Hacking with light by Johnny Lee
Mike and I have been discussing how strange it is that we don’t value the contribution of imagination as the pilot of new knowledge creation in an organisation.
UPDATE: I see that the Ted conference held in Feb 2008 thought Johnny Lee is pretty cool.
What if we dared to imagine - what if it was expected as part of work? What if we let ourselves imagine ideas that don’t exist today, playing with the world and its realities as if they were soft clay, ready for us to remodel? What if we saw our world as composable and reformable, like a set of shared ideas with connectors ready to be stuck quickly together to try things in a new way?
We suspect our concerns about intellectual property and our fears about lacking individual skills have something to do with our failure to innovate in collaboration. It would be inspiring if we could drop these fears and and allow the exploration of things to be both our education and the conception of new possibilities. We could compose from the component ideas of others - be they keen teenagers, business people or academic researchers.
All that stands in our way are our internally fixed boundaries around knowledge.
Mike and I hold the view that organisations should deliberately nurture the emergence of new knowledge by combination. We should honour inventions built from sticky-tape and string. The internet was made that way.
And now an examplar.
Johnny Lee has a wonderful approach to innovation. Johnny is a researcher in human-computer interaction (HCI). But Johnny’s brilliance is greatly amplified by his love of sharing how to do neat things, seemingly rather simply.
This inspiring video shows how to make a wall-sized interactive whiteboard using just a ballpoint pen, a projector and a remote control from a game console. I guarantee you’ll be intrigued. You’ll want to try it:
Johnny dares to imagine things that don’t exist today, to ask questions that begin with, “What if we could … ?”. Most of us know how limited we feel when interacting with the computer, but Johnny explores several ideas about what might emerge in the future. And he’s built them:
The extraordinary thing is that Dr Johnny Lee shares his work with obvious joy and has a website of interesting projects to try.
Dave Wallace, to whom the fortuitous assembly of useful pieces is more than a pastime, is a fan.
