Rants,Raves and Ruminations

When I was at the recent Adobe Max in Las Vegas, I spent a lot of time just wandering the halls and listening to bits and pieces of conversation between the attendees. What struck me was how closely we are becoming tied to the products we use and how narrow, in many respects, our vision was around what we do. What really sealed this for me was talking to a teacher who was passionately involved with providing his students with online support materials for his classes and how committed he was to “eLearning”, Flash and Captivate.

I will admit I admired his passion but I came away disturbed at how narrow-minded he was and how much he was going to hurt his students if he didn’t stop thinking this way. What he wasn’t doing was “connecting the dots”.

The dots are the devices being used to display the content. As we move into a “specialization” work flow, the sheer number and variety of outlets for our efforts are increasing. I, for one, never expected that anything I do is going to be viewed on everything from a 21 -inch flat panel display connected to a desk top computer to the console of a Jaguar. As we become more “product-centic” or “discipline-centric” the mediums used to display our work are expanding and yet I rarely hear this in conversations among developers and designers.

What we need to be doing is not only asking what information is needed but we now have to start asking how that information will be accessed. When you ask that second question you move into a rather uncomfortable place because you then need to ask: “Is Flex/Flash/Dreamweaver/ColdFusion the technology best suited to a Portable Computer/PDA/ Cell Phone/ PSP/ Jaguar Dashboard Console? ”

People are going to be starting up their portable’s, PDA’s, cell phones, PSP’s, dashboard consoles or any other display and they are going to expect us to deliver the information they need… when they need it …. On the device they are using. The thing is: We can control the message. We have no control over the medium.

One of the more common questions I am asked is “What do you think is the next big thing?” My answer is “Video and knowledge on demand.” The first one, everybody gets but the second one is foreign to most.

I am a teacher. That’s my day job . As an educator, I am terribly uncomfortable around the terms “eLearning”, “Distance Education” and “OnLine Course”. I am sure they mean something to the institutions that use them but the problem is the institution controls the meaning of the term. Each term means different things to different people and they don’t mean a thing to me.

At its most fundamental level the teacher/student relationship is dead simple: Teacher provides knowledge student needs.

How that knowledge is provided is where “connecting the dots” becomes important. In our web-centric universe, knowledge can be provided in ways we have never encountered in the past. The old model of my physically being in a class and orally delivering the knowledge is now just part of the mix. The web enables me to provide knowledge when it is wanted, where it is wanted using media other than paper or voice and through mediums used by the student… not me. This is “knowledge on demand”.

Sitting through the mobile keynote at Max I heard a lot of talk about making people rich and how it was a brave new world that was opening for us. I couldn’t disagree more. Connect the dots through the Adobe products and you discover mobile is nothing more than the “end game”.

To me the cell-phone or PDA is just another medium ...or dot ... I can use to provide knowledge. What I need to be able to do is to provide the knowledge through whatever dot the student happens to be using at the time.

My students can sit in the student lounge, open their Mac and PC portable computers and access course notes through a wireless network provided by the College . They can sit in the bus on their way to class and, using a cell phone, access the notes from the class they just attended or the class they are about to attend. They can sit at home using Desktop Computers connected to a broadband network and work on the projects that will be graded the following week. How that material is provided to the students is through many of the tools provided to me by Adobe and I have to choose the tool best-suited to providing “knowledge on demand.” To many educators this is a frightening prospect because this stuff isn’t easy.

It is no different in the worlds of business and government. At Max I saw a project where the U.S. Army is providing its “war fighters” with real time access to service manuals, tech resources and experts in the U.S. to rapidly fix, in real time, malfunctioning equipment in a combat zone. The technologies used were Acrobat Connect, video, audio, PDF and any other medium that solved the problem. As it was explained to me, “ the experts were available in real time, at any time.” Knowledge on demand used to fix a stalled Hummer.

Ride the subway in Tokyo and you can’t help but be struck by how the Japanese have taken to their cell phones as a point of contact with the world. One of the applications Adobe frequently shows is a weather application. When you really think about it, the salaryman on the Tokyo subway train is gathering the knowledge necessary to plan his next vacation. Knowledge on demand to make an informed decision.

There is a company I know of that is in the process of seriously examining the use of Podcasts and Vcasts to “spread the love” about the company with their clients, employees and peers. These things will be picked up on portable computers, PDA’s and iPods.

The thing is the people consuming this knowledge couldn’t care less whether Flash, ColdFusion, Acrobat, Flex or any other technology was used to create the product. They want to be able to flip open a device and access the information wherever they are ,,, whenever they bloody well feel like it. When Kevin Lynch was tooling around in the Jaguar at Max showing off the Flash–enabled console in the dashboard, I am sure that the 3,5000 people that were there looked at it and thought, “What a cool application of Flash!”

That’s all well and good but do you really think the guy that drives that Jag thinks the same thing when he glances down at the console? He wants the knowledge to figure out how to get from “here to there” … not to marvel that his console is Flash enabled. The fascinating thing about that console, though, is the information it shows can just as easily be provided through a cell phone, a portable computer, a PDA or anything else that can connect to a wired or wireless network.

Knowledge on demand forces us, as developers and designers, to move out of our “product-centric” silos and look at ways of designing interfaces and providing the data flow into those interfaces. It requires us to understand that the projects we are working on simply can’t be repurposed. Each dot has its own unique design approach. You can’t, for example, simply port your web site over to cell phone usage. For example, look at this page on your computer screen then consider how crappy it would look if it was jammed into the screen of the cell phone in your pocket. Maybe Flash is not the technology to do this. Maybe it is an HTML solution or a PDF that is best suited to the knowledge need posed by the cell phone.

As I pointed out earlier, knowledge on demand, is not easy. It requires you to anticipate how that knowledge will be accessed and then to design and develop the interface appropriate to the medium. How you design an interface for a cell phone is fundamentally different from how you design the interface for a computer. It requires you to look at and have a familiarity with new tools that are outside of your current comfort zone. It requires you to have an understanding of which combination of tools are best-suited to the task at hand and, most important of all, to have a deep understanding of the person demanding the knowledge and what technology he or she is using to meet that demand.

That last sentence is important. I had the pleasure of having a short conversation at Max with Jennifer Taylor who is Adobe’s “Engagement Platform” kahuna. I have never really understood the term and asked Jennifer to give me the Executive Summary definition of what the term means. About a minute into the explanation it hit me: The Engagement Platform is the ability to use all of the tools provided by Adobe to meet the knowledge-on- demand need. In a word it is … integration.

It is not Flash, Flex or ColdFusion. It is not Acrobat, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Apollo, Captivate After Effects or Audition. It is not Illustrator, PhotoShop or InDesign. They are noting more than tools. It is how all of those tools can be brought to bear to meet the immediate need for knowledge at any time, anywhere and on any technology whether it be the desktop PC or the Jaguar that Kevin Lynch used to tool around the Conference floor at Max . The key is not what tools were used. The key is how those tools are used to connect the dots.