#engineering serendipity

[storieslikethreads]

Engineering Serendipity - Great American Road Trip with no Car, Butterfly Jackets & Zigzag Walks

"The adventure is not the getting there, it’s the on-the-way. It is not the expected; it is the surprise; not the fulfillment of prophecy, but the providence of something better than prophesied. You are not choosing what you shall see in the world, but are giving the world an even chance to see you. "  -- Stephen Graham, The Gentle Art of Tramping

Zigzags in the Sky & on the Ground 

As I mentioned in my last post, I am currently on a three months journey following the Fall migration of the Western population of Monarch butterflies. Planning the route was a bit of a challenge as not much is actually known about the Western migration. What is known is that:

There are many different routes, even within each of the populations.

There is a lot of overlap, and no genetic differences, between the two populations of North American Monarchs, which are divided into Eastern and Western population based on which side of the Rocky Mountains they are on. 

The routes are much more complex than predicted by previous models, which essentially assumed that the butterflies would be flying straight south to their overwintering sites. 

Their different migration routes tend to follow rivers, in particular, I was told to follow the Fraser and Columbia Rivers

Monarchs do not fly in massive groups and fly at high altitudes, making it unlikely that I would see them unless they were feeding or resting. 

Monarchs exclusively eat milkweed...so follow the milkweed and you'll follow the butterflies

With that information, I traced a rough route that would start in Vancouver by the Fraser River. I would then proceed east in British Columbia to follow the Columbia River all the way back into Washington and Oregon.

The next challenge to planning my route was that I have neither a license nor a car, so I am wholly dependent on buses and trains. Once again, I adjusted my route a bit based on Greyhound and Amtrak stops. 

Today is the 10th day of my journey and I have yet to see a Monarch. Each day I am hopeful that I may see one, but in the end, this journey is much more about engineering serendipitous discoveries and encounters on an ancient route, than it is about stalking butterflies. 

Speaking of engineering serendipity, last year I read Stephen Graham's fantastic book, The Gentle Art of Tramping, and have adopted one of his explorations devices: the Zigzag Walk. Give it a try, something beautiful always comes along when I do. 

A frequent wish of the traveler and wanderer is to obtain genuinely chance impressions of cities and countries. He would trust neither his own choice of road, nor the guide’s choice, nor the map. But if he goes forth in aimlessness he inevitably finds himself either making for the gayer and better-lighted places, or returning to his own door.

The problem is to let chance and the town take charge of you, for the world we travel in is more wonderful than human plan or idle heart’s desire.

One day in New York, wishing to explore that great city in a truly haphazard way, I hit on the following device–a zigzag walk. The first turning to the left is the way of the heart. Take it at random and you are sure to find something pleasant and diverting. Take the left again and the piquancy may be repeated. But reason must come to the rescue, and you must turn to the right in order to save yourself from a mere uninteresting circle. To make a zigzag walk you take the first turning to the left, the first to the right, then the first to the left again, and so on.

[…]

How unusual and real and satisfactory were the impressions obtained by going–not the crowd’s way, but the way of the zigzag, the diagonal between heart and reason.

The adventure is not the getting there, it’s the on-the-way. It is not the expected; it is the surprise; not the fulfillment of prophecy, but the providence of something better than prophesied. You are not choosing what you shall see in the world, but are giving the world an even chance to see you.

Source: The Gentle Art of Tramping by Stephen Graham

So far so good---I left New York on September 2nd, and nearly missed my connecting flight in Chicago since we were an hour late leaving NY and ended up landing in Chicago at the same time that my connecting flight to Vancouver was boarding. I did make my flight (thank you, Great Butterfly Gods) and got some serious butterflies (figurative this time) when we landed in Vancouver and the lady sitting in the aisle seat of my row got up and put her jacket on....it was a gorgeous Prussian Blue jacket, decorated with roses and peonies and on them, you guessed it, MONARCHS!!! The delightful convergences didn't stop there as when I was walking from the plane to the Canadian customs, I noticed a giant billboard on the ground below; it was an ad that stated simply: This is perfect for you," with three butterflies. :) 

To serendipity, convergences and divergences!  

[newstfionline]

Engineering Serendipity

By Greg Lindsay, NY Times, April 5, 2013 WHEN Yahoo banned its employees from working from home in February, the reasons it gave had less to do with productivity than serendipity. "Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings," explained the accompanying memo. The message was clear: doing your best work solo can't compete with lingering around the coffee machine waiting for inspiration--in the form of a colleague--to strike.

That same day, Google provided details of its new campus in Mountain View, Calif., to Vanity Fair. Buildings resembling bent rectangles were designed, in the words of the search giant's real estate chief, to maximize "casual collisions of the work force." Rooftop cafes will offer additional opportunities for close encounters, and no employees in the complex will be more than a two-and-a-half-minute walk away from one another. "You can't schedule innovation," he said, as Google knows well, attributing the genesis of such projects as Gmail, Google News and Street View to engineers having fortuitous conversations at lunch.

Silicon Valley is obsessed with serendipity, the reigning buzzword at last month's South by Southwest Interactive Festival. The term, coined by the British aristocrat Horace Walpole in a 1754 letter, long referred to a fortunate accidental discovery. Today serendipity is regarded as close kin to creativity--the mysterious means by which new ideas enter the world. But are hallway collisions really the best way to stoke innovation?

As Yahoo and Google see it, serendipity is largely a byproduct of social networks. Close-knit teams do well at tackling the challenges in front of them, but lack the connections to spot complementary ideas elsewhere in the company. The University of Chicago sociologist Ronald S. Burt calls these organizational gaps "structural holes." In a 2004 study of 673 managers at the defense contractor Raytheon, Mr. Burt found that managers who serendipitously bridged such gaps were more likely to generate good ideas (and advance professionally as a result). "This is not creativity born of genius," he wrote. "It is creativity as an import-export business." In such cases, serendipity is the spontaneous plugging of these holes, over which good ideas flow.

Whereas Mr. Burt painstakingly assembled his analysis by hand, today sites like Facebook and LinkedIn contain enough information to do so automatically. Last month, researchers at Israel's Ben-Gurion University detailed how they were able to construct social network maps of a half-dozen technology companies--including one with more than 50,000 employees--in a matter of hours using readily available data. Armed with such maps, says Michael Fire, the paper's lead author, managers can spot isolated teams and structural holes, tweaking the organizational structure in real time. Rather than wait for their employees to cross paths, they could simply make the necessary introductions.

ONE reason structural holes persist is our overwhelming preference for face-to-face interactions. Almost 40 years ago, Thomas J. Allen, a professor of management and engineering at M.I.T., found that colleagues who are out of sight are frequently out of mind--we are four times as likely to communicate regularly with someone sitting six feet away from us as we are with someone 60 feet away, and almost never with colleagues in separate buildings or floors.

And we get a particular intellectual charge from sharing ideas in person. In a paper published last year, researchers at Arizona State University used sensors and surveys to study creativity within teams. Participants felt most creative on days spent in motion meeting people, not working for long stretches at their desks.

The sensors in the A.S.U. study were supplied by Sociometric Solutions, a spinoff company of the M.I.T. Media Lab's Human Dynamics Laboratory that uses "sociometric badges" to measure workers' movements, speech and conversational partners. One discovery, says Ben Waber, a co-founder of the company and a visiting scientist at M.I.T., was that employees who ate at cafeteria tables designed for 12 were more productive than those at tables for four, thanks to more chance conversations and larger social networks. That, along with things like companywide lunch hours and the cafes Google is so fond of, can boost individual productivity by as much as 25 percent.

"If you just think of serendipity as an interaction with an unintended outcome, you can orchestrate pleasant surprises," says Scott Doorley, a creative director at Stanford University's Institute of Design. He and his colleague Scott Witthoft have instituted simple measures like positioning couches near doorways and stocking rooms with multiple types of seating to encourage lingering conversations.

Dr. Waber goes further in his forthcoming book "People Analytics," envisioning a sensor-strewn office that reconfigures itself each morning courtesy of algorithms that plug any nagging structural holes by reassigning seats. "We're still in the very early stages of engineering serendipity," he says. What comes next may make the data-driven Googleplex look touchy-feely by comparison.

Greg Lindsay is a visiting scholar at the Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and Management at New York University and co-author of "Aerotropolis: The Way We'll Live Next."