turntable / as the table turns

Jim at Coudal Partners compares his kids’ experience at Montessori with the way he runs his company…

I have three young kids in the Montessori system and I’m a big fan of the way those schools foster a love of learning through an emphasis on personal responsibility and the freedom that comes with following curiosity, as opposed to following a predetermined agenda or schedule…

…if you see work as a Montessori preschooler does, as a wide-open path where one thing leads to another and the development of one skill allows for another level of things to be explored, then that’s a whole other kind of “work.” It’s not so much about what you make, it’s more about what you learn making it.

Found via Wider Angle

I have 2 kids (Emory 7.5 and Jasper 3.5) who are both going to our local Montessori school. I have always felt strongly that the standard school system sucks. I’ve always had a desire to help reshape formal education, to create a better experience focused on: inquisitive thinking, creativity, collaboration, discovery, and following your passion.

No worksheets, no tests, no lectures, no classrooms, no homework.

It turns out, Montessori is what I’ve been after.

We went to a parent night where they showed us some of the materials the kids are currently using and learning. It was incredible. I was so jealous. I wanted to take my 7 year old’s class!!! The things he’s learning are concepts that I’ve only just barely discovered myself after re-reading Bill Bryson’s book “A Short History of Nearly Everything”. I went home and talked to Emory about it and I could see how much he’s absorbing: stong nuclear force, weak nuclear force, dark matter, supernovas, on and on. The learning he’s experiencing is not the type that’s only good for passing tests. He gets it, probably not all of it entirely, but he gets the big important ideas. Meanwhile, he’s enjoying it, really loving it, and because of that a lot more is actually sticking and getting processed in a meaningful way.

The following night we watched a video that outlines the major differences between Montessori and traditional schooling. (I’m happy to lend out my copy if you’re interested in watching it)

At first, it comes off like a cheesy corporate training video. But the content blew my mind.

I came to the profound and stark realization that sending your kid to a traditional school is like giving your kid a lobotomy and throwing them in a torture chamber. If they come out fine, it’s in spite of the education they were given. That’s how I felt about school when I was in it. Now I just wish I saw that video about 2 years ago (and I wish my parents saw it 30 years ago). Our older son Emory went to Montessori pre-school. It was awesome. Then when he was 6 we decided that he should go to the local school: it’s a block away, it had a great reputation, we were unsure whether the Montessori primary school would provide enough “grounding”. Ugh. In some ways it was a necessary and important way for us to learn that even at a “good” school in a country with a good reputation for their education system is just the same old bullshit: worksheets, tests, and catering to the lowest common denominator. It’s just as backwards as everywhere else. After eighteen months of standard schooling, we switched Emory back to Montessori and we are ecstatic.

While watching the Montessori video, I realized how directly related the principles are to interaction design, the web, social networking, and open platforms. Fundamentally, Montessori is a well designed platform that uses the same underlying techniques as our best digital platforms:

• object oriented architecture
• peer networking
• multi-sensory inputs and outputs
• parallel processing
• iterative and agile development
• progressive disclosure and perceived affordances

Best of all, the Montessori platform provides so many beautifully simple, highly imaginative, fun materials to help people (kids and adults alike) enjoy the learning process so that it is an extremely powerful and meaningful experience.

If you’re interested in finding out more about Montessori I highly recommend that you watch the video, read this article and others like it, read this FAQ and go observe a Montessori class.

This past week I went in and spent a couple hours with Emory’s class. I had a lot of fun making this simple little digital story together with the kids. I can’t wait to do it again!

Found on Reemer:

My friend Jonathan says: “to succeed in a market with no real switching costs (e.g. the consumer internet), when users invest in you, you must use that investment to make it better for them to stay, not to make it harder for them to leave.” Facebook just provided a way for every consumer internet developer on the planet to make money from their site, *and* make Facebook more valuable. There’s risk involved, but I think there’s far more upside.

My favorite bits:

• involve users in your web application’s story
• make growth a social aim for existing users
• talk to your users (bad news > no news) … more likely to tolerate growing pains
• embed your service in others

(thanks Adam)

This is a really quick-to-consume presentation from this year’s SXSW. It views Las Vegas as the ultimate user experience design case study.

It also makes some really poignant comparisons between Vegas and MySpace, then weighing that up against design elitism. I get it, but I’m still a design snob (I know you wouldn’t know that looking at this blog). I’ve been to Vegas once in my life and I’ve promised myself that I will never ever go there again. I don’t feel quite as strongly about MySpace. They may have their place in this world, but personally I don’t want to have any part of it. Having said that, I don’t mind learning some lessons from their success.

In particular, this bit on slot machines has some great insights on designing game play experiences and giving people instant gratification…

Going down to the microlevel, let’s examine slot machines. A well-designed model can bring in $1b
year! Slot machines gross more every year than McDonalds, Wendy’s, Burger King, and Starbucks.
Combined! Players typically initiate a game every six seconds!
- designed for a specific audience: women over 55 with disposable income
- many small, positive reinforcements and constant feedback. Gives out a variety of rewards: small
pays, medium pays, and huge jackpots
- infrequent random reinforcement or intermittent reward
- built on a flexible platform, games and winner/loser ratios can always be tweaked
- every detail is carefully created. there is even a sweetener to the sound of money falling. some
machines have up to 400 different sound events
- lettering is such that even the legally blind can play

The best part of an interesting article on Apple’s huge retail success with the Apple stores ($4,000 per square foot – woah!)…

“One of the best pieces of advice Mickey ever gave us was to go rent a warehouse and build a prototype of a store, and not, you know, just design it, go build 20 of them, then discover it didn’t work,” says Jobs. In other words, design it as you would a product. Apple Store Version 0.0 took shape in a warehouse near the Apple campus. “Ron and I had a store all designed,” says Jobs, when they were stopped by an insight: The computer was evolving from a simple productivity tool to a “hub” for video, photography, music, information, and so forth. The sale, then, was less about the machine than what you could do with it. But looking at their store, they winced. The hardware was laid out by product category – in other words, by how the company was organized internally, not by how a customer might actually want to buy things. “We were like, ‘Oh, God, we’re screwed!’” says Jobs.

But they weren’t screwed; they were in a mockup. “So we redesigned it,” he says. “And it cost us, I don’t know, six, nine months. But it was the right decision by a million miles.” When the first store finally opened, in Tysons Corner, Va., only a quarter of it was about product. The rest was arranged around interests: along the right wall, photos, videos, kids; on the left, problems. A third area – the Genius Bar in the back – was Johnson’s brainstorm.

Well, what do you know? Another of my predictions for 2007 is just now coming to the surface…

Internet advertising works best when anyone can produce a simple ad. This was first shown with Doubleclick ceding ad prominence to Google and now it will be shown in internet video with blip.tv’s new DIY ad program.

It doesn’t appear to be as advanced as what I proposed – bidding for ad placement, different ads served to different users, with green screened product placement ala in-game ads. However, that will emerge. Count on it.

Steve “iTunes Lock In” Jobs is pushing to abolish DRM. Looks like another one of my predictions is moving ahead nicely.

Not that I’m keeping tabs.

The What’s UP 2007 event was good fun. I met some really nice, well clued-up people. Here are the slides from my predictions (use the < > keys to navigate). The day after UP, I headed out on our family summer holiday.

As I write, I’m in the exquisite Northland region of NZ (in Oakura Bay to be precise). It’s been ideal in every way. Swimming, kayaking, bbq-ing, reading and sleeping. It’s warm here day and night, and there’s no wind. It’s really been making us question why people (us included) live in Wellington.

At the holiday house I perused the book shelf and noticed The Google Story. I tend to have a strong aversion to business books. However, I’ve really been enjoying it. It’s a good piece of storytelling. The thing that’s sticking out for me is how Larry and Sergey have always had the tenacity to do things their way, along with the perseverance to execute first and foremost. Ultimately, it’s really about having the conviction to relentlessly pursue what you believe is best and have fun doing it.

At the UP event, I noted that several of my predicted future platforms could easily be generated out of NZ. Foo Camp is coming up this weekend and I’m really hoping to see strong evidence of that same type of tenacity, conviction, guts, plus the ambition to build something big and important and useful from this beautiful country, something that the world needs and NZ can deliver. Peter Jackson did that for the film industry. Who will do it for ICT?

I’m involved with a start-up building a web app. The following was my initial outline describing what I thought were some important thinking points in developing a web app.

Key ideas:

• Workflow is everything
• Email is the lowest common denominator – every app needs ways to interface using email (get and set data) – the concept extends out to email-via-mobile
• Distributed platform – a site is just one interface to your platform (others = email, rss, docs, widgets, mobile)
• Emergent architectures – data is dynamic, architectures need to be dynamic (tagging, faceted browsing)
• User participation – the web is a read/write platform
• Publish and subscribe – smart ways to automate read/write (RSS, SOA)
• User generated content – both explicit (comments) and implicit (user meta data – "People who like this also like")
• Scalable participation – needs to work for lurkers and power geeks
• Content generation is a selfish act – a lot of user generated content is created by "implicit creation" – bring user meta data to the surface. Let people pivot around the meta data to get different perspectives (faceted browsing).
• Mass customisation – tools/services to allow millions of people to customise their product/experience
• The long tail – a corollary of mass customisation – providing easy access to millions of niche items can be more profitable than focusing on a few big hits – metadata is key to making this happen
• Programmable web – developers need the ability to build new tools and features via SOA
• Agile + iterative – func specs can kill, design for adaptation

Other import ideas:

Web as platform

• The End of Software Upgrades, Fixes, and Security Patches.
• Software and Data Available Wherever You Go
• Isolated Software Can’t Compete with Connected Software
• Deprecation of the Traditional Operating System
• Software That Is Invisible

Agile design

• Design the system not the surface
• Design as evolutionary and user-driven
• There is no page, only pathways
• Rapid and iterative over final
• Simplicity over complexity
• Collaborative and open design

Game theory

• Easy to Learn, Lifetime to Master
• Offer clear and obvious short term and long term goals.
• Players should be able to succeed in the first 10 minutes or earlier.
• Support short session times of 10-15 minutes as well as longer.
• Support multiple player styles such as Bartle’s 4 types: Achievers, Explorers, Socializers, and Player Killers.

Important sites/platforms:

• amazon – read/write, recommendation system, mass customisation, distributed platform, long tail, open API – progammable web (must read amazoning the news)
• ebay (trademe) – read/write, distributed platform, marketplace, reputation system
• paypal – email is the interface, distributed platform
• wikipedia – read/write, user participation, reputation system, distributed platform, infinite version control
• flickr – AJAX workflow, read/write, social platform, distributed platform, open API – progammable web, long tail
• gmail – AJAX workflow, read/write, distributed platform
• delicious – read/write, distributed platform
• craigslist – read/write, social platform, long tail
• cafepress – read/write, mass customisation, distributed platform, marketplace
• 37better – great web UI thinking, "Getting Real" agile + iterative approach
• IM, p2p – read/write, distributed platform, always connected, asynchronous
• typepad – read/write, ASP, social platform
• firefox – tabbed browsing, extensions (programmable web), standards compliant, open source
• RSS – distributed platform, read/write, pub-sub, in-box for the web
• greasemonkey – programmable web
• last.fm – read/write, implicit creation, social platform, recommendation system, distributed platform
• zohowriter – read/write, AJAX workflow, infinite version control, distributed platform
• tivo – workflow, publish and subscribe, recommendation system