Listening to another great edition of Peter Day’s World of Business, GlobalBiz: Inside Silicon Valley, and to people moaning about innovation not happening fast enough, slowly enough, or sustainability enough. Generally, not enough.
Got to thinking about how best to innovate or have innovative ideas, and like most answers in life, realised Star Trek held the answer: Sci-fi plot devices.
All the silly ideas they probably just came up with quickly to lazily help the plot along. The communicator, Uhura’s ear piece, PADD, medical scanners, replicators, holodecks, universa translator, and asking ’computer’ when anyone has a question, are just mobile phones, bluetooth earpieces, iPads, all current effort in the personal health device sector, synthetic food production, augmented reality, Google translate, and Siri or TomTom respectively.
Let’s stop forcing our thinking about what a great product might be now, and think instead about how to move a conversation or situation along in a story. Extreme user story style.
Documenteering 