My thoughts on diffusion design are starting to coalesce a bit. I’ll kick off a public rumination on the topic with a quickly hacked together proposition: The Innovation Paradox.

The two most important attributes of an innovation’s diffusion speed (how many adopt and how fast) are relative advantage and compatibility [Rogers]. Those two attributes seem like a good place to start — and they immediately generate a paradox. But, if you start to peel back the definitions of words like relative, advantage, and compatible, that paradox may no longer exist.

Just an immature thought at the moment. More to come.

Michael Bierut has a great post on Design Observer describing quintessence. I’m interested in the book, but I sense it’s long on example and short on analysis. What we really want to know is what are the patterns of designing the quintessential.

Predictably, many of the products are familiar from our childhood; kids seem to have a nearly infallible sense of what makes something the real thing. “A rule of thumb often useful in determining whether something is quintessential,” wrote Edwards and Kornfeld, “is whether it resembles a child’s drawing of the thing.” This childlike sensibility holds true today. Mays said the New Beetle’s circular shape had much in common with Walt Disney’s drawing of Mickey Mouse; David Galbraith goes to far as to label the Zune “unsafe for children,” imagining that any child unlucky to get one will be fated to get “the shit kicked out of him at school by mocking friends chanting ‘Zuny Zuny Zuny.’”

The folksonification of the web is creating new methods for sensemaking. Tag clouds are everywhere now. They originated as a categorization identifier or label. Now the tag cloud method is being used for full text analysis — where every word becomes a tag.

For instance, the image below shows Chirag Mehta’s method for parsing presidential addresses using tag clouds.

I played with this a few weeks ago. While it’s very creative I can’t parallel process it — meaning there are no remnants of the data when you scroll across the timeline. To be very useful at comparisons I need to be able to compare across the timeline beyond what ghosts in my mind’s eye as I scroll through. Regardless, it’s a very creative and clever way to use the tag cloud method.

I applaud the New York Times, whose graphics I often critique, continually pump out new ways to interact with “the news” and information. Below is a more artistic rather than analytic approach to looking at Bush’s State of the Union history:

This is still a very sweet way to document life. See the collection here.

When you allow users or consumers to add, change, create, delete, rate, and interact with your site, product, service, content, etc, you open the door to a host of new questions.

How much participation is enough?
Is there a spectrum/scale of the value of participation? Is it linear?
What are participant roles? Who is best suited for those roles? How do we support them?
How does participation correlate with profit? Is there proof of causal links?

This is just a start. The point is that the participatory nature of digitial communication will increasingly demand new valuation metrics. This is an undeveloped thought — but worthy to mull over. A very old post (Khoi Vinh’s interesting link archive system directed me there) from Bradley Horowitz sparked this line of questions.

Gillette is a software company.

Hardware companies make money on infrequent higher margin items. Usually they involve productions systems built with large capital investment and are built to run as fast and error free as possible.

The best software companies build for design speed (as opposed to production/operational speed) and identification of errors. These errors or deficencies are then fixed or improved as quickly as possible and released back to the user base. They either run on a continuous subscription based model or charge for major updates/releases.

There is fertile ground to talk more about the distinctions, but most importantly, I want to draw out how the two companies differ regarding innovation (and how that manifests in increased revenue). The basic model of selling hardware — houses, appliances, cars, etc, involves a longer production, buying, and “service” value chain. It’s capital intensive, which induces a sort of efficiency intertia: if it ain’t broke, don’t fixt it.

Selling software — cereal (yes), digital applications, digital cable, etc, may involve intensive capital investment, but selling it means rapid prototyping and constantly introducing new value. Consumers really “consume” software. Its value is in its use rather than its possession. The mantra for selling software is rapid improvement, iteration, and change. The inertia is stuck on “different” — it’s the ball in motion to the hardware’s ball at rest.

The way to apply this distinction is to try to define your company — put it in one of the boxes. Then imagine if you flipped — that as a car manufacturer you became a software company instead of a hardware company. How would you operate differently? What would be different about the organization? How would you make money? Where and how would you invest R&D budgets? Marketing and sales?

Gillette really turned a hardware business model into a software model. They are wildly successful and demand huge premiums on what was considered a commodity — a series of sharpened metal edges mounted in plastic. The key is that they didn’t just build a product to wear out (some would say we need to design our hardware to fail earlier so people will have to repurchase), they actually improved the use through software. They could be better though… they could extend the software metaphor further by allowing backwards compatability to a point that it no longer made sense. All the heads should work on all the bodies unless the connection mechanism changed to improve performance (as far as I can tell, there hasn’t been any innovation on how the razor head attaches to the handle). Imagine them stretching the metaphor even further — what would Gillette as an open source software company look like? How could they design in Web2.0 patterns into the blades? I’m reaching… but you get the point.

There is a company who already thinks like this: Doblin. They have a pdf that outlines a strategy to create business concepts. Even if you are a hardware company (or expand the spectrum to the full array of business models), you can take advantage of software company processes like rapid prototyping. Before you invest to change capital-intensive systems, you can concept artifacts and experieces to evaluate innovation opportunities. You can innovate your business model with very little investment.

The key in initiating something new and different is to find metaphors that link the unknown to the known. Revolutionary items don’t have much of a link to the present — they usually destroy the value of the current system. This is difficult to manage both internal and external to a company (investing, changing, and building in a current organization — and then conveying that to consumers of the product).

All this stems from thinking about the iPhone… Jobs tried to use the metaphor of a do-it-all device. I’m not sure that’s the best metaphor. Consumers have to value the idea of a do-it-all device. Simple is better. I’ll try to come up with better use metaphors for the iPhone.