The Culture

The Culture has given them preconceptions about what’s exciting, what’s interesting; and most designers spend their time trying to emulate what’s supposed to be hot, what’s current, what’s trendy. But just think, if we want to do something that’s original, how can rely on what the Culture tells us? The Culture tells all of us the same thing. It’s not Big Brother who’s watching you, it’s Disney, The Shopping Channel, Rupert Murdoch, Time, and a few other mega-corporations.

The Culture that they inflict on us through their virtual monopoly of network television, cable, CDs, film, theatre, book and magazine publishing, etc., is designed to appeal to the lowest common denominator, which in turn allows them to merchandise the greatest numbers of tchotchkes. Of course, the establishment allows just enough high culture to prove that they’re not philistines.

7 Steps For Creating Disruptive New Retail Experiences

Why are people willing to pay $4 for coffee at Starbucks and clog Apple stores to play with electronic gadgets? Both companies reinvented the retail experience.

Have you wondered why we linger in an Apple store, playing with shiny screens, but never set foot in a Sony Style store (which, incidentally, has its devices locked behind glass doors)? Why are one company’s stores a multi-billion dollar business while the other doesn’t even show up in their annual report?

The difference is that Apple has created something very different from the cold, “hands-off” nature of traditional high-end stores, while avoiding the clutter of a warehouse store like Best Buy. In sociological terms, Apple has very deliberately changed the “script” of electronics shopping.

What do we mean by “scripts”? Sociologists have spent years studying experiences and have noticed that there are shared rules that govern how we act. These scripts are unwritten and unspoken, yet greatly influence our day-to-day behaviors and interactions.

Scripts are why we know what to do when we go to the DMV. Unfortunately for the DMV, that script includes complaining to the people in line with us, expecting a bad photo to be taken, and talking afterward about how inefficient the process was. On the other hand, a birthday party is supposed to be a happy experience. We appropriately sing and smile, often in spite of how much is on our minds.

In the mundane routines of our lives, experiences that stand out are often those that change the existing scripts. Mini Cooper, for example, replaced the “cheap small car” script with one that leverages the fun aspects of driving a rally car.

To truly design a great experience that’s right for your company, we need to look beyond the field of design to sociology, economics, organizational behavior, and even theater. These seven principles will help you be strategic about the experiences you design and choose the right script for your company.
1. Experience design is not about luxury.

As soon as the conversation turns to design and customer-centered activities, the knee-jerk reaction is to cast the product as a “premium” idea. The truth is that customer experience can be central to even “value-based” businesses. Consider Southwest Airlines. At its best, the combination of heart, humor, and efficiency makes for a distinctly Southwest script for air travel that’s different from the norm.
2. Start with empathy.

Understanding and challenging social scripts requires stepping into your customers’ shoes. Harley-Davidson has a strong community of riders as brand ambassadors precisely because its employees are the kinds of people who equate biking with life and freedom, and regularly hit the open roads.
3. Do your own thing.

Find authentic sources of connection with your customers and stick to them. People will value originality as long as you continue to serve their needs. Target was a discount retailer trying to outdo Walmart on price before it realized it could create a destination for the design-minded community, providing a lot more value.
4. Utilize all elements of theater.

Create an immersive world with consistent rules. To reinforce the script, think of the whole experience as a “play,” including the cast, costumes, set, and props. Starbucks employs all of these elements in their coffee-shop experience– everything from the interior design to the names of the drinks are considered in delivering the experience Howard Schultz envisioned when popularizing the “coffee-shop” script in the U.S.
5. Use different incentives to create different behaviors.

Align your people, including their incentives and motivations, with the desired experience. Saturn changed the car-buying script in the 1980s by employing salaried salespeople–and eliminating a stereotype of the sleazy car salesman who’s after commissions.
6. The devil is in the trade-offs.

The experience you offer should have a clear point of view. What you leave out often says more than what you leave in. Chipotle refuses to use freezers, in the fast food industry no less. And Whole Foods won’t accept over-processed foods in its aisles. Managing trade-offs tightly is essential to creating a script with a character that inspires people and separates a brand from the pack.
7. Evolve to stay relevant.

Never stop prototyping and testing changes to make the experience better and to change in step with people’s needs. McDonald’s has proved surprisingly resilient through market ups and downs. It constantly experiments with its experience at its Innovation Center in Illinois, making sure new elements–like its wildly successful coffee offerings–support and augment its business goals.

Designing great experiences is a blind spot for many corporate leaders. It’s an area of expertise that needs just as much attention, rigor, and patience as the other aspects of business excellence taught in our B-schools. And with folks like Apple raising the stakes, ignore it at your own peril.

Steve Jobs Style

“It’s not the consumers’ job to know what they want.” In other words, while Mr. Jobs tried to understand the problems that technology could solve for his buyer, he wasn’t going to rely on the buyer to demand specific solutions, just so he could avoid ever having to take a risk. This is what’s commonly known as leading.

Presentation Ideas

Herding Cats:
The Art of Creative Collaboration

Objectivity and invention

When Trying to Invent, Being Objective Can Cripple Your Process
Most fields pride themselves on objectivity. Designers need to have a point of view.

This is the final essay in a three-part series by Jon Kolko, author of the new book Exposing the Magic of Design, on how to embrace design synthesis in your organization. Read the first part here and the second part here.

During the first part of this series, I wrote about some immediate ways you can design synthesis into your work, in order to make sense of chaotic and incomplete data. In the second part, I described ways to change the culture of your workplace in order to encourage more play and creative productivity. In this final part, I would like to offer you a provocation — not methods or techniques, but a call for judgment, interpretation, and bias.
The Importance of a Point of View

Most professional careers celebrate objectivity. Doctors, engineers, bankers, and anthropologists all describe a need for a clear, sensible, emotionless approach to their work. Data is king in these fields — until hard data is provided, professionals are taught to be skeptical, and to reject unsubstantiated changes. Metrics and empirical tests of efficiency, validity, or productivity are celebrated. Even marketers — whom often produce humorous and emotionally charged artifacts — tend to substantiate their work with rigorous data collection both before and after the production of these artifacts, in an attempt to add some form of rationalization, and to track and analyze their successes. Google Analytics has made the infamous A/B testing ubiquitous in web properties, where a full suite of metrics can be processed and tracked in order to understand the causal relationship between a decision and the behavior of the community of users. This idea of causality is the holy grail of statistics, as it — when combined with appropriate sampling and other qualities of statistical significance — indicates a direct and logical relationship between an action and a response.

When synthesizing, using data to justify old decisions is a recipe for disaster.

Designers, too, have found value in data — we’ve learned to use it to “speak the language” of other disciplines, who frequently hold some form of decision making power over our ideas. Designers have, with some successes and a great deal of failures, attempted to cost-justify usability with data, rationalize branding and mark-making with questionnaires and surveys, and utilize trends, patterns, and “best practices” to back up our design decisions.

During design synthesis, this is recipe for disaster, and the reason is found — perhaps ironically — in data from cognitive, social and behavioral psychology.

Framing and Sensemaking
To state the obvious, we are all different. We start with various genetic dispositions, and over time, we’ve experienced different things and been taught different morals and cultural norms. We’ve had serendipitous moments, we’ve learned, and grown, and changed. And we approach the world through a lens that is made up of these moments, feelings, and emotions. There’s one reality, but lots of ways of viewing it. And this lens directly effects how we act in a given situation. This is a frame — a perspective, one built over time and through our experiences. A frame allows us to understand cultural norms and nuances, and allows us to “instinctively” or “intuitively” react to a situation. We approach every experience from a certain vantage point, and from that unique perspective we judge and interpret and make decisions. Our political views, our prejudices, and even our tastes in music affect the way we approach each new experience, and these new experiences in turn continue to refine our views and tastes.

During synthesis, this frame, and our awareness of it, acts as our most important tool. For as a designer stands in front of a whiteboard in a war-room, surrounded by anecdotes, quotes, pictures, sketches, and working models — and searching for a new, innovative, and persuasive idea — she is relying on her ability to connect something in her own life with something in the data she’s gathered. She is purposefully applying a frame of bias to objective, empirical data, in order to produce something new.

Synthesis requires highly eclectic designers empowered to embrace their biases.

This is called sensemaking. According to Karl Weick (known primarily for his work in organizational and behavioral theory), sensemaking is, “importantly, an issue of language, talk, and communication. Situations, organizations, and environments are talked into existence… Sensemaking is about the interplay of action and interpretation rather than the influence of evaluation on choice.” Cognitive psychologist Robert Hoffman describes sensemaking as “… something different from creativity, comprehension, curiosity, mental modeling, explanation, or situational awareness… sensemaking is a motivated, continuous effort to understand connections (which can be among people, places, and events) in order to anticipate their trajectories and act effectively.”

During design synthesis, we apply our perspective to data, and something new is produced. The more interesting our perspective, the more interesting the end result. Put another way, sensemaking is most likely to lead to something new and exciting when those doing the synthesis have led a life of extreme, interesting, fresh, unique, obscure, and extremely varied experiences.

I find this particularly important, as it arrives at the heart of most organizations — the people they employ. I’ve discussed methods and techniques for synthesis, and the culture and environment necessary to make meaning of data, but all of this is useless if the people doing the synthesis aren’t very interesting. Synthesis requires a team of varied and highly eclectic designers who are empowered to embrace their biased perspectives. Through this bias and judgment comes innovation. Groundbreaking design doesn’t come through statistical regression testing, metrics, and causality. It comes from the richness of a biased perspective on the world.

Research/Innovation

How Do You Transform Good Research Into Great Innovations?

This is the first essay in a three-part series by Jon Kolko, author of the new book Exposing the Magic of Design, on how to embrace design synthesis in your organization.

You’ve just completed design research in the field, capturing hours of video, thousands of photos, artifacts, papers, and documents. And now, you’re stumped and overwhelmed. What should you do next? How do you do it? And how do you know when you’ve done a good job?

Design synthesis — the process of translating data and research into knowledge — is the most critical part of the design process. Yet in our popular discussions of design and innovation, we’ve largely ignored this fundamental role. We engage in debates and discussions about process methodologies (waterfall vs. agile, user-centered design vs. technology-driven design) and management techniques (topgrading, negotiation), yet we rarely engage in conversation about incubation and translation: making meaning out of the data we’ve gathered from research, as we strive for innovation. It’s as if this part of design is magical, and for us to formalize our techniques would somehow call attention to our sleight of hand.

We rarely engage in conversation about making meaning out of data.

Without a formal strategy and approach to synthesis, experienced designers rely on their intuition, built up over years of trial and error. “Just trust me,” says the old-guard, and the discipline of design loses credibility. Worse, younger designers flail and waste precious time, becoming frustrated and ultimately rejecting the ethnographic research methods themselves. Yet it isn’t the research methods that are at fault, as research itself does not produce new ideas. The approaches to incubation and translation can be formalized, and to do so offers a great service to designers who are struggling to work through increasingly complicated problems in business and culture. During design synthesis, truly revolutionary innovations emerge.
Focusing on Activity and Action

Most of us engaged in large-scale design efforts agree that ethnographic research is required to build empathy and understanding. Yet immediately after research has been conducted, a period of complacent inaction emerges. The team is overwhelmed, and without a clear indication of what to do next, they sit, idle, sifting through the transcripts and video with no rhyme or reason to their method. In my experience, clients — reacting to this inaction — dismiss the entire value of research at all. Similarly, creative directors — frustrated with a lack of forward movement — often circumvent process and rely on their personal experiences, doing whatever worked well last time, again. Precious time is lost; ideas become flat and tired; the team tends towards inertia. Here are three tactics to overcome this inertia.

1. Get out of the laptop. The data created or gathered from contextual research will often take many forms: photographs, video clips, transcripts, requirements lists, magazine clippings, and other artifacts related to the problem. In an effort to maintain some sense of coherence, we’ll frequently horde the data in our laptops. The digital format lets us easily organize ourselves around files, folders, wikis and databases. But the file structure also arbitrarily limits the ability to manipulate individual pieces of data freely across file types, to form connections between pieces of data, and to manipulate the data quickly. The physical limitation of the laptop (the size), combined with the digital limitations of the software (the organizational schema), dramatically limits our ability to understand the research in totality. Externalize the data through a process of spatialization. This is the quintessential (and unfortunately overplayed) image of the designer moving Post-it notes around (typically on a glass wall, and usually photographed through frosted glass with a dramatic depth of field). Each Post-it contains a piece of data. A week of research will generate thousands of data points. Take the time to rigorously move from a digital medium to the physical world.

2. Identify and celebrate patterns and anomalies. As your data is now quite literally all around you, methodically identify relationships between customer utterances, feature requests, technical constraints, and other data points. These relationships are hidden in the data, and it’s up to you and your team to identify them; the unique disciplinary makeup of the team will determine the lens through which you examine each data point. Quite literally, compare note 1 and note 2, and if they are related, place them next to each other. Repeat this, through several passes, over the entire room. Time-box the exercise based on your schedule; when you are done, look carefully at patterns you’ve discovered, as these can begin to articulate opportunities for “low-hanging fruit” or “quick hits”. But don’t discard the extreme outliers, either — as these articulate opportunities for dramatic and radical innovation.

If the data isn’t modeled, it never happened.

3. Build a model of something, anything. A model is a visual representation of an idea; we use models to understand, and to communicate, and to simplify. Build a model of your data. Start with circles and arrows, and connect noun and verb pairs. Identify existing or potential work flow changes, and map them in a process flow. Extract the power dynamics implicit in any human system (literally, the people who hold the power, and whom they hold it over), and make a chart of this data. Because these are thinking tools, tools for synthesis, there’s only one wrong way to do this: not doing it at all. Looking at the data and talking about the data doesn’t count. If it isn’t modeled, written, drawn, and otherwise solidified in an artifact, it never happened.

These tactics are fundamental for making sense of gathered research data, in order to move from data to information. This is the beginning of synthesis: Making meaning of data in order to produce new, compelling, and appropriate innovations. These tactics can be applied to the design of new products, both physical and digital, and to business process problems, systems and services, and even to complicated issues of channel optimization, go-to-market strategies, and other complication core business issues.

In Part II of this series, I’ll describe the culture that’s necessary to support these types of activities. See you next week.

Cultural Values

Fast Company
Jan 19, 2011
Popular Topics

Cultural Values That Will Make Your Office an Idea Factory
Jon Kolko shows how a change in corporate culture can lead to better design solutions.

This is the second essay in a three-part series by Jon Kolko, author of the new book Exposing the Magic of Design, on how to embrace design synthesis in your organization. Read the first part here.

In the first part of this series, I wrote about some immediate tactics you can take to encourage more design synthesis in your ethnographic research work — to help your teams make sense of chaotic and often incomplete or conflicting research data. In this next part, I’ll offer some suggestions and recommendations on changing the culture of your company to embrace the types of thinking that occur during synthesis. Arguably, this is a harder — but much more important — part of exposing the magic of design.
Building a Playful Culture

It’s unfortunate; when people speak about a playful office environment, they often describe Nerf darts, beanbag chairs, and funny hats. This stereotype, reinforced by lavish dot-com and web 2.0 spending, comes from poor consulting cultures that positioned juvenile behavior as necessary for those coming up with new and novel ideas. This only serves to reinforce the view of designer as magician — that somehow, while playing hours of foosball or XBox, designers are busy dreaming up the next Twitter, Apple, or Nike.

When people speak about a playful offices, they often describe Nerf darts.

In fact, playfulness in culture can be designed, and it doesn’t require any Nerf toys at all. But it requires some top-down qualities that will challenge traditional corporations and financially-strapped agencies. To be playful, an organization needs to embrace dynamic constraints, provide a runway to explore deviant ideas, and support and encourage flow.

Embrace Dynamic Constraints
While the word constraint has a negative tone, constraints act as the central construct for managing an otherwise overwhelming design activity. Designer Charles Eames described constraints as the qualities that contain a design problem, that mark its beginning and ending, and that illustrate to what extent the designer can affect change. Clients and technologies provide constraints, but the most useful and actionable constraints come from within the designer, and are often established during synthesis. A playful culture enables a designer to propose new constraints, and when the context of the situation demands — to the frustration of business owners everywhere — the designer can selectively ignore constraints entirely. Consider the following dialogue between a designer and a product manager concerning a web-based flow:

Designer: This is such a critical moment in the checkout flow that I highlighted the area in red and made the action abilities a bit larger than on other pages.

Product Manager: But that doesn’t fit within the parameters of the templates we’ve established and everyone has signed off on. It’s different from the other pages. Won’t it be inconsistent?

Designer: Yes, it is inconsistent. But I think, at this part of the flow, it’s important to call it out as separate.

Product Manager: I’m confused. When we developed the templates, you told me consistency was important. Now you are telling me it’s not important. Which is it?

Does the designer have the ability to establish constraints during synthesis? Are they empowered to make decisions like this? Most importantly, is there institutional support for the design team — have the directors and other managers enacted policy, procedure, and precedent that brings designers into a situation early enough to make this form of strategic recommendation?

Provide a Runway to Explore Deviant Ideas
Most businesses embrace an established hierarchy of decision making. This, theoretically, helps streamline important decisions, enforces accountability, and minimizes risk. In the context of creativity, while senior and director-level designers have refined their craft, it’s unlikely that they will have the “best idea” during a synthesis session, as synthesis is dependent on a breadth of experiences and unique viewpoints. To hold a playfully deviant point of view in the context of a serious design discussion allows a designer to explore divergent ideas, temporarily move the problem constraints, and expand the boundaries of what might be considered “appropriate” design decisions. A playful culture will provide a runway for those with deviant ideas to explore and refine the ideas — even when those ideas conflict with the vision of leadership. Sometimes this runway consists of permission; other times, it requires hours and financial support. But in all cases, support comes from above, by setting a tone and approach that embrace conflicting ideas.

Does your company culture afford freedom, flow and decision-making?

The notion of being playful is to appreciate and encourage divergent thinking and the shifting, flexing, and removing of constraints. Play is about exploring “what-if” scenarios; that is, dream states. Our lives, jobs, and compensation are so frequently tied to rational thought that we have often forgotten how to actively dream, yet these dreams — the ability to generate ideas, outlandish or otherwise — are at the core of design innovation. Design synthesis embraces this divergent dreaming.

Support and Encourage Flow and Autonomous Decision Making
According to psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, flow is an optimal experience achieved during creativity that is an “automatic, effortless, yet highly focused state of consciousness.” Flow is literally the awake-dreaming state of mind that occurs when a designer is able to move through the space of a problem, holding many design “moves” in the mind at once, and suspending self-criticism while retaining idea-based judgment. To state the obvious, this takes time — blocks of undisturbed time. Conference calls, meetings, check-ins, standups, email threads, bug-lists, IMs, and other distractions can make it literally impossible to enter this flow-like state. A culture that recognizes the importance of flow can create a virtual barrier around a design team, where someone — usually a creative director — can play interference for the team by handling all of the tedium described above.

If someone’s making decisions during a flow-like state, they aren’t checking in with the team, and they aren’t waiting for consensus before moving forward. Simply, they are empowered to act autonomously — rejecting the increasing trend towards “socialization” of every decision made during the development of a product, system or service. Consider if your company culture affords this level of freedom, flow, and individual responsibility and decision-making.

Synthesis is the ability to make meaning out of data, and playfulness is a cultural phenomenon central to meaning-making. Play can be introduced, over time, into any organization. Start by embracing the dynamic nature of constraints, providing a runway for employees to explore deviant ideas, and supporting and encouraging flow and individual decision making.

During Part I of this series, I offered some tactics on how to jump into synthesis; in Part III of this series, I’ll describe the importance of celebrating bias in your design synthesis work. See you next week.

Impact of Web-Based Video for Innovation and Creativity

http://www.ted.com/talks/chris_anderson_how_web_video_powers_global_innovation.html

Innovation Labs

Instead of assembly line, think swarming beehive. Teams of people from different disciplines gather to focus on a problem. They brainstorm, tinker, and toy with different approaches — and generate answers that can be tested on customers and sped to the market. At times, it’s true, innovation labs can seem like dot-com flashbacks, full of pretentious rhetoric, black-clad engineers, and interior design clichés like cappuccino machines and foosball tables. But the fact is that the concept has been embraced by companies far removed from Silicon Valley. These organizations have discovered that innovation labs can be a powerful tool for big corporations to cut through their own bureaucratic bloat.

A central tenet of the innovation lab movement is that layout and design are crucial. Mattel Inc.’s preschool toy unit, Fisher-Price, has its center at company headquarters in East Aurora, N.Y., but it’s clearly a separate part of the operation. Called the Cave, the center boasts bean-bag chairs, comfy couches, and adjustable lighting that makes people feel as if they’re far from the office. Teams of staffers from engineering, marketing, and design meet there with child psychologists or other specialists to share ideas. After observing families at play in the field, they return to brainstorm — or “sketchstorm,” as they call it. Then they build prototypes of toys from foam, cardboard, glue, and acrylic paint.

Mingling with people from various disciplines has been key at the three-year-old operation. Staffers such as Tina Zinter-Chahin, senior vice-president for research and development, call the interaction spelunking, since it’s based on an idea of taking a “deep dive” into product development. “People at first were skeptical,” says Zinter-Chahin, noting that toy designers didn’t care to spend so much time with marketers. “They said: ‘Come on, I’m going to go away for five days and take a marketing person?’ We found that while they aren’t great with foam and glue guns, they’re great at hashing out an idea and positioning the product.”

Already, Fisher-Price staffers can point to successes. After observing babies as they learned basic skills, the spelunkers realized that moms spent a lot of time teaching kids about such things in the house as doors, light switches, drawers, and kitchen utensils. While the company could boast about toys that make noise or flash lights, it was short on real-world practical stuff. It solved the problem with Laugh and Learn Learning Home, a $65 model home made of plastic, where kids can crawl through a front door and explore the alphabet, numbers, music, speech, and different sounds. A smash hit in its 2004 debut, it’s now a full line of toys. The outfit has high hopes for a couple of forthcoming products, such as the Easy Clean high chair, the result of a spelunk about issues moms had feeding kids.

Although innovation labs are typically created to generate new product ideas, they are also sometimes used to improve manufacturing processes. At Boeing Co., (BA ) for instance, nearly 3,000 engineers and finance and program management staffers from scattered locations in the Renton (Wash.) area were moved last year to the factory where 737 jetliners are assembled. “If you are in the office area, you can feel and hear the noises in the factory and can look out your window and see the wing tips going down that line,” says Larry Loftis, director of manufacturing for the 737. “There is a constant reminder for the engineers.”

Such shifts smooth the way toward faster working arrangements. To urge people to mingle, Boeing created common break areas where mechanics and engineers can talk shop over coffee or a snack, building informal relationships that could speed both daily working processes and innovations. Now, if a mechanic finds that a part doesn’t fit, he can find an engineer to redesign it nearly on the spot. Or when a jet with a novel interior design first rolls on the line, the engineers and mechanics can make changes, as needed. “When things don’t fit exactly right, they can change the engineering or blueprint in hours, instead of weeks or months,” Loftis says.

Collaboration as alternative to competition

The Snuggle For Existence

Everyone is familiar with the struggle for existence. In the wake of the revolutionary work by Charles Darwin we realized that competition is at the very heart of evolution. The fittest win this endless “struggle for life most severe”, as he put it, and all others perish. In consequence, every creature that crawls, swims, and flies today has ancestors that once successfully reproduced more often than their unfortunate competitors.

This is echoed in the way that people see life as competitive. Winners take all. Nice guys finish last. We look after number one. We are motivated by self-interest. Indeed, even our genes are said to be selfish.

Yet competition does not tell the whole story of biology.

I doubt many realise that, paradoxically, one way to win the struggle for existence is to pursue the snuggle for existence: to cooperate.

We already do this to a remarkable extent. Even the simplest activities of everyday life involve much more cooperation than you might think. Consider, for example, stopping at a coffee shop one morning to have a cappuccino and croissant for breakfast. To enjoy that simple pleasure could draw on the labors of a small army of people from at least half a dozen countries. Delivering that snack also relied on a vast number of ideas, which have been widely disseminated around the world down the generations by the medium of language.

Now we have remarkable new insights into what makes us all work together. Building on the work of many others, Martin Nowak of Harvard University has identified at least five basic mechanisms of cooperation. What I find stunning is that he shows the way that we human beings collaborate is as clearly described by mathematics as the descent of the apple that once fell in Newton’s garden. The implications of this new understanding are profound.

Global human cooperation now teeters on a threshold. The accelerating wealth and industry of Earth’s increasing inhabitants — itself a triumph of cooperation-is exhausting the ability of our home planet to support us all. Many problems that challenge us today can be traced back to a profound tension between what is good and desirable for society as a whole and what is good and desirable for an individual. That conflict can be found in global problems such as climate change, pollution, resource depletion, poverty, hunger, and overpopulation.

As once argued by the American ecologist Garrett Hardin, the biggest issues of all — saving the planet and maximizing the collective lifetime of the species Homo sapiens — cannot be solved by technology alone. If we are to win the struggle for existence, and avoid a precipitous fall, there’s no choice but to harness this extraordinary creative force. It is down to all of us to refine and to extend our ability to cooperate.

Nowak’s work contains a deeper message. Previously, there were only two basic principles of evolution — mutation and selection — where the former generates genetic diversity and the latter picks the individuals that are best suited to a given environment. We must now accept that cooperation is the third principle. From cooperation can emerge the constructive side of evolution, from genes to organisms to language and the extraordinarily complex social behaviors that underpin modern society.

ROGER HIGHFIELD
Editor, New Scientist; Coauthor, After Dolly