The power of rapid prototyping, and other things we learned at Collaborate

Tom Chi, the cofounder of Google X, wasn’t wearing Google Glass when he spoke at Fosterly’s first ever Collaborate conference on Friday. But he came with a piercing vision for marrying efficiency and creativity, particularly within large organizations.

Doing is the best type of thinking. Thinking is the worst way to think.

The first prototype for Google Glass, he said, was pieced together in about three hours, from parts that included a coat hanger and the stretchable fabric high school kids use to cover their textbooks.
But that came after way too many hand-wringing sessions over questions like Glass’s display colors, he said.
“The innovation that we have is 100 or 1,000 times too slow,” he said.
And that’s because organizations — even the top thinkers at Google — spend too much time planning and not enough fiddling with a real, actionable prototype.
“Doing is the best type of thinking,” said Chi. “Thinking is the worst way to think.”

(He also revealed the existence of a document entitled “What will it take to get Google in your brain?” and the fact that Yahoo does employ smart people: “I don’t know what they’re getting to do, but they’re there.”)
So, what’s a good way for large organizations to cut to the chase? Through rapid prototyping: putting the developer and designer in a room, to face a stream of nonnegotiable feedback from users, all the while coding and rebuilding the project.
The flow of reinvention is meant to free the creators from the Scylla and Charybdis of  “deck dilution” and excessive attachment to one iteration of the project, allowing them to push forward with interesting new ideas.
The government also made an appearance.
The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) announced a $100,000 prize for the best software to track and trace books in low-income countries. The initiative by All Children Reading, a partnership between USAID and the Australian government, follows a similar challenge announced last February for technology that could help authors create reading material for children in their local languages. More info on the grants here.
MakerBot announced it would donate a replicator to the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library’s lab space.