When I was in the navy, traveling to countries bordering the Baltic or the Mediterranean, I began to make observations of the culture. You could try to classify outgoing cultures, family-oriented, etc, etc. Lots of ways to slice the pie. I stumbled on a different, and more objective means of discerning cultural attributes. As crass it may first seem, I looked at bathroom design, and specifically, toilets.

First, my sample is, of course, limited to men’s bathrooms. However, even in that limited sample, you can start to look at some common variables. Are there privacy shields between urinals? Do the urinals extend to the floor? Do they have deodorizers in them? How clean are they? How tight are the toilet stalls? How low are they? Do they include sanitary guards for the seats? Auto flush? Bidets or no?

You’re rolling your eyes right now. You are asking yourself–”what does this say about the cultures?” I think you can break down the elements, and if you have a large enough sample, make inferences about what the culture values. How designed are the bathrooms? Or are they utilitarian, or at worst, forgotten necessities?

I used to sketch the layout, shapes, and design elements where I traveled. I’ve lost those records to many moves and many boxes that accumulate. But rather than focusing on the insights I could generate from those drawings, I’d like to push myself to find common cultural items — the more mundane the better — and break them apart, and compare and contrast them. As I get deeper into some global client work, the more interested I become, again, in understanding cultures — what unites us and what defines us.

The more interesting things I read, the more interesting thing I want to write.

“They depend on upon material culture to make their culture material.” from Grant McCracken in Culture and Consumption II.

A few posts sit unfinished and unpublished in my blogging software. I think there are some good posts in that bunch. And that’s the problem. Are they too good? I don’t mean the style of the content but the quality of the ideas. They’re ideas that I think are worth something. I keep coming back to them as something I’d like to develop into a product and/or service. So do I blog about them?

Wired would probably say yes. But in a world of transparency, what happens to the idea of appropriability? How do you appropriate the value of a completely transparent thing? This type of thinking leads me, from my econ undergrad days, to the world of public goods. In human capital intensive markets there is an increasing tension between capturing the value of an idea and inherent freedom of the idea.

Lot’s more to think about here. More to come on the topic.

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.

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.

It’s difficult to perceive the world in new and different ways. CES, Macworld, hundreds of blogs, my clients, my co-workers, my friends create my homophilous network of stimuli. I see the value of the subtle improvements in the UI of a website, the features and functions of a new mobile device, the social impact of Second Life. But it’s all about context.

I spent the weekend in a small town (18,000 pop) in southern Illinois. My wife and I visited my Grandma. I don’t think she’s ever used a computer and has no desire to. I, on the other hand, jonesed for a web-fix and couldn’t find the wifi network my brother claimed he found last time his family visited Grandma. So early Saturday morning I headed out to a coffee shop we always pass on the way to Grandma’s from the highway. I remember it for its name “The Common Ground” and that it advertises “Free Wifi.”

I bought a cup of coffee, fired up the laptop, got good signal strength from the the access point, but no dice on connecting to the Internet. I moved around to different tables and got odd stares from a group of three older men sizing up the new guy. Without success and two large cups of coffee later, I went to plan b. On that same stretch of road the coffee shop is on so too sit tens of gas stations and fast food joints. I had also filed away the advertisement that scrolls on a big LED on the Dairy Queen roadsign: “Free Wifi.”

I drove into a parking spot, laptop still on, and was successfully browsing. I went inside, got a $.79 cup of coffee (in a little diner-style plastic mug they kept refilling), and settled myself into an old wood both. The place was buzzing with customers, all aged 65+. One man, who I later learned was the town’s Wal Mart Greeter, chatted me up about Apple. He had purchased a working iMac (who knows what variant) for 5 bucks and was running OS 9 on it (he purchased for 50 cents at a garage sale). He had an odd mix of seemingly deep knowledge of technology and a naivete regarding its use.

After getting muscled out of my first seat by a 70 year-old woman defending her Saturday morning breakfast club’s area, I continued to check email, read my feeds, and surf a little while taking in the community that was Dairy Queen on Saturday morning in a small town in southern Illinois.

What made the Dairy Queen an actual hive of activity, of relationship, of comfort? More puzzling, when I followed up on Sunday, following the same routine, I was the only customer there for the first 20 minutes or so. The weather was bad, but more likely, I think the community locus that morning centered around the town churches.

As we, who make our lives thinking and building digital communities and experiences of the future, pontificate about the value and the patterns of community building it’s worth changing perspective now and again and looking deeper at the aspects of aliveness that exist in the enduring forms of human connection and communication. I think there is a lot of value at looking at the Late Adopters and Rejectors to see how they live without our innovations…