Transcript below from Mark's keynote at the inagural eComm 2008. The corresponding slides can be found here.
Chair: We are now moving off the lightning talks and we're moving to a 20-minute key note. We are moving to a trio of talks based around design. We have Frog Design, we have Bug Labs, we have Yuvee and we have Mark Rolston, who is the Chief Creative Officer of the legendary Frog Design. And I think that Mark is going to be speaking about what problems that we are here to solve, what the value proposition is for consumers and what the drivers are. So please welcome Mark.
Mark Rolston: Thank you. So, I think that I am going to slow things down a little bit at least. I got 20 minutes to burn here and I probably do not have 20 minutes material. [Laughing] I was telling Lee [Dryburgh] I feel like a little bit like a fish out of water with some of these topics [previous talks]. What I bring is more of a message from a user experience perspective in a little less industry specific look at things. But perhaps that's something important today.
First of all, rule of thumb in what I have to say. Change is inevitable and it is an important idea to us and that is the business we are in. We are either an enabler, a catalyst or at times, a provocateur on this basic idea with industries. The two important parts of this idea are changed in what largely I hear everyone talking about today is in terms of making things better. But there is another kind of change which is different. I want to talk a little bit about that. And the way to frame that story up a little bit is to first talk about maybe the life of the product or "it". This is the singularity that I am referring to. And this mental model that is so critical in a product's success and the life span of a product.
So, if we start in the beginning of a product's life, there are some sort of inspiration. Something gets it going. It comes from nothing and becomes something. We are not sure what it is, what is "it." I want to dwell on this word "it" because I think that that is a critical idea in the minds of consumers.
A new model emerges when we have that. We may not know quite what it is at that point. The author of that may give it a name but the public does not know quite what to think about it. And over time, it becomes "it", a way that a single word might express the common understanding of what this thing is in an industry. Even then, it may undergo some evolution. It may change course. It may actually bifurcate. It may become multiple things. And even better, it may come in collision with another market with its own perception of what it is. What is interesting about that is quite often, more often than not, this product in many of these industries, I am going to come around with this industry, is still beholden to that original mental model, that original "it." The way the world thinks of it and it ends up being a box. It ends up of being a limiting conceptual boundary for what it is. So change becomes beholden to this singularity. Almost likely, the astrophysical phenomenon, it is sucking in every attempt to escape out of that reality.
I will give you an example. I will try to be a little bit more concrete here. The car. Do not take me to task for the genealogy here. I took some exceptions. But the automobile, it starts with a basic model hundred years ago or more than that. Even through all of the innovation, what we call innovation with the automobile, it still is basically, even with a number of iterations, and this is just one manufacturer, the number of iterations that we have created still basically is the same thing. The way we buy it, the way we use it, the value proposition and the way that people understand this product is still the same thing. So, that leaves me to this industry. Sublime statement here. We unfortunately, are trying to apply that kind of thinking to a model like this.
I want to introduce this idea and where this might be going. We have the telephone. I am going to focus on the handset itself. I know that a lot of folks have been talking about the services behind it but I want to talk about what the users gets and the way they focus their attention on what "it" is. And, that is often through the device that they hold in their hands. The physical and functional expressive reality and not all of the business behind that.
That telephone, while simple in its initial incarnation is actually beholden to a lot of functions. We sort of plugged in all these different things; all of a sudden "it" is now challenged by a lot of different players and a lot of different mental models. Those things are born out of other realities or other sources for what these mental models, you might say interface, the market approach, the technical realities, the boundaries. Just the thinking that defines these products. And all of the sudden, the phone is incredibly challenged. And those things all come from different corners of the world that you might say. And again, you could look at these six ways to a hundred but hopefully this gets the basic idea across.
In the end with this happening, the phone ceases to be a phone. It ceases to be the "it" that it was originally born with. Why is that? What we are facing here is that software is allowing for the product's ever shifting identity. That original product, the thing that we hold becomes almost a non-object to this dynamic reality that sits within that. It is almost just like a hole in the world, a portal that allows something dynamic to come through. "It" can essentially be anything you want it to be. And that, in a way that we normally think about products is really challenging. We want to design something with a sort of singular identity where everybody says that this is what it is supposed to be and what happens when "it" becomes some anything that you want it to be?
So, we move from a literal, from a design perspective, from a product creation challenge. Something where the form, and function, the story is easy to tell, it is literal. You can almost look at something as an alien from another planet and over some exercise,grok what it was suppose to be doing for that culture, for those people, to a more abstract relationship between form and function.
The physical object of course looses its functional identity. What it is instead, as I said is a portal. The physical object does not become meaningless, it takes on new roles. Here, it is fashion and it is self-identity. Like what people have been talking about portals, this physical object becomes another part of my outfit or my dress but it is not what it was. In that, it was at one point an expressive way of identifying what it does. At this point, it is not, it is instead something that is just part of my outfit. What it does is a dynamic reality beneath that. So, what are the drivers of this change? Technology easily,democratization of these tools, these types of platforms allow folks like us in a direct idea relationship and folks like you to move more quickly from idea to execution for the concept itself is that much closer to the execution. And therefore, the opportunity to make a radical change to escape that sort of singularity is much easier.
The ecosystem is driving that. In other words, a product does not exist in isolation anymore. We have a lot of discussions about this today. This I think is one of the most fascinating things and as a design consultancy, one of the most difficult aspects. There is less and less opportunity to create that sort of singular statement that almost a mixture of political, emotional, fashion statement in this one gesture. Folks, we have been around since 1969 and we very practiced to that. But the new reality in making products is a much more systemic challenge.
Form and input, I think that for whatever reason, there has been a culmination of these radical ideas that for many years just floated around in Power Points in the back rooms of large companies and small. They were tossed around inside the design firms but they never went anywhere. But one or two products managed to escape and that leads to the next two points.
Competitive landscape, just at the time that that was hitting critical mass, you have some players getting weaker and some new players are entering the market namely this one.
This is a shot of the opening sales day in New York for the iPhone. And when customers demonstrate a willingness to accept these new models in the industry dog piles, then you have this opportunity to truly move from the current model or the current singularity to something new. And that is the opportunity in front of us. "It" is changing. "It" is becoming something else. This industry has an opportunity to seize that moment and to define something new.
Chair: Any questions?
Audience: So, when you are looking something like the iPhone which has grown tremendously, what is "it"? What do you see the "it" is?
Mark Rolston: I think that if we over simply the story, it is the new computer, you might say. "The PC is dead, long live the PC" or you could throw in "The phone is dead, long live the phone." But the two were colliding. Apple's essentially, if you watched to SDK release last week, they essentially pulled - some of our folks inside called the Windows '95 moment. They unified this development platform, they have opened it up and I think that the iPhone, you are going to quickly see, is going to move away from being phone to being sort of ubiquitous, mobile portal into your life. Telephony may actually be a very minor feature in sort of the net use that occurs on the phone. I might even say that it might even end up sub 10% if you measure across the customers. They are going to be doing everything that they do on PCs today. And what has been so beautiful about the PC is that it is agnostic. It does not give a crap on what you do with it. You do what you want to do on that. An invention, a need and even random or just whimsical desire can be expressed on that device and there is no business model to get in the way. And I think that the iPhone just jumped into that pond and we are going to see a lot of interesting invention.
Chair: Mark, were you here when I opened up today?
Mark Rolston: No.
Chair: Because, you have actually echoed what I said about the telephone is dead. You have echoed many things. So that was cool. Can you comment on Android? Any general comments on Android?
Mark Rolston: Android takes what one company is doing as a provocateur and makes it wide. Android is the antidote of what Apple has presented. Apple is going to go off and do that on their own but the whole world cannot get behind that model. The last time that they did that, we had Microsoft becoming a giant gorilla and Apple actually I think will be a lot less friendly as a Gorilla than even Microsoft. And so, I think that Android is a fantastic antidote to end up. We are actually doing a lot of development with android so we are incredibly behind it.
To add, what is really fascinating about that and I cannot name people, but a lot of players who have no business in this industry, they are not about communications and not about telephony but they are just about consumer features and consumer products in a broad sense are using that and some normalization of platforms to jump in and make products that are going to fly right in the face of people like Samsung, Motorola and the carriers. It is a fantastic time. You are going to see that real soon.
Chair: So, it means that the phone is no longer a phone and the television is no longer a television. That is just a terrible battle. We talk about convergence but that is where we do not know what the damn thing is or what it wants to be because it can be potentially everything and voice becomes secondary anyway.
It is a computer, the iPhone anyway. So we are still calling a phone. Do you think that in twenty years time we will be talking about telephones?
Mark Rolston: We might use the word but the word would have ceased to become what it meant. We may use it just to describe it in its form factor.
Chair: What if you spend most of your time shopping on or looking up information and the only place of telephony...
Mark Rolston: Again, the word becomes sort of a meaningless carrier to that. We may come up with another word. That actually is a brand challenge and that the [inaudible] to how that is accepted. I do not think that it is something you plan on or can talk about with any accuracy. It is like fashion.
Audience: A question from the back since you are talking about fashion. We are still talking about "it," right? There is just this thing that I have got in my pocket or the guy [James Body] has got and all these things that he is going to security with.
What do you see as the future of wearable computers and everyone's got this bluetooth thing. When are we going to become borgs to some extent because everyone got this little bluetooth devices in their pockets. It seems to me that people at some point are going to stop wanting to carry these things and just wear clothing or something that even more of a statement, I guess.
Mark Rolston: I think that is easily true. But that is far enough out there. That would be a talk with the futurist rather than a designer and I am what you call a near futurist, you might say. So, I am focused on what we can actually accomplish within a reasonable amount of time. I think absolutely that a lot of sociological change has to happen. We still identify with a point of contact even with devices just like with humans. So holding something in our hands, is very meaningful even if its meaning that I try to imply is actually being driven by lots of outside forces and outside systems. There is an infliction point there, that singularity that we like to have in our hands and we will define as a single thing even though it represents many things.
Audience: I am from UK and the average number of mobile devices and subscriptions per person is 1.6. That is an interesting number because it is going up. And I think that in Italy, the number I think is above 2. Most people I see with iPhones have at least one other phone as well. And I am so quite interested in what you are thinking about. The fact that people will have multiple devices, in my belief is because they are cheap, they are differentiated and so you might have an iPhone but you will have a phone as well perhaps.
Mark Rolston: Sure, I think that two ways to answer that is, one, iPhone is a baby. It is not what it will become and I am not here to defend the iPhone. I think that the point is that looking at the phone as just phone is what is about to change or what is about to blow up. So people may own multiples but each of those may represent different modulations of that dynamic reality. That sort of hole and space that is possible or they may actually intentionally from a fashionable perspective and I say fashion in a broad way, narrow their functionality. If you look at what Apple did with the iPod, sorry about that Apple again example, but they narrowed the offering there to tell a simpler story. And that in essence is sort of a fashionable way of addressing the product's identity. It is not a technically bound thing or it is not a market thing but it is the way of crystallizing the value that they want to define in that product. And I think that people having multiple handsets is a similar type of phenomenon.
Audience: I guess the question over here to your left. Could Nokia pull this off? Nokia having 40% of whatever or the market.
Mark Rolston: Nokia certainly could pull it off. But I think Nokia with their platforms is a little too subscribed to an agnostic take on value. And, that is not how you give birth to a market that is how you follow-up. And so, the market is too young right now and what you need is a lot of high value and highly contextual applications that say, "This is the way to go" and what I have seen so far in the touch platform that they are developing and the existing platform is that the experience is shabby. It is kind of cobbled together and the market is growing out of that. It looks like the technology underneath and it should not. This is too late for that. Those things will be challenged.
The agnosticism is a great growth stage but you cannot end up there so Nokia needs to grow out of that. I think that they have the capacity to but they are also slaved to the success of that early platform. All the developers are going to bitch and whine if they try and move the direction that I am suggesting.
Microsoft faces that, right? That many PC platforms, that many variations of the PC, that many application developers, it is hard for Microsoft to make a bold escape from their own destiny. Nokia is a smaller version of that, easily.
Chair: Thank you very much Mark.
Chair: We are now moving off the lightning talks and we're moving to a 20-minute key note. We are moving to a trio of talks based around design. We have Frog Design, we have Bug Labs, we have Yuvee and we have Mark Rolston, who is the Chief Creative Officer of the legendary Frog Design. And I think that Mark is going to be speaking about what problems that we are here to solve, what the value proposition is for consumers and what the drivers are. So please welcome Mark.
Mark Rolston: Thank you. So, I think that I am going to slow things down a little bit at least. I got 20 minutes to burn here and I probably do not have 20 minutes material. [Laughing] I was telling Lee [Dryburgh] I feel like a little bit like a fish out of water with some of these topics [previous talks]. What I bring is more of a message from a user experience perspective in a little less industry specific look at things. But perhaps that's something important today.
First of all, rule of thumb in what I have to say. Change is inevitable and it is an important idea to us and that is the business we are in. We are either an enabler, a catalyst or at times, a provocateur on this basic idea with industries. The two important parts of this idea are changed in what largely I hear everyone talking about today is in terms of making things better. But there is another kind of change which is different. I want to talk a little bit about that. And the way to frame that story up a little bit is to first talk about maybe the life of the product or "it". This is the singularity that I am referring to. And this mental model that is so critical in a product's success and the life span of a product.
So, if we start in the beginning of a product's life, there are some sort of inspiration. Something gets it going. It comes from nothing and becomes something. We are not sure what it is, what is "it." I want to dwell on this word "it" because I think that that is a critical idea in the minds of consumers.
A new model emerges when we have that. We may not know quite what it is at that point. The author of that may give it a name but the public does not know quite what to think about it. And over time, it becomes "it", a way that a single word might express the common understanding of what this thing is in an industry. Even then, it may undergo some evolution. It may change course. It may actually bifurcate. It may become multiple things. And even better, it may come in collision with another market with its own perception of what it is. What is interesting about that is quite often, more often than not, this product in many of these industries, I am going to come around with this industry, is still beholden to that original mental model, that original "it." The way the world thinks of it and it ends up being a box. It ends up of being a limiting conceptual boundary for what it is. So change becomes beholden to this singularity. Almost likely, the astrophysical phenomenon, it is sucking in every attempt to escape out of that reality.
I will give you an example. I will try to be a little bit more concrete here. The car. Do not take me to task for the genealogy here. I took some exceptions. But the automobile, it starts with a basic model hundred years ago or more than that. Even through all of the innovation, what we call innovation with the automobile, it still is basically, even with a number of iterations, and this is just one manufacturer, the number of iterations that we have created still basically is the same thing. The way we buy it, the way we use it, the value proposition and the way that people understand this product is still the same thing. So, that leaves me to this industry. Sublime statement here. We unfortunately, are trying to apply that kind of thinking to a model like this.
I want to introduce this idea and where this might be going. We have the telephone. I am going to focus on the handset itself. I know that a lot of folks have been talking about the services behind it but I want to talk about what the users gets and the way they focus their attention on what "it" is. And, that is often through the device that they hold in their hands. The physical and functional expressive reality and not all of the business behind that.
That telephone, while simple in its initial incarnation is actually beholden to a lot of functions. We sort of plugged in all these different things; all of a sudden "it" is now challenged by a lot of different players and a lot of different mental models. Those things are born out of other realities or other sources for what these mental models, you might say interface, the market approach, the technical realities, the boundaries. Just the thinking that defines these products. And all of the sudden, the phone is incredibly challenged. And those things all come from different corners of the world that you might say. And again, you could look at these six ways to a hundred but hopefully this gets the basic idea across.
In the end with this happening, the phone ceases to be a phone. It ceases to be the "it" that it was originally born with. Why is that? What we are facing here is that software is allowing for the product's ever shifting identity. That original product, the thing that we hold becomes almost a non-object to this dynamic reality that sits within that. It is almost just like a hole in the world, a portal that allows something dynamic to come through. "It" can essentially be anything you want it to be. And that, in a way that we normally think about products is really challenging. We want to design something with a sort of singular identity where everybody says that this is what it is supposed to be and what happens when "it" becomes some anything that you want it to be?
So, we move from a literal, from a design perspective, from a product creation challenge. Something where the form, and function, the story is easy to tell, it is literal. You can almost look at something as an alien from another planet and over some exercise,grok what it was suppose to be doing for that culture, for those people, to a more abstract relationship between form and function.
The physical object of course looses its functional identity. What it is instead, as I said is a portal. The physical object does not become meaningless, it takes on new roles. Here, it is fashion and it is self-identity. Like what people have been talking about portals, this physical object becomes another part of my outfit or my dress but it is not what it was. In that, it was at one point an expressive way of identifying what it does. At this point, it is not, it is instead something that is just part of my outfit. What it does is a dynamic reality beneath that. So, what are the drivers of this change? Technology easily,democratization of these tools, these types of platforms allow folks like us in a direct idea relationship and folks like you to move more quickly from idea to execution for the concept itself is that much closer to the execution. And therefore, the opportunity to make a radical change to escape that sort of singularity is much easier.
The ecosystem is driving that. In other words, a product does not exist in isolation anymore. We have a lot of discussions about this today. This I think is one of the most fascinating things and as a design consultancy, one of the most difficult aspects. There is less and less opportunity to create that sort of singular statement that almost a mixture of political, emotional, fashion statement in this one gesture. Folks, we have been around since 1969 and we very practiced to that. But the new reality in making products is a much more systemic challenge.
Form and input, I think that for whatever reason, there has been a culmination of these radical ideas that for many years just floated around in Power Points in the back rooms of large companies and small. They were tossed around inside the design firms but they never went anywhere. But one or two products managed to escape and that leads to the next two points.
Competitive landscape, just at the time that that was hitting critical mass, you have some players getting weaker and some new players are entering the market namely this one.
This is a shot of the opening sales day in New York for the iPhone. And when customers demonstrate a willingness to accept these new models in the industry dog piles, then you have this opportunity to truly move from the current model or the current singularity to something new. And that is the opportunity in front of us. "It" is changing. "It" is becoming something else. This industry has an opportunity to seize that moment and to define something new.
Chair: Any questions?
Audience: So, when you are looking something like the iPhone which has grown tremendously, what is "it"? What do you see the "it" is?
Mark Rolston: I think that if we over simply the story, it is the new computer, you might say. "The PC is dead, long live the PC" or you could throw in "The phone is dead, long live the phone." But the two were colliding. Apple's essentially, if you watched to SDK release last week, they essentially pulled - some of our folks inside called the Windows '95 moment. They unified this development platform, they have opened it up and I think that the iPhone, you are going to quickly see, is going to move away from being phone to being sort of ubiquitous, mobile portal into your life. Telephony may actually be a very minor feature in sort of the net use that occurs on the phone. I might even say that it might even end up sub 10% if you measure across the customers. They are going to be doing everything that they do on PCs today. And what has been so beautiful about the PC is that it is agnostic. It does not give a crap on what you do with it. You do what you want to do on that. An invention, a need and even random or just whimsical desire can be expressed on that device and there is no business model to get in the way. And I think that the iPhone just jumped into that pond and we are going to see a lot of interesting invention.
Chair: Mark, were you here when I opened up today?
Mark Rolston: No.
Chair: Because, you have actually echoed what I said about the telephone is dead. You have echoed many things. So that was cool. Can you comment on Android? Any general comments on Android?
Mark Rolston: Android takes what one company is doing as a provocateur and makes it wide. Android is the antidote of what Apple has presented. Apple is going to go off and do that on their own but the whole world cannot get behind that model. The last time that they did that, we had Microsoft becoming a giant gorilla and Apple actually I think will be a lot less friendly as a Gorilla than even Microsoft. And so, I think that Android is a fantastic antidote to end up. We are actually doing a lot of development with android so we are incredibly behind it.
To add, what is really fascinating about that and I cannot name people, but a lot of players who have no business in this industry, they are not about communications and not about telephony but they are just about consumer features and consumer products in a broad sense are using that and some normalization of platforms to jump in and make products that are going to fly right in the face of people like Samsung, Motorola and the carriers. It is a fantastic time. You are going to see that real soon.
Chair: So, it means that the phone is no longer a phone and the television is no longer a television. That is just a terrible battle. We talk about convergence but that is where we do not know what the damn thing is or what it wants to be because it can be potentially everything and voice becomes secondary anyway.
It is a computer, the iPhone anyway. So we are still calling a phone. Do you think that in twenty years time we will be talking about telephones?
Mark Rolston: We might use the word but the word would have ceased to become what it meant. We may use it just to describe it in its form factor.
Chair: What if you spend most of your time shopping on or looking up information and the only place of telephony...
Mark Rolston: Again, the word becomes sort of a meaningless carrier to that. We may come up with another word. That actually is a brand challenge and that the [inaudible] to how that is accepted. I do not think that it is something you plan on or can talk about with any accuracy. It is like fashion.
Audience: A question from the back since you are talking about fashion. We are still talking about "it," right? There is just this thing that I have got in my pocket or the guy [James Body] has got and all these things that he is going to security with.
What do you see as the future of wearable computers and everyone's got this bluetooth thing. When are we going to become borgs to some extent because everyone got this little bluetooth devices in their pockets. It seems to me that people at some point are going to stop wanting to carry these things and just wear clothing or something that even more of a statement, I guess.
Mark Rolston: I think that is easily true. But that is far enough out there. That would be a talk with the futurist rather than a designer and I am what you call a near futurist, you might say. So, I am focused on what we can actually accomplish within a reasonable amount of time. I think absolutely that a lot of sociological change has to happen. We still identify with a point of contact even with devices just like with humans. So holding something in our hands, is very meaningful even if its meaning that I try to imply is actually being driven by lots of outside forces and outside systems. There is an infliction point there, that singularity that we like to have in our hands and we will define as a single thing even though it represents many things.
Audience: I am from UK and the average number of mobile devices and subscriptions per person is 1.6. That is an interesting number because it is going up. And I think that in Italy, the number I think is above 2. Most people I see with iPhones have at least one other phone as well. And I am so quite interested in what you are thinking about. The fact that people will have multiple devices, in my belief is because they are cheap, they are differentiated and so you might have an iPhone but you will have a phone as well perhaps.
Mark Rolston: Sure, I think that two ways to answer that is, one, iPhone is a baby. It is not what it will become and I am not here to defend the iPhone. I think that the point is that looking at the phone as just phone is what is about to change or what is about to blow up. So people may own multiples but each of those may represent different modulations of that dynamic reality. That sort of hole and space that is possible or they may actually intentionally from a fashionable perspective and I say fashion in a broad way, narrow their functionality. If you look at what Apple did with the iPod, sorry about that Apple again example, but they narrowed the offering there to tell a simpler story. And that in essence is sort of a fashionable way of addressing the product's identity. It is not a technically bound thing or it is not a market thing but it is the way of crystallizing the value that they want to define in that product. And I think that people having multiple handsets is a similar type of phenomenon.
Audience: I guess the question over here to your left. Could Nokia pull this off? Nokia having 40% of whatever or the market.
Mark Rolston: Nokia certainly could pull it off. But I think Nokia with their platforms is a little too subscribed to an agnostic take on value. And, that is not how you give birth to a market that is how you follow-up. And so, the market is too young right now and what you need is a lot of high value and highly contextual applications that say, "This is the way to go" and what I have seen so far in the touch platform that they are developing and the existing platform is that the experience is shabby. It is kind of cobbled together and the market is growing out of that. It looks like the technology underneath and it should not. This is too late for that. Those things will be challenged.
The agnosticism is a great growth stage but you cannot end up there so Nokia needs to grow out of that. I think that they have the capacity to but they are also slaved to the success of that early platform. All the developers are going to bitch and whine if they try and move the direction that I am suggesting.
Microsoft faces that, right? That many PC platforms, that many variations of the PC, that many application developers, it is hard for Microsoft to make a bold escape from their own destiny. Nokia is a smaller version of that, easily.
Chair: Thank you very much Mark.
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