IT innovation is also part of socially embedded systems, the use of which cannot be isolated from the social and cultural environment or from local norms of practice.1,25 In some cases, teachers and the educational establishment have resisted innovation that requires a significant change in pedagogy and that might reduce teacher status.
When a new engineer started at IMVU, I had a simple rule: they had to ship code to production on their first day. It wasn’t an absolute rule; if it had to be the second day, that was OK. But if it slipped to the third day, I started to worry. Generally, we’d let them pick their own bug to fix, or, if necessary, assign them something small. As we got better at this, we realized the smaller the better. Either way, it had to be a real bug and it had to be fixed live, in production. For some, this was an absolutely terrifying experience. “What if I take the site down?!” was a common refrain. I tried to make sure we always gave the same answer: “if you manage to take the site down, that’s our fault for making it too easy. Either way, we’ll learn something interesting.
I had a fascinating discussion with my sister-in-law, a real-life professional Architect, about the parallels between her work and the type of interface design we do at Juice. In both cases, design requires looking at the problem from many perspectives, blending art and science, creativity and time-tested principles. Sure, she had to go to graduate school for three years and is part of a rigorous apprenticeship system. But when you consider the ways we approach and solve problems, there are a number of common threads:
Selon le Financial Times (cité par Daniel Cohen dans Le Monde 2 du 18 octobre), les dirigeants des grandes banques internationales auraient touché ces trois dernières années environ 95 milliards de dollars de rémunération… alors que les pertes causées par leurs erreurs sont évaluées à plus de 1 000 milliards de dollars par le Fonds monétaire international. C’est là que la crise actuelle apporte un élément nouveau. Non seulement les rémunérations très élevées sont socialement injustes, et économiquement inefficaces, mais elles sont nocives.
« Y en a marre de ne protéger que la liberté d’expression, et pas le reste », s’est exclamé le représentant de Disney. « Le public n’est pas équipé. C’est comme si on donnait des voitures aux teenagers et qu’on en accepte les conséquences sans rien dire! » S’adressant directement à la Commission : « En plus, vous n’êtes même pas en mesure de faire appliquer quoi que ce soit » !
