Patchworked

Tilting at windfarms: Apple’s MacBook Air offers a point-source solution to a systemic problem.

Apple’s unveiling of its new MacBook Air, the thinnest laptop on the market, was met with both great fanfare and great controversy by those interested in its eco-pedigree. Bruce Nussbaum sums up much of the enthusiasm in the business community in his blog Nussbaum on Design:

“What struck me most about Steve Jobs’ presentation was the effort he made is showing how green the 3 lb. Air is. It doesn’t have mercury or arsenic in its LCD and glass. The aluminum frame can be recycled. The circuitry is PVC free. And there is less packing material than other laptops.”

I admire Apple for making an attempt to mitigate its effect on the environment. But I expect much more from the company that brought together designers, programmers, and record labels to bring digital music to the mainstream. Hopefully this is just Apple’s first foray into sustainability – and we’ll soon see the whole Apple tree.

With the MacBook Air, though, Apple has seemingly abandoned the ecosystem approach. They haven’t rethought manufacturing. They haven’t redesigned the shipping or distribution system. They haven’t improved consumer access to component recycling centers. And most importantly, they haven’t addressed the underlying issues of disposability and planned obsolescence. It’s a bit like trying to solve a Rubik’s cube by getting all the colors on one side to match – and scrambling the other eight sides in the process.

For a company like Apple, that’s unfortunate. Its blockbuster iPod + iTunes offering clearly demonstrates Apple’s ability to think systemically. After all, the iPod would have been just another MP3 player had Steve Jobs overlooked the record labels, the need for digital rights management, the online purchasing system, and the easy-to-use interface that ties it all together. Bringing together each part of that ecosystem made the offering great. It wasn’t just about the iPod. It was a true music system.

It seems that the MacBook’s environmental shortcomings stem not from an attempt to mislead Apple aficionados, but rather from a misguided effort to solve a systemic problem – environmental damage caused by the computer industry – with a single solution. After all, environmental impact isn’t just measured by whether or not a product’s components will someday occupy space in a landfill. But that’s the only metric Jobs seems to have addressed. Issues like material consumption in manufacturing, energy consumption in transportation, and the lifespan of the product itself remain unresolved. And MacBook owners may not even know how to go about recycling their laptops once they’ve gone kaput.

So which is it: a green machine or greenwashed business as usual?

That’s all admirable – and certainly represents a vast improvement over current industry standards. But environmentalists and eco-blogs like Treehugger.com have rightly pointed out that the energy required to make and ship the machine, the virgin materials in each MacBook, and the very fact of its planned obsolescence are all decidedly not environmentally friendly.

Congregate, communicate, innovate: Silicon Valley eschews tele-interaction

The New York Times ran an article today about the micro-clusters of technology-related businesses dotting the San Francisco Bay Area. Networking lies to the south, near San Jose. Product design centers around Palo Alto. And digital media resides further north, up in San Francisco.

That’s an incredible irony: the metropolis that helped launch the information superhighway – indeed, the area that’s named after the silicon in processor chips – still relies on the interstate highway to do business. Yaniv Bensadon, the founder of a tech support startup, put it best:

“For a consumer Internet company, this is where everything happens. It’s true that things can be done anywhere on the Internet, but at the end of the day it’s still a people business.”

In an era when we rely on technology to do everything from ordering take-out to diagnosing illnesses, it’s easy to forget how much people still matter. But they do. Humans have spent the last several hundred thousand years evolving into highly sophisticated social creatures. We have complex systems for creating and communicating meaning, most of which go far beyond the words we verbalize. Indeed, the vast majority of meaning lies not in what we say, but the way we say it: gestures, expression, tone, even body heat. And we haven’t yet evolved past that. True, we can now pepper emails with increasingly sophisticated emoticons. But communication mediated by technology is necessarily stymied, because technology simply can’t re-create the hundreds of nonverbal cues we rely on.

This lesson is easy enough to understand in the context of romantic relationships. Nobody enjoys a long-distance relationship, no matter how many free night-and-weekend minutes they have. But for some reason, that lesson becomes muddied when it comes to business relationships. When people are trying to do something complicated, like create a new product, they often forget the basics. Smart, multi-disciplinary teams follow best practices, nailing down the design specs, forecasting revenue, and developing clever go-to-market plans. But what kills most innovation isn’t a lack of ideas. It’s a lack of relationships. At the end of the day, innovation is an intensely social activity. And it’s those relationships – often more than the quality of the ideas themselves – that determine whether an idea ever sees the light of day.

Ironically, Silicon Valley’s oft-maligned engineers may understand the basic social principle of innovation far better than their more outgoing peers in other industries. It’s a good reminder to the rest of us: innovation isn’t a creativity problem. It’s a people problem.  And sometimes, the engineers are the coolest kids on the block.

Innovation via Dog

I recently went on a walk with a friend and her new dog, Davey. For a puppy, he’s pretty well behaved. He mostly sits, tries to stay, and often keeps off the furniture. But walking through the park was another story altogether. He was a barking machine. First it was a forty-something woman on the jungle gym. A mom retrieving her child? “Arf! Arf! Arf!” Next it was a man wearing a track suit and making slow, balletic movements with his arms and legs. A Tai Chi practitioner? “Arf! Arf! Arf!” After a while, I started to think Davey had an aggression problem. But now I think it may have been something else entirely.

Cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner tells us that we make sense of the world through stories. When something doesn't make sense or violates our expectations, we tell a story about it to rationalize what we’ve seen. See that man in a suit talking to himself on a street corner? "Oh, he's probably using his Bluetooth." Your cube neighbor digging through the garbage? "I bet she accidentally threw away her sales report." And what about your otherwise dapper boss wearing Bermuda shorts to the staff meeting? "He must have spilled coffee on his pants this morning." We tell these stories to make the world make sense, and reassure ourselves that the universe is not a chaotic place. We believe that even strange-seeming circumstances have rational explanations - if only we can find them.

Dogs, on the other hand, have no such ability. Excepting Lassie, the average dog can no more tell a story than tie his shoes. So when something out of the ordinary happens, all a dog can do is bark.

That’s exactly what Davey was doing. He wasn’t trying to be aggressive. He was reacting to the violation of his expectations, in the only way he knew how.

It’s easy to forget how often we explain away out-of-the-ordinary events, dismissing incongruities in the world around us. Taking a walk with Davey was a good reminder of that. But it’s those very events that can point to the greatest opportunities for innovation and design. As innovators, maybe we should forget about market research – and just take our dogs for more walks.