Ralph Lombreglia

For a cou­ple of years, I worked on a book project called Trillions with the founders of MAYA Design, Inc.  My recent com­ment on the iPad reflects a key theme of it: the shift from a com­put­ing agenda dri­ven by technophiles to an agenda dri­ven by nor­mal human beings who don’t care about tech­nol­ogy per se.

(The term MAYA, which is bor­rowed from indus­trial designer Ray­mond Loewy, is an acronym for “Most Advanced Yet Accept­able” and has noth­ing to do with the Mesoamer­i­can civ­i­liza­tion or the well-known 3D soft­ware called Maya.)

Besides being high-end design­ers, the MAYAns are inven­tors and inno­va­tion con­sul­tants. They help peo­ple in busi­ness see things differently—radically dif­fer­ently if we’re talk­ing about real inno­va­tion, as opposed to the lit­tle tweaks that the com­puter indus­try typ­i­cally calls inno­va­tion. Real inno­va­tion is heresy, a deep break with the ortho­dox. It springs from a fun­da­men­tally dif­fer­ent ori­en­ta­tion to reality.

“Heretic” usu­ally calls to mind fig­ures like Gior­dano Bruno and Galileo, but Edwin Land, the inven­tor of the Polaroid cam­era, was cer­tainly one. (Most peo­ple called him “Dr. Land” though he pos­sessed no for­mal degree from any­where.) The story may be apoc­ryphal, but sup­pos­edly Land snapped a photo of his young daugh­ter one day with a con­ven­tional cam­era. She exclaimed, “Daddy, let me see the pic­ture!” and the rest was a pretty big piece of pho­tog­ra­phy history.

Being a kid, Land’s daugh­ter wasn’t in a posi­tion to cre­ate the cam­era and the com­pany and all those happy picture-takers and tech-sector jobs. That required a grown-up will­ing to have his head turned around. It’s a rare qual­ity. If you’re deeply invested in the con­ven­tional wis­dom you’re not likely to escape the numb­ing effects of famil­iar­ity and sud­denly see the world in a whole new way.

Even so, the MAYAns believe that some method­olo­gies for cul­ti­vat­ing inno­va­tion can be learned, and in fact they have a new spin­off, The Luma Insti­tute, for doing just that.

For a quick glimpse into their world, take a look at two lit­tle side-projects they’ve cooked up around Apple’s new iPad: Sprocket and Face­jobs. Sprocket (an app plus a wear­able car­ry­ing bag) lets bicy­clists com­mu­ni­cate with the world behind them. Face­jobs is a hand-puppet application.

Nobody said that heresy has to arrive in the world look­ing like the Grim Reaper (although that Face­jobs guy is pretty scary-looking). If Sprocket and Face­jobs seem too silly for seri­ous atten­tion, give your head a ten-degree twist and think about it again. Whimsy is often a door­way into orig­i­nal­ity. And MAYA’s vision of the future of com­put­ing does not look like “computing.”

You might also be inter­ested in an iPad post from MAYA’s CEO, Mick McManus.