Accessibility = Disruption = Growth

Disruptive Innovation = When people who didn't use a product start using it. Accessibility = When people who could not (and hence, did not) use a product start using it. Business people think hard about disruptive innovation and growth, they care about the economy. And designers think hard about accessible design, they care about individuals. …

What is your product like?

One way to look at design: anything which produces a meaningful influence on human behavior. I am always keen to know about small things which change people's behavior. So recently, I came across this story from AirBnB: As part of the onboarding process at Airbnb, the company encourages new employees to ship new features on …

Think about it deeply, then forget it

Our mind can produce ideas when we step away from a problem. In the TV series 'Mad Men', the central character, a creative head at an advertising agency, gives this advice to his junior to get ideas: Just think about it deeply, then forget it. An idea will jump in your face.This was a common …

Power of curiosity

A few days back, this paper was published by Open AI - an AI research organization sponsored by people like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. An AI agent was incentivized to be curious and explore the game. And it was the first time the AI beat human performance on the game 'Montezuma's revenge'. Instead of …

The Slow Hunch

Intuition, gut-thinking, snap judgements get a bad rap in today's data hungry world. We think of intuition as something instantaneous. So, someone developing an intuition over a span of years - sounds like an idea I knew no name for. The Slow Hunch. In the book 'Where good ideas come from' by Steven Johnson, he …

Fragility of ideas

Yesterday and the day before I reflected on how superstition and innovation perhaps had a link. At start of something completely new, it's not possible to separate the good ideas from the bad ones. So we need to allow people to be a little crazy. Jony Ive shared this in his Tribute to Steve Jobs: …

Superstition and Innovation – Part 2

Yesterday I delved a bit into how Steve Jobs carried, or at least seemed to carry supernatural beliefs. And he was not the only innovator doing so. We like to think of innovators in technology and science as analytical, rational, albeit enthusiastic and driven people. After all, computers do not understand emotion, just the cold …

Superstition and Innovation – Part 1

If a mythological society innovates more, do superstitious individuals innovate more? Or maybe a tighter formulation: are innovators necessarily superstitious? We think of superstition as backward and unscientific, and of course in many ways, it is backward. But I can't help but speculate on how individuals like Steve Jobs and Isaac Newton embraced beliefs in …

Unicorns, Dragons and Galactic worlds

Yesterday I wondered if mythology and innovation were linked in a society. If Silicon Valley carries the mantle of being the most innovative place in the world today, it must have its mythology too. We can see it in use of mythical creatures like unicorns and dragons to denote, well, businesses. We can see how …

Mythology and Innovation

Few days back I shared a few posts which mentioned how innovation and growth stagnated starting at around the 1970s. I wonder if it was also co-related with a drop in mythology and superstition. When I read about people during the 60s (especially in California and New York), there are references to mystical books like …