I seem to be reading a lot of books lately about solving problems and how this is done in other ways than traditional rationality. Spock (the First Officer, not the Doctor) would have us believe that by applying rationality and logic to a problem it may be simply and unemotionally solved. In many ways my previous history in this field in Cognitive Science predisposes me to think this way. Cognitive Science is based on a belief that you can model thought and reason. My early works with Phil Johnson-Laird on Mental Models (thats 1983) was all about how we might model intelligence, and then hypothesize and test by experiment. Artificial Intelligence (AI) then emerged from Cognitive Science with it emphasis on ’search’ - in fact AI was once described to me as search algorithms, nothing more. So logic is just search? Didn’t seem quite right, but it was an exciting time none the less.

Out of the flush of excitement of all the AI stuff, you get to see that there was more going on, and that the ‘more’ was also exciting. That man Don Norman popped up with Don Broadbent with Neural Networks. What was that all about? Santa Fe with Complexity Theory, and, groundbreakingly Kevin Kelley with Out of Control to bring it all together, subtitled “The New Biology of Machines”. Fascinating, Captain.

And these odd emergent systems made decisions too, but the decisions ‘emerged’ from their organisation rather than having to be sought out. And there was no ‘why’, there was only the answer.

Sometimes it could go badly wrong. A neural network was trained by the military using photographs to distinguish US tanks from the then Soviet tanks. It did, but only afterwards was it realised that the neural network had made its discrimination on the basis of lighting conditions - the US tanks had been photographed in the morning, the Soviet at night! Thats the thing, you never know with a neural network, its decision is never justified, it just is.

The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowieki is about this stuff too. Do I like it? Well, kind of, but next to the Tipping Point or Blink by Malcolm Gladwell, its a bit lightweight and way too observational, with very little analysis. What I did like about it though is the way that it defined what crowds do well and what they don’t. My recent piece about leadership in Interactions sets me up as very ‘anti-crowd’, but I am absolutely resolutely not. I believe that the crowd can create the best decisions, but the right questions need asking and answers coordinating and that was clear from the book, and I appreciated that. Making a film, designing an experience, is not a single problem with a single solution, like guessing the weight of a bull (a Wisdom of Crowds example) but it is a project that requires that many ‘weight of bull’ (!) problems to be posed and then solved simultaneously. Making a film, designing and experience by crowd-committee is like waiting for the monkeys to come up with Hamlet

So, rationality and logic - rip it up and start again? Nope, we need right brain and we need left brain. The time has come to weigh both with equal measure. Let’s take note of Spock when he says “”Logic is the beginning of wisdom; not the end.”

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The late great Douglas Adams in his Hitchhikers Guide to the Universe (thats the book, not the crappy film) made a reference to a planet that was dying. The people on that planet decided to flee the destruction in three great space arks, the A Ark containing the Innovators, Inventors, Bosses, Thinkers and Movers and Shakers, the B Ark containing all Middle Managers, Facilitators, Salesmen, Accountants, Risk Assessors and Telephone Sanitizers and the C Ark containing all Workers and Doers. The plan was that the B Ark was sent off first so that everything would be well organised, sanitized and risk free when they arrive.

Can you see where this is going? The B Ark was sent off and the inhabitants set in stasis, and, well, after it had gone the others found out that the planet wasn’t in danger after all, so they could stay.
So, lets think. On which Ark would Usability and Customer Experience Practitioners be? Myself, I’d like to travel on the A Ark, hence my provocations about leadership, vision and such like. I’d prefer Usability and Customer Experience to be used as a force for innovation and change rather than risk and defence. At an Aiga Event some months ago, James Woudhuysen was very provocative about aspects of usability, claiming its rise was due to its defensive nature, not its power to innovate. Good for mitigating risk, bean counter stuff, he claimed.

James was also quite harsh about UX attempts at evolutionary innovation … filling in experience ‘white space’ on a BMW car by using screens on top of the door arches. A bit sad? Perhaps pandering to the whims of the moneyed elite… So,are we simply the telephone sanitizers of the new media? Or can we be better than that?

The culture is right now I think for a shift from a risk culture to a innovation culture. I think that reflects in micro cultures too, like usability-as-defensive-methodology to user-experience-as-innovation-methodology. Lets make changes and grab this damn thing. Hence my obsession with film production methods

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