The Sketching in Hardware Conference just wrapped up.

From the conference description:

Rapid prototyping of information processing devices offers a new way of creating technology for industrial design, experience design and technological creative expression. Sketching in Hardware 1 will bring together a select group of people intimately involved in this field to discuss the ideas, methods, challenges and potential of these technologies.

I’m interested to hear about what went down at the Henry Ford Museum this week. I suppose the rest of us will have to wait for the blog posts to percolate. For now, we’ll just have to look at the flickr pool and wonder.

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Bob Sutton has a post on his blog refuting the Wall Street Journal’s
recent articlewhere they cited research showing that idea generation through group brainstorming was no more productive than individuals coming up with ideas on their own.

“G]reat brainstorming sessions are possible, but they require the planning of a state dinner, plenty of rules, and the suspension of ego, ingratiation and political railroading. Hosts have to hope that people won’t expend creative energy trying to tell others their ideas are bad without actually telling them that — admittedly a real business skill. And they have to cross their fingers that the session won’t deteriorate into what some people call “blamestorming” or “coblabberation,” where you get nowhere or settle on something mediocre to be done with it….

My reaction to reading this is “So how DO you tell people that their ideas are bad?” It may seem flip, but often the difference between good and bad idea generation is how well the people involved know each other. I can tell my best friend that his shoes are ugly, but I couldn’t necessarily tell an employee of a client during a group facilitation the same thing.

Sutton says that because the sessions took place in an experimental environment rather than in a workplace with established culture and processes, that they can make no definitive claim on the efficacy of brainstorming.

Sutton:

if these were studies of sexual performance, it would be like drawing inferences about what happens with experienced couples on the basis of research done only with virgins during the first time they had sex.

Continue reading “Does Brainstorming Not Suck?

Check out this video. It’s a concept video that ETC students produced to demonstrate applications for Dynamic Physical Rendering, an Intel-funded research effort to develop ‘programmable matter’, technology for creating self-constructing 3D objects on the fly.Watching the video, I imagine the car designers offing themselves in their garages after their work is literally squashed and warped at the whim of a CEO. Regardless, assuming that something like this will become viable in the coming decades, I am interested to see the ‘software’ interface that enables you to reshape a 3D model by manipulating a physical object itself. When the corporate flunkie in the video tucks and shapes the car, how are they controlling what points on the model they are manipulating, or what tool they are using? Will a second input device be needed, or can the ‘claytronics’ hardware shape and color itself into a ‘hard’ software UI?

From an Interaction Design angle, this seems like the hardware analogue to Jeff Han’s Multi-Touch Interaction Research at MRL and other research at MIT’s Tangible Media Group and that the marriage of multi-touch and gestural interaction methods with dynamic physical rendering will open up stunning new methods of creating and shaping physical objects with human hands.

In the meantime, I wonder whether we aren’t better off just teaching people how to sculpt rather than creating advanced tools that do essentially the same thing?