Reinventing the yoyo
Also over breakfast, someone I know from the WELL told me he’d just overheard from the next table: “Content providers should be paid for the content they create.” Immediate flashback to a WELL picnic 17 years ago, where another WELLbeing said exactly that to Howard Rheingold. This kind of thing happens all the time because every time a new wave of people gets interested in technology they “discover” issues that they’re sure no one has ever thought about before. The discussions we are having today about security, copyright, anonymity, integrity of data…have been had over and over again going back to before the Internet was even invented. I have a friend who says in school he was taught that the Greeks had figured out everything, and it’s only since the 1960s that we reject all historical authority.
The first part of this morning’s O’Reilly Radar talks about the fact that due to liability issues teens today don’t get to use heavy machinery or discover talents they might have for actually building things. Designers now often don’t actually know how to make things.
Dale Dougherty fleshed this out with some discussion of geeks having fun - making railway cars out of bicycles and old carts, solar-powering a shipyard, making all kinds of very strange things out of old bicycle parts - not to be green, but just because they love bicycles. Brian Warshawsky then demonstrated a wind-up power source his company, Potenco, is working on to power the one-laptop-per-child. It looks exactly like a yoyo.
wg
March 26th, 2007 at 5:56 pm
I eavesdropped those remarks! my son was stung by a bee at that picnic, which was held at muir beach.
the yoyo-like battery charger may deter diabetes according to doc flash on the well. walk an hour a day, pedal your battery charger, whatever keeps your body in traveler mode so that it consumes energy from stored fat instead of using sugar. when I mentioned that to my son, a mechanical engineering student, he advised me to relax and take a walk.
March 29th, 2007 at 3:16 pm
Meanwhile I was at a Stanford Design class (in Said Business School in Oxford) trying out rapid prototyping, or low-res design. What it shows is that working around a practical design with all involved (rather than the isolated “expert” designers producing a solution for people whose needs they dont understand) gets you to the real issues very fast. It’s like co-creation/co-governance.
We were asked to design a water storage solution for a $1/day family. Within 90 minutes we presented a customer-centric dramatisaiton of the relationships needed to make this work when there’s an overabundance of designs for water storage and the problems are clearly different. They’re issues of culture and financing. It was very powerful, and has major relevance to the question of how e=-services keep solving the wrong problem really well.
It definitely applies to future e-services.