Mystical Siting

We live in an area where Elk graze.  Sometimes we see them grazing in the foggy grassland area off to the left of the road we travel in the morning.  Sometimes we see them just behind our house taking a rest or nibbling the pasteur grass. This whole area south of Enumclaw is grassland butted up against the foothills of the Cascade mountains under Mount Rainier.  It's wild here.  

One lucky day last Fall I happened to see our herd of elk in the field behind our house.  Their heads turned as one, their steps were as one, their listening was as one, ears capturing every sound, their jog was as one and they were completely silent.  They listen far and see far.  They knew everything that was going on around them and within their circle and they knew I was watching.  Their ears and their eyes tell you that.  They look right at you. They listen at you.  We counted; there were 40.  

There was a regal female, a queen of an elk leading the group slowly and carefully around the side of the house.  Several smaller animals, some almost fully grown, some obviously yearlings, others even younger followed her.  We ran out front to watch them.  I couldn't take my eyes off of them long enough to grab my video camera just a few feet away (curse me!).  There were three grand bulls with huge racks watching over the group from the rear.  They stopped, they listened, they looked.   

The lead cow approached the barbed wire fence at the front of the property and stood still before it, listening, looking, thinking.   She couldn't see down the road to the left because of tall bushes.  She listened for cars then leaped just over the fence.  Waited there just on the other side looking and listening before walking onto the road.  What we saw next was absolutely gorgeous.  She waited there in the middle of the road in full view of cars coming from either direction and waited there.  

Quickly and one by one the other members of the herd began jumping the fence to join her. Those that could not jump over tried jumping through the two highest wires and some were falling and scraping themselves.  The youngest were trying to scramble under the lowest wire and were getting caught and becoming frightened and frantic.  

One of the bulls walked up from the back of the herd to asses the situation.  The young ones stood back.  He looked at the barbed wire fence as if assessing the situation.  He stepped back, he lowered his body, gathered his energy and hurled himself forward with such force that he broke the two top wires with his chest before skidding like a bullet on the ground on the other side of the fence.  He got up and watched as the rest of the herd quickly moved through the opening he had made in the fence.  They all ran to follow the 'great mother' to the other side of the road where they gathered before running up the hill toward more private ground.  

My son and I stood watching in awe; we witnessed the divine that day.  

We see these fabulous wild animals all over here in the misty back forties where the fog hangs low, the hedges grow tall and ducks live in the make shift ponds that come and go with the rain and snow melt.  The elk, the bear, the fowl, the bald eagles, the country people, the horses, the dairy cows and even the coyotes coexist out here.  

There is always a threat that the town will open this rural area up for housing development. My landlords want to sell their 30 acres here in 5 acre parcels.  Plastic red tape is flying in the wind marking boundaries signaling something ominous.  My heart bleeds to think it.  Where will the dairy farmer graze his cows, how long before some suburbanite gets hurt by an elk and they are run out of their traditional grazing lands,  what happens when the brown bear takes his Fall walk along the blackberry bushes that line the fields after the development comes?  What happens to the honorable balance that has been achieved here?    

The Meanings of Innovation

There has been a discussion going on about a universal definition for innovation among some members of the Transforming Transformation on-line group at transforming@googlegroups.com.   I found myself annoyed to read a couple of posts claiming it as a matter of fact that innovation is about business differentiation and economic value; that's an operational definition not the definition of innovation, seems to me.

I like definitions to see people clashing over the meanings of words; its good fun and valuable too. I think a lot about definitions in my work as an ethnographer design researcher in innovation groups; I think they are extremely important.  I often witness communication difficulties between collaborators when people use the same word in very different ways or in ways that everyone knows don't quite fit. The word Portal for example. In 2000 we borrowed that word to talk about what we now understand to be on-line portals, places to go to access personalized on-line access to information, services and tools. But at first, we just didn't know what portals were going to become and only later were able to give the word portal this operational definition. Looking deep into this phenomenon as an ethnographic "finding" is something that I've been doing for some time and I mention this because I see it as deeply significant to innovation discovery.  

#1:  If you don't know the word and can't find the word that fits what you witness or create then this is a good thing.  Just like when an experienced miner is mining for gold or for oil with a pick in a tunnel and sees indications that a vein is near, the same thing is true when seeing multiple word meanings at play and people arguing and having difficulty letting go of their perspective; you know you are close to witnessing or discovering innovation opportunity or on the down side, missing it altogether.  

#2:  When perspectives from one discipline are shared and applied in another this can lead to breakthrough innovation.  So exploring word meanings from disciplinary perspectives can be a useful tool. This is just what Mark Weiser did when he invented ubiquitous computing in the early 1990's.  He was having deep discussions with his colleagues anthropologists Lucy Suchman, Gitti Jordan and others in the Work Practice Group at Xerox PARC.   In an interview that I did with him back then he described to me how he took their perspective on designing for the way people work in the real world and applied it to his own thinking about the future of computing.  The bringing together of the anthropological and computer science perspectives was a struggle but through that struggle the vision that got  computers off the desktop and into the environment came to be and the mobile and embedded computing industries were born.   

What might be the universal understanding of importance to Innovation work just might be that words and concepts take on meanings that are nuanced by experience, goals and contexts. You really have to wonder if there is such a thing as a universal definition for a word. What does that even mean?  How could it be achieved?  The best one can hope for is an operational definition that people find appropriate and useful to their purpose.  

 

Leaving traces for Internet archeologists to find when they look back from the future

I've been thinking a lot about entertainment lately, what it is, how people think about it and experience it.  I was talking with a friend from India recently about how entertaining it is to look back at school yearbooks and how reminiscing about our hair, our clothes, our friends and reading what people write on the pages is always good for laughs among friends and family.   He wasn't familiar with the term yearbook but once I had explained he told me to check out www.Allofme.com; Allofme is a web service that finds references to you on the Internet and maps these references to a time-line.  

I did check it out and it was fun and entertaining but more than that.         

I did a search on myself and found the several the other Cynthia DuVals right there intermingled with me in time.  I found out I'm mentioned in at least two books I didn't know about, kinda nice.  I was a little embarassed by a few references the service found, OK, maybe more than a little embarassed.  Thankfully it didn't pick up some of the junk that I know litters the Internet with my name on it, tests I've done on emerging software, profiles I've written to get past marketing gatekeepers, an Office Live website test for example.  Pure junk.   Allofme didn't make me laugh much but it was fun to play with and it did tell me that there is a lot of work with my name on it that isn't junk, could be on-line and probably should be.     

This is a great little tool and a lot of fun but not in the intimate yearbook kind of way that makes it fun to look at with friends and family.  You get some embarrassment and some surprises and insights about how the universe of people now and in the future can see you through the lens of the Internet.  I certainly have new ideas about how I can proactively alter my on-line identity to suit my purposes better than on line mentions in books and random attempts to blog and build webpages.  I'm going to get to work on these traces of me because it might be that these traces are all that will be findable about my life when I'm gone; forget dust to dust I'm going to be random bits of data.  My great grand children will find me scattered across the Internet by Googling "Cynthia DuVal."  It's my job to make sure they find me.