Jason Francis Kraft

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The stereotype of technology innovation is that it gets realized by a private genius who works independently to envision and then implement a breakthrough product. Innovation is thought to be a solitary pursuit owned by the few, diametrically opposed to social pursuits, friends and partners. Steve Wozniak worked alone 16+ hours/day to assemble smaller and smaller circuit boards and innovate the first Apple IIe. He had no wife, no girlfriend, no social life. Steve Jobs made the product look good, formed business alliances, sold it and won customers. But Woz without Jobs or Jobs without Woz, and there would be no Apple.

The Neanderthal vanished from existence ~30,000 years ago succeeded by modern man. The popular notion is that modern man was smarter and more technologically advanced. But evidence suggests Neanderthals had approximately equal inventive capabilities, survival techniques and tools to show for it. The one vital difference: modern man collaborated, shared and socialized to a much greater degree than the insular, private Neanderthal. As soon as a man invented a new technique, everyone in his group knew about it and used it. By contrast, Neanderthal inventions were never fully realized and died with them. The lesson: modern man was more innovative, advanced and conditioned to survive because his culture socialized and shared its important advancements with itself, evolving and iterating through use, learning and collaboration.

Steve Wozniak and Neanderthal Man

The vast proliferation of Internet social platforms, widgets and user activity on them is not just mindless t(T)witter. It’s technology at work.

I’m both jealous and relieved not to be John Ive.

Ive gets to design 3-dimensional, physical products for Apple. A few of his most recognized creations:

With the exception of some home projects, like the tanzu on my previous NYC loft or the headboard on my new Los Gatos bed, I design 2-dimensional items—user interfaces for Web, desktop and Mobile technology services. My work does have an interesting 3rd dimension beyond just ink on substrate: the interactions that guide users through content and produce results. But the frustrating reality is that software is very ephemeral. I’ve worked on Web sites for weeks, months and even years, then exit and return 2 years later to find the business has transformed, my designs deleted save for remnant screenshots I preserved in my portfolio. If I’m lucky, millions of users navigate my work (ideally without it getting in the way of their hunt for content) for a relatively short time, then it vanishes, very little lasting, almost nothing for history.

John Ive’s best products get consumed, loved and then indoctrinated into MoMA. Not even my most notable work, or the work of the most famous interaction designers get elevated to museum status.

Then there is a dirty underbelly to industrial design. An Ive product isn’t just one sculpture to be admired; it gets mass-produced as a non-biodegradable piece of metal, plastic and chemicals. Then, 99.999999% of it gets thrown out, accumulating in landfills or melted down, emitting dangerous environmentally hazardous gases. Chinese children get lead poisoning.

← 2,000,000 discarded G4 cubes, iSubs and iPods

So, I’m relieved that both my good and bad work evaporates like water into the ether, an imaginary cloud of ex-software that clears space for another generation of apps, neither hurts nor kills. Software is green.

There’s only 1 hitch: I need this Ive-designed Powerbook to accomplish my work and even to write this post. For what it’s worth, I keep all of my Apple gear as mementos for my own history, sparing the environment for awhile.

James Cameron’s Avatar invents a new vocabulary of futuristic technology and alien biology. The mixture of imagery, special effects and action is fantastic and convincing. But seamlessly woven into the mesh of that world is something much simpler and even more inspiring: the notion that a change of context can morph simple human to genius.

Avatar’s hero, Jake Sully, is introduced as a 2nd-rate replacement for his brilliant, schooled brother who has recently been killed. Jake is an ex-Marine paralyzed from the waste down. Both physically compromised and mentally weak, he is barely more than a bedazzled mute presented with a seemingly unfortunate assignment: to engage with “combatant aliens” in a hostile world. Without much too lose and no apparent ambitions, he accepts. Upon entering the planetscape of Pandora as a biological alien Avatar, Jake’s motor-coordination and personality instantly emerge. The story doesn’t alter anything notable about the hero’s personality, just his body and environment. Everything down to his speech patterns remain the same. He simply becomes himself to his fullest in the culture he was always meant to exist, the species he was meant to become, the female he was meant to be with. The story is a coming-of-age. A withered man shrunken as tiny as a child gets transplanted to an artificial body that ushers his growth to become real. His character blossoms to its fullest potential within an environment he is perfectly suited to thrive.

Amidst today’s 6 billion living humans, the sinking realization of having never achieved one’s ultimate potential in an oppressive world is practically universal. If Avatar is right, we are all geniuses waiting for the correct sequence of events to align and change our environment finally to become ourselves. Context is the window to our genius.

In the case of Typekit I find myself pining for open source.

With the service, founder Jeff Keen created another hosted Javascript API. This one renders hundreds of native fonts as text on any site. Web designers have dreamed of such opportunity outside of Flash, native to the browser for years. Any font, cross-browser, cross-system, pre-loaded from the web page, easy to design, easy to manage and SEO.

What’s wrong with it? For one, it’s centralized. Every site using the Typekit javascript widget is dependent on its infrastructure. For two, it’s a company with a product for profit, not a standard. Because fonts are central to any Web designer’s toolbox, a framework for displaying them should be standardized. Designer’s have already paid to license the fonts they use to design with. With Typekit, Keen wants them to pay again and depend on his service.

Imagine HTML sold as a product. Control of the core markup for rendering every Web page in existence would put too much power in the hands of the company that sold it. And that’s the problem with Typekit. We can’t go there.

My prediction is Typekit may be toyed with by designers until a suitable alternative rises from the HTML 5 standard.

Early-stage bugs aside, the strategy and experience executed thus far by Boxee is impressive and promising. To paraphrase Boxee founder, Avner Rosen, they intend to be the FireFox of Internet video. A way to help users find and interact with video. But tethered to the Web and computer, that doesn’t quite achieve the lean-back TV-watching user experience. Enter “Boxee Box.”

Avner’s original strategy when approaching Union Square Ventures VC Fred Wilson was a hardware play. Fred said, “dead.” Avner returned with a ubiquitous Web-only software prototype. Fred said better, now get users. Rosen returned again with 10,000 users and an impressive growth curve and finally secured funding. Then, Boxee’s app ramped up features and users even faster.

With the release of Boxee Box we can now see Boxee’s focus to build the ideal hardware/software product, a more open, versatile Apple TV, was never thwarted. They followed the necessary evolutionary steps to get there first using the Web for what it’s become: a sandbox for product prototyping and a launch pad for serious companies.

Boxee commissioned the hardware design from Astrol Studios (Xbox 360 and Nike watches), and electronic engineering from D-Link.

Does Darwin’s theory of evolution conflict with the myth of Christianity? Of course it does. But to get you to attend church, a priest will reconcile the two based on “faith.” Likewise, survival of the fittest in capitalism conflicts with the benevolent force of open source development.

The faith placed in the ideals of open source creates a moral fabric to motivate developers. I cannot question its success in many cases, especially in these early days of computer evolution or a start-up company.

In an earlier era religion garnered most the will and material donations of the state. Entire civilizations were conquered in the name of God to carry home riches. The wealthiest entities on Earth were the churches, lined with gold from wars abroad.

Today religion is still with us and churches remain exempt from taxation. But in the modern world corporations have taken the power. Business rules the earth. Microsoft, Apple, Google, Cisco.

Faith-based principles eventually fade in importance as science, technology and markets take over. For those who still believe, the corporations continue to capitalize on faith with token open source programs and donations.

Start-ups often capture the imagination of open source development, both to leverage “free” IP and to “build the dream.” Without substantial funding from incumbent powers, it’s the only way to poke holes in the crowded and protected industrial complex. But those early open source companies cannot succeed as independent, operating entities without migrating to a commercial path or securing faith tokens from major corporations. FireFox, the open source browser, survives on Google donations. Open source blogging software WordPress.org spawned the paid alternative WordPress.com.

Like religion, it’s an inexorable fate for open source. But it will always have an important place in conception and early development.