Author / Robb Bush

by Robb Bush

Doors of Perception 7 : FLOW

NOTE: This is a re-post from 2002. The blog platform, and my content are long gone from the internet - and many of the original links are non-functional. Trying to stitch it back together. So much for digital permanence. Pfft.

To what question is ‘pervasive computing’ the answer?

John Thackera’s generative question at Doors7

Thursday, November 14, 2002

Day 1 of the Doors7 Congress in Amsterdam NL

I am definitely in the right place at the right time. Some great presenters and the theme and content is right on target.

Speakers today included Janine Benyus, author of Biomimicry delivering a fascinating lecture on creating design strategies by learning from similar solutions in nature. Key takeaway: rather than design like machines…design like a living system.

Luis Fernandez Galiano, from Madrid School of Architecture gave a passionate presentation about the pleasures and frustrations of design in a complex world.

David Rokeby and Michael Awad are artists doing some fascinating modeling of patterns in space and time using by using algorithms and filters to modfy video of human movement in public spaces…remember the theme is FLOW.

Lars Erik Holmquist, leader of the Future Applications Lab at the Victoria Institute in Sweden gave an interesting introduction (which I agree 100%” with the key point): “design real stuff, build prototypes, and test it with real people”, which was obviously targeted at designers that deal too much in blue-sky and pray to the gods to deliver the technology too make it work (expressed in his cargo-cult metaphor).

The technology exists today to make some very useful things work IMHO!!!……

Lars is the chair of Ubicomp…and he prefers to use the term “ubiquitous computing”…for obvious reasons. Either/Or IMO, How about ‘Ambient Computing’?

Elena Mavromatti and Achilles Kamesas are doing some fabulous things as part of the Disappearing Computer initiative and leading the project called e-Gadgets as in “Extrovert Gadgets”. Their demonstration was controlling the playback of a wireless MP3 Jukebox with a wireless remote in the form of a light cube…you would change “channels” by rotating the cube different directions.

Marko Ahtisaari (link to his blog) is the Director of Insight and Foresight at Nokia…and is chartered to developing new lines of business at Nokia. He is investigating patterns of existing behaviour that could be extended and enhanced with their technology.

Mindblower of the day was Axel Thallemer…who is the founder of Festo corporate design, who has incorporated biology into industrial design with incredible innovations in Architecture, Transportation, and Consumer products. Although in German text, his book contains illustrations of the many innovations created by Axel and his team.

Axel Thallemer, founder and leader of Festo Corporate Design and Robb Bush of Ambient Informatics.

Friday, November 15, 2002

Day 2 of the Doors7 Congress in Amsterdam NL

Another day of incredible presentations. My head is full.

Bruce Sterling kicked things off with expected Sterling-esque dystopian future scenario based on the wonders of ubicomp, or pervasive computing…an example of “battlefield intelligence” and subsequent detachment by military forces…eSoldiers. Was a great start, and got the crowd loosened up…but on edge. This shit COULD be dangerous, and designers have a responsibility to make things usable…which tied into a key theme of the dicussion this week.

One other theme was “dashboards” (and one of my main reasons for attending) which fell completely flat in the show, but outlined very insightfully by John Thackera in his article “Real-time design in the ‘world as spreadsheet'”. He was asking great questions on the panels…looking for the big picture, to look for the interconnections between science/biology, Technology, Architecture, Design, and Human Facors (another theme). The panel on “dashboards” /was/ entertaining…but completely missed the opportunity that these dashboards do imply a positive control (as opposed to “control:power”). It is the type of control than can help comanies reduce wasteful inventories, reduce the number of empty trucks driving around…and can also more intelligently use raw materials…for example. On looking for the big picture issue…I see where he is going, but often the guest responses are decidedly intra-disciplinary (?). Everyone /says/ that there needs to be a crossing of disciplines to create new solutions…but few are really doing it, (with the exception of Axel Thallemer and a few others to add) falling back on established disciplinary descriptions of applications. Which is understandable.

Fortunately some guys from Moto(rola) are thinking up completely NEW things. Marco Susani, a strategic designer at Motoroloa is defining types of flow and creating a new ontology to describle the flow in complex networks. The old terms somtimes do not work, and this seems to be a great excecise for defining the scope of a systems design…if one can characterize and name TYPES of flow. Thats new. The presenation was passionate and very emotional/beautiful in the descriptive graphics. If anything was missed (maybe I missed it), it would be that fact that for any individual there exists many diverse and overlapping types of flow (stratification). All of the models are interwined…PLUS the fact that there are multiple connections BETWEEN the models creating a scale-free network.

Felice Frankel delivered a great presentaion based on her book Envisioning Science (link), which she also signed a copy for me, thank you. Just buy the book. No embellishment needed.

THEN came the real mindblowers. Philip Tabor, architect, delivered a beautiful concept called a ‘simulation space for half formed thoughts’…a ‘daydream engine’. He was looking for vagueness an fuzzy edges vs. sharp contrast in the design of Spaces, Systems, and I guess a NEW way to think about a new “epistemology of the creative process” (i just made that up).

Patricia de Martelaere, philosopher, was everything you would hope for. Being and becoming. Platos ideal static world (shadows). The non-existence of “real time”. Which also means there may need to be a new term…because “real” and “time” have too much baggage. Perhaps any improvement in usefulness, utility, benefit, value that is created can be considered as a move toward “real time” even though, philosophically (and possibly scientifically) that something called “real time” does not exist.

OK. Move on.

Joshua Davis. Awesome. Just like every other rad developer dude I have ever known….has done some incredible Flash scripting. He has been able to COMMUNICATE through his book Flash to the Core . Had the crowd rolling. Incedble work, with attitude (worth another paragraph).

The OPEN DOORS contest, well lets just say there were only 3-4 contestants that were really in the ballpark….the ones with incredible concepting and execution vs. the ones that were average stuff with the word “pervasive” or “flow” slapped on them as an afterthought. (more later on how Ben Hooker and Shona Kitchen from Royal College of Art UK was, IMO, the best of the show the with their Altavistas Project).

Some Pics!


"Doors divas" Ine and Dagmar. The entire staff was fabulous! Congrats!


Koen Koevoets of Koen&Co in Utrecht was especially gracious and a really nice guy to have a few Heinekens with.


The American phenom of "Speed-dating" worked in the new Flow context as a way to meet a lot of people fast!

Saturday, November 16, 2002

Day 3 of the Doors7 Congress in Amsterdam NL.

The show ended on a high note and seemed to be a great success. I agree. The ideas and interconnections…the flow created by the conference itself was quite amazing. The flow of ideas, concepts, prototypes, and processes came together across Biology, Theoretical Physics, Art, Music, Software Development, Critical Theory, and Device Development…as well as proposing the physical topology and conceptual models to deal with the design of interconnected/networked systems.

What a great chance to meet people who are thinking really hard about these issues and kudos to the Doors team for the foresight to assemble these different disciplines that must create together to design and deliver systems that are highly usable, convenient, sustainable, value creating (in many ways), along with the new responsibility for design decisions in this context.

Control came up as a theme both good and bad…and may be worthy of a new conference. Control:Convenience. It means different things to different people and within different contexts.

J.C. Herz, of JoystickNation has revealed that the character and nature of MMORPGs, and even The Sims represents a new development model that includes the users to enhance modify and maintain the software. (Much more on that later!!!)

Franziska Nori of DigitalCraft delivered a passionate plea to reinvent the museum space. What is it for now? Is it relevant? Should it contain everything, or be an arbiter? Who are the customers, the users, the producers? What is the motivation to be represented in a museum? And, one of the biggest questions was “who is the public, and what public do museums cater to?“

Ezio Manzni, professor of industrial design at Milan Polytechnic. The Sustainability guy. The depiction of networked systems as either “large and fast” (the Highway…Airport, Distribution Networks) and also in a tighter mesh that is “close and slow” (the neighborhood, people-processes).

I think this reflects a philosophical approach to the scale-free networks described in Linked: The New Science of Networks by Albert-László Barabási (2002) and Nexus: Small Worlds and the Groundbreaking Theory of Networks by Mark Buchanan (2002).

Natalie Jeremijenko showed project with Robotic feral dogs to detect radioactivity, etc. (using modified aibos etc) and some profound thoughts. (More later…)

Neil Gershenfeld, director of Center for Bits and Atoms at MIT wants to take technology DEVELOPMENT to people that need it…whether it is eskimos to help manage wildlife populations (or to help designers that need help perhaps). This was not GIVING them technology that someone else invented but helping rural communites develop systems that THEY think would benefit. The opinion in the crowd was that this was a double edged sword.

The finale of Doors7 with many of the speakers and conference organizers on stage.
by Robb Bush

High-Velocity Commerce – SXSW 1999

Here is a ‘podcast’ about my SXSW presentation in 1999.

Of course it’s ai-generated, and welcome to what’s next!

SXSW has a history going back almost 40 years, catalogued on its website. However, it’s just select snippets from what MUST be a truly INCREDIBLE historic archive!

Should SXSW “AI-ify” all that content someday? 🤔

TRANSCRIPT

Online shopping these days. It’s like trying to keep up with a rocket. Right. Well, buckle up, because we’re hitting rewind back to a time before same day delivery was a thing before you could even order groceries from your phone. For smartphones, period. We’re talking 1999. Yeah, you heard that right. 1999 South by Southwest Interactive. The dawn of the.com boom.

People thought they could sell anything online and everyone was scrambling to figure out how. Luckily for us, someone was there taking notes or more accurately, giving a presentation. Exactly.

We unearthed this gem of a talk. And let me tell you, it’s like a time capsule from the future of shopping. Our guide on this trip down memory lane is Robb Bush, marketing guru extraordinaire, working at a company called i2.

Right? And he doesn’t disappoint. He steps onto that SXSW stage with his bold prediction. Commerce is about to get a whole lot faster. He called it high velocity commerce. Catchy, right? But back then, no one even knew what that meant. So let’s dive in, shall we? Picture this. It’s 1999. The Dot-Com hype is real. And Robb’s blowing minds with these new marketing opportunities.

He’s talking about things like 1 to 1 marketing and customer profiling. Now remember this is before Facebook, before every website was tracking your every move. It’s like he was speaking a foreign language, except it was the language of the future. And get this. He was already warning people about the potential downsides. Like what happens when everyone is selling someone else’s products?

He called it the de-contextualization of marketing messages. Think about how relevant that is today with online marketplaces and all those targeted ads following you around. It’s like he could see the future of the internet, both the good and the well, maybe not so good, but the real heart of his presentation was this. What were consumers expecting from this brave new world of online shopping?

And get ready for it, because it sounds eerily familiar. Go on. He said online shoppers in 1999 wanted to – get this – higher quality, tailored products the best price delivered. Ready for this tomorrow? Tomorrow? Yeah, in 1999. That would have blown people’s minds. Back then, tomorrow meant waiting a week, maybe more. Exactly. And you have to hand it to Robb Bush.

He didn’t shy away from the challenges. He put it out there asking businesses, can you develop, buy, make, move, store, sell and deliver with the responsiveness required for high velocity commerce? The man was throwing down the gauntlet. He was. And here’s the real kicker. How can you support the level of customization and personalization promised? See, he knew speed wasn’t enough.

It had to be personalized speed. He was talking about a whole new way of doing business. He called it integrated demand planning and fulfillment. Okay, so what in the world does that even mean? It sounds pretty technical, even for a bunch of techies back in 99, it does sound a bit like something you’d need a dictionary for, right?

Well, it might sound complicated, but it’s actually the blueprint for how we shop online today. Imagine, if you will, a world where businesses can predict what you want. Predict. Come on. That’s straight out of Minority Report. Well, maybe not predict exactly, but get pretty darn close. Think about it. Businesses could configure products on demand, give you instant pricing, and guarantee delivery dates.

Hold up. This is 1999, right? We’re talking dial up modems and those clunky computer monitors. Is that even possible back then? That’s the thing. It wasn’t. At least not on the scale that Bush was imagining. He was basically predicting the rise of cloud computing, sophisticated algorithms, the whole shebang. He knew that businesses would need to connect the dots between different departments, different systems, to make it happen.

It’s like he could see the matrix or something. But how do you propose they actually do it? What were those acronyms again? CRM, a SCM&O. It’s like alphabet soup over here. He was definitely ahead of his time with those acronyms, but they actually make a lot of sense. CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. Basically, it’s all about understanding your customers.

Like what do they like? What do they buy, what makes them tick. So CRM is like the digital equivalent of that shop owner who knows everyone’s name and their favorite order. You got it. And then there’s SCM&O, Supply Chain Management and operations. This is the behind the scenes magic of getting a product from the factory to your doorstep.

Okay, so that’s like the logistics crew making sure everything runs smoothly. Exactly. And last but not least, PLM product lifecycle management. This one’s all about the journey of a product from the initial idea all the way to when it’s discontinued.

So are you saying that Robb Bush basically predicted the entire e-commerce ecosystem we have today? Back in 1999.

That’s wild. It’s pretty mind blowing, right? He saw that to create this high velocity commerce, you needed to connect all these different parts of a business. It wasn’t just about selling things online. It was about creating a whole new way of operating. And a big part of that was putting the customer at the center of it all. It’s like he was saying, hey, forget mass production, let’s focus on personalization.

But wasn’t there a risk of losing that human touch in all this technology? That’s a great question. And it’s something that Bush was acutely aware of. He knew that technology alone wasn’t enough. You needed something else to build trust, to create a sense of community in this new digital marketplace. So he wasn’t just talking about algorithms and supply chains.

There was a human side to his vision, too. Absolutely. He talked about building knowledge in consumer communities, places where people could connect, share information, get advice. Wait a minute. Is he talking about online reviews back in 1999? He might as well have been. Yeah. He understood that even in a digital world. People still craved connection. That sense of community you get from interacting with others.

So he wasn’t just predicting Amazon. He was predicting the rise of online forums, product reviews, maybe even influencer marketing. It’s all connected. Exactly. And here’s the kicker. A lot of what Bush talked about back then, it’s just, well, it’s just how we shop now. Personalized recommendations, instant delivery. The whole nine yards. It’s like he had a crystal ball and he saw the future of online shopping.

It makes you wonder what would he think of e-commerce today, right? Would he be impressed or would he be like, ‘what took you so long’? It’s probably a bit of both. But one thing’s for sure. His call to action is more relevant than ever. Enhance the way you do business. Seize new marketing opportunities. Build customer relationships, improve operational efficiency, and gain a competitive advantage.

Those words could have been spoken today. It’s true. It’s like the fundamentals of business. They never really change, do they? It’s all about adapting. Evolving. Staying one step ahead. Well said. And on that note, I think we’ve reached the end of our journey back to the dot.com frontier. It’s amazing how much has changed in 25 years and how much has stayed the same.

The desire for connection, for a seamless and personalized experience. It’s what drives us as consumers. It’s true. And who knows what the future holds. Maybe in another 25 years someone will unearth this very podcast and marvel at how we used to shop with just our phones. The cycle continues. I wouldn’t be surprised. But until then, we can keep exploring, keep innovating, keep chasing that high velocity commerce dream.

Here’s to the future of shopping. Thanks for joining us for this deep dive, everyone. Until next time.