David Zach, futurist

Laptops vs. Lectures: Let's Ban Lectures! — Datamation.com

One science professor achieved minor YouTube fame recently when a video surfaced showing him freezing a student's laptop in liquid nitrogen, then smashing it on the floor. The professor commanded: "Don't bring laptops and work on them in class!" (I wonder how many university students watched that video during class.)

Click below to read the full article.

via itmanagement.earthweb.com

I got a bad feeling about this. Let me see if I have this straight. If kids no longer know how to deal with the basic educational method of lecture, that is lectures ... they should get rid of lectures. Have we gone completely mad?

Sure, entertainment is fine, but at some point, it's not about being entertained or holding on to their attention with tricks. The students have to learn to pay attention. It's a skill like anything else and it's another endangered species no one seems to care about. Learn to concentrate. Not multitask. Focus on one thing at a time. 

(There's a great PBS video called Digital Nation - the first part takes a bunch of proud multitaskers and then empirically shows them how absolutely terrible they are at everything they think they're good at. Marvelous!)

I think the continued customization of the world is leading towards a world that will demand customization for everything. And when it doesn't exactly match expectations, they attitude will cause the person to either be less productive or less attentive — probably both.

Call it "division by design." The better the design and the better our appreciation of great design, the more likely people will reject things that are not great design. I see a lot of companies putting a lot of time, money and attention into making sure that work environments are designed exactly right so as to encourage productivity and happiness in workers. My question is: How exactly do you design for happiness when happiness is such a fluid thing, especially amongst younger workers whose definition of happiness probably changes from day to day? It's a disturbing thing as well when more organizations are buying into the foolish notion that people have a right to be happy instead of a much saner (and older) notion that we have a right to pursue happiness.

Get your heads out of your personal computers and your interpersonal computers. Pay attention. It's not about you, it's about knowledge and the world. It was here first, it doesn't owe you a thing. If you're part of a generation that prides itself on being so open-minded, then be open-minded about something other than the stuff you already agree with. You perhaps forgot or sadly never learned that the entire world with one minor exception is something else other than you. Focus your attention outside of yourself and when it school it means putting it upon books, lectures and your notes. 

Pick up Maggie Jackson's book Distracted. It's subtitled The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age. Seriously. We are distracting ourselves into a society that cannot pay attention and in effect cannot produce nor defend anything of value. Good luck with that. 

Breakout Future Career: Molecular Gastronomists

My friend Shawn Kelley of @wallblank forwarded this to me regarding the printing of food. It's a concept from Philips Design for what's going to obviously be a breakout future career molecular gastronomists. There's a nice video explaining the concept here.

The concept (vs. the practice) is simple enough. Figure out the component molecules of a particular food and then place those molecules one by one, row by row into whatever design you happen to think broccoli would look better as, say as a Rubic's Cube, a photograph, or even a carrot. Even better, how about things like ice cream or chocolate taking on architectural qualities.

Never will kids be bored with their food ever again. OK, sorry, that's obviously a fantasy.

Let the Printing of Robots in Back Bedrooms Commence!

Perhaps I only keep doing this to cause mass confusion, but I keep telling my audiences about the factories of the future won't be in China, but may well be in your back bedroom, or at least in your neighborhood. 

Here's some fun stuff of printing robotic articulating figures - out of stainless steel. The printer in this case is an industrial designer by the name of Mani Zamani.

Here's his website and here's his Youtube channel.

The more we remove people from the manufacturing process, the less reason there is to have the work done in cheap labor locations. It makes far more sense to have the products manufactured closer to the point of consumption. It's far cheaper to ship raw materials than it is finished goods - and if the finished good doesn't have to have much transportation involved, then you might not even need packaging.

This is all about logistics. The movement of people, things and ideas - or selected movement of some and not moving others. For quite some time I've been thinking logistics is one of the center points of how we get the future to work.

Reading list ASHRAE & APCO talks & Rockford IL Chamber event

At my recent talks (and conversations in the hallways) in Orlando to ASHRAE & APCO and to the Rockford IL Chamber, I discussed a number of books - and there were quite a few requests for a repeat of the books recommended. So here they are:

The Pirate's Dilemma by Matt Mason

How youth culture is changing the nature of capitalism. What I like about it is pointing out that a lot of young adults are approaching the marketplace with a new sense of how it works. As I put it in my talks, they understand the three part notion of economics today: Attention, Experience & Attitude.

The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman

Change by Design by Tim Brown

Design Thinking by Thomas Lockwood, editor

These three books are a good introduction to the rise of design and how design thinking is a counterpoint to more traditional MBA thinking. Design determines value. As we get better at understanding the potential of design thinking, we dramatically increase our ability to create & organize value.

The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

I recall reading an article which said that a survey of high-tech executives believed that Neal Stephenson probably is the science fiction writer who best describes how the future will actually happen. I would tentatively agree because I keep thinking no matter what we imagine, increasingly it appears we'll be wrong.

Distracted by Maggie Jackson

My favorite read of 2009. Subtitled "The erosion of attention and the coming dark age." Yeah, it's that optimistic. I just don't understand how we can fritter away our most valuable resource and expect that the outcome will be what we've been hoping for.

Rapt by Winifred Gallagher

I've not finished this book but I do like that it's sort of the opposite of Distracted - a few instructions on how to pay attention to one thing at a time - over time. I would finish it, if I could pay attention to it long enough ...

Last Child Left in the Woods by James Louv

This book begins with the quotation: "I like playing indoors because that's where all the electrical outlets are." The fact that we are denaturing our children has profound implications. I worry over the loss of understanding of natural cycles and a sense of the slowness of nature. We have replaced cycles and seasons with fads and trends. To slightly misquote Peter Pan, "Oh, the cleverness of us!"

The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell

Modern economics and the fact of one damn thing leads to another.

Hip: A History by John Leland

A history of what's been cool, and how it got there. This is essentially a history of fads, but more than that, it's also a sense of the trend of importance of being hip and how that captures our attention in modern times.

The True Believer by Eric Hoffer

How people get caught up in cults of personality and mass movements. A great book for the early years of the 21st century. I find Hoffer and Chesterton to have been essential in the formation of my world view. Go here for more on Hoffer and here to find some of his great quotations.

In case you haven't gone to my website, it's www.davidzach.com

And, in the category, now why didn't I think of this right away, here are my books!

Worth Remembering: the future value of old ideas by David Zach

Before we look forward, we should first look back to see what has been said and thought before. Don't try to invent ALL of the future, borrow the best from the past upon which you can build the hopes and dreams of today.

Zachronyms: funny words for funny times by David Zach

Back in the ancient days of the late 20th century, I worked at Northwestern Mutual as a trend analyst, and did a lot of reports on demographics. To spice up those talks and reports I would often pepper them with some of the funny lifestyle acronyms that had been popular at the time. Not just YUPPIES: Young, urban professionals, but how about PUPPIES: Pregnant urban professions, or better yet, SPORES: Stupid People On Rented Equipment. This book is full of it, acryonomicially speaking.

I also quoted GK Chesterton a fair amount. Go here to visit the American Chesterton Society.

(I'm on the board and will be speaking at their annual convention on August 5th, just outside of Washington, DC.)

Data Visualization, Data Complexity

I keep thinking there's got to be a better way than just more and more data for us to plow through. Here's an example of Visual Complexity via Gizmodo.com of fascinating data visualization that offers some hope, especially with sense that design applied to data should reveal refinement and a sense of the aesthetic. 

Can data be beautiful and give us a sense of "Ah!" as opposed the the growing sense of "Ugh!" — one can only hope and encourage the information architects to focus not just on measurement, but whimsy as well. 

Designing Interactions by Bill Moggridge

An interesting website about this book Designing Interactions, Bill Moggridge the founder of the design firm IDEO. Lots of good notions of how we interact with designed things. The interviews are interesting. We take so much for granted regarding the depth and complexity of design in everyday things

Business Week: The Future of Innovation

Well, it would seem that this whole futurist thingie is taking off and even Business Week is asking futurists for their opinions. The writer Damian Joseph asked what sorts of innovations and inventions will come about because of the recession. I read somewhere along the line an article suggesting that the USA will get through this economic mess faster and better than other economies because we've got so many people who know how to start over and reinvent themselves. They're not as held back by legacy concepts. I'm certain that people here can reinvent themselves but today with so few connections to the past and any sense of enduring principles, I wonder if they can still reinvent themselves with any endurance. It's one thing not to be bound by history. It's quite another to dismiss it. If someone reinvents themselves are they basing the invention upon something specific or upon whatever has caught their attention most recently? 

Lily Tomlin once said that, When I was growing up I always wanted to be somebody. Now I see that I should have been more specific. 

Pop-up Businesses is one idea (so named by Damian Joseph) that I'm having fun with - as are a few reporters knocking on my email door wanting to know more. The basic idea is that because of improvements with logistics, technology, systems management and a strong sense amongst youth to constantly change what they pay attention to - that we may see in the future businesses that identify a need (or want) in the marketplace, gather together people and resources to fulfill that need and then just as quickly disband and move on to something else. How will that all work? I haven't the faintest idea, but I'm willing to bet that there are people out there who will know how to do it. 

I first started playing with this idea after working with the Self-Storage industry. Temporary space usage for more than just storage may be ideal for this sort of business model. Take a look at storage facilities and you'll now find a lot more than just sheds with garage doors. 

For each objection that someone can identify that would prevent the Pop-up Business notion from being successful, find alternatives around each roadblock. The sort of problem solving that designers are taught is the key here. Don't think of how it can't work, think of what will be necessary so that it can work. What are the upsides? What are the downsides? 

Microsoft: the Future of Computing

And, for what it's worth, computing in this future is also a description of life in the future because in this scenario the two are inseparable. Resistance is more or less futile, but we're going to love it so I guess it's OK. 

As I have been a devoted companion to my new Amazon Kindle 2, and find myself carrying around three sleek devices (Kindle, iPhone and MacBook Air - four if you count my iPod Shuffle) my mind has now been effectively trained to be immediately dissatisfied with whatever I have right now because I just know that the next version is going to be soooo much better. As cool as I think the Kindle is, I can't help but imagine what it's going to be like as a Kindle 3. And what about color, larger touch screen, a better (a much better) keyboard.

Microsoft imagines what this future of upgraded devices will be like. Watch the video on this page here: 

CNET: Microsoft's glimpse of the future

One of my big concerns is that we wrongly keep thinking that the Age of Information is about more information. It is not. It is about less information, as in taking all that information, processing it, filtering it and refining it so that it passes into either knowledge or wisdom. Most of the information needs to go behind the scenes, bypassing humans and just be machine to machine. If it makes it out of that loop it need to be run through the mill of elegance and eloquence. By the time it gets to me, I should be able to say "Ah!" not "Ugh." Information should not bother me unless it's cool and actually has something to say. It should not steal my attention away, it should barter for it. 

Still the video as they present it is pretty cool. I love the idea of being able to seamlessly pull and push information from device to device, to reach out and touch it and move it around. I just worry that information has clearly addictive qualities. 

As Eric Hoffer said, You can never get enough of what you really don't need.

Failure Magazine

As there seems to be some truth to the notion that those who succeed have also failed — and failure can be a marvelous teacher, check out Failure Magazine. 

David Zach interview on Future Innovation

Last Spring I did an interview with Deb Malewicki, a professor at UW-Whitewater in their MBA program. The topic was the future of innovation. I just learned that it's been posted. It's a 30 minute video interview, free for the viewing. Here's the link: http://onlinemba.uww.edu/temp/dzach/