TECHNOticles

Guest writer Heena put together an article for us a while ago where she redefines TechnoTicles from [Technology + Articles] to TechnoTickles[Technology as a result of a Tickle] (mind you the ‘c’ has been replaced by ‘ck’). Here she presents her views on creativity and innovation in the technology space.

A tickle makes me laugh when it catches me unaware. It’s a funny feeling I don’t completely understand. But tickles, the funny sensations, are not just related to my external being as I often find myself being tickled in my brain. The unwanted tickle causes an itch, which makes me take action involuntarily.

Tickles inside our mind can force us to think, to imagine and cause enough irritation to make us take actions that we otherwise won’t dare to do.

Popularly, creativity has been associated with the people from the art world, painters, dancers or musicians. The common trait among them being their thought process that is adapted to boundary less imagination. But creativity is not really limited to the domain of these few fields. Browsing through the history of technology and computing, there are innumerable incidents representing technologists becoming leaders when they married their technological depth to their peripheral understanding of some distant fields. Some of the innovative products and services are presented below in order to elicit this fact.

Creativity happens when we allow ourselves to make mistakes. The ideal way for an organization to be creative is to not just look to the experts, but allow explorers (people who have a passion to explore and those who are not afraid of making mistakes) to make decisions once in a while.

This notion led the Interaction design Guru Alan Cooper to reverse the trend of programming of interactions. Earlier interactions between software and humans were designed by programmers. But the problem lay in that they always designed programs, not products. They designed their code such that it ran more efficiently and could be easily worked upon by other engineering professionals. But the design that Alan Cooper does or that happens at IDEO is very different. Teams at these companies are concerned about Product Design and the interaction that the software has with humans, assuring that human users do not get frustrated with the product and actually end up being delighted. They design products outside in, rather than from inside out. This methodology sets them apart, and is the reason that they are leaders in creative consulting.

The potential of realizing imagination, realizing dreams lies in the simple question: ‘Are we ready to take risks?”.

In the past, people have had ideas that would in their time be considered absurd, but have turned out to be immensely successful and game changing. That is because creativity is a funny thing. The more absurd the thought, the more potential it carries to be creative. Some people just feel these thoughts (resulting from needs) tickle in their brain and around their neck. And just like the sweat it keeps irritating them until they are realized.

Peter Burns, the talented designer of iPod iWatch created his idea during his universities days. While jogging, he used to hate using the standard iPod headphones. He thought there must be a better way to strap on/hold your iPod. So he twisted, substituted, combined, modified and had put the iPod in different use, and now he calls it iWatch.

Doug Engelbart, father of the mouse, realized that problem solvers required the ability to interact with information displays using some sort of device to move [a cursor] around the screen. There were several devices then in use, or being considered for use: the light pen, joysticks, etc. but the best and efficient device was missing. This need ‘tickled’ Doug Engelbart and the technology which bought a revolution in the world of computing, the mouse, was born.

Ray Tomlinson gave society one of the greatest communication tools in history. He was not sure about what he was doing. It was a hack. It probably took five-six hours to create the technology. The idea cropped by observing the facility that had proved its usefulness in sending messages to the same computer. It stuck to him: What about when someone was on another computer, maybe across the country? It would be like the telephone but they wouldn’t have to be there to answer the phone. This idea on implementation gave us our first email.

‘Innovation best comes from people who know nothing about the topic’.

Steven J Sasson (inventor of the digital camera), has very beautifully portrayed the hidden reason behind the innovative ideas in the above statement. With his boundary less imagination and playing with the given tool he created the first digital camera which bought revolution in the world of photography. He was given a charge-coupled device. It was a brand new device and he was asked to do some imaging experiments. Not really knowing what to do, he decided to make an image-capture device, made it portable and he came up with the idea of building a digital camera, different from the conventional camera that existed then. He just adapted an analogist’s way to take pictures, he was no photography expert. I would again call it the ‘tickle’ in his brain, that helped him make the connection, the connection between the previously unconnected elements. When a thing is molded, twisted or related with seemingly unrelated it generates something new and innovative.

At the end I would like to quote words from Abraham Maslow:

The key question isn’t “What fosters creativity?” But it is why in God’s name isn’t everyone creative? Where was the human potential lost? How was it crippled? I think therefore a good question might be not why do people create? But why do people not create or innovate? We have got to abandon that sense of amazement in the face of creativity, as if it were a miracle if anybody created anything.

I think it’s time that more of us let the tickles inside our brains to take control of us, to bring our technology thoughts to the outside world, to be ready to take risks and venture into creating the worlds that we at present only imagine.