It’s the second day of the wonderful Pop!Tech gathering in Camden, Maine, and the dicussions are shaping up as nicely as yesterday’s sessions.
Michael Schrage was the featured speaker early this morning. I introduced him and then, after he’d talked for a few minutes, got going with a question-and-answer session that I found illuminating. He’s a brilliant and accomplished man, and his new book, Serious Play, is a terrific synthesis of ideas that make great sense.
The conversation focused in part on the idea of “iteration” — prototyping again and again until you get things right, or right enough. As software moves into more and more of what we do and use, this notion takes on an interesting meaning, because ultimately we customers are the ones doing the testing of the prototypes, which become indistinguishable from actual products and services.
Marc Canter is now introducing what he calls a “new approach to user interfaces.” His upcoming software tool is kind of a meta-tool, which people will use to create all-encompassing computing environments the way they want to. It looks very, very interesting, and I’m hoping to get a more hands-on view of it soon.
Don Norman just referred to this essay, entitled “In Defense of Cheating,” in his portion of the discussion. Hmmmm.