears to be active in Autism causes.

Watching this video reminded me of a fascinating feature on CBC Radio’s science program, Quirks and Quarks, titled “Rethinking Autism.”. In it, you’ll hear of how an autistic person, Michelle Dawson, has been collaborating with a cognitive neuroscientist, Laurent Mottron, to explore the subject of autism. Listening to Dawson forces you to accept a radical new perspective on autism, it’s nature, and how it should be addressed. Needless to say, it lead to a firestorm of protest on the part of CBC listeners.

Anyone curious about autism owes it to themselves to watch Amanda’s video and listen to Dawson’s discussion. The discussion attached to the metafilter post, which includes comments from Amanda (slientmiaow) is worthwhile, too.

For reasons I don’t understand, people pay attention to Nicholas Carr. He made his name a bit back with the question, “Does IT [Information Technology] Matter?” (his short answer: no), which has been parlayed into punditry. I see links to his stuff all the time, which baffles me, because most of what he writes is crap. Or hackery. Or both.

A recent post exemplifies this. He laments the “shrinking” of our culture, the small chunking-ness, the bite-sized-ness lead by things like YouTube, finishing the post with the ominous, “we’re getting smaller, too.”

All of which is bullshit. The most obvious arguments (the success of the LORD OF THE RINGS movies, the viewership of episodic serials like SOPRANOS and LOST) are well presented by Tom Coates and Nick Sweeney in the comments to the post.

I think there’s an important, and more subtle reality here, if you take a purely economic perspective to the issue.

Before the Web, it wasn’t economically feasible to distribute content in small chunks. If you did small chunks, it had to be collected with other small chunks (in a magazine, newspaper, sketch comedy television show). There wasn’t an economic model that really supported the release of a standalone 3-minute non-music video, or a standalone 1000-word essay. Essays had to be bundled with other things in order to get someone to fork over $3.95 to pay for it — even if the reader just wanted that one essay.

The Web has made it feasible to deliver 3 minutes of video, or 1000 words of text, on its own, without any bundling. I suspect it’s less a matter of the shrinking of our culture, and more a matter of the market simply providing more options for expression across a spectrum of delivery sizes, and people are taking advantage of them all.

YouTube isn’t shrinking our culture — it’s simply presenting another choice alongside many others.

In March, I’ll be in Las Vegas for the IA Summit. The conference will be at the Flamingo, but I’m not particularly keen on staying at that hotel. I’ve stayed at the Venetian and the Bellagio before. I’d love any suggestions for where to stay.

I’d also love suggestions for where Adaptive Path should host a cocktail hour. There is no shortage of drinking spots in Las Vegas, which makes the task of finding a good one for us daunting. IAs love beer and gin and tonics, and they want to be in a place that’s not TOO LOUD so they can geek out.

Please leave suggestions in the comments! Thanks!

The podcast interview with Chip Heath, Stanford B-School professor, on the ideas in his new book MADE TO STICK, proved to be the most valuable 40 or so minutes I spent with my iPod of late. In it, Heath discusses the qualities of ideas that survive, that stick, that take hold of others’ imaginations. (John Kennedy’s, “send a man to the moon in this decade” is his canonical example). As someone who gives a lot of presentations and engages in other modes of discourse (whether pedagogical or persuasive), I found it quite instructive.

Last night I went with some friends to see Pan’s Labyrinth. We were looking forward to the film because it promised something different — a macabre fairy tale about a girl who retreats to a fantasy world in order to deal with her difficult Spanish-Civil-War circumstances. We were hoping for a film with real teeth, depth — something compelling for an adult audience.

What we got was boredom. Every one of us walked out of that movie bored. It was predictable, mechanical, and just didn’t hold interest. The story is gruesome for gruesome’s sake, or rather, for the sake that del Toro seems to have no ability to engage the audience’s emotion except through repulsive imagery.

Pan is really two movies — one about a girl and her imagination, one about people fighting the Spanish Civil War. The latter is a rote resistance-from-within war movie, with an evil ruthless captain, rebels, supporters of the resistance operating on the inside, and no heart. The former is about a remarkably self-centered girl striking out on various quests, often behaving so stupidly that it’s hard to have sympathy with her plight.

In the same way I’m appalled at the critical accolades bestowed upon Letters from Iwo Jima (another boring, rote movie), Pan’s Labyrinth has received almost unanimously glowing notices. Have critical notices always been so off? I suspect that, like I said with The Descent, people who watch movies for a living are exposed to so much utter crap that anything which doesn’t just outright suck is lauded.

What’s troubling for me is that given how bored I was with Iwo Jima and Pan, I’m fearing going to the theaters to see anything. I’m interested in Children of Men, but fear it will be just as boring. The Pacific Film Archive here in Berkeley is showing an Ernst Lubitsch retrospective. Now there, I can’t go wrong…