Dear Don,

I like the distinctions you make and would like to add a prefix and two suffixes to R&D such that we get a list that reads:

Theory, Research, Development, Production, Marketing.

I'm sure we could add other chapters to a book that you suggest needs writing on this area of design.

My point is that the lag between each of these stages is heavily weighted at the beginning, less so at the end. That is, the 20 years for multi-touch displays getting from ideas of "wouldn't it be great if" (hypothetical = what if) to an iPhone is mostly about Theory and Research. The fact that Apple shifted its attention to Development, Production and Marketing indicates a shift towards APPLE INC versus APPLE COMPUTERS. That is, Apple is more interested in selling objects than in struggling with ideas.

Hence, the borrowed idea that Steve Jobs attributes to Picasso (it actually comes from T.S. Eliot) that "Good artists copy; Great Artists steal" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CW0DUg63lqU). Apple, under Jobs, saw itself as the supreme thief, the great artist who knows what to do with all the good stuff that others have spent 20 + years working on.

Fair enough and good luck to them. One might ask that they achieve the heights Eliot demands ("The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn." - see Wikiquote entry below)) but, in the market place, it becomes difficult to distinguish Apple's thieving from Google's thieving from MicroSoft's thieving and who really cares?

Of course designers care and thinkers care and researchers care. Why? Because status in these realms is not tied to marketing. A good idea is still a good idea even if the product doesn't sell. And, in these realms, the inhabitants bother to establish ways of discerning great from good from crap. Heck, they even set up public institutions (universities) designed precisely to publicly distinguish great from good from crap.

Jobs obviously saw himself as part of world of care and not merely the head of a company that sold stuff. Hence his gesture towards the tradition of care: "I would trade all of my technology for an afternoon with Socrates." (As quoted in Newsweek (29 October 2001)). The only problem is that Steve would have had to pay Socrates for the afternoon of ideas by serving him dinner. Socrates is claimed, by some, to have been a vegetarian, but I still can't see him tucking in to one of Steve's vegan concoctions and I'm very sure that Socrates would have had a giggle fit if Steve had tried his magic stare.

Back to the 20 year slog!

Keith Russell
OZ newcastle

[See Wikiquote entry on Jobs: "This is a favorite phrase of Jobs, but he is (mis)quoting Pablo Picasso. "Lesser artists borrow; great artists steal" is similarly attributed to Igor Stravinsky, but both sayings may well originate in T. S. Eliot's dictum: "Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn."]

 
>>> Don Norman <[log in to unmask]> 01/12/12 4:00 AM >>> 
If you look at Apple's products ver the past 10 years, it all has come from
development. Apple closed its research labs (I used to head it). It now
relies on development efforts, plus purchasing companies.  Siri came out of
the research labs of SRI, but the basic research was done over a decade
ago.   Siri was a small startup that Apple bought. Multi-touch displays
were in the labs over 20 years ago. Apple bought the technology, although
some of the patents came from work done in my days at the ATG in Apple, but
a decade before the product came out. . Android was purchased by Google. So
too was Google earth, google maps, google docs.

etc.  The full story would take a book.  And although i write books, I am
not going to do this one.