Just some notes; on collaboration, creation and innovation

A great conversation started on a private mailing list shared by my classmates. It was sparked by a piece in yesterday’s Times: The Rise of the New Groupthink.

In his email, K criticized the idea that innovative thinking could be efficiently mastered by groups. He’s, of course, right. But “innovative thinking” isn’t a thing you can schedule a 90-minute meeting for; it’s a longer process.

What groups are good for is overcoming the limitations of our own individual ways of thinking. There are some problems that I can’t fully understand or attempt to solve without working with others.

One of the things I’m happy to have learned about in the SFI program is complexity. And here’s my theory about the relationship between collaboration and complexity: all of the easy problems — the ones which can be fully conceived by a single person — have already been solved. Complex problems are (to generalize) too big to be adequately understood by a single person. They’re far more difficult to solve, because doing so demands effective communication between two or more people.

I don’t think anyone credible is (as K suggested) trying to “transfer the innovation spark from the individual to the group.” What some are trying to do is figure out how to facilitate the conditions for a group of people to be able to effectively tackle the problems that are too big for anyone to figure out alone.

For small problems: you’d be foolish to ask a group to do a job when a single (adequately-equipped) person could handle it. In contexts like that in the SFI program, I think this point needs to be made more clearly.

My takeaway from the Times piece isn’t that the world is finally cluing into that group work is a sham. It’s mostly just a reminder that introverts often prefer to work alone, and that they sometimes come up with some swell stuff.

I don’t know why working collaboratively is hipper these days than working in solitude, but it might partially be because lots of people are starting to use new tools which make interpersonal communication faster and cheaper. The existence of these makes possible new ways of working; in particular, they’re enablers of collaboration. It’ll take us a while to figure out how to design and use them most effectively, but — buried in the baby photos on Facebook and the mountains of hashtags — there’s a big step forward.

I also agree strongly with the point that M made in the email thread, that group brainstorming is effective with people who have a strong sense of self. And that achieving a (non-dickish) strong sense of self among students would be a worthy project for educators.

The importance of quiet, or solitude, or unplugging to my own creative process is something I’ve been thinking about for years. Some others are interested in the same things, and here are a few that stand out:

 

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A Bixi Toronto map with less suck

Bixi launched in Toronto last week, and I approve. Not only because the bikes are sturdy and fun to ride, but because there’s data on where they are, at toronto.bixi.com/stations. That page supposedly “optimized” for mobile devices, but I can tell you that it doesn’t feel so on my Android phone. Or even my laptop, really. So I made a more functional (less pretty) one here: pwd.ca/bixi. Enjoy. Continue reading

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Trends in incubating social innovation

In this, my final semester of coursework in my M.Des., I’ve been studying ‘socialX‘. As the final official piece of my independent study on the subject, I chose to specifically look at the different ways in which organizations are supporting or incubating social innovators/entrepreneurs and their projects.

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Visualizing Twitter clusters with gephi (update)

[This update on my Twitter cluster visualization project is also the final report for the independent study I've been doing on infoviz. I'll definitely pick up this work again soon, but not in the next couple of weeks. A previous post with some of my early tests and rationale is here. A walkthrough on how to get started making these is here.]

For the past few months I’ve been absorbing lots about information visualization, and in the past four weeks I’ve been doing a bunch of work specifically on visualizing clusters based on the Twitter network. The goal of this is described in a previous post. Along the way, I’ve learned a weird bunch of other things: tuning MySQL performance, the advantages of the Google Social Graph API over the Twitter API, how to get around the fact that many of OCAD’s lab computers are still running OS 10.5, how to make a screencast, etc. I want to take this work in a bunch of other directions (and will, once I’ve dealt with my other deadlines). Here’s some of the more interesting maps that I produced along the way: Continue reading

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Visualizing twitter clusters with gephi: walkthrough

I like step-by-step walkthroughs. They’re task-oriented and context-specific, not universal like conventional documentation. They’re good because no matter what it is I’m doing, someone else has certainly done it before. They’re also good, because when I take the time to figure something out, it’s nice to have a record of it in case I need to do it again. I make them for myself often; generally just a record of ‘Terminal’ commands I used to get something done (they’re more complicated when there are GUIs involved).

So, here’s a walkthrough of how I made my Twitter maps. I’ve tried to keep it simple, but you’ll need to know a bit of MySQL to make this particularly useful. Continue reading

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Visualizing Twitter clusters

I’ve seen lots of maps of online social networks. They’re nifty, but often either ugly or messy or useless. But I came back from Strata really impressed with LinkedIn’s InMaps. The layout of the maps is pleasing, but more importantly, they use cluster analysis to demonstrate something that’d be harder to do if not visualized. If you have a LinkedIn account and haven’t tried InMaps, do.

In InMaps, clusters tend to represent companies or communities-of-interest. I wondered what they might represent if I fed it the network of people that I follow on Twitter. Continue reading

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