Manufacturing guy-at-large.

Topper

Added on by Spencer Wright.

Recently.  

The number and complexity of the surfaces here is just dumb, and it's my fault. I ended up rebuilding it with a solid model, though I'd like to revisit the surface model again. 

 

Luck

Added on by Spencer Wright.

I guess I'm a decade late to this party, but this interview with Dr. Richard Wiseman about his book "The Luck Factor" is really great. Excerpts:

BUT THE BUSINESS CULTURE TYPICALLY WORSHIPS DRIVE -- SETTING A GOAL, SINGLE-MINDEDLY PURSUING IT, AND PLOWING PAST OBSTACLES. ARE YOU ARGUING THAT, TO BE MORE LUCKY, WE NEED TO BE LESS FOCUSED?
This is one of the most counterintuitive ideas. We are traditionally taught to be really focused, to be really driven, to try really hard at tasks. But in the real world, you've got opportunities all around you. And if you're driven in one direction, you're not going to spot the others. It's about getting people to have various game plans running in their heads. Unlucky people, if they go to a party wanting to meet the love of their life, end up not meeting people who might become close friends or people who might help them in their careers. Being relaxed and open allows lucky people to see what's around them and to maximize what's around them.
WHAT ARE SOME OF THE WAYS THAT LUCKY PEOPLE THINK DIFFERENTLY FROM UNLUCKY PEOPLE?
One way is to be open to new experiences. Unlucky people are stuck in routines. When they see something new, they want no part of it. Lucky people always want something new. They're prepared to take risks and relaxed enough to see the opportunities in the first place.

BUT CAN WE ACKNOWLEDGE THAT SOMETIMES BAD STUFF -- CAR ACCIDENTS, NATURAL DISASTERS -- JUST HAPPENS? SOMETIMES IT'S PURELY BAD, AND THERE'S NOTHING GOOD ABOUT IT.
I've never heard that from a lucky person.

Startups Should Write Prose

Added on by Spencer Wright.

And you probably should, too.

Note: I wrote this post in response to Eric Paley's "Startups Shouldn't Write Prose" post. While I disagree with the premises of his argument, I do concur with a number of his conclusions (e.g. that formal business plans have limited utility). Regardless, I have respect for his thoughts on the subject, and appreciate the ideas he puts forward in the original post.  

I am a big fan of accepting and accounting for uncertainty. Uncertainty has been a big part of my life, and I suspect that its role in the lives of those around me will only increase over time. In general, I think that's okay. Partly because I think it's fun to embrace uncertainty, but mostly out of my feeling that, as Chuck Klosterman wrote, "the future makes the rules, so there's no point in being mad when the future wins." My best play is to construct general theories about what the world will look like in the future, and then try to position myself in such a way that the work I'm doing will be rewarded and the things I care about will be allowed to grow.

It's a tough thing to do. Humans are mediocre predictors, and they're terrible at understanding and evaluating predictions (see Subjective Validation, the Forer Effect, and whatever your friends think about their horoscopes). In philosophy and math, formal argumentation takes a large role here; it can be very helpful in evaluating the methods of reasoning used by predictions in general. 

While I was a passable student of higher order logic in college, formal argumentation has played a large role in how I understand the world. But I accept that my experience is not universal, and I care more about getting my point across than I do about the medium. And the fact of the matter is that prose remains my best tool for communicating complex ideas - and I suspect that the same is the case for most individuals and brands.

Startups, like the rest of us, deal in uncertainty. A startup is, in Steve Blank's definition, "an organization formed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model." That is, startups are inherently uncertain what business they're in, or what business model they will organize themselves by. The primary obstacle in any startup's path is figuring out what they can make that people will want.

In the early stages of a startup's life, investors constitute something of a separate class of customer; as funding options broaden (see crowdfunding; the SEC's recent actions), this line will blur even more. Regardless, all of a project's stakeholders will require some form of communication, and in the case of investors, a startup's goal is to show how and why its business will be successful. There are many aspects to that equation, of course. But they generally include at least an implicit argument, which is communicated in a variety of ways. Startups need to communicate that there is (or will be) demand for what they're working on, and they need to show that they are uniquely positioned to meet that demand.  These are complex ideas, and not to be taken lightly. Moreover, investors won't want to feel like they're being argued into something, so startups would be wise to let the logic of their product, and the makeup of the team behind it, speak for itself. 

Slide decks do not generally convey argumentative structure well. Arguments are not constructed hierarchically, but slide decks present information in a top-down, slide-by-slide manner. They also measure information in discrete parts - the slide being the smallest unit of measurement. But arguments don't conveniently break up well into slide-sized pieces, and the result is that key points are often truncated in order to adhere to a slide's predetermined size. 

What slides are good at is creating a rhythm during a presentation. For many presenters, this is highly useful - but to my mind, the content of the argument should not be sacrificed for the sake of presentation, and any presentation method that requires arguments to be abbreviated should be avoided. Startups should avoid hubris at all costs - and the presentation of an abbreviated argument in order to make a stakeholder easier to convince is not a step on that right path. As Edward Tufte wrote:

The pushy PowerPoint style imposes itself on the audience and, at times, seeks to set up a dominance relationship between speaker and audience...A better metaphor for presentations is good teaching. Teachers seek to explain something with credibility, which is what many presentations are trying to do. The core ideas of teaching - explanation, reasoning, finding things out, questioning, content, evidence, credible authority not patronizing authoritarianism - are contrary to the hierarchical market-pitch approach. 

Slide pitches encourage a presenter to elide the deductive reasoning of his company's work, and let the post hoc ergo propter hoc nature of the presentation seduce his audience. As Tufte says, "PowerPoint actively facilitates the making of lightweight presentations," and I would argue that startups should avoid lightweight presentations - especially when dealing with early stage investors.

Prose, on the other hand, is accessible, thorough and can be highly evocative. It's also platform independent, and doesn't require the author to be present to provide context to slides which have been abbreviated in order to achieve a consistent tempo. Prose can be used to convey complex, nuanced arguments, and it does so in such a way as to communicate argumentative style and personal character.

Prose also has the benefit of requiring verbatim proofreading, forcing its author to literally read back an argument to himself. This process can be extremely helpful to a project in which all of the details haven't been ironed out, as weak points are often glaringly obvious when they're verbalized explicitly. Slide decks, on the other hand, allow authors to gloss over difficult points in the text, with the intent that they will be filled in verbally during the pitch. Careful audiences will pick up on these argumentative gaps, especially when reviewing notes after the presentation, and the result doesn't reflect well on the author's formidability or command of the subject matter.

Of course, all authors need to find their own paths towards personal argumentative style and brand image. But the benefit of complete sentences, whether in the form of blog posts, executive summaries, or soliloquies, should not be undervalued. Prose is a powerful tool, and there is a wealth of historical examples of well composed prose arguments which - long after their authors are gone - remain convincing and powerful (see Chomsky's early syntax work, Boolos on incompleteness, Plato (take your pick), or any nearby piece of scientific literature). It's possible that the same will someday be the case with the slide deck. But I suspect instead that it's a transitional technology, and that presentations relying on PowerPoint-like technologies will be largely forgotten. Written prose, on the other hand, will be with us in some form or another for a long time, and I'm not in a position to argue with the future on that point. I encourage young teams - and anyone wanting to convey their ideas to others - to do the same.

For anyone looking for a particularly acute parody of a slide deck, see Peter Norvig's Gettysburg Address. Note, though, that any medium has examples of poor execution - and please send along examples of especially good slide decks, if you've got them :) 

Special thanks to Hope Reese and Nick Fletcher Park for editing. 

Taguchi

Added on by Spencer Wright.

From the Wikipedia page on Taguchi Methods. Genichi Taguchi was an engineer whose research focused largely on manufacturing tolerance design. 

He therefore argued that quality engineering should start with an understanding of quality costs in various situations. In much conventional industrial engineering, the quality costs are simply represented by the number of items outside specification multiplied by the cost of rework or scrap. However, Taguchi insisted that manufacturers broaden their horizons to consider cost to society. Though the short-term costs may simply be those of non-conformance, any item manufactured away from nominal would result in some loss to the customer or the wider community through early wear-out; difficulties in interfacing with other parts, themselves probably wide of nominal; or the need to build in safety margins. These losses are externalities and are usually ignored by manufacturers, which are more interested in their private costs than social costs. Such externalities prevent markets from operating efficiently, according to analyses of public economics. Taguchi argued that such losses would inevitably find their way back to the originating corporation (in an effect similar to the tragedy of the commons), and that by working to minimise them, manufacturers would enhance brand reputation, win markets and generate profits.

Manufacturing agnosticity

Added on by Spencer Wright.

I came across an interesting quote yesterday in the Wikipedia page for Geometric Dimensioning & Tolerancing (GD&T):

Descriptions of manufacturing methods should be avoided. The geometry should be described without explicitly defining the method of manufacture.

In context, this makes sense. GD&T has the purpose of making a part that fits the intended purpose, and in an ideal world, manufacturing methods are largely irrelevant to that process. But in the conventional design-manufacture cycle, I think this sets up a poor incentive structure, and hinders communication of key information.

It would be my hope that design tools evolve such that intent can be executed directly. But as it stands now, designers are still largely designing features. The result is that manufactured products carry high setup and switching costs, and often require multiple sample iterations in order to get right.

I admire the intent in the quote above (which, it should be noted, seems not to have been taken directly from the ASME standard), but I think it's a bit optimistic. Until we figure out a new way of incorporating intent directly into design, methods of manufacturing will be highly useful in design data transfer. 

Tags

Added on by Spencer Wright.

ISO should be an open source project

Added on by Spencer Wright.

Or, I mean, whatever. I *guess* they can keep trying to get ~$400 from me to see the spec for representing geometric data (ISO 10303-42) in STEP files... but I'm not sure that's sustainable long term. Right?

Seriously, though: What am I missing here?  Why are standards bodies organized in ways that seem to specifically prevent small (but potentially motivated) teams from participating? Are the projects they're working on too complex? In light of counterexamples ranging from the Linux kernel to GCC to the Apache web server and Android, I can't see how this is the case. Is it just a matter of entrenched interests refusing to relinquish control of a powerful governing body? Are there examples of similar open-standards projects that I'm not aware of?

Regardless, I wonder what the long term prognosis for standards regulation of this type is. I would *hope* that in ten, fifteen years max I'm seeing these standards in a web browser for free. Am I crazy?  

If I am, I hope somebody speaks up :) 

 I posted a related question on Quora. Answer it!

N.B. It strikes me that my nomenclature might be a little off, and that perhaps there are good examples of open-standards projects in the web world (e.g. W3C). Forgive my ignorance.

STEP files

Added on by Spencer Wright.

From Step Tools, Inc.'s excellent overview of STEP purpose, applications and development (emphasis mine):

The ultimate goal is for STEP to cover the entire life cycle, from conceptual design to final disposal, for all kinds of products. However, it will be a number of years before this goal is reached. The most tangible advantage of STEP to users today is the ability to exchange design data as solid models and assemblies of solid models. Other data exchange standards, such as the newer versions of IGES, also support the exchange of solid models, but less well.

But later, in the "Future of STEP" section: 

The real issue that stops faster STEP deployment is the commitment of those with the resources necessary to define the standards. The government does not like to pick solutions for industry, and industry does not like to fund the development of solutions that can also be used by their competitors. Consequently, much work only gets funded in situations of clear and desperate need such as when the high cost of manufacturing is causing excessive job losses.
The Internet and the World Wide Web broke through this cycle when "killer" applications made the benefits of the new infrastructure clear and compelling for all users. AP-203 made STEP useful by allowing solid models to be exchanged between design systems. AP-238 will make STEP compelling for some users by allowing them to machine parts more efficiently. However, like the early Internet there will be alternatives that are considered more reliable by other users. The killer application that makes STEP ubiquitous has yet to be identified.  

There's a lot of good info on STEP buried in obscure corners of the web. I hope to be summarizing some of my research on the topic soon. 

More on Prose, from GitHub

Added on by Spencer Wright.

This great snippet from FastCo's piece on GitHub's management structure hit me hard, especially as I've been thinking about the power of prose. See also: Ryan Tomayko on GitHub's open-source structure.

Communication isn’t just key to self-organization--it also solves or simplifies a bunch of other hurdles that growing companies face...
Marketing collateral is a natural by-product. When your company communicates internally with polished, clear, and well-produced content, it is easy to and repurpose that material for external communications. The kind of communication that is required for self-organization will end up producing all the events, schwag, and content you need to build and publicize an authentic brand.

I think that the power of this shouldn't be understated. Having a clear idea of the business you're in and how you communicate about it - which, as I've argued, can be done well through writing prose - can produce ripple effects throughout other facets of your company. 

It also strikes me, reading the above quote, that slide decks are almost never presented to potential customers.  If there are counterexamples to this, I'd love to see them. If not, I wonder if marketing departments are identifying weaknesses in the medium that upper level management is blind to.

 

Reid Hoffman

Added on by Spencer Wright.
If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.

LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman. I googled around for a quote with context, but didn't immediately find one. Oh well.

Paul Graham

Added on by Spencer Wright.

Paul Graham, from a high school graduation speech he apparently never gave. Emphasis mine. 

And yet every May, speakers all over the country fire up the Standard Graduation Speech, the theme of which is: don't give up on your dreams. I know what they mean, but this is a bad way to put it, because it implies you're supposed to be bound by some plan you made early on. The computer world has a name for this: premature optimization. And it is synonymous with disaster. These speakers would do better to say simply, don't give up.
What they really mean is, don't get demoralized. Don't think that you can't do what other people can. And I agree you shouldn't underestimate your potential. People who've done great things tend to seem as if they were a race apart. And most biographies only exaggerate this illusion, partly due to the worshipful attitude biographers inevitably sink into, and partly because, knowing how the story ends, they can't help streamlining the plot till it seems like the subject's life was a matter of destiny, the mere unfolding of some innate genius. In fact I suspect if you had the sixteen year old Shakespeare or Einstein in school with you, they'd seem impressive, but not totally unlike your other friends.
Which is an uncomfortable thought. If they were just like us, then they had to work very hard to do what they did. And that's one reason we like to believe in genius. It gives us an excuse for being lazy. If these guys were able to do what they did only because of some magic Shakespeareness or Einsteinness, then it's not our fault if we can't do something as good.
I'm not saying there's no such thing as genius. But if you're trying to choose between two theories and one gives you an excuse for being lazy, the other one is probably right.

Faceted Classification

Added on by Spencer Wright.

From Wikipedia, emphasis mine: 

A faceted classification system allows the assignment of an object to multiple characteristics (attributes), enabling the classification to be ordered in multiple ways, rather than in a single, predetermined, taxonomic order. A facet comprises "clearly defined, mutually exclusive, and collectively exhaustive aspects, properties or characteristics of a class or specific subject". For example, a collection of books might be classified using an author facet, a subject facet, a date facet, etc.
Faceted classification is used in faceted search systems that enable a user to navigate information along multiple paths corresponding to different orderings of the facets. This contrasts with traditional taxonomies in which the hierarchy of categories is fixed and unchanging.

Back in the Napster days, I spent a not insignificant amount of time renaming song files and placing them in a hierarchical file system. Each track was named in the following format:

"#{artist_name} -  #{album_name} - #{track_number} - #{track_name}.mp3"

And my directory structure looked like this: 

 

  • Music
    • #{artist_name_1}
      • #{album_name_1}
      • #{album_name_2}
    • #{artist_name_2}
      • #{album_name_1}
    • #{artist_name_3}
      • #{album_name_1}
      • #{album_name_2}
      • #{album_name_3}
    • etc.

With individual track files living inside each album directory. 

At the time, I was running Linux on my home PC and spent a lot of time navigating file structures in a shell. Having my music organized hierarchically was useful there, and I spent a bit of effort maintaining the system, even going so far as to write a shell script that would automate the creation of file structures for unclassified files.

Today, my habits have held over even while technology has changed. I still think of my media collection in terms of files (so old fashioned, I know) , and I keep iTunes in the "column browser" view. It works, but it's antiquated; were I more modern, I'd stream media exclusively and would search a cloud library for tags (created through folksonomy), not browse by static, predetermined layers of organization. When I was running Linux that wasn't an option, and my hierarchical organization was my easiest and most effective way of sorting songs. Now, that advantage is slipping away in the music industry, as social and cloud-based streaming services become more and more intelligent about how they thing about the qualities of a song or artist.

In other facets of my life, hierarchical organization gets closer and closer to obsolescence. When managing 3D assembly models, I find it tricky to establish naming sequences that will make sense across projects and phases of development. I tend towards part names that begin with two letters and end with four numbers. In a given filename, I follow the part name with a short verbal description. The end result looks like this:

"BK1008 Rack End.ipt"

Here, the file extension is .ipt, which is the Autodesk Inventor extension for part files. This particular part is one I designed for custom bike racks, and the prefix "BK" refers to bikes. The part lives in a directory called "BK Bike Parts", along with a bunch of other - related and unrelated - parts. Parts are categorized in directories according to the purpose they're originally designed for, but they're often repurposed or discarded. Their part numbers are just placeholders, and the descriptive titles I give them are often mostly meaningless. Often times, one designs a part with a particular form in mind and names it accordingly. Over time, that form changes, and in the end the name is nothing but a vestige. It's a kind of a Theseus' Paradox, and one that conventional naming schemes - or mine, anyway - don't account for well.

I'm happy to say that I have no idea what my files naming sequences will look like in five years. Jordan Brandt, Technology Futurist at Autodesk, predicts the death of files in a way that strikes me as totally prescient here. I'm not totally clear on the implications, but he describes a world in which part metadata is stored at attribute tags, much like Facebook photo tagging. Such a system would, I presume, at least initially require the user to set up searchable tags in order to enable reliable part retrieval. Eventually I'd hope that attributes could be generated predictively, much like Facebook scans photos for faces and auto-suggests likely matches for who to tag. 

At this point, my file naming conventions would become irrelevant. Brandt puts it very well - I *never* need to look in a particular folder, or for a particular filename, when I want to find a photo on Facebook. It's tagged with all the relevant data, and with adequate search tools it'll never be hard to find.  Eventually I expect the same to be the case for the little gadgets I'm designing: their identities becomes more and more tied to their actual attributes, rather than some arbitrary and cumbersome naming sequence.

Miyamoto

Added on by Spencer Wright.

From The New Yorker's great profile of Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto. Emphasis mine. 

What he hasn’t created is a company in his own name, or a vast fortune to go along with it. He is a salaryman. Miyamoto’s business card says that he is the senior managing director and the general manager of the entertainment-analysis and -development division at Nintendo Company Ltd., the video-game giant. What it does not say is that he is Nintendo’s guiding spirit, its meal ticket, and its playful public face. Miyamoto has said that his main job at Nintendo is ningen kougaku—human engineering. He has been at the company since 1977 and has worked for no other. (He prizes Nintendo’s financial and creative support for his work: “There’s a big difference between the money you receive personally from the company and the money you can use in your job.”) He has never been the company’s (or his own) boss, but it is not unreasonable to imagine that Nintendo might not exist without him. He designed the games and invented the franchises that caused people to buy the consoles. He also helped design the consoles.

This is fascinating to me. I am unclear, in many ways, about the extent of my own desire for ownership of the products I create. Specifically, I can say this: I wish for the experience of providing value more than I do for ownership of what I'm working on. It's totally possible for that to come through individual endeavors, but my experiences working alone have in many ways been lacking in this area, and my natural inclination now is to look for value in collaboration, not solitude. Ownership is secondary, as the benefits it has provided me have been limited by the ultimate value of the work I've done - which value is, I suspect, greater in collaborative settings than not.

More Kahneman

Added on by Spencer Wright.
A disturbing demonstration of depletion effects in judgment was recently reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The unwitting participants in the study were eight parole judges in Israel. They spend entire days reviewing applications for parole. The cases are presented in random order, and the judges spend little time on each one, an average of 6 minutes. (The default decision is denial of parole; only 35% of requests are approved. The exact time of each decision is recorded, and the times of the judges’ three food breaks – morning break, lunch, and afternoon break – during the day are recorded as well.) The authors of the study plotted the proportion of approved requests against the time since the last food break. The proportion spikes after each meal, when about 65% of request are granted. During the two hours or so until the judges’ next feeding, the approval rate drops steadily, to about zero just before the meal. As you might expect, this is an unwelcome result and the authors carefully checked many alternative explanations. The best possible account of the data provides bad news: tired and hungry judges tend to fall back on the easier default position of denying requests for parole. Both fatigue and hunger probably play a role.

Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow; emphasis mine.