Laying around in the previous long-form blog from back in 2007 there’s a few articles I wrote on innovation.  Hindsight and time are powerful teachers, and some things that felt urgent at the time -in the great scheme of things- become irrelevant with time:  the difference between importance and urgence. There’s however a few topics that keep coming back, and we seem to never totally master, perhaps because they an ingredient of the very fabric of what makes us humans.

Wake to a new day striving for perfection knowing  it’s a battle you’ve already lost, but you have to go out there and fight it anyway. Innovation is one of those matters where many people have many things to say every day, never totally mastering it, and few are truly prepared to shed some light and make some progress in the field of ideas.

Just so that I  provide some context on the subjects I’ll be dealing with in subsequent and unevenly distributed posts in the coming months, here’s a mostly unadulterated  repost of my first attempt in talking about these matters.

Repost follows:

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I’ve posted about Lautréamont before, and how he perceived progress back in 1870, but really… that’s hardly an original thing to do, we could name quite a few others who have been inspired -oftentimes blinded in fascination- by the brilliance of his sayings.

It’s not without a great deal of irony that us technologists/artists/scientists/geeks turned entrepreneurs look back for inspiration in the great revolutionaries of our history when what we’re actually after all the time is gradual, creative destruction, an evolutionary approach to growth through mutation.

Ideally, continuous innovation, or innovation as a process instead of periodical big-bangs would be the perfect approach, to satisfy both a conservative sense of self-preservation and the imperious need for renewal we’re always trying to realise.

Professor VJ, in his great post “The Renewable Tradition – Part III” very evidently agrees with me when quoting Lautréamont, but he goes much farther to say :

As we sit at our Death Terminals and wait for the next big bang of creative potential to immerse ourselves in, we cannot help but wonder: “Is there another way out? Which way is out? This way? This? How do we move beyond the newness of a tradition typecast as being avant-garde but always trending toward the ‘innovative’?”

and he quotes:

Sukenick:

Innovation bears the same relation to the mainstream as does a concept car to a factory model. Or even better, a hot rod to the mass production version. The former comparison stresses the experimental aspect of innovative work; the latter stresses the excitement, the extra intensity, the pure thrill that comes with the riskiness of high stakes.

Rings so true to me. Professor VJ then goes on to try to identify patterns of possible innovation processes (though he doesn’t get to name them this way, or ellaborate on a systematic approach to identifying them)

In other words: remixologists who play with innovative genres are practicing forms of extreme writing. But here the term “innovation” also brings to mind other terms like “technocapitalism,” “market timing,” “fashion statement,” etc., in that the further you can push the envelope, the more entrepreneurial your writing gesture may be, especially in relation to the way one employs new media technologies that challenge the concept of writing to its core. Could it be that the degree one is more likely to find ways to create measurable value to their embodied praxis using new media technologies is directly correlated to the more attracted they will become to the latest innovations being invented in the commercial marketplace?

In the end he leaves us without a clear conclusion, apparently without venturing to offer an opinion, or definitive statement of any kind… which nevertheless still works well for me as some food for thought. So he borrows Suckeniks voice again to say:

Obviously there’s no progress in art. Progress toward what? The avant-garde is a convenient propaganda device, but when it wins the war everything is avant-garde, which leaves us just about where we were before.

There’s no progress in art. There’s no progress in its implementation techniques.

That’s the field of technology. All art has always been preceded by some form of technological advance.

But art is not the same thing as ideas. Art is one possible form of implementation of someone’s ideas, so let me say it:

There can be progress in the field of ideas.

This “remixology” Professor VJ talks about works its magic at implementation level, taking elements from disparate works of art.

But borrowing elements of art, is not the same thing as borrowing the ideas that drove someone to create them.

You could end up borrowing the symbol, but not the context that gives it a meaning… or giving it another meaning entirely.

I’m going well out of bounds there, but interestingly semiotics is one field where the Situationists felt at home (another “revolution”)

And guess who did the Situationists quote ? Well, Debord referred to Lautréamont too, of course.

Any elements, no matter where they are taken from, can serve in making new combinations. The discoveries of modern poetry regarding the analogical structure of images demonstrate that when two objects are brought together, no matter how far apart their original contexts may be, a relationship is always formed. Restricting oneself to a personal arrangement of words is mere convention. The mutual interference of two worlds of feeling, or the bringing together of two independent expressions, supersedes the original elements and produces a synthetic organization of greater efficacy. Anything can be used.

…

Lautréamont advanced so far in this direction that he is still partly misunderstood even by his most ostentatious admirers. In spite of his obvious application of this method to theoretical language in Poésies (drawing particularly on the ethical maxims of Pascal and Vauvenargues) where Lautréamont strives to reduce the argument, through successive concentrations, to maxims alone–a certain Viroux caused considerable astonishment three or four years ago by demonstrating conclusively that Maldoror is one vast detournement of Buffon and other works of natural history, among other things. That the prosaists of Figaro, such as this Viroux himself, were able to see this as a justification for disparaging Lautreamont, and that others believed they had to defend him by praising his insolence, only testifies to the intellectual debility of these two camps of dotards in courtly combat with each other. A slogan like “Plagiarism is necessary, progress implies it” is still as poorly understood, and for the same reasons, as the famous phrase about the poetry that “must be made by all.”

Apart from Lautréamont’s work–whose appearance so far ahead of its time has to a great extent preserved it from a precise critique–the tendencies toward detournement that can be observed in contemporary expression are for the most part unconscious or incidental; and it is in the advertising industry, more than in a decaying aesthetic production, that one can find the best examples.

So how do we stop awaiting for innovation to happen unconsciously, incidentally, publicitarianly ?

Nurture and embrace continuous innovation, instead of mere decaying aesthetic production.

The irony is that, again… we will find some clues on how to achieve the holy grail of evolutionary development in the works of revolutionaries like Lautréamont and the Situationists.

                          

And by a product I mean, not e-reader technology, but something human beings can use (and are willing to buy).

Image via Wikipedia

1)  Touchscreen  ( back and forth keys are a definitive no-no). You have to be able to flip pages with your fingers. Still with me?  Remember, touchscreen.  Throw your Kindle thing away.

2) The display must cover the entire surface of the device, with no frame.  Books have no frames.  You can have controls.  Eight of your fingers are always on the back of the book, why place buttons on the front side?

3) Unless you have perfect e-paper (and you most likely don’t have it yet)  it’s better to deliver a high density LCD screen, say 1280×800 in 10″.   A rotary control on the side should serve to control brightness. Or better, the device should come with an auto-brightness mode that self-corrects in tune with ambient light. Make the auto mode optional.

4)  A non-ingredient:  you don’t want an OS,  you want to read things.  So your most recent books should be available on the main screen. Not applications. People don’t want applications the same way they don’t awant shelves, nor book covers.  Shelves and book covers are a minor nuisance when you want to read a book. You must be able to switch between thematic bookshelves that must be readily available with a single gesture or keystroke. A rotary control with three positions (back, forth and select) can do this job. All user interface must be hidden most of the time.

5) Make it easy to share pages with other users. I’m reading this page and I want to beam it over wi-fi to my colleagues, and have that displayed on their screens automatically.  It’s not that hard, the technology is already available, you only have to put it to work for humans.  Extrapolate to the internet:  integrate Wordpress, Typepad and Movable Type api support.   Keep the “social” nuts happy providing Facebook and Twitter support. It’s easy and it doesn’t cost a thing.

6) You need an iTunes-kind of bookstore. Make it open so bookstores from all around the world can publish their stuff.   Make the whole Project Gutenberg catalogue easily accessible.  Forget about DRM. Play embrace and extend game with Amazon and send them customers.  Do the same with Barnes and Noble and with every small player too.  There’s 6 billion people in the world and every one of them on average have a penny to put in your piggy bank.   That’s a lot  more than you are making now.  Mind you, maybe you have to give these e-readers for free.

7) Let me take audio notes and attach them to pages. Include a screen reader. It doesn’t have to be a perfect screen reader, it will be okay as long as it’s understandable what it says.  People with low vision problems and blind people deserve better.  I know it seems that this could cut down on the audio books market.  Not so.  If I want to hear William Gibson reading out loud, I will buy the audio book anyway.   Send the greedy marketer to the closet, you will sell more books by letting people rest whilst listening to any book.

                          

Paul McDougall of InformationWeek sums it up more concisely than I did.

What he sees in Microsoft is the symptoms of the very well known phenomenon called Marketing Myopia.

McDougall writes:

Microsoft’s problem is that it’s failed to innovate at a time when the only acceptable answer to the question of what business you are in is…innovation. Redmond has become the tech industry’s version of Detroit, which is facing oblivion because for the past 100 years it’s done nothing more than deliver iterative versions of the same old Model-T.

I actually think it’s worse than that, I see it as an unfortunate combination of marketing myopia paired with innovator’s dilemma, another very well known phenomenon.  Alone or in twos, none of these diagnostics are promising prospects.

I watch these events unfolding with the same look an astronomer watches galaxies collide, distant and marvelled, at the same time concerned, curious and involved, for nothing that occurs in our cosmos is alien enough, or without consequences and teachings we should take heed of.

It’s astonishing that companies like Microsoft seem pathologically unable to avoid such destiny, like an inertia driven massive planet on a collision course towards an almost certain devastation.

In the end it’s always been about learning what the public wants, make what the public wants and exceed expectations. You can’t do these things well listening to yourself speak with your eyes fixed on your own belly button.