Matter/Anti-Matter

These seem to be apocalyptic times for designers. If you happen to be a member of this threatened species, you better look for another calling. We had just put Pillippe Starck's "Design is dead" fatalism to bed, and then I read Peter Merholz's essay from 2007: "Stop designing products!"

What sounds like another shocker initially, however, turns out to be a milder riff on an old and well-known theme that Merholz himself has been promoting for two years now: "Experience is the product -- and the only thing users care about:"

"When you start with the idea of making a thing, you're artificially limiting what you can deliver. The reason that many of these exemplar's forward-thinking product design succeed is explicitly because they don't design products. Products are realized only as necessary artifacts to address customer needs. What Flickr, Kodak, Apple, and Target all realize is that the experience is the product we deliver, and the only thing that our customers care about."

I guess what Merholz wants to point out is that while many brands may think they're all about the experience, their thinking is still centered on the eventual "thing." You could counter that, of course, and contend that it's a question of how you define this "thing." "It" could be an amalgam of both the physical form and its history and meaning. Whatever your approach (the experience as the Holy Grail or a broader definition of "thing") the overriding theme is the same: A product is not just a product. But what is IT?

In an era "when all of us, journalists, business people, and designers are making the transition from being leaders of thought to curators of conversations," as Bruce Nussbaum describes it, designers, including product designers, evolve from information architects to communication architects. Interaction designers start designing interactions between people (a.k.a conversations) and not just interaction with machines. Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, while typically not the most eloquent CEO, nailed the mantra of the Generation C(onversation): "The other guys think the purpose of communication is to get information. We think the purpose of information is to get communication."

Good designers are conversation starters. They instigate opinions and re-create the "aura" of the (art) object that German philosopher Walter Benjamin considered to be erased by the mechanics of technical reproduction. While the destruction of "aura" signaled the passage from the artwork as cult (i.e. as a religious object) to the artwork as exhibit (in museum and inevitably in cinema), the "age of conversations" catapults it back into the sphere of cult.

The "aura" of the product is the people who talk about it. Products are the stories of products, and meaning is construed by memories, associations, and provocations. If product and user story match, at least partially, a narrative sandbox, a room of emotional resonance emerges that creates new, proprietary meaning: a third story, if you will. Call it "branding."

Designers are marketers; marketers are designers. They are unified by one and the same task: branding. Or in other words: creating a memorable, auratic and yet reproducible experience for consumers. Conversations are part of this experience; they are integral to the "aura." Designers visualize it. They unearth, discover, and articulate the consumer stories. They invent the product stories. And then they connect both. Industrial design, web site, software design, organizational design, etc. -- all design is essentially an act of branding, regardless of the proportion of emotiveness to functionality.

For designers as curators of conversations there are three trends to take into account:

First, the stories behind products and the consumer stories increasingly appear on the web. More and more consumers spend their social lives on the web, networking, shopping, producing, consuming, socializing, etc. And so do products: The web is where they are discovered, examined, and experienced by consumers. The digital domain is the sounding board and the archive for the stories behind them. It is the emotional resonance room that resides at the intersection of click streams, transactions, virtual encounters, and real-time and recorded conversations.

Second, a growing number of product and consumer stories on the web are "social." This means, they are open-sourced conversations that anyone willing to engage in a multi-logue can enter and shape. Many of these conversations are cross-platform and cross-media. They can go on for a long time; they may start anytime, anywhere, with anyone; and other people may choose to join them. They can start in one medium and continue in another. (Imagine a conversation via IM that continues in e-mail -- Gmail allows for that already -- or a Wiki entry that continues on Twitter and then on the mobile phone before it ends on Facebook.)

Third, both product and consumer stories may occur at the intersection of virtual world and the traditional web: the boundaries are blurring and not only do the interactions and transactions converge but also, increasingly so, perceptions and behaviors. Virtual worlds like Second Life have serious implications for products: they give form to"intangibles" and dematerialize the "tangibles." Virtual worlds create forums and experiences to express and visualize intangibles such as emotions, perceptions, and opinions, and at the same time, they create virtual artifacts (avatars, 3D objects etc.) that represent real world physical objects.

For designers, the task at hand is to listen to all these crossover conversations and design the conditions for them to take place in hybrid forms and formats, enabling, facilitating, and curating them without creating them.

Since the SXSW conference buzzword was convergence, Chelsea Holden Baker of Frog Design looks back at convergent themes of three panels in three synthesizing steps, and a little bonus at the end:

Blood Sweat and Tears: Great Design Hurts

John Gruber (Daring Fireball) and Michael Lopp (Apple), made the case for cultivating discomfort as a designer: "Are you willing to be an asshole?" We took a trip back through the iconic designs (like IBM) of Paul Rand and examined the allure of the Apple logo (whether rainbow-striped or white, what makes it sexy is the bite. It's original sin.). What stood out to me here, however, was discussion of emotion as a physical thing; just a limbic response, a bunch of bouncing chemicals. Because that leads to...

From Frustration to Elation: Getting Emotional by Design

Dan Rubin (Black Seagull/Sidebar Creative), Eris Stassi (Interaction Designer, Apple) and Didier Hilhorst (Interaction Designer, Ideo) shared a saccharine PowerPoint full of hearts and talk about how good design should elicit a response like good sex. Bad design (like ATM machines) can be like a bad, abusive relationship. Essentially: Emotion is essential to good design. (Just keep the limbic system from above in mind).

Does Tomorrow's World Need Designers?

Frog Creative Director David Merkoski took the stage with Alonzo Canada (Jump Associates), and Helen Walters (Editor of Innovation & Design, BusinessWeek.com) for a panel moderated by Johanna Blakley (Deputy Director, The Norman Lear Center). Here we fast-forwarded to a debatably near future--into the realm of the new singularity--because it's not a matter of when it will happen, it's a matter of thinking about it now; and that doesn't just mean watching The Matrix again.

The panel posited that all the caring and emotion we put into design could lead to the negation of emotion when we create machines that are smart enough to design themselves. But will machines be good designers (and who decides what good means)? Is emotion smart? And then there's the nurture or nourishment question: Will our relationship to the machines/systems be that of pets or food? While this might all be uncomfortable to think about, humor was still alive and well. As Merkoski put it, "There had to be a beeper before there was a cell phone. . . We might just be the beeper." So since we're getting sci-fi, here's to the pseudo-scientific:

A General Theory of Creative Relativity

The captivating Jim Coudal ("Big Cheese", Coudal Partners), launched into his theory (which essentially serves as a window into the Coudal Partners process), whereby e=mc2 means e (your energy/effort) is equivalent to m (the mass of information available to you) times c (the flash of inspiration), squared (the power of enthusiasm/belief). Or something approximate to that. Coudal showed this video from Steve Delahoyde's (Coudal) series called "Regrets." Essentially, it's a highly creative video about the ability to balance e, m and c, and a desire to hold on to the power of enthusiasm.

Enjoy.

It's freezing in Austin (39 degrees last night....) but nonetheless SXSW Interactive is about to kick off today. There is no doubt that the conference is hitting the mainstream this year (with Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg as keynote speaker and most of the big high-tech players participating). The program, which is notoriously hard to navigate, has grown even more in terms of depth and breadth.

SXSW has therefore teamed up with Microsoft and frog design to create a rich, interactive online community hub that facilitates real-time conversations around conference events while also providing an easy-to-us panel calendar. The Silverlight-based application features premium content from SXSW Interactive, including video clips from keynotes and panels, as well as user-generated videos, Flickr images, and social networking content. At the same time, aggregators from Technorati and del.icio.us comb the Internet for relevant information, keeping the site dynamic.

Check it out: http://pulse.sxsw.com

Next weekend, just a couple of days after the dust of the primary campaigns will have settled, national media attention will return to Texas as Austin is turning into party central for the annual South by Southwest Festival (SXSW, March 7-16). SXSW Interactive, added in 1994 to the music festival, has evolved into one of the most influential tech conferences in the country and beyond. While somewhat geeky in its first years, SXSW Interactive is now considered a must-attend venue for big tech players (Google, Microsoft, Seagate, etc. all have a strong presence at the show), start-ups, creative agencies, software developers, futurists, designers, artists, media, and bloggers alike, all of whom are chasing the next big digital thing. A key contributing factor for SXSW's success may have been that the initially narrow meaning of "interactive" has expanded its relevance to more industries, media, and platforms over the past few years and now serves as the modus operandi of all business, no matter how creative or digital it is. With its more solid business underpinning, SXSW Interactive has overtaken both the Push conference in Minneapolis and Wired's Nextfest in terms of relevance and commercial success.

The Soul of the Machine

Yet despite its explosive growth (16,000 overall attendees are expected in Austin this year), "South By," as conference goers dub it, has done a good job evading all attempts to be easily categorized. The interactive part, in particular, has somehow managed to remain its cutting edge. It still offers a wildly eclectic bazaar of topics, trends, opinions, and applications, and one can truly say that all of the tech conferences out there it is the one best positioned to explore "the soul of the machine."

The organization is professional but there is still a lot of room for the unexpected, below-the-line, grassroots eccentricity that gives the conference its special flavor. A big part of this can be attributed to Austin, which has emerged as a thriving hub for creative people and embeds SXSW in the kind of community fabric that doesn't tolerate any over-spin or sell-out. The organizers have also made a point to add many community elements to the event: web 2.0 for web 2.0sters, if you will. For example, this year, they pioneered a "panel picker" that allowed users to vote on submitted panel proposals and essentially democratized the entire programming. I'm not entirely sure if this is the best application for the "wisdom of crowds" since there is a real danger that the panel selection turns into a popularity contest or an easy target for PR professionals and speaker bureaus. I, for my part, am old-fashioned and prefer conference programs to be curated by a curator, simply because it is otherwise daunting to ensure the right balance between diversity and cohesion. Anyway, it's too early to tell -- we'll see how it turns out.

In addition to the panel picker, SXSW has teamed up with Microsoft and frog design to create a rich, interactive online community hub for the conference. The application features premium content from SXSW Interactive, including video clips from keynotes and panels, as well as user-generated videos, Flickr images, and social networking content. At the same time, aggregators from Technorati and del.icio.us comb the Internet for relevant information, keeping the site dynamic.

But not everything at SXSW will be user-driven. In fact, some of the program highlights were carefully chosen: Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, will give the keynote on March 9. Other keynotes include Frank Warren (March 10) and Jane McGonigal (March 11). Opening Remarks (March 8) will be delivered by Henry Jenkins and Steven Johnson, and Michael Eisner, former head of Disney, will be interviewed in a special session on March 11.

Searching for the Killer App

As eyeballs wander towards Austin, it will be interesting to see which digital innovations this year's conference will bring. Google's Dodgeball blew up at SXSW Interactive in 2006, and last year, a hitherto unknown service called Twitter enabled attendees to chat about panels in real-time and in public, and as instant as the format was its proliferation in the blogosphere: Twitter became the app de jour at SXSW and then, quickly, the rage of all digerati.

So who will be this year's Twitter? Practically speaking: Meebo. The instant messaging service is the official sponsor for live chat at SXSW 2008 and has stepped into Twitter's footsteps, which is kind of ironic. Meebo as Me-too. And philosophically speaking? Who knows. It seems safe to place a few bets on models around the new "Digital Green." The conference will be hosting five panels devoted exclusively to sustainability issues (five more than in previous years, if you're counting), among them "10 Ways to Green-ify Your Digital Life" and "Green Software -- Really?" Another big topic will be how gaming, virtual worlds, mobile and contextual web will converge (yes, convergence is resilient!) in the "Age of Engage," including discussions on OpenID and hardware mash-ups ("the long tail of gadgets"). And then there are interesting sociological tangents such as "Sexual Privacy Online," "Self-Branding," or the existential question for the attention junkie: "Do You Have to Disappear Completely to Get Things Done?" The most exciting domain for disruptive innovation right now is probably news (which, as we know, is broken), and several panels will discuss the future of Internet radio, Internet TV, as well as crowdsourced, hyper-localized models of news production and aggregation.

Or maybe, after five days of "geekspasm" and partying, ReadWriteWeb's prediction may come to pass: "The killer app in Austin might just be beer."

Links

We will report from SXSW Interactive on this blog, but in the meantime here are a few helpful links to get you in the mood:

Official SXSW Festival Site: http://www.sxsw.com

Interactive SXSW Schedule/Calendar: http://sched.org/

Official SXSW Live Chat: http://www.meebo.com/sxsw

SXSW Insider Guide: http://sxsw.ning.com/

SXSW Facebook Page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/SXSW-Festival/7826953993?ref=s

Unofficial Weblog: http://sxswbaby.com

This is the first in a series of interviews with innovation thought leaders. We've reached out to innovators in marketing, design, strategy, and operations -- from start-ups, small-medium sized business, Fortune 500 companies, academia, to non-profits -- and asked them to answer the same set of questions.

We're kicking the series off with Manoj Kothari, founder and managing director of Onio Design, one of the leading design and innovation consultancies in India. A graduate of IIT Bombay and the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad, Manoj orchestrates trend research, strategic consulting, and design management practice at Onio. Manoj is a frequent speaker at various forums on innovation, trends, and design.

How do you define "innovation"?

It is as basic as food, clothing, and shelter in the broadest sense.

What was your most successful innovation, and how did you find it?

For a person whose profession is innovation, it is hard to point out one idea that "would change life." Every idea has its own destiny.

What is the best idea you've ever had and haven't yet executed?

To make a film on Siddhartha -- by Herman Hesse.

Which design "failure" did you learn the most from, and why?

Simple lessons on prototyping: We took some calculations for granted and prepared the whole pilot lot of metal stands to hold 20 liter water bottles. In front of the client the 100 stands gave way...

What lessons can you pass on to others from how your organization has changed to make itself more innovation-driven?

1. Never begin before sensing enough.

2. Do not judge an idea instantly. Hold it in your mind for some time.

3. Do not work only on one idea. Create a 'family' and the 'succession plan' before launching the work.

4. Never undermine the insights that may come through prototyping.

5. Detailing at the early stages is key to smooth implementation.

6. Unless the top team agrees, innovation is a headless chicken.

In your opinion, what are the biggest barriers and challenges that stand in the way of organizations becoming more innovative?

Unlimited vision is only with limited people.

Beyond your organization, who do you admire for risk-taking innovation, and what do you think makes them successful?

Vision, driven by guts and gut-feel. There are several small and big time people around.

What innovation are you still waiting for?

I wish cars could fly and reduce the traffic on the ground (especially in the context of India).

Can you call a concept a cultural phenomenon if different people conceive of it at the same time? Within the past few months, three publications have come to similar conclusions. The digital media agency Avenue A | Razorfish released a study called "Fast Forward: Designing for Constant Change." It consists of thirteen essays as well as research exploring how consumers' digital media habits are changing, and how this affects the design of user experiences and brands. The key take-away is: Today's online users are forced to adjust to constant change in increasingly volatile rich media environments, and they are increasingly good at it.

Around the same time, the Museum of Modern Art in New York announced an exhibit called "Design and the Elastic Mind," which will open in February, 2008. While the Avenue A | Razorfish study provides actionable advice for marketers, the MOMA exhibit examines the philosophical implications for designers:

"In the past few decades, individuals have experienced dramatic changes in some of the most established dimensions of human life: time, space, matter, and individuality. Working across several time zones, traveling with relative ease between satellite maps and nano-scale images, gleefully drowning in information, acting fast in order to preserve some slow downtime, people cope daily with dozens of changes in scale. Minds adapt and acquire enough elasticity to be able to synthesize such abundance. One of design's most fundamental tasks is to stand between revolutions and life, and to help people deal with change."

And lastly, in a similar vein, Roger Martin, dean of the Rotman School of Management and father of the concept of "integrative thinking," elaborates on "The Opposable Mind" in a book published earlier this year. F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote that one sign of a "first-rate intelligence" is the ability "to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." Accordingly, Martin argues, a sure sign of first-rate business intelligence is the ability to recognize two diametrically opposing ideas and meld them into a new model that is superior to either. Martin says that designers often engage in abductive reasoning: they imagine what might be and act on that insight -- even though they can't prove it.

The "adaptive," the "elastic mind," or the "opposable mind" -- business or consumer, and whatever the name, the concept is the same: the rise of new digital technologies has turned us into skilled micro-managers of constant change, in all aspects of our lives. Uncertainty has become our routine as we live in a state of permanent crisis, in a multi-task, muti-tab, multi-media, multi-window world where each new online event requires a new and different reaction. Sometimes we flee but mostly we adapt, bridge, and synthesize. We have become adept at adapting. We switch back and forth from from macro to micro, zoom in and zoom out, face-to-face and space-to-space, at the same time but at different paces, shifting time and shifting places. We possess what drummers show when they perform two distinct rhythms in their hands and feet -- excellent coordination. Seamless is our modus operandi.

As micro-managers of constant change, we stretch our minds' boundaries and sometimes over-reach; we combine the long and the short form, the philosophical and the mundane, the narrative and the 140-word Tweet. We understand that the "map is outgrowing the territory," as Bruce Sterling puts it. We can think meta while in beta, and we understand that every idea immediately transcends itself into something bigger, something universal that it is meta-tagged before it is even final.

What does all that mean for product designers, not only in the digital realm? Acknowledge that consumers are smarter than you. Hence, design for input, and do not just satisfy the user preferences. Understand change as a feature. Design a highly modifiable and personalizable experience that is adaptive to change, but build in enough flexibility for the users to adapt the experience itself to changing conditions. Make your products adapt, bridge, and synthesize, as your users do. Give them features that literally scale. Equip them with "peripheral vision" -- the ability to see things outside of the usual spectrum, not front and center but right, left, and in the back. And if all that isn't enough: Allow the user to customize, mash up, and ultimately re-design the product or service beyond its original purpose.

Examples? Netscape, Flash, JavaScript, TCP/IP, IM, and a host of other products in the digital realm have all moved far beyond what they started out as. The iPod enabled podcasts, Google Earth triggered hundreds of mash-ups, Google's Open Social and Open Mobile inititiaves will further spur third-party innovation resulting in myriad new applications that will change the orignal services. And then there is of course Facebook, which from a social network evolved into an operating sytem, a content distribution platform, a whole new micro-economy -- or all of that together. The product is the system and the system is change.

A comment in my article about Amazon.com's MP3 download store took me to task for picking nits about aspects of the service, especially about the quality of the usage experience. Fair enough--one man's nit is another person's show-stopper. But when it comes to convergence--hardware, software and services all coming together as they do in digital music, for example--it's taking care of those nits that are crucial to delivering satisfying music. Good enough is just not good enough unless you are happy being an also-ran.

Why? Because convergent systems are tremendously complex--both to create and potentially to use. The trick is to hide that complexity to the user so that it appears easy. Doing that requires huge amounts of work and difficult choices and, yes, paying attention to seemingly small details. Cumulatively these small details add up to either ease the use of the system or to hinder it. Look at how many poorly executed solutions to the digital music system have come and gone over the years. The basic idea of most of them was probably solid; where they fell down was in taking care of the details: ease of discovering music, rules for DRM, pricing, ease of transaction, ease of interface, and so on.

Being trained as a designer I'm perhaps more fussy about these differences than many people. It's hard for me to say, as I've been looking at the world this way for so long. But a recent article by innovation guru Michael Schrage reminded me of how far apart designers are from most people in how they look at the manufactured world, including things like convergent media systems. Schrage was participating on the annual IDSA (Industrial Designers Society of America) and BusinessWeek design awards, and the experience was so unexpected that he says he literally will never look at "designed" objects the same way again.

By far the most striking revelation for me was the collective designer obsession with detail. You've no doubt heard the phrase "God is in the details" or "The devil is in the details"? This design jury had heaven and Earth covered. You can talk "brand" or "vision" or "concept" or "insight" or "elegance" until you're blue in the face, but world-class designers care about how those ideals are expressed in the details. Something that I would dismiss as a niggling detail the designers would say revealed the essential point they were trying to make. Great design is about the ordering and intention of details that you can--or aren't supposed to--see and feel.

This is why Apple is held in such high regard by designers--its unstinting attention to detail. Nothing is overlooked. That doesn't mean they get everything right all the time by any stretch (Dan Saffer at Adaptive Path is complaining that iTunes is not a very good application, for example), but you can always tell that things have been thought about and paid attention to. If you're playing in the same pond as Apple, they set the bar for experience because of how they sweat these details, and that forces you to do the same.

What was worrying about Schrage's article is that it reminded me of how little conscious attention most people involved in bringing these convergent systems into the world have about these small but crucial details. That's probably why Apple has had a pretty much uncontested run for the last five years.

It's not the most innovative name but the concept may be revolutionary. Metaplace, a virtual community that is currently being tested for launch in spring 2008, was one of the most talked about start-ups at the TechCrunch40 Conference. The new platform allows anyone to build a virtual world from scratch -- for the web or even mobile applications -- without any programming knowledge. Like other virtual communities such as Second Life, There, Entropia Universe, or World of Warcraft, the Metaplace worlds can be used for gaming, socializing, and e-commerce. And they come with the usual community features: forums, user ratings, wikis etc.

Unlike Second Life et al, however, users will not need to download any special software to engage in their respective virtual spaces; the service is hosted, so everything happens inside a browser. Because the Metaplace worlds are based on standard web technology, they can be embedded in blogs, Facebook profiles, MySpace pages, or web sites. "It's basically an MMO accessible through Flash apps, 3D clients, cell phones," as Om Malik writes: "While Second Life is evolving as an immersive 3D metaverse which slowly incorporates web elements like XML and RSS in-world, Metaplace is beginning as a web-based network which swallows the attributes of online worlds."

Metaplace is the brainchild of Ultima Online creator Ralph Koster. Koster ultimately envisions people share thousands of user-created virtual worlds with one another and tear down the walls between existing platforms. "We want to see 10,000 virtual worlds so that lots of wild and crazy stuff gets made because that is the only way it will advance as a medium," Koster says. His vision is just the latest in a series of moves to open up the "walled gardens" in online communities: Facebook opened up its platform for third-party developers, Second Life did, and MySpace is supposed to follow soon. Technology Review depicted a mash-up of Google Earth and Second Life into a "Second Earth" meta-verse, and models like Pageflakes allow users to completely customize their homepages. Metaplace presents an even more radical step -- the fully convergent virtual meta-platform for divergent user-generated content.

Slowly but surely we are seeing what may be the tentative contours of web 3.0: a user-generated, entirely customizable "world wide sim" that is mashed-up of geo-mapping (Google Earth), immersive 3D virtual worlds (Metaplace), and social networking features (Facebook) -- peppered with the power of the semantic web (Radar Networks) and a constant lifestream of user content.

There are many pundits who herald Apple for its "convergence strategy:" iTunes is on more than 300 million computers, Apple TV has been launched, and the iPhone has emerged as the most talked about new consumer electronic device in history and is expected to fuel the launch of more all-in-one gadgets from competing consumer electronic makers. Convergence is -- once again -- all the rage.

But what does convergence exactly mean? Let's try a very simplified overview. First of all, there is the media convergence between the worlds of telecoms, TV, Internet, and computing, including fixed-mobile convergence, voice and data convergence, and three-screen-convergence. Then there is what you may call messaging convergence: email, chat, video-conferencing, and other messaging tools are becoming more and more integrated. Device convergence, furthermore, describes the fact that almost everything from a laptop to a mobile phone to a television to a games console is now, arguably, the same kind of device: each consists of a microprocessor, a screen, storage, an input device, and a network connection. Finally, all these types of convergence require a convergent user experience. Media scholar Norbert Bolz argues that "Shaping the interface between telecommunications, new media, and computer technologies is the most important task of the future." Indeed, there is a gradual convergence of things with Internet and the Internet of things, resulting in ubiquitous computing and -- to a certain degree -- ubiquitous design.

Yet some outspoken critics of convergence remain skeptical. According to Al Ries, "In the high-tech world, divergence devices have been spectacular successes. But convergence devices, for the most part, have been spectacular failures." Ries provides some examples: "The first MP3 players (the Diamond Rio, for example) were flash-memory units capable of holding only 20 or 30 songs. The first iPod, on the other hand, had a hard drive and could hold thousands of songs. Now there were two types of MP3 players, a classic example of divergence at work. Every high-tech device has followed a similar pattern. The first computer was a mainframe computer, followed by the minicomputer, the desktop computer, the laptop computer, the handheld computer, the server and other specialty computers. The computer didn't converge with another device. It diverged. When the cellphone was first introduced, it was called a 'car phone' because it was too big and heavy to lug around. You might have thought it would eventually converge with the automobile. It did not. Instead it diverged and today we have many types of cellphones. Every Best Buy and Circuit City is filled with a host of other divergence devices that have been enormously successful: the digital camera, the plasma TV, the wireless e-mail device, the personal video recorder, the GPS navigation device. What convergence device has been a big success? Not many, although there have been a lot of convergence failures."

Ries was obviously wrong in predicting the failure of the iPhone, but nonetheless his view corresponds with the findings of a recent research project, conducted by Swisscom's R&D division. The study examines how users really use their cell phones, and it unearths some surprising insights that run counter to the widespread gospel of convergence: "People are in fact using different communications technologies in distinct and divergent ways. The fixed-line phone is the collective channel, a shared organisational tool, with most calls made in public because they are relevant to the other members of the household. Mobile calls are for last-minute planning or to co-ordinate travel and meetings. Texting is for intimacy, emotions and efficiency. E-mail is for administration and to exchange pictures, documents and music. Instant-messaging (IM) and voice-over-internet calls are continuous channels, open in the background while people do other things. Each communication channel is performing an increasingly different function."

So what do innovators make of these conflicting views? Of course, one could argue that the iPhone doesn't really try to be a convergent product and that, in fact, convergence is a myth that users don't care about. Is the answer to divergent user needs more divergence or better convergence? "We have to be extremely careful that we don't go in the Swiss army knife kind of direction where we lose focus on what the consumer wants," warns Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, the boss of Nokia, in a recent Economist article. I think he is right. It is paramount that companies have a "convergent view" on product ecosystems and know when to design the space between the devices and platforms and when not - this is what Apple is so good at. What we need is a greater diversity of hybrid devices that orchestrate convergence and divergence to the benefit of a more satisfying user experience. Convergence does not equal "sameness." Convergence and divergence are not fixed attributes; they are adverbs that describe the modality of an experience. A convergence/divergence combination will enable variety, which will again enable true customization. The Holy Grail is not convergence. It is a slight variation of a line by Malcom Gladwell: "There is no perfect product. There are only perfect products."