Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: The technographer's net connection

Author:garret p vreeland
Posted:3/4/1999; 5:51:12 PM
Topic:ADSL
Msg #:3596 (In response to 3588)
Prev/Next:3595 / 3597

Don't worry about me and bandwidth; I'd just as soon waste it as anyone else.

I was trying to recall more about my meetings experience, when I remembered a piece of 3D software for UNIX called "TDI" ... it was from France, I think. I was looking for a broadcast 3-D solution, and their implementation really got me excited ...

Instead of onscreen sliders and other interface complications a la Alias Wavefront, they had a plug-in box with six dials on it that stood next to your keyboard. To extrude a shape, you turned one dial. To rotate it you turned another dial. It was so simple to do complex modeling, a total novice could do it.

The point for me was that the hardware and software were no longer factors between me and my creativity. I could "broad brush" an entire 3-D scene in minutes, then dive into the finer menu-driven features to make the scene more realistic. They took a paradigm that was familiar, and applied familiar functions to it.

Maybe for technography you implement an on-screen "remote" of sorts, with pushbuttons for fast access to important commands ... promote, demote, embolden, etc. etc. Hot keys or Fkeys for fast access (I'm repeating myself here, but ease of use and transparent interface are GOLDEN in applications like this ...). Hey, hook a Palm into all this and use it to drive something ...

You know what? I haven't had the time to download the pics of the interface yet ... I'll do that tonight. I'm running the danger of covering territory that's already been tramped by thousands ...

Between you, me and the wall, videoconferencing always was a disaster. It never worked properly; the cost far outweighed the benefits. I hated them. The technical always overrode the original point of the conference. It was more of an "ego trip" for a corporation to do a videoconference; they were always happy afterwards, for having been on the "cutting edge."

The first show I ever went out on was a Campbell Soup corporate meeting ... the first time I ever saw interactive voting in use ... you know, the little boxes at your seat and you vote on questions projected up on screen. This was 1984/5 ... and the Campbell senior management "got it." They understood what power they had to poll their employees and really make worthwhile changes in their structure to fight the onslaught of the unbelievably cheap ramen soups.

This outline/heirarchy idea of yours is an even better tool to communicate/share ideas. I'm thinking of that same Campbell show, and wondering how much more effective their response to the ramen threat would have been if they could have shared this same technology/technography to brainstorm and solve their problem. By using interactive voting, they could only answer questions posted pre-show, gleaned from upper managements' impressions of what the salesforce thought. Using your outline/technography concept, EVERYONE could have been problem-solving in a first-person, realtime fashion. They would have come up with literally hundreds of solutions ... even REGIONAL solutions to their problems.

Oh, one other concept I forgot to mention earlier ... another thing we noticed about using an outline/heirarchy format in meetings was that even a totally "fluff" meeting would swiftly become pointed and important. Once you start breaking ideas down, almost as fast as you promote lines, you go from a totally useless meeting to the most important meeting of your life.

Try it.(You, Dave, probably have. Anyone else reading this should try it out, even on paper at a meeting). Start off light, and see how fast the heavy concepts come. It's great fun to watch ... even more fun to participate!

Ah, well. I'm preaching to the choir. Don't know if you've done this yet, but wouldn't it be cool to post the outline heirarchy of this technography project discussion, and have "open source" on the technography issue? A board is nice, but a living, working outline would be SERIOUSLY COOL. Even cooler in realtime ...

I keep trying to sign this off, but I get other ideas. What about posting entire drawings/documents in the heirarchy?

AAUUGGHH. I have work to do ... this is too much fun.

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