Me on the Wii

As I age every year, I find myself increasingly tired of being an early adopter. My grad students constantly embarrass me with their always exuberant energy and willingness to adopt the new. While the Nintendo Wii craze was sweeping the world, I was busy with facilitating operations at the Media Lab, and then the announcement hit that I would become the next leader of RISD ("Riz-dee"). Amidst the chaos of my life, I knew that I had to resolve two important things: 1) finally figure out Ruby on Rails, and 2) buy a Wii.

The former goal was accomplished last week (thanks to one of my brilliant grad students), and I thought getting a Wii would be easy but realized that even the late adopter can be early. I wasn't aware of the shortage of these devices. Finally getting my hands on one last night, I now understand the hype. Size, form, and feeling all meld into an experience that uses "just enough" technology to realize pure fun. Nintendo's ethos of design is set to trump Apple's, in my book.

Bigfoot Greetings

With a simple flick of the wrist and click of a button, I ordered my custom-printed cards from Apple. Not very many, really--only 50 total. A few days later, they arrived in two cardboard boxes. I opened one of the boxes, and inside there was another box. I opened that box, and found yet another box. Finally, after opening the last box, I found a bundle of cards. I felt as though I was playing with a Matryoshka doll. The sad part of it, however, was that all the layers of packaging were going to end up in the recycling bin. Did there have to be so many?

On the right is the pile of printed cards and envelopes; on the left is the pile of packaging material. I'm fearful of calculating the carbon footprint of my greeting cards ...

BGI = Before Google Images

In my recent tour of the RISD Library, I was startled to find a room with cabinets upon cabinets of labeled clusters of clippings from magazines. For any given term, there is a corresponding file of laminated individual pages from publications that span over 30 years. This is a room of visual inspiration that RISD students have been coming to for years in order to see source material connected to specific ideas and keywords.

Naturally, my first thought was, "With Google Image Search, wouldn't such a resource's popularity be waning?" The maintainer of the room explained this indeed to be the case--especially on cold or rainy days, when a visual inspiration can be only a few clicks away instead of a long walk to the library away. But the advantages of this physically based approach are quite clear: 1) the quality of images is better, as they've been hand-curated, and 2) there is the element of serendipity that comes from the messiness of it all that leads to happenstance encounters of new inspiration.

As I now approach the presidency of RISD in only a few weeks (I start June 2), I continue to be in wonderment of the many wonderful aspects of an art and design school that will certainly benefit the world of technology by providing new surprises like these.

The Green Forest

I recently gave a keynote on the topic of simplicity at a management retreat in Germany for a large lighting company. As with most retreats, we did a physical team-building exercise, which in this case was a five-mile hike up a mountain together. At the very top of the mountain, we enjoyed a delicious dinner in an isolated log cabin in the forest. For sure, I expected that we'd be dining with paper plates and plastic flatware, but instead, there were regular plates and metal silverware. I commented to an attendee that this was quite a fancy affair to be having at a camp, to which he replied that it was required by law. Rewinding the day in my head, it occurred to me that even during one of our mountainside pit stops, we were drinking coffee out of regular porcelain cups.

The simplicity of disposable plates and utensils is quite desirable from a time-saving perspective, but their environmental impact is quite complex. McDonough's mantra of "reuse instead of recycle" echoed in my mind.

Another Typewriter Falls

Every week I count at least one typewriter that has met its demise. It would seem that our society would be more forgiving of these machines. After all, I know of no easier or more direct way to place a printed address on an envelope.

The newer typewriters had little character [sic], as they were under digital control. But the old typewriters were much like an untuned piano in the sense that every letter typed made an imperfect and unique imprint. Type that is set on the Web does not suffer from imperfection. Every letter is placed perfectly on the digital page, with absolutely correct spacing.

I predict that we will see a yearning in our society for more ... imperfection. Not just flaws or errors, of course. We will want to see evidence of what is human-made and real.

XO: Give One, Get One

I was in Miami last week for Art Basel, and it was an odd coincidence that I had just purchased five of Nicholas Negroponte's new XO computers and ended up at a party at Luminaire celebrating the XO. If you haven't purchased an XO yet, don't worry, as there's still time left before December 31 to participate in the Give One, Get One program. Your $400 purchases one machine for a child in a developing nation, and it also buys you an XO for yourself.

These machines don't run Microsoft Word and the Adobe suite of products, but they do run a fluent Web browser. And the machine has a wonderful key that, when pressed, "calls out" to other XO units in its vicinity to create a map of the literal local network that surrounds it. The little rabbit ears on the two sides of the screen form a wireless mesh network with other XO units, so if a single XO has Internet and the rest don't, the single connection is shared by all.

In the distant past, I recall seeing many new computer launches, like those for the Commodore Amiga, the NeXT Cube, and the BeBox, but in recent times it is rare to come across a totally new platform like the XO. The price is right, so I recommend that you buy one while you still have a chance to do so.