The Dilemma
How do we take a notion and turn it into something? Itself a great ideation topic, let’s talk about it!
This Episode
Ideate Like A Boss via Anchor.fm
Be sure and subscribe to the podcast using your favorite podcast application!
Quoggling Sand podcast via Anchor.fm
Episode Art
Photo by K. Mitch Hodge on Unsplash
MAYA and The Familiar Surprise
Raymond Lowey, how did I forget his first name? Prolific industrial designer and insightful innovator, here’s a rundown about MAYA (Most Advanced. Yet Accetable):
The MAYA Principle: Design for the Future, but Balance it with Your Users’ Present (interaction-design.org)
I for some reason have “Minimally Advanced” in my head, but I also prefer the “Familiar Surprise” label which is more easily grasped by the casual consumer in my experience.
Here’s a solid TED talk by Derek Thompson about MAYA and Raymond Lowey:
Here’s a not-affiliate link to Derek’s Book:
Hit Makers: How to Succeed in an Age of Distraction
I have read this book, it is on the one hand familiar, and yet on the other something of a surprise. All kidding aside, these observations really shine a light on how disruption and adoption can come together well, or not.
Along those same lines is another book I’m reading right now by Clayton M Christensen:
The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms To Fail
(Also not an affiliate link)
YouTube Launch Date
According to Wikipedia:
They launched in February, 2005. Elsewhere a launch later in December is mentioned, let’s call it 2005.
The post-Truevision ideation on the project we were calling ShareVideo, commenced those early discussions in late 1995 and early 1996 and eventually had the gathering of despair in 1996. Had we attempted to make the product that Adam envisioned (which was the productization of the solution he envisioned, solving the problem around sharing videos of grandkids with grandparents in the UK, itself a worthy goal regardless), we would have come up against the connection barrier at the very least. By 2005, high speed connections were available, better compression was more mainstream, Justin.tv would launch in 2007 with live streaming on the go, and ShareVideo would have spent years trying and failing to make a customer experience work without the underlying parts coming together.
Anyone who remembers the “Quicktime-size video clips” that you might view from CD-ROM… you know those 320x240 (or smaller?!?) clips that were horribly compressed and ugly, which would not make those grandkids look happy. Looking back, the ideation was good, the timing was wrong. The innovation stage would hopefully have revealed the state of tech at the time and the possibility of overcoming the limitations of the day. By 2005, faster connections, mpeg was the norm (motion jpeg or mjpeg is good, but without inter-frame compression advances that were only just coming onto the scene in 1996, a workable customer experience was not going to be there until, well, 2005 or so). Perhaps it was that we were on the production side (BetaCam, SMPTE coded streams, overscan, high speed hardware, vectorscopes…) which lead to this gap in possibility and realistic timeline?
Our gathering had started off with ideation and then got bogged down arguing implementation without considering innovation required to get there. Our ideation phase worked, though probably not as we would have intended.
Support The Show!
The Quoggling Sand podcast is really a show for guest and listener interaction, wherein we bounce ideas around, talk about what we’re working on, what we want to work on, how we’re doing it, why we aren’t.
Email me at quogglingsand.com if you want to join in the discussion!
If you would like to find out what Dan is working on now and into the future, check out this Buy Me a Coffee profile with links to this and that, and if you feel the need to contribute to the bean bin, actual coffee does power these efforts… truth in advertising!
And of course, subscribing and sharing this newsletter are two great tastes, here’s a button for the latter: