[MUSIC]. Now I'd like to talk about history as a constraint. Like what is the role of history plays, what came before and how does that create obligation for what comes in the future? And so, history, let's think of this as the you know, obligations that are created by past beliefs. You know, how yesterday's actions and experiences and decisions shape, that is constrain, right today's options and the things that we have as possibilities today. And so if we're going to innovate, to what extent do we have to take account of what came before. You know the past really is never dead. It just sort of keeps coming back and asserting itself in different ways. So that's what we have to watch out for, is when things in the past, we're not aware of them. We don't understand why they are the way they are, and then what it is that we have to do in order to acknowledge that. And its to, to honor what came before in a way that allows us to move forward. And it does not constrain what we're trying to do, go forward. So then we're going to talk about three things. things in the world. That is sort of physical infrastructure. The things we connect to. We're going to talk about knowledge in the world. The skills of practices. Things that people know, you know, how they know of them, things that people have come to understand and their understanding in the world. The kind of cultural practices and traditions and what kind of obligation that creates that we have to consider as we innovate at a societal level. So things in the world. Think about things in the world like the infrastructures. Now we have segway and I'll drive on the street and I'll drive on the sidewalk then it becomes a problem. The segway needed this infrastructure in order to allow adoption to happen. Now without the infrastructure without the place to write it, it was dead innovation. I'll show you another innovation early problem the typewriter. So the early typewriters were problematic, because they had laid out the keyboards alphabetically and as people would learn to type and type faster and faster there were constant jams. And so these kind of jams, I don't know if you've ever played with a a typewriter like this so it's real easy to get the keys to jam up. And so in the late 1800's I think it was like 1868 maybe Christoper Sholes came up with a different layout. And so what he figured out was that there are these keystrokes that are in close having keys that are closed to each other made these mechanical things that go up close to each other and they would jam. And so he set it was all spread out the frequency of these letters. In, in essence, slowing down the person from typing, and it, it'll create fewer jams, so basically he spread it out and he came up with, called a QWERTY keyboard. QWERTY, which is named for the top row of letters across the the keyboard, as you can see here. So people like the QWERTY keyboard. People learn how to use it. People were going along with it. You know it wasn't quite as fast as it could be. But nonetheless, it was you know people thought, yeah this is great. Soon someone came out with a different keyboard. This was Blickensderfer and he came out with a keyboard and it was faster. It was lighter. It was cheaper. And also it did not jam. And the reason it jammed was it use the balls. So like an IBM select, you can see one of those, it has little balls with all letters on it and it would go that way. It was mechanical, in was about 20 years later. In fact, it was very very superior to the Remington from a technical point of view but was unable to take over what happened in the intervening 20 years. So when Remington bought the rights to the Sholes keyboard to QWERTY keyboard. They started a number of secretary schools that started to professionalize in the you know, based in the profession of being a secretary, they have people learn how to do it. So they have about 20 years of head start and even though it's something that came along that was better, faster, cheaper, they were unable to unseat it. The people said no thanks, because the keyboard layout was different than the QWERTY keyboard layout. might have had a, you know something like this, I use a Dvorak keyboard, even nowadays, you have an option on the computer, you can actually change the keyboard, and yet people don't. Well why not? Well, we have this installed base, right, there's knowledge in the world, we know how to do it, we know this way, this infrastructure's there. And so if I were to produce a keyboard that looked like one of these other things here, it would be hard for people to learn. I couldn't be insured that there would be enough people in the world that know how to do that. The QWERTY keyboard, on the other hand, I can assume that everyone knows how to use that keyboard. This other keyboard, the piano keyboard, this thing drives me crazy. It's got like three keys, then two, then three, then two, then all the black keys, and then, you know, there's some place, some time people know up there, they push, they know, which, what, which one to push. It really is actually kind of perplexing. Actually I know how to play the piano and it's still perplexing to me. Because as you try to learn more and more things it's not intuitive at all, and yet if you were to produce something that was, you were going to call a keyboard. It pretty much has a look like this, because there's a history and when, that history creates obligation for going forth. Unless what I was doing had something to do with these keys, I probably should pretty much stick to that kind of keyboard layout. If I want to assume there's people in the world who can actually use the things. I'm proposing innovation. Back around the time of the invention of the gramophone Thomas Edison what he did was he had the gramophone and then a live person play behind the screen. And trying to get people, training people to hear the difference between them to say,you know what, the fact is the rise is actually, the gramophone is actually superior to this person playing. So the person playing will make mistakes it won't sound as good. It doesn't sound as in, in the same way as this gramophone here. So it had reverb. It has all sorts of things that the, the, the room, sound of the room came with the gramophone. Which is where the person behind the, on the screen didn't sound as good. And so what was happening was there were these understandings in the world about what music is, what does it mean to consume music, that he was actually changing by doing this. In fact this was an early version of the, you may be of a generation where you remember there was some ads that were, is it live or is it memorex. and so he was doing this a long time before that. Even later, there's still this idea of what is high-end stereo, you know,, is it vinyl, is it CDs, is it mp3s, and that people keep you know, there's a constant debate about this, about what does it mean to here, how can you hear these, these different kinds of music in some way? What is better? What does it mean to be high end? And these are things that people have an understanding and distinct opinions about. And so the history of what came before is something we have to account for and our beliefs about these things. Also, if we look back at the industry constraints we talked about last week about the market. So if I have a lot of vinyl, I'm really reluctant to buy a bunch of CDs. If I have a bunch of CDs, I'm really reluctant to go to MP3s. And so this is this kind of, of adoption cost we're thinking about here as well. So in addition to the history, creating this kind of knowledge in the world, these things that people know. It also creates these adoption costs, these changes then that we have to make, in order to change our lives around these new things. We adopt innovations for what they say about us. And so, is there good reason to stand in line,you know, at the Apple Store, wherever, in the iStore, the G-phone store. stand around the, the block, you know, sleep there and camp out there overnight, for that device when you can just order online, just get it a few days later. I mean do you really need to make a phone call that day with that thing? Why do people do that? Well this is what this is about them. So it's more than just the function of the device it really is just with the device is about them. If I have one of these then I'm one of those kind of people and one of those kind of people who art of desirable in certain way. And so what it says about us is an important aspect of this about the[UNKNOWN] in the world because people understand what understand what it is and people understand how to interpret this thing. And so when they say you're with it, understand, 'oh, he's one of those people, I like that. So there three ways of history things in the world, you know, the physical things, infrastructures, things that we connect to, knowledge in the world with skills, and practices that we undertake in what they mean. And that also our understandings in the world of cultural practices and traditions that we have. And how it is that we express those traditions through time. So if we want to overcome history constraints again, I think overcoming is kind of a strong word. I think it's if we want to understand history constraints and how it is we can operate within them then offer the following. Let's think about these three things, like things in the world, knowledge in the world, and understandings in the world. Think about the physical infrastructure. I understand and I've, I did spend a little time with the people that created the Nissan Leaf. And one thing that's happening here is there's a company that is putting charging stations up and down and across the state of Tennessee, where Nissan headquarters So there's one problem which is the cars. If you want to fast charge them. If you want to charge them quickly. They require a high voltage power system of 480 volts. And the prob, problem is basically there's gas stations everywhere. But there's not everywhere that you can get 480 volts. Most homes will not have a 480 access to 480 volts. It's usually industrial places or, or eating establishments, places like that. Eating establishments have them because they have large ovens, and large, you know, washers, and, and, large machines and heaters and things like that and so they have that kind of voltage there. So, what they did was they actually partnered up with these eating places to say, you have the infrastructure in place, you have the 480 volts and that kind of thing we need. And we have people you know, that we can bring, so let's collaborate on this and let's actually leverage the infrastructure that you have and allow us to charge cars while people are here. In fact, you can charge one of these cars to about 80 or 90% of the charge within half an hour which is maybe about the time that a person would spend inside of a a small restaurant inside of a place like this. Like this Cracker Barrel in in, in Nashville. Though I have seen some in other places as well. And a Walmart, I've seen charges in places where people would go, and spend some time. And also where the infrastructure is accessible. So again, this car would be very difficult to bring out if it weren't for the infrastructure. Consider also, this was very similar to the digital camera. The digital camera was Sony focused on the camera, whereas the infrastructure was also being done by others. So the printing was being done by HP. The hard drive was being done by Conner. The CPU was being done by Intel. And so as those things were done that they became the infrastructure for, to allow the digital camera to exist. And so again, this is sort of understanding what's out there, right, as a way of being able to leverage, being able to use to help our innovation move forward. Knowledge and practices in the world where the skills and practices that people have and how they have that. I don't know if you ever had the experience where you walk up to a door and you're pushing on it and pushing on it and it won't, it won't open. It's like, you're trying to push it. And then someone says, hey, wait a minute. That's a pulling door, not a pushing door. They say, why? Looks like it should be a pushing door. I don't understand this. A friend and colleague, Donald Norman wrote a great book called The Design of Everyday Things. It's about design and how we design things that are actually not intuitive. People know a lot of things. But there is knowledge in the world, and so why don't we use that? If people know things like how to hold something or how to operate something, why not use that in the innovation? Because if people had to learn new things, they're much more likely to not adapt because the things that we don't understand are much more likely to reject than things that we do understand. So there is this knowledge in the world that comes from history. That comes from people's past experiences. So we use that. We should definitely be using that knowledge in the world. Then there's this thing of understanding cultural practices in the world. That there are open standards. A soda it is a, a, a soft drink. You know, they generally come in 12 ounce sizes. Right, and that's a standard. And so unless you have a really good reason for not using a 12 ounce cup or a televised drank. And your making a drink. use 12 ounces. Because the machines will hold that. Everything's about that. If your trying to make some change around that then that's fine. But don't make arbitrary changes, just to make changes. JPEG standard. You know, JPEG, the photographic standard. You know, if your doing something photographic, use the standard. Unless you have a really good reason not to then you should use it. People will complain about it. Say oh, it's terrible, it's blocky, it has, you know, it's not as good as it could be. Well if you change it just to change it, it's very unlikely that people are going to adopt that. Because cameras don't work on it and there's all the software that works on it. And people understand JPEG and want to use it, so allow them to use it unless you have a very, very good reason not to and then you need to explain to people why this is not JPEG. Why do you want to use something else? So these three ways of history, things in the world, knowledge in the world and understanding in the world, are things we can leverage, that we can use, that's not about overcoming an option, we can potentially use them to help us drive an option of, of our innovations in the end. So how do we overcome these societal constraints, you know? Is that, is that really the goal here? So again I've been saying all along, that it's really not about subverting society, that the societal constraints have a role. They have something important in them. It's about protecting society. You know, it could be that society's right, that your proposition for change is you know, it's not going to work, that it's going to be harmful to you, it's going to be harmful to society. And so again, you want to consider these things worth of values and their values any of that drives. How our social control. Like living asserted around our innovation. And also whats the role of history in terms of what our proposition for change is. How are we changing in, or is there any obligation that we have to the past in the direction that we change. So with that that closes out our discussion of societal constraint. And next up is the segway case. What I need you to do is read the segway case before you actually go to the video, and then watch the video and we'll talk about and debrief the segway case.
