Human beings have spent around 2 million years working with physical objects in physical space. We are hard-wired to enjoy throwing things into the air, at animals and at each other because mastery of these skills has given us a huge evolutionary advantage.

We understand the inter-relationships between weight, inertia, texture, tensile strength, brittleness, velocity and gravity so well, we’ve even given it another name. We call it instinct.

When we cross the road in front of a car, we are judging the speed of the car and the width of the road and performing fairly complex calculus in the process. Some would say that we are not really doing the calculations in this case – we are simply using instinct.

Calling this process ‘instinct’ isn’t very helpful because it doesn’t explain anything. We’re simply renaming the observation, rather than attempting to explain it.

The truth is the calculations do get done. We use a neural-based learning system rather than a set of solvable equations but the calculation does happen. It’s part of our operating system.

Only after Humans had being throwing things around for a couple of million years, could we get down to the slow business of developing useful abstract notions. Like a positional system of mathematics, time, complex numbers, algebra. These are all things that are not hardwired. On the contrary they are remarkably counter-intuitive to our operating system and have taken centuries of trial and error to grasp them.

With these abstract notions we created computers, and interestingly, computers have evolved towards us, in completely the opposite direction. They started life as deeply abstract calculation engines. Nowadays, with rich graphical interfaces, touch screens, large icons and finger control they are increasingly feeling like physical objects.

Systems that run on Human OS

We are hired-wired to respond to real-world physics. So it make sense that machines that run our software feel the most comfortable and the most intuitive to us.

Apple has a pretty good record of developing uniquely human products. A much discussed example of this is the iPhone. As with a number of Apple products, it includes a seemingly superfluous set of features, which were designed exclusively for the Human operating system. It had a display that could be touched, pinched, swiped and poked. An interface which ‘slid’ realistically left and right and simulated a real sliding object, with inertia and momentum. A display that righted itself.

For the first few days after buying an iPhone, most people simply couldn’t stop playing with them. The experience was undeniably satisfying because it tapped directly into our hardwired OS.

Another example is Google Earth. I remember being astounded when I first came across this technology in 2006. The mapping software was functionally very useful. But the user interface, for me, was the thing that made it great. The user could ‘spin’ a realistic globe, zoom in, pan, tilt and ‘fly’ across the earth. The inertia, perspective, texture and shadowing all added emotional realism to the rational experience of map browsing.

The move to Human OS cuts across many technologies

Take the example of video games. Back in the late 70’s people were astounded at the game of TV Pong. The way the square ball deflected of the player bat simulated a single basic law of physics (deflection of force). It felt good when we hit the ball – a little like a real game of Ping Pong. So we played and played.

Nowadays we have Call of Duty Modern Warfare Black Ops. The game basically involves shooting people and ducking. But the visceral effect on the player is staggering. This is because it simulates nearly every physical law I can think off. Namely gravity, inertia, texture, fluid dynamics, light and shadow, particles, smoke, fire, smoke, heat distortion, reflection, refraction, dynamic contrast (the way we see in bright light), coronas, disintegration, shear force, impact force and so on). It feels like a real world, because it simulates so much of what feels natural to us.

And it’s not just the games themselves. Hardware is increasingly seeking to simulate physics as realistically as possible. First the Wii, then the Kinect both seek to increasingly break down the barriers between the human and simulated physical worlds.

Now think about OS’s. In the beginning, OS’s like Unix were command and syntax-based. Then Xerox and Apple Mac simulated a 2d environment, where icons can be ‘picked up’, dragged and dropped, and the Mouse acts as a kind of proxy for the hand.

With every new version of every OS, more physics. Even Windows 7 has elements which fade in and out, cast shadows, scroll bars have inertia.

Apple’s iOS is interesting because it takes physical simulation further. Objects slide, spin and stop just like real objects. Recent prototypes like Bumptop try to take this on even further with a navigable 3d environment, files that act like game tiles with varying weights that can be picked, stacked and even toppled.

A great many technological movements fit this model. I’ve put some here, but I’m sure you can think of more.

The Future

Across the board, mass technology is trending towards more physical simulation as a way of becoming more compatible with the Human OS. As technologies move towards the Human OS, our intuitive grasp of them will also accelerate, and the need to ‘learn’ how to operate a computer system will simply disappear. It will feel so obvious and so coupled with the physical world, people will not even be aware they are operating one.

It also begs the question, as systems become more compatible with the Human OS, how will they change us? We have already seen evidence of advanced hand-eye coordination in gamers, increased evidence of ADD-like behavior in multitaskers who are empowered further by multitasking mobile devices.

The relationship that Humans have with their own technology is a symbiotic relationship. Both are mutually beneficial, but also mutually dynamic. In other words, we benefit but we also change. That is why it is so interesting.

Late in the spring, British Airways gave us a great brief for North America. Last year they held a contest where they gave out hundreds of free international flights (and shipping) to small business owners in the U.S. so that they could do business face-to-face rather than just via email, iChat, Skype and…fax. They hold the belief that face-to-face contact helps seal more deals rather than just staying put and hoping for the best—which in the current economy, we’re probably more likely to do. Stay the course. Take less risks. Tread water. Shutter the place. Etc.

We immediately told them we would use the entire budget to make a feature length-documentary about the death of the use of the fax machine in Sacramento-area small businesses between ’98-’08, while also weaving in our commentary on the dearth of new ideas in leather belt holsters for mobile devices.

They pushed back. Gently.

Actually, that last paragraph’s not true. BA were giving away more free flights this year, and thought last year’s winners—in telling their own unique success stories—would inspire other small business owners here to enter this year’s contest, and go see their clients and prospective clients face-to-face.

Meeting real people who’ve dreamt up their own business and are ambitious enough to make it a reality was the fun part. Working with a budget that didn’t allow us to send clients, directors, producers, account people and creatives back to far-flung locations to recreate face-to-face meetings was the challenge.

Tireless creatives Jessica Shriftman and Zac Sax teamed with director Chris Bren and Picture Farm out of Brooklyn, as well as photographer Todd Selby, and BBH editors Mark Block and Jonah Oskow to bring stories from a handful of the most compelling businesses to life. Throughout the summer, the group was fueled for the most part by Kombucha tea and it’s startling before-taste.

The films (and the chance to win) can be found at British Airways’ Face of Opportunity site, and, we hope, elsewhere.

I recently attended an excellent Made by Many event hosted at BBH which featured a re-presentation by Manuel Lima of his 2009 TED talk on data visualisation. Manuel is the curator of visualcomplexity.com and is an eloquent, modest, charming pioneer in this fascinating field.

As a novice myself, I could not help wondering why we are all so immediately and instinctively attracted to the best of data visualisation.To start with, I’m sure there is some fundamental truth that for most of us data become meaningful only when we can see scale, change, patterns and relationships. Seeing is understanding.

It’s also very reassuring to discover that complex, seemingly chaotic data sets and networks can be expressed as elegant, colourful, ordered maps and models. Perhaps there’s something akin to what the Enlightenment scientists felt as every new discovery revealed the endless beauty of nature.

Indeed the best examples of data visualisation have their own aesthetic beauty. (I felt a nostalgic pang as I recalled time spent with spirograph in my bedroom as a child.)

Like spirograph, but better: Email map by Christopher Baker

To some extent however this elegance, which makes data visualisation so immediately compelling, also represents a challenge. It’s possible that the translation of data, networks and relationships into visual beauty becomes an end in itself and the field becomes a category of fine art.

No harm in that perhaps.

But as a strategist one wants not just to see data, but to hear its story. And it can seem that for some visualisations the aesthetic overpowers the story. I spent many hours when younger staring at data tables, yearning for them to reveal a narrative. It is the prospect of bringing articulacy to hitherto cold, laconic facts that should be at the heart of the excitement around data visualisation.

The more compelling projects from Manuel’s archive did indeed seem to reveal some insightful truth about the relationships that they considered. Enron’s email patterns, the map of Segolene Royal’s supporters, the plotting of visitor eye traces in Barcelona, all looked extremely useful.

Enron Communication Graph, by Kitware Inc.

With this last instance in particular,  one can start to imagine how understanding the dynamic patterns of tourist traffic around the city and its most photographed areas might enable the development of all kinds of helpful tools and services for both tourist and city.

Tracing the Visitor's Eye by Fabien Girardin

Manuel himself talked about ‘turning tools of curiosity into tools of functionality’. In this respect he quoted Chaomei Chen: ‘A taxonomy of information visualization is needed so that designers can select appropriate techniques to meet given requirements.’ And clearly this desire to enable greater utility is driving Manuel’s own research into the different methods and models of visual representation.

As a pioneer in his field, Manuel discussed the opportunities emerging in interactive data maps and he described a Californian experiment in which it should be possible physically to interact with a huge data set distributed about a six storey building.  Blimey. I think I’ll leave that to the true data connoisseurs …

Finally, as a grey haired strategist, I found myself considering how the paucity of visual representation techniques had impacted the way we tackled problems in the past. I think we knew fundamentally that most events were precipitated by complex systemic pressures and relationships. But our limited power to disentangle the many elements in one system reduced us to characterising most strategic problems in rather monochrome ways.

So, this is progress indeed. Data visualisation has radically improved our understanding of these complexities. The real question is: what will we do with that understanding?