This was a very interesting seminar, if not immediately relevant to my own research. Not only was some of the content fascinating, but the method of presentation was also novel. Professor Flack uses mindmapping software to prepare his presentation and then uses the mindmap as a navigation tool during the presentation. By clicking on a mindmap element, a separate page would be opened where he could explore that concept in detail or perhaps an image clip launched.

Here, belatedly, are a copy of the abstract and my notes from the seminar.

Abstract:

In this seminar I will outline a range of theories of innovation within the broader context of technological development, to draw lessons about how the design process may be facilitated or constrained, especially with regard to usability. The discussion will be grounded with reflections about several empirical cases. These will include the design of a particular “smart Product” (Persona–the electronic contraceptive) and the development of a “Personal Learning Appliance” for a new e-learning initiative at Edinburgh (The Global Innovation MBA–GIMBA).

Conclusions will address the need for practical trialling; the need for mapping the space of behavioural interactions (behavioural ergonomics?) and the need to overcome “default satisficing behaviour” among prospective users.

Notes:

Technology, according to Pacey, is only successful when technological, cultural, and organizational components are all in place. Ownership, for example, in the case of a water well is important in keeping the pump running and maintained. This is one theoretical underpinning to understanding the process of innovation and designing for usability.

One of the fascinating case studies that Professor Fleck discussed was about the robot milking machines. Mackie’s of Scotland make ice-cream from the milk of their own Jersey herd. They were interested in increasing milk yields and decreasing the cost of human labour required to obtain the milk. They implemented a series of portable robotic milking stations in the fields. Using RFID or some such similar technology, when a cow comes to the milking station, she can be identified and the milking station automatically configures itself to milk that particular cow. Milk yields rose by 19% in the first year. It took the cows three months to adjust to the new system. It took the human staff almost a year. It was easy for the cows to adjust to because it required very little training on their part. They went to get food when they were hungry. They went to be milked when they felt full. The process here also had an unintended side benefit. While the primary goal was to increase milk yields, because the opportunities for human intervention in the supply chain (milk to ice-cream) were significantly reduced, the liability was subsantially reduced. Their cost of implementation was quickly repaid by the savings on the liability alone. Good for the cows. Good for Mackie’s. Good for the ice-cream too.

One problem of implementing new technology is that people are reluctant to change their behaviour of usage beyond what works for them. Professor Fleck called this “default satisficing behaviour.” In many cases, this manifests iteself as resistence to learning anything beyond basis usage of a piece of technology. Innovation and technology requires many components (bits and pieces from many seemingly unrelated fields) and customer context is important.

With respect to learning, we need to realize that in a bricks-and-mortar university, learning is an interaction between the instructor and the students, not between the student and the materials.

One of the things I wanted for the two blogs was a unique but similar look, so the two layouts are basically identally. Even though the layouts look very simple, it took me hours and hours back in September to research the CSS required to lay the pages out in three columns plus a spanning header/footer without using any tables. The tricky part wasn’t so much the lack of tables but in getting CSS which would work consistently across the different “standards-compliant” browsers and did not employ absolute positioning in order to work. Judicious use of the float properties in CSS and div elements seem to have it under control, at least for browsers I use.
The floating three-column layout with spanning headers/footers:
#leftcol, #middle, #rightcol {
background-color: transparent;
float: left;
}
#leftcol {
width: 17%;
min-width: 8em;
padding-left: 5px;
padding-right: 5px;
}
#middle {
width: 58%;
padding-left: 5px;
padding-right: 5px;
border-left:1px dotted #999;
border-right:1px dotted #999;
background:#333;
}
#rightcol {
width: 17%;
min-width: 8em;
padding-left: 5px;
padding-right: 5px;
}
#header, #footer {
width: 100%;
padding: 0em;
background:#000;
color:#FFF;
}
#footer {
clear: both;
}
Once that was figured out, organizing the content into logical blocks was easy enough and away we went. The last major CSS tweaking I did back then was to add automatic tagging of internal versus external links. External links have solid underlines and, depending on your browser, an animated spinning globe to the left of them inline with the link. They also turn orange when you run your mouse over them (hover). Internal links don’t have any inline graphics, turn green when you hover over them, and use a dashed underline. The CSS wizardry that does this is part of the CSS3 Selector Recommendation from the W3C. I followed Stuart Langridge’s write-up at http://www.kryogenix.org/days/external.
Today’s efforts were focused on colour schemes. Ein² has a very pleasing colour scheme of blues and greens, which I very much like. For the research blog here, I wanted something a little more serious. The original page started off mostly in greys with a little bit of light blue thrown in. It was very monochromatic and serious, but not very inspiring. Fellow Brainstormer Jim Lai dug out his colour theory books and we set to work with a will and ended up with an analogous colour scheme to Ein² but a little more formal in presentation. While I don’t like it as much as the other, it will do for the moment.
I’ve also added some text about my recent talks and writings. I’m hoping to start using Tinderbox to manage production of information about papers or talks I’ve developed and papers/books I’m reading which can be automatically updated and then included in this blog. That’s a task, however, that will have to wait for another day as will a description of Tinderbox and trying to validate included stylesheets in external stylesheets that use CSS3.

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