 In 1884, two young men came up with an idea, a proposal, for a project that would change the world. In 1884, if you were a young, ambitious entrepreneur, or designer, or an engineer, the field that you would choose to work in, the cutting edge field with the latest and greatest ideas were being developed in technology, was in the field of construction. Now today, we look at construction that's kind of boring. We wouldn't really call it a technology at all. It's been presumed that we can build skyscrapers and tall buildings. But in 1884, you have to remember, this is the age of steam power. There's no electricity. You want to build something you're going to do with your hand, with an animal, maybe with steam. 1884 was also the time before steel and wrought iron were used to build things. This is the age of the birth of telegraphy. The rise of railroads. This is the industrial age. And as much as we like today to claim that we live in a time of the greatest change in the history of the world, that presumes a great deal. Because unless some of you are vampires or you're Wolverine from X-Men, this is the only time in which you've lived. You have to try to imagine this is before electricity, before you go into your house and flick on a switch and have your whole house become unlimited. These two young men were architects, Coastal and Nuget. And they came up with this idea together. And this is also decades, century plus, before all of our terminology for how you design and create things. They came up with a proposal that we would call today a discovery phase. They did quick iterative prototyping. And they realized they needed a mock-up, a rough draft to show their boss their idea. And this is what it looked like. Now, this might be a giveaway. Yes, you are correct. Their boss was a man named Eiffel. But in 1884, he was not a famous person yet. He was a successful rising star in architecture. But he did not have a building with his own name on it yet. And these two young men, they were in their 20s. They had some experience, but they were not, well, not nearly as well-experienced as Eiffel. But there's a few lessons in here we can all learn about pitching ideas. So in this diagram, if you notice in the right margin, I'm going to flip this over just so it's easier to see. There's sort of an index of scale of the ambition for their plan. Now, one thing I can tell you, my talk is largely going to be about creative thinking. And I try to be creative about how I teach you about creative thinking. But in this little thing, they were thinking ahead about how to impress their boss to convince them the value of this idea. So that little index has seven buildings in it, which were among the seven tallest buildings in the world at that time. One of those seven is the third second from the bottom is the Statue of Liberty, which they knew Eiffel had worked on. So they are slowly putting in this implicit message, yeah, we know what you did before, but look at how much better this idea will be if they're playing to his ego a little bit. But they put this plan together, they gave it to him, they're like, yeah, we should build this building, the tallest building in the world, which was impressive, but also they wanted to build it out of wrought iron, which was a new material that had not been used before, not been used anywhere near this scale. They thought for sure Eiffel would go for it, they pitched him and Eiffel said no. And Eiffel turned the idea down for a couple of reasons, the primary one being he didn't think it was that interesting a project. He thought it was a stunt design. It's only claim to significance was that it was the tallest building. It didn't do anything, it didn't solve a problem, it wasn't particularly interesting aesthetically. So he turned down the idea. So the first lesson so far is how you pitch an idea matters a lot. Even though they failed in their first pitch, they were thinking about how do we convince their boss? Beyond our own ambition, how do we convince him? Second, the idea got rejected. Eiffel didn't kill the project though. He gave them feedback and left it up to them to decide what to do with that feedback. And these two young men were smart. They had some wisdom about design. They realized that Eiffel had some insight and was revealing skills and talents they didn't possess. They got a third engineer involved, an older gentleman who had more experience than they did. Now, Syvestra, this third gentleman, he is the reason why the detailed latticework and design, pattern, language that you see in here, gold ratio being applied, all of that talent came from this third engineer. They came, they worked together, they drafted a new plan, brought it back to Eiffel and it's of course, as we all know, the Eiffel Tower exists. Yay, it got built. You all should be happy about that. And to Eiffel's credit, he did put in things into the design of the building that were beyond just being a tall building. It was one of the first radio towers in the world. It had, because of its scale, they had an atmospheric lab they built in one of the upper towers. There were all these different projects and breakthroughs and discoveries in science that took place because this building was built. So I've given you too many lessons so far about the importance of the pitch. It's almost as important, even more important than the quality of the idea itself. And people like you who are creatives and love your ideas and are passionate about them often forget that the pitch will define for everyone else what the idea actually is, no matter how great you think it is. And second, however ambitious you are to take that feedback and not take it personally and recognize it's actionable and find another person, a collaborator who has skills you don't possess to move on. But my talk for you, my closing talk is comprised of four lessons, four major lessons that come from this book, The Dance of the Possible. Now before I tell you these four lessons, I wanna take a moment. Anytime you're the last speaker, there's certain burdens you have to care about, responsibilities you have to take care of. So there's been a lot of commentary about people taking photos of slides, which is great. You're giving feedback to speakers that you care about what they're doing. It's far better than you're not paying attention at all. But I wanted to offer you, in my talk itself, you can actually get all the slides. And you can take a photo of this slide that tells you where all the slides are too if you'd like to do that now. A lot of people are doing it, fantastic. So while you're all doing that, I'll briefly introduce myself. So I started my career in the early 90s. I was trained as an interaction designer before that term was really popular. I studied at the school at Carnegie Mellon, which Dan teaches at now, Go Tartans. We are one of the few universities whose mascot is a piece of fabric. Tartan is a plaid cloth. Very embarrassing, I'll tell you that over drinks, which is my second responsibility. When this talk ends, I'm going straight to a bar. You're welcome to join me for your first post-event, post-day talk drink. Finishing my introduction, I worked in the software industry, managing teams of designers and engineers for about a decade. And then I quit in 2003 to try to write books. That's mostly what I do today is write books and give talks like I'm doing right now. I've written seven books, most of them are here. I'm talking today about my most recent book, which is The Dance of the Possible. So first lesson, all ideas are made from other ideas. Now when I say this, all ideas are made from other ideas, we all know in the way that we're trained in the Western world, we were educated about any discipline, science, engineering, you're taught some of the history of how ideas develop. We all know that E equals MC squared, Einstein's famous formula that he didn't invent the concept of energy, which is E or the notion of mass or the speed of light. He incorporated those things together and he built on what scientists before him had done. So we know that in the abstract. But I'm offering this as tangible advice. Any time that you are working on a project, you feel stuck, you don't see another way, another alternative, or your experience in my current profession, writer's block. It means you've forgotten this. All ideas come from somewhere. There's a notion, an inspiration, a causality, something that gives you an inspiration to think of the thing you're gonna work on or a problem to solve. Those are all components that are brought together. And when you're stuck, it means you've forgotten that the thing you are currently working on can be broken down into pieces. And if we're broken down into pieces, you can always reassemble them, put them in a different order. What if this goes on top? If we're thinking about user interfaces, we have a mob cup, a screen, a wireframe. What if we move this to here or that to there? There's always a way, if you break down the thing you are working on into pieces, to find a way to move. That doesn't guarantee you're gonna, the next idea is gonna be a good one, but any time you're stuck, it means you've forgotten this little lesson. So to illustrate this, I'm gonna go back to the Eiffel story. So this is one of Eiffel's earlier buildings. About 10 years before the Eiffel Tower project began. I mentioned before, this is the birth of railroads, railroad construction. So this is a railroad bridge over a river in France. And it looks very sturdy. Not that interesting aesthetically. Didn't end up on people's, there's no posters of this building anywhere. It's an early project that he did. And some of the methods he's using, they were familiar to people who made bridges out of wood. Box and girder construction you can find. Bridges still standing today that were built in this era made out of wood. So what's new here? Well, he was using a new material. This was made out of iron. So he was developing his expertise with a new idea while reusing an old idea. Ideas are made from other ideas. An earlier building that is vaguely familiar to the Eiffel Tower project, is this tower made for the New York World's Fair in the 1850s, a lighting observatory. And this defined a pattern, or was one of the buildings that defined a pattern, in every World's Fair in Expo, since this has a tower of some kind. And in Eiffel's mind, this is before he got pitched by those two young men, this is a stunt project. Doesn't do anything. It's a little observatory area at the top. You can charge tickets, people go up, they go down. And often these buildings were torn down. They were not built to last. So even before, any notion the Eiffel Tower ever came around, there was a seed in the past. A notion that one day might come to fruition, that he had experienced something and had a commentary about it. When he saw this building, his comment for it was, it was built without regard for form, commercial only in purpose. And he made that commentary never thinking he'd build a building like it. It was in his mind. I live in Seattle. This is our space needle, we're very proud of it. Most Seattleites who will tell you all about the building and how tall it is, have no idea, this is part of that story. It was built for the World's Fair that happened in Seattle in 1970. Also a side note, I love food. Seattle has great food. The food at the top of the space needle is terrible. If ever you go there, please don't go up to the eat food there, okay? If you want a food recommendation in Seattle, my Twitter handles up before ask me, I'll send you my special design oriented food consumption list for Seattle. This story continues though. Building right across the street, the Gama Tower is part of that tradition. It was built for the expo that was built, that was here in about 20 years ago in 98. It's part of that same tradition. It was built to be, not quite a stunt building because it was built to last, but it's part of that same tradition. You see these ideas being echoed and reused throughout history. Another related side story to this. So this is a lift built by Messner. You all probably know it. It's one of the most famous building in Lisbon. There's a connection here between the Eiffel Tower and this building. There's lots of poorly written tour guide information. And so Boone showed early this morning that funny thing in Hawaii of Google's wrong, don't go this way. That kind of misinformation lives on in all media. It's not something new for the internet, although the damage and ramifications of it on the internet are a scale beyond what we knew. But this building has a reputation. There are some Wikipedia pages and travel guides that reference that Messner, who was the architect, worked for Eiffel, which is probably not true. I did some research. I couldn't find any specific proof either way, but it's probably not true. But there are elements of the design of this building that clearly show that Messner was inspired by Eiffel. He had to be. He was a younger engineer. And when he was in engineering school in France, he probably was exposed to the Eiffel Tower, which was the greatest, most earth-shattering breakthrough in architecture and engineering of that time. And when you look closely for those of you who are not from Lisbon or if you are next time you go, if you look at some of the detail work, it is reminiscent of Eiffel, this attention to detail and aesthetics that's unusual in functional buildings, unusual at least in many cultures in functional buildings. So tie this back around and get closer back to the actual Eiffel Tower. So this is a later building by Eiffel. This was completed in 1881. It's also a bridge like that rail bridge I showed you before with the box and girder construction. But this is something very different going on here. This now, you're like, whoa, this looks a little bit more Eiffel Tower-like. And I call this bridge out, but there's a couple of things here about all ideas being made from other ideas. He had built train bridges before. This is a rail bridge. He had used arches before. In fact, arches are one of the oldest patterns in architecture and engineering history. You can go back 2,000 years to the Romans and the Greeks, they made stuff out of arches. But the material they used was stone, which had different constraints for tension and stress. Rot iron, which is what's used here, combining an old idea with a newer one, gave Eiffel a bunch of possibilities that were never available before. Now all of a sudden, the arch is transparent. The load bearing capacity is very different. And he used that to the advantage of the design. In Eiffel's notion of a stunt building, this is not a stunt building, this building is transcendent. It goes beyond the technological function. In our terms today, we'd call this delighting the user, delighting the customer. In his mind though, this is just what you use technology for. In his way, he's trying to better the human condition. You don't even know anything about architecture or arches or history or Eiffel. When you walk across the hillside, and this is what you see over the river valley, it just draws you in, you don't know why. It's just interesting for your eye to look at. You'd give it a long glance, even if you didn't care at all about the future history architecture, there's something in the design itself. That's what Eiffel was after in the use of technology. All ideas are made from other ideas. It applies not just to design architecture, it applies to all intelligible knowledge and disciplines. So this is one of Da Vinci's most famous drawings. Does anyone know the name of this drawing? Any art majors who design historians? Vitruvian man, Vitruvian man. Sometimes I ask audiences in America and they say Vitruvius man and Vitruvius was the volcano. Vitruvian was a person. Now I remember when I first heard about this drawing, Vitruvian man, I thought Vitruvian. Oh, this must be Vitruvian. Mr. Vitruvian is being drawn here. But then I read the history of Vitruvian as a reference to Vitruvius who was a Roman architect and we know his name because he wrote a book called The 10 Books on Architecture. This is the first designed pattern language book we have in the Western Canon. We are very proud in this day and age of pattern languages, pattern languages for user experience, pattern language for coding, pattern language, we think we invented it. This book was written the first century into pattern language for architecture, how to make arches, how to make cement. I don't necessarily recommend that you read it because the publishing standards in the first century were very low. It's sort of like early blogging in that he tells a story about how to build a bridge and then the next thing is like how he doesn't like his neighbor, then there's a recipe for soup. It's very all over the place. It is interesting and it indulges your curiosity but it's not a great design pattern book. But that said, I offer this because, so for Truvious was Roman and the Romans were great at borrowing ideas in particular about engineering and design from the Greeks. So the Greeks now we're talking about 3,500 years ago in that range. This book was written 500 years after the Greeks, first century, Da Vinci was alive in the 1500s. So by the time this idea, this set of notions from his book got to Da Vinci, they were already almost 2,000 years old. Now the story for that drawing is very simple. Da Vinci was a reader, he studied history. He studied all sorts of diverse fields but he studied, he wanted to understand the history of ideas. He would like this part of the talk in particular. Part of why he made his development and found his ideas, he understood so much about what had already been known. He believed you had to go backwards to go first and studying nature was one of the ways that he did that. So he read this book, there's a passage in the book where for Truvious is talking about the form of the human body. The golden ratio, at the length of your wingspan, the ratio of that to the size of your body and the size of your head to how tall you are. And he read that passage, he was inspired by it. He was inspired by this 2,000 year old idea and that's why he made this drawing. He wanted to manifest, he wanted to take this old idea and reuse it and explore what he could do with this thing from the past. Now in the present of course, the history I just gave you, most people don't know. We know this drawing, we don't know what it means or where it came from or who Truvious was. I didn't know that until I became one of these people who obsessively reads the history of things. But this is now an idea that's so solidified in Western culture. It's one of the most famous drawings that we have and that means now people refer to it without even knowing the history. You can refer to an old idea and gain power from it without knowing its history. So you can find versions of a Truvian man that just come from all over the place. And everyone who sees this finds it funny because they know the reference, they know it's referencing this, but they don't know that it's referencing this and they know that references the Greeks, they have a shallow understanding of the history of that idea. So you can find all kinds, if you do weird Truvian men through a Google or a search online, you'll find endless, people get this tattooed on them. It's a fascinating subculture of the Truvian obsessives. But to drive this point home, there's a popular TV show in the States called Westworld. How many of you have heard of or seen the show Westworld? A lot of you, fantastic. This reference will be good for you then. So Westworld, a show about the human race, but what is a perfect person? What is the idea of a person at all? What did they choose to be the iconic idea for their show? This is a Truvian man. Now, once you know that, every time you see the opening of the show, there's a power and significance in this idea you could not have as the creator of it or as the consumer of it, without knowing that all ideas are made from other ideas. He's not just referencing the past, or this show is not just referencing the past, but trying to draw that in and gain power from it. Now, to make these practical terms, I know most of you are not architecture historians. A lot of you are not going to make TV shows. I want to try to give you practical knowledge pulled from these stories from history. So the lesson out of this, any problem you are working on has a history. Every problem has history. A lot of my work is about innovation, what that word means and how it happens, or how, more often, why it doesn't happen. And there's this belief, well, I'm working on version one of something, so it's new, it's never been done before. I'm like, really? Really? It's funny how our little logo for email is still a picture of an envelope. Ever think about that? These things come from somewhere. There's a history to every idea. And you have power as a designer, or as an engineer, or even as a marketer, or a creator, or as a manager. Whatever problem you are facing, invest some time in studying the history of it, because you will discover solutions from the past have just been forgotten, it's still applied today. Or at minimum, you'll find inspiration from other people like you in the past who were smart and well-meaning, and how they went about trying to solve the problem then. So some more recent examples of applying this idea. So this is a diagram, a Wikipedia diagram, of the Google page rank algorithm. Now the founders of Google, Larry and Sergey, were master students or graduate students at Stanford. Now they knew at Stanford, anyone knows this who reads academic papers. It's been tradition for many, many years at the bottom of your academic paper, when you write one, that you list the bottom of reference to all the papers you read, or that you cited. So it was built into that process on printed paper of referencing. Now page rank is based on the idea, the page is worth the most, it's most important is the one that most other pages point to. Where Larry and Sergey get that idea from? Academic papers, it took this idea they were familiar with about printed papers for academic journals, they said, hey, let's take that idea, how do we apply it to the web? Just like IFO was taking the arch, how do I apply that with this new thing? That's where page rank comes from. And that's a big part of why Google is still a billion dollar company. Another fun example ties back to my Seattle residency. We love to call, there's Amazon.com, which is in Seattle, based in Seattle, is often called the everything store. And they're a Goliath, an economic Goliath, the value of their stock and the value of the company is insanely high. And part of what they're giving credit for is revolutionizing the idea of how people get consumer goods. This is from the letterhead of an earlier company called Sears and Roebuck. Now I mentioned Eiffel, 1884, rise of railroads. Railroads paved the way for a whole bunch of secondary side industries. Once you have railroad, you can deliver goods anywhere in the country. Not as fast as you can today, but faster than ever before. And Sears and Roebuck took advantage of this. They had a printed catalog, this thick printed catalog you could order, and you could order almost anything from it. You could even order all the parts and equipment you needed to build a house. Think about Frontier America. You want to buy a house? Model six, seven, we'll send it to you in two weeks. So this is the letterhead from Sears and Roebuck Company. Amazon Prime is this popular service in America. Some ridiculous percentage of Americans, 47%, 50%, have an Amazon Prime subscription, which guarantees you shorter delivery times, refund the high-caliber customer service. Effectively, the mission statement for Amazon Prime is this. We sell everything by mail order only. Your money, we probably return it for you if you're not satisfied, and we will pay freight or express shipping charges both ways. Now that seems fine, and the abstract, okay, conceptually as a business model, great. I mean all the way down to design. There are things that can be learned here. That catalog had pages that those pages had products. Today, we would call this a landing page. Sears and Roebuck's catalog had landing pages on every page. They were thinking about conversion. They were thinking about price anchoring. There's also a high quality, it's very dense, but this is like high quality newsprint typography and spacing. It's a lot of intelligent thoughtful work going on here. And there's probably things here that today's pages could learn from because it's been forgotten. When Amazon.com started, pages were simple. That was the appeal, but now the pages have gotten really complicated. So the advice I give to my friends who work at Amazon is well guess what? You can go buy Sears and Roebuck catalog through Amazon and have it delivered by Prime in just two days. You're making metaphor on top of metaphor. Works great. Now Dan was talking a lot about new metaphors which I think is fascinating. I think I've realized my role in the metaphor dynamic is I go in the other way. I'm fascinated by all the old metaphors that we just forget about and we haven't mined or developed or thought through enough. So another fun one regarding user interfaces and user experience is the notion of scrolling. It's become this word now that we just use completely abstracted from its original meaning. To scroll. We don't have a scroll bar. If you looked at this and said, what if asked someone 400 years ago, can you move the scroll bar? They would point to this. Move it where? Why would I move it? That's a metaphor joke. Now to tie this closer to home for UI and UX design. So scroll bars were invented by Xerox Park basically when they did their first designs for word processors. They were thinking about all these different models for UI. You can look at the history of the scroll bar. So Xerox Park is all the way in the left of 1981. There's a whole bunch of ideas in there that have been abandoned. I'm not gonna nerd out and get too much into the details of this stuff. But the history of just the idea of the scroll bar, the number of features that are in there and the way they're manifested, sometimes the quality, the number of features is high. And then in the middle history, it gets low, the most famous thing being proportional scroll bars. That means that the scroll bar, the thickness of the scroll bar shows you relative your view to the entire document. Now, if you look at Windows in 85, they got rid of proportional scrolling. Xerox Park actually had an early version of that. She had this notion of proportional scrolling was in the initial idea, got lost, and then 10 years later or so it came back. Now, if you were working on user interfaces and you were the scroll bar expert, which was someone's job, that's my era of, that's how old I am. That's my era of UI development. I'm working on the scroll bar. What's a scroll bar? Oh, it's gonna be so cool. It's the most innovative cutting edge thing you're ever gonna see. By knowing the history, you have an advantage. You know more of the ideas, more of the ways people have tried to solve this problem in the past and there's power, there's power in that. That's my first lesson. These lessons get increasingly fast because I know as I mentioned before, I am the last thing holding you back from your first drink of the day and I'd like to join you in that. So my second lesson is that great ideas often look weird, at least at first. So I'm gonna jump back. I gave you the short version of the Eiffel Tower story. I'm gonna jump back there in a second. Now, one of the problems of being alive in the present is we are terrible at understanding the full depth of the complexity of anything that happened in the past. There could have been great drama and turmoil in how idea developed and we are completely ignorant of it because we just assume, well it was, it won eventually. So what interest could there be in understanding the difficult parts? My ambition for you though is to make you recognize that everything that you use today and take for granted, there is an interesting story there of someone facing, trying to convince people of the value of that idea. It's Eiffel. So what I left off in the story, the young men, they got a third guy involved, they pitched him a second time, Eiffel said yes. So the first problem Eiffel had was that he didn't have control over this idea for the project. The project was a proposal for the 1888, late 1880s World's Fair in Paris. There was a committee that got to decide. So it turns out Eiffel knew some of the people on the committee, he was well respected in Paris. So getting him to accept his idea was a challenge but not an extraordinary one. The curve ball was, to use an American reference, the thing that made it more difficult than it seemed at first, when they told him yes, we love your project, it's great but you ask for, I'm making up numbers here, they're approximate but they're not accurate, you ask for two million dollars, well they gave you one million dollars. So he was offered half the budget to make this building that was taller than any building out in the world at a material that had never been used at this scale. And Eiffel took this as an opportunity, he was also an entrepreneur. He thought about it and he said, okay, maybe if I put up my own money, I'm willing to do that if I now have concession rights, tickets and Eiffel Tower t-shirts and all the stuff, all the stuff that comes with it, it's kind of self popcorn and baguettes. He's thinking ahead that there's gotta be some trade off for me. So the only reason the project took off is he was willing to put his own equity behind his idea. And a major reason why ideas in the world on your project team with your friends, you wanna go on a trip and no one wants to go with you, it's often it comes down to who was willing to put their own personal equity, it could even just be your reputation behind an idea. Having an idea is one thing, being able to say, you know what, I'm gonna work weekends on this until I have a prototype is another. So the Eiffel story only takes place because he's like, you know what, I care enough about this, I'll put my own stake at risk. The next part of the problem was okay, works out the finances, gets the plan together, hires an engineering team, they start building. As soon as construction begins, there's outrage. Everybody hates the idea of this building. Parisian culture, high arts. It's still one of the great art and culture cities in the world. It was even more supreme and standing then. Poets, musicians, artists, writers, they all got together in outrage to write an essay saying that the Eiffel Tower should be killed. There's a pamphlet that's written, it's called the Pamphlet of 300, the Committee of 300. There was a pamphlet, which was the blogging of the day, the social media of the day. And imagine 300 artists. You know how hard it is to get three designers to agree on some aesthetic choice? They had 300, they all got together and they wrote this document about the Eiffel Tower. I'm gonna read part of it to you. We writers, painters, sculptors, architects protest with all of our strength, with all of our indignation in the name of slighted French taste, which is a very powerful force against the erection of this useless and monstrous Eiffel Tower. This mass of iron gymnasium apparatus incomplete, confused and deformed. Now mind you, the project had just started. I mentioned in my career, I had to represent my project team's work to executives and I had many product reviews and spec reviews and I had some terrible ones, but I never had 300 of my peers come together to write a document to demand that my project had just started to be canceled. Part of the problem for us again in the present is we know too much. We think if this is embarrassing, it's embarrassing for these 300 people. How much could they have understood about aesthetics or about progress if they could come out against this tower? But part of the context that's missing is what I'm gonna share with you. So again, wrought irons new, tall buildings are new. Paris is a beautiful city now, it's a beautiful city then, but most buildings were five stories high. Built out of stone or brick, five stories high. You had a few churches that were exceptions. They stood out in the landscape. So you have to imagine you're walking around Paris in 1884, 1885. And you're with your friends, that you're walking by promenade, you have a baguette in one hand, you have some delicious cheese in another, you have a bottle of wine. It's great, maybe a mime stumbles by. And you're walking up, you're just having a great afternoon and then you turn the corner and you see this, iron monstrosity. Yeah, it is. In the context of the city and also in the context of known understanding of what good was, this is something no one had ever seen before. It's pretty disturbing. The progress is often disturbing. When people use the word disruption, it drives me crazy because they talk about it like it's a positive thing. The fact that disruptive innovation became a goal is insane to me, it's a torturing of the language. Disruption is what these people felt when they saw this thing. Because that's human nature. We generally don't like change. We like change efforts and validated by people we trust. I like to read the review of the movie before we go see a new movie. I like to see the preview first. We're like sampling things first. It's kind of half digested for us by the time we get a new idea. To actually experience the new requires a very big open mind. So this to them seemed really weird and broken and strange. And they rejected it out of hand without fully understanding what it was. Now part of what I'm trying to point the, to tie this history back to your own practice. There's a very important distinction you should know is people work with ideas all the time between what you think of as a bad idea and what's simply a weird idea. Now a bad idea, you could have followed the advice of many of the speakers earlier today and you have clear criteria. You did a discovery process and customer research. You're understanding clearly what the problem you're trying to solve and what the steps and how the user scenario and the cognitive walkthrough were in the current world, how they walk through life. So you can evaluate an idea based on how it's gonna map to some set of experienced goals. This is a bad idea because on step three there's no way they're gonna figure that out. But there are some ideas that you will come across that you may even come up with on your own where you go through that and you're like, you know, I don't know what a user's gonna respond to this. Like it could be great, it could be not, I can't, and you have to design or like tell us more about this idea we don't fully understand it. They go, I don't fully understand either. It's interesting to me though there's something in there and I haven't figured it out yet. Most of the time we're under schedule pressure. We wanna get work done, wanna be productive. So weird gets lumped in with the bad. You just throw it away. So my advice to you, if you want a better working with ideas is to have more receptivity for the weird. And the tactical way to apply that, the practice is have a place for those weird ideas. You don't just throw them away. Have a spot on your whiteboard. Weird ideas, this thing you wrote down. Have a folder on your drop box. I had this prototype, it's weird to me but I'm not gonna kill it yet, I'm gonna keep it around. And your goal then, your side project is every so often it could be once a day, it could be once a week. You go back and look at that weird pile. Cause the first time our perception looks at a thing we're only able to ask certain questions of it. Like is it, what is it good for? I don't know, but it's kind of weird, I'll keep it around. Then the second time you look at a thing you're gonna ask more, what if I put it high? You're gonna ask more questions about it. You're gonna probe deeper. You're gonna see it in a different way. And that's where progress happens. That's where better ideas happen. Now to bring this back to UI and specific, I'm gonna show you what I've showed it already. So this is a prototype of one of the most important inventions in the history of human computer interaction. Or computing at all. It's a prototype of it but I'm showing it to you here and I wanna see if anyone can guess what it's a prototype of. Mouse. Any other guesses? Who said that? Who said mouse? Good job. So I did a presenter's trick on you which he was not fooled by. This is actually upside down. That's the picture right set up. Which generally doesn't help people very much. But it's fun to play with perception a little bit. So the clue here is that this white blob is a person's name. Now Doug Engelbart, who should be a household name, Doug Engelbart is deservedly so the inventor of the mouse. He worked at SRI labs in the late 1960s and in his lab, much of the future computing was invented or prototyped. From graph user interfaces, to video conferencing, to human computer interaction with the mouse. So the story here, which helps explore the weird, is he was thinking about the history of ideas. All ideas are made from other ideas. So he's thinking in 1965, how are people gonna work with computers? He's thinking, okay well, and I'm paraphrasing here. This isn't literally what he said, but it is what he did. How do people interact with machines now in 1965? Well, there's a couple of models that exist that are popular, cars. Two hands, you also use your feet. Also thinking about sewing machines. You use your hands, you also use your foot. He was thinking, we have four limbs. Shouldn't we be maximizing our limb potential in human computer interaction? And I say that as a joke, but I bet there's some startup somewhere that's gonna promote this idea of maximizing your productivity by having UI that applies to every possible limb in every direction. So, let's move up in time a little bit. This is a more recent prototype, not more recent, but this is from mid-70s. He abandoned all the weird foot stuff. He focused on the hands. And this is from the mid-1970s. Mid-1970s, you have to remember, this is 10 years before the Macintosh. This is when computers were things in a room with the big spinning tapes that one person managed for the whole, like this was not anything that anyone would ever think would be a consumer product. So imagine, it's 1975. He's been working on this for seven or eight years. You're in 1975 and he shows you this and says, this is the future of computing. What the hell are you talking about? You'd walk away from that person. It's just too weird. Now generally in life, it's reasonably afraid of the weird. You wouldn't want to eat weird food unnecessarily. You wouldn't want to talk to weird people unnecessarily. But if you're interested in being better at working with ideas, your receptivity to weird stuff has to increase. Otherwise, you're only making yourself the potential to absorb ideas that are well accepted. It's always fun for me to go back into the history of ideas, the history of things. Another name that should be a house would be named Susan Cain, who was the visual designer at Apple. We talk a lot today about design systems. What do you do? I'm a design systems engineer. I've managed design systems. She made a design system before it was called that. Most of the iconography, typography that went into the Macintosh was done by her. And this to me, you showed this to someone in 1983, when she was working on making these sketches for the icons, this is also the future computing. You get a similar response. This is a kid's doodle on graph paper. How can this be connected to anything of significance? Another way to frame this is and to encourage you to become better at using ideas from the past. Is it every masterpiece, everything that we call an innovation? Many technologies in this room we take for granted, projectors and air conditioning and clean lights. All these things were invented by someone who has a story much like Eiffel's. And if that's a problem space, whatever problem space you were working on, owe it to yourself and to your users to have some recognition and understanding of that history of those ideas. My third lesson for you, there's only two more. Our minds are naturally creative. The history of creative thinking is tied to enlightenment, romanticism, even actually the Greeks did it too with the muse, that there's certain powers and special abilities that people are creative have. And that's part of the problem with the label creatives, which used to be popular in the States, that the certain people who can come up with ideas and certain people can't. And a lot of people who study engineering or science are taught to feel they're not creative, even though a lot of the work they do, by my definition would be. Create to me, creative, often emphasizes to our own detriment, the novel. Novelty, things that are new. Not necessarily things that are good. And a lot of the rhetoric on innovation, we change, oh it's new, I've never seen this before, oh it's a hot thing. Most hot things go away, because they're not very good, they end up not finding a use. So the word or the definition of creative thinking that I think is the strongest one, that create is a verb. It's an action. If you're making dinner for someone, you are creating something. Even if it's the most unoriginal dinner ever, you're still creating something. It's an activity, it's something you do, you burn calories while you're doing it. It's not some special thing that occurs on its own, that you're struck by an epiphany. Now I happen to think that in general, forget creative thinking, just thinking at all. Doesn't happen as much as it should. We're not that good at thinking. We like being told what to do. We like hearing things, stories that make us feel satisfied. We don't often ask enough questions, which is really the seed for thinking at all. So for me, the word creative thinking, it is often just the thinking. When you're working with someone on, it can be the most menial project in the world, and you're stuck, and you can't figure out how do we get, we don't have enough, we don't have any garbage bags left, we have too much garbage, we're gonna put all the garbage. And so, oh, we have this other, oh I forgot, in the garage, we have this other receptacle, but great, that's thinking. Solve the problem. Now to be creative thinking, you'd want to call that creative thinking, you'd think there'd be some magical answer. You came up with some solution to the problem that's been solved before, but most of the time in the practical world, solving the problem is all anyone cares about. If, God forbid, you needed heart surgery, or brain surgery, and you go to the doctor, and they're like, yes, it's very dire, and we have a solution that's gonna cure your cancer, and you wouldn't stop them and go, wait a second, I know you can cure me, but is it a creative solution? I only want you to fix my brain cancer if it's not creative. You want your problem solved, and that requires thinking. The separation between thinking and creative thinking becomes very subjective, and most people most of the time really don't care, including your coworkers, including your clients, that want the problem solved. If you can solve a problem in a superior way, that's great, but you often don't need a particularly creative brain or innovative idea or a novel method to make a superior result. We all know as designers, and usually experienced people, there's lots of terrible design in the world. If you applied Don Norman's design of everyday things to half the stuff you see when you're walking around the world, it'd be a major breakthrough. Is that particularly creative? No, it's a progress, absolutely. My personal example to drive home this notion about everyone having the potential for thought, or creative thought, is that it's one of the main reasons why we've survived as a species. We're not particularly fast, we're not particularly strong. The thing we do well is use our higher brains to make tools and solve problems built into us. And if you're a functioning adult, which all of you clearly seem to be, you found this building, you found the room, you're mostly still awake, so you're a functioning adult, your brain works relatively well compared to the rest of the population, you can generate ideas whenever you need to. And the personal anecdote, the daily anecdote that reveals this is an experience we all have of losing stuff. So imagine that this day is over, we went out for a drink, we had a great time, we joined for dinner, great. And then we probably gonna come back to the event on Friday. Imagine it's Monday morning, you're back to your regular routine, and you're getting up to go to work or whatever you do that's outside of your home or apartment during the day. All of us go to the door, we go to the airlock of our lives, and we do our pre-airlock check, the wallet, purse, phone, keys. We do it all at least once a day, the check, to have all the stuff it's supposed to have that's important. So let's say you do that on Monday morning, you got your phone, you got your purse, you got your phone, and no keys. So your brain automatically knows this, oh, oh, I always put my keys by the basket, by the door, so you go, your brain's at level one of thinking, very basic routine thinking, you go to the basket. But the keys are not, you filter through and all the stuff in the basket, they're not there. So your brain now goes to level two, because you've gone through this before, oh, maybe they fell behind the basket, very ordinary straightforward kinds of thinking, anyone would do this. Just look behind the basket. Maybe you have a plant there, look behind the plant. Now that the common ordinary solutions are gone, your brain starts getting creative. You start thinking, oh, maybe I left them at my friend John's house, or Sally said, oh, no, that's not possible, I got in the house. Couldn't have left them there, I am here now. Then you start thinking, what, wait, did I wear a jacket? You go to your closet. You go to the jacket that you wore, not in those. But you're in the closet, you see all these other potential places, keys could be, you should look at your clothes, you haven't worn in days, or weeks, because it could be. So you didn't do an ideation exercise, you didn't get out a deck of creativity, inspiration cards, you didn't have to meditate, or light a candle, your brain just does it when you're suitably motivated. And often, we're not suitably motivated, because to be creative means you're dealing with the unknown. All those things you check and try, you're not sure of the outcome, and mostly in life we like secure outcomes. We wanna go home and know that our home is still there and our cat's still there. All the stuff that we like, we like security. And the idea of being creative means we have to go into these places. And as you're probably in your own lives, you know it gets even worse when you lose something, you'll go back to your basket, maybe they're rematerialized, while you're looking around, the laws of physics in the universe have changed to bring your keys back to you, so you can get extremely creative about things when you're suitably motivated. Now suitably motivated is a fascinating little phrase, suitably motivated, what does that mean? What does that mean? And I think when we label people creative, about biologically for the most part, we all have the same basic neuron structure in our brains. When suitably motivated, some people seem to require less motivation to just try stuff out. Their inhibitions are lower. They are more curious. But those are personality traits. Those are not neurological traits, suitably motivated. So part of the job then of a team lead, of your boss, or even for yourself, if you're working on your own, is how do I find my suitable motivations? And the best suitable motivation for all of this work that's come up a few times today, is about your interest in the problem to solve. If you're really, really interested in the problem to solve, it could be because you care about the customer, it could be because you're intellectually fascinated by the kind of problem that it is, you have ample suitable motivation. The SID talked about this, about government work, long-term hard work, and to do these things over a long period of time. Who is interested in doing that kind of work? Someone who's suitably motivated by the problem. Suitable motivation. Now my last story for you, my last lesson for you I suppose, takes us and drives it home into a few practical little things, or insights to leave you with. So we talked already, there's three of them. We already talked about creativity is a kind of work, it's a kind of effort. When you are trying to find your keys, or your phone, you can't find it, you are burning calories, your heart rate is up, there's energy being spent, to me that is creative work. You are creating something, you're trying to solve a problem, you're making attempts, that's what creativity is. False constraints. There is a phrase, it's one of my most hated phrases, but as you can tell I have many phrases or words I do not like. There's a phrase called thinking outside the box. How many of you heard or said this phrase in the last week? I'm not gonna throw anything at you, I'm sure it's more than that. Think outside the box. Now think outside the box comes from this puzzle. This puzzle's been around for a long time, but it became popular in America in the 1970s. It was used by a consultant to help illustrate different ways of thinking. And this puzzle's been around forever, so I'm gonna tell you the solution. If you wanted to figure it out for yourself too late, there's like a moratorium on how long you can wait, it's over. The goal of this, the instructions you get, the only instructions you get, you have to connect all the dots, using only straight lines. You put your pen down or pencil down, if you connect all the dots using only straight lines. We'll give you a second to look at it for those who have not seen this problem before. Okay, it's long enough. So the way you solve the problem, the instructions didn't say anything about the box. But inherently we see a box, it's a constraint, we assume that's part of the challenge, but it's not. So the solution for the puzzle, the simplest solution requires you to have at least one line that goes outside the box. That's where the phrase comes from. Now the intent of this phrase, I hate the phrase and I'll tell you why, the phrase is often used, it's kind of like a judgment, that you're in a meeting with someone and you have something you're trying to solve or do, it's not happening and someone goes, hey, come on guys, think outside the box. Which basically, given what I'm telling you, it equates to, hey everybody, be smarter. Come on, I know I'm smarter than you and I could do this in a second, but I'm not, instead I'm telling you to think outside the box. If they were really so creative, they'd say, oh I have the solution, done. And you move on to the next thing. So it's an empty statement, it's a fallacious statement, it doesn't mean anything. The value of it though, and the noble intent of the phrase, is that we need to work to recognize false constraints. So the false constraint is the box. Nowhere in my instructions that I say, you cannot go outside the box, we assume it to be true. I'm gonna break a constraint of my own and I'm gonna move to this side of the room. How are you doing? Still awake? Good? Am I disrupting you at all? Not disrupted yet? Now constraints are fascinating given how our psychology works. We are social creatures, part of our evolutionary history, tribes and groups, we work collaboratively together. And the way society functions is the interpretation and application of constraints. When you show up at a room like this, there's no sign that said, don't stand on your seat. And none of you were standing on your seat yet there was no sign. Also, none of you chose to stand up here with the speakers or to sit in the middle of the floor and it's like stretch out. There's no sign that says don't do that, but you all have assumed a constraint. And that's good for the most part, that's good. That's how society functions. That's why we get around. That's why when you show up in a supermarket, there's a line, you get in line, it's all applied and assumed, that's good. Except for when you are trying to solve a new kind of problem or a different kind of problem, except for when you're trying to generate ideas. When you're in that mode and that's your goal, constraints, false constraints are a problem. So to illustrate this further, this little puzzle before I get rid of it, I really don't like to look at it for very long. If that's true, false constraints, there's probably an infinite number of solutions to this. Infinite, the instruction is just one thing. Lines, they have to connect. Well, if you go really far outside the box, you can do it in three lines. Big lines back and forth. Of course, nothing in the instructions say what a line actually is. The actual definition of a line is the connection between two points. So, you're doing one line. No one said not to do that. Also, there's this solution. Well, a line is an abstraction. So therefore, I can solve it with my abstract line just by going up and there's the origami solution. So it goes on and on and on. What constraints are you inventing? They're not in the instructions, they're in your head. So this is a very useful technique to use for logical, rational people who like to be right and fear the unknown. If you feel stuck, you're on a project with a goal that's creative and it's not going well, make a list of all the constraints that you're assuming to be true. You can do it on your own at your whiteboard by yourself. I used to be a team leader, so we would do this as a team. Like, hey, why is this so hard? Let's make a list of all the things we were assuming. And I might take the lead on that, have someone else do it at the whiteboard. Well, the deadline's supposed to be Friday. Sally said these are three requirements. Bob's, and then invariably, by the time I got three or four items on the list, someone would go, wait, why are you assuming that? That's not in the spec. Oh, well I heard from, oh no, he changed his mind. Aha, one less constraint now. And when you eliminate a constraint without any magic creativity hats or spells, the set of ideas you can consider now gets bigger. It just opens up all on its own through reduction, through deduction, through logical processes. The number of things you can get through now gets bigger instantly. If you thought the deadline was Friday, but you realize that your boss went away, so the weekend, they're not back till Monday evening, hey, we could choose to work the weekend if we wanted to, and get this done on time. False constraints. Now this fancy language for this constraint, requirement, elicitation, you can find fancy words for all this stuff and I don't really like the fancy words because they distract from the simplicity of these kinds of thoughts. Find the false constraints. This all comes back to psychological theory and Freudian inhibition. We're afraid of what happens if we undo these things, where we might go, it's the unknown again, it's looking for your keys again. So suitable motivation, we wanted to do that, it's part of what will allow you to seek out those false constraints. The last kind of false constraint I want to talk about very briefly is organizationally speaking. There are a lot of fallacies that are rampant in human culture. In every society that I have studied or looked at, that you'll be in a meeting, you'll pitch an idea, you'll have a concept, something you want to share and someone will say we tried that before. Have many of you heard that at one time in your career, in your life? Maybe from a parent. Oh, we tried that before, not gonna work. Now this is a logical fallacy. We tried that before. It's possible that when you tried that before, the people, the team of people you had working on it were the dumbest people in the whole company. Could be true. Also could be true that was five years ago and now technology has changed or information has changed. So to say we tried that before is empty. It's a way to kill an idea without any merit. A wiser manager, a wiser boss, a wiser coworker would say, we tried that before, what has changed that weren't trying it again? Now you're having a conversation with a merit of ideas. There's many of these, there's actually a whole list of them called idea killers and you can search for them. Seeing the list often just impresses people. So you're like, oh, I heard that one. Yeah, I never recovered from that one. But if you know these phrases, I just gave you a way out. When you hear that phrase, you go wait, but things have changed. You can initiate a real conversation about them. And it's useful in any organization because organizations like to be conservative, like convention, to be armed and aware of those phrases and have your counter statement, or counter question to keep that idea alive. So that is my last point for you. To sum up my four lessons, all ideas are made from other ideas. Great ideas look weird at first. So have a method for keeping them around. Look at them every so often, ask new questions. We are naturally creative. We never feel stuck, think of losing your keys and what you're willing to try and apply that to your problem. And then lastly, eliminate false constraints. It's the deductive, logical way to find more possibilities for things. This is my razzle-dazzle book cover display. As I said, all of these slides you just saw are here. If you wanna know more about the book, that is where to go. I'm going to head to the bar as soon as I've done answering questions and people wanna go to a bar and get a drink with me, that'd be fantastic. Otherwise, I hope you enjoyed your day and that I helped you send you off back into the rest of your world. So thank you for listening. Thank you. Thank you.