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:

I was truly interested and excited about what Apple announced yesterday. But after that glow faded, I’m left with questions and concerns:

1. What protects that screen? Imagine using this thing. I have an iPod now that I have the lockdown on with a protective cover. Only the controls can be accessed when it is protected. How do you protect the iPhone when the screen = the controls. You can’t just slide it into a protective case. Think about all the phone design of late… flips, sliders, etc… all built for protection and ease of use. That big beautiful iPhone screen will be a mess after a few weeks of use.

2. What keeps the screen clean? Anyone who has spent time using touch kiosks knows how disgusting they get in a short period of time. With me dragging and fat-fingering onto an iPhone I’m going to need to clean it constantly.

3. Where do I carry it? Is it big enough to fit in a pocket? Part of my last choice in phones was influenced by the need for portability. Thin isn’t everything. To me the ultimate factor of portability is if the device is obtrusive or not in my front pocket. iPhone isn’t going to fit. So then what? How do I carry it around? I don’t want to haul a manbag around everywhere.

4. How long will it be exclusive with Cingular? In any market (geographical area) one provider may provide better coverage and clarity than another. iPods are ubiquitous and require no extra layer to provide the content and connection (unless you count iTunes as the syncing mechanism… which is limiting to say the least). What happens when I buy an unlocked version? How much of the firmware is built for a specific carrier?

5. What do I do with my old phone? When I got an iPod it didn’t really replace anything. I had stopped lugging around my discman… In the case of the iPhone it replaces something that is usable for me. What do I do with it?

6. What do I do with my iPod? I currently have 30+ GB of music (no video) on my iPod. I like having all that at my fingertips. I don’t want to pare down my collection in smart lists to sync with the iPhone. Which means, even with the iPhone, I’m caring around the iPod still…

7. If I’m listening to music on iPhone how do I know I have an incoming call?

8. How does the device comply with FCC E911 Phase II requirements? Or more simply — how does the iPhone determine location of the user?

9. Will the multi-touch scroll be usable in lists of 1000 artists? Even the current iPod dial UI is reaching the limits of usability. I really think this one of the biggest weaknesses of the device. In the Smart Phone category the thumb wheel and scrolling orb are about as simple as it gets. The only thing you could add to them them is a “fast-foward” style feature–shift the scroll into different gears… especially when navigating lists and many pages.

10. How usable is the multi-touch keyboard? Those keys look pretty small. I guess not much different than a Blackberry… Just no tactile difference between the keys…

11. Am I really going to spin, flip, and zoom web pages like the NYTimes to read them?

12. What’s the global rollout plan?

13. What are the specifics of the Google, Yahoo, and Cingular partnerships?

I’ll add more if I think of them or run across good questions from other people. No matter my concerns, this should be real progress for users. Hopefully Nokia and Motorola come back to table with something better, different, more focused, etc. Lot’s of ways left to innovate.

And the more I think about this — at least from the US perspective, I imagine if we had this much innovation and competition among the carriers… and not marketing, sales, pricing competition, but innovation around the experience. If anything limits iPhone adoption it will be unsupportive or archaic carriers built to squeeze as much revenue out of their exisiting taxing of users model.

Where do I want to put my money? New innovation around protocols that circumvent the circus that is the US carrier network industry.

Lots of interesting noise around the “size” of Second Life. And it’s bizzare that there is so much noise when the actual signals can be published at any time. The debate steams from the Shirky camp that believes Second Life doesn’t rate all the press it’s getting (due to the overinflated population/usage numbers) and the reaction of anyone who has a vested interest in Second Life defending its value (where value can diverge beyond the topic of size/usage).

I came across this from GigaGamez:

Linden CEO Philip Rosedale suggested retention was 10%— a percentage so low, it shocked me. (“[A]bout 10% of newly created residents are still logging into Second Life weekly, 3 months later.”) When I checked with Linden Lab last week, Philip and Marketing Director Catherine Smith reported back a slightly higher percentage, this one gauged by returning users from over the last 30 days (but not those who created an account within that period)— “12-15% and has remained steady over the last year… we know churn will be high, but the difference is a network effect and constantly changing content that people do come back to see. ”

The stats above are going to be the crux of some back of the napkin calculations I’ll throw out later (need to verify some data sources first). But there’s probably an easier quick litmus test on the hype factor — the concurrency data. How many people are online at a single time. Let’s assume the following are generally accurate (sourced from Linden’s feed once a minute) — (see graphs). Eyeballing it, it looks like 10-12k concurrent users is the average — with spikes up to 20,000 or so during peaks. If we go back to Shirky’s statements about marketers and press not asking the hard questions to parse out “cool story” versus “does it matter”, it seems to me that in terms of scale, this is a non-story. Especially when you look at this:

So this, as it turns out, is where to set the Second Life bar: of the 2,000,000+ registered accounts now, roughly 240,000-300,000 are regular users, residents in both the colloquial and literal sense. Clay is right to call for the media to stop reporting that very top number without caveat. Shirky is further correct to wonder if all the big companies recently promoting their brands in Second Life (NBC! American Apparel! Adidas and Toyota!, etc.) count as news, since it’s not clear if this is just a gimmick, or if they’re actually getting any measurable return from their promotion dollars.

But even in the Gigagamez post, Wagner James Au admits that measured on scale alone, this isn’t so newsworthy.

So here’s my take:
Second Life, in itself, is never going to reach the mass adoption or generate the impact MySpace and YouTube have. The wild assumptions on Second Life adoption and growth will never materialize without dramatic changes — incremental improvement won’t do it.

However, Second Life is worth looking at, watching, and playing in. Even if you are a marketer. I think it’s definitely a Faint Signal on the Fringe — what is happening in terms of:

Design for user-generated content
Design for user-generated commerce
Community Design
Rights of digital content and creation
Rapid prototyping and immersive design
Government regulation of global virtual property and content
3D social application design
Etc

There are lots of newsworthy elements of Second Life… but in typical hype fashion, money, size, and sex sell.

I’m a little over a hundred pages into Marvin Minsky’s The Emotion Machine and came across this gem:

To understand how our thinking works, we must study each of those “very different things” and then ask what kinds of machinery could accomplish some or all of them. In other words, we must try to design — as opposed to define — machines that can do what humans do.

In my words, he’s taking about Designing to Define. I think that is an apt way to describe an interesting philosophy of doing to learn. In the software community the closest thing is rapid releases, rapid prototyping, etc. But what I’m talking about isn’t designing to improve — it’s designing to learn. That is something I’m not sure that product companies do intentionally. Maybe I’m wrong. But even if they’re not doing it now, they will (and those that are – you’re a step or two ahead).

Marketers, especially those of the direct variety, have always done this to some degree — if they do it right. On a very basic level they understand the values and motives of consumers through emergent design — the audience, the offer, the creative, endlessly reformulated in small increments, a plodding evolutionary approach. What makes that world complex, however, is 1) the spectrum of sophistication (or lack thereof) of other companies’ approaches and 2) the pure volume and breadth of direct marketing communication. Very few marketers actually take into account what else people are getting in their mail as a part of the audience, offer, creative equation. They don’t completely define context.

It is the proper atomization or disaggregation into component parts that is the difficult part of Designing to Define. I don’t have to understand all the workings and innards of a complex system, but rather I want to design a system that elicits the outcomes I desire in the appropriate contexts. Therefore:
1. I must be clear about my intended outcome(s)
2. I must understand the relevant components of context
3. I must be able to break the design features into mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive parts

Doesn’t seem so easy when broken out that way. But the fourth element of DtoD is iteration. The outcomes, context, and design components must all be quantified and measured — then coupled in iterative ways that improve outcomes, are either specialized for specific contexts or rigorous enough for most contexts, and reduce time and cost of design and production.

I know. You’re thinking: this isn’t anything new. This is the scientific method. And I agree. But instead of designing experiments, just design products and services that are emergent and experimental while delivering value. Make the emergent qualities part of the value and assets of the company. You’ll get closer to actual “use contexts”, shorten the time to learn, reduce R&D costs in the long run, and make competively differentiated products and services that people use and will increasingly value.