Bill Buxton’s new mantra for creativity
Sketching User Experiences by Bill Buxton
Bill Buxton is a Principal Scientist at Microsoft Research, an early Octopz advisor and the author of the book Sketching User Experiences. In a recent BusinessWeek article, Buxton shares one of the techniques from his book, called the Order of Magnitude or OOM rule, for overcoming a creative or conceptual impass. The OOM rule states that:
If something changes by an order of magnitude among any meaningful dimension, it is no longer the same thing.
To illustrate the effect of OOM, Buxton takes us back to the early 1800’s schoolhouse and uses the student slate (an existing technology) and the emergence of the classroom blackboard (an implementation of the existing technology on a larger scale) as an example. Buxton points out the despite the lack of technical innovation, the change in scale from slate to blackboard, fundamentally changed the classroom and the impact on education was greater than paper, the PC or the Internet.
Bill Buxton’s example of Order of Magnitude (OOM) using display technology
Buxton then draws on his own experiences and interests to provide a contemporary example of the OOM rule at work, by citing the accelerating shift from today’s digital electronics and personal computer displays to large interactive wall displays that can be put up anywhere there is a whiteboard or cork board.
Microsoft’s Ian Sands demonstrates TouchWall and Plex (video by TechCrunch.com)
The importance of this development was underscored yesterday by Buxton’s boss Bill Gates (click for video) at the Microsoft CEO summit, where he demonstrated TouchWall and Plex, prototype technologies for creating inexpensive wall-based multi-touch computer interfaces.
Buxton concludes his BusinessWeek article by putting his OOM rule in context with respect to creativity and problem-solving:
Not everyone can learn to be a world-class designer, no more than everyone could become a major league pitcher or a Nobel Prize-winning nuclear physicist. But that doesn’t mean you can’t be taught to improve your ability to throw a ball, or understand something about the interior working of the atom. So it is with creativity. There’s no magic formula for any of this, and the OOM rule is just one technique that one can add to one’s quiver. It’s not the full story. But it is a good start.
BusinessWeek also has a review of Sketching User Experiences as well as more articles by Buxton on risk and entepreneurship and innovation.
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