The INs and OUTs of the technology box...

In 1969 Professor John Eric Adair, one of the modern world’s foremost thinkers on leadership, introduced the idea of “thinking outside the box”. The concept refers to a puzzle, in which one has to join nine dots arranged in three rows of three, using only four straight lines and without ever leaving the page. It can certainly be done, but only by drawing beyond the confines of the grid.

Seven years later, in 1976, my first boss and mentor at TV GLOBO, where I began my career as a 2-inch VTR support technician advised me: “remember that the worst machine is always the newest one”. At the time I did not quite understand what he meant, and had no idea of the potential impact of encouraging a VTR operator to step outside of his comfort zone. In fact, at the time, I thought my boss should read more about John Adair’s ideas.

There’s no doubt this avant-garde style of thinking has propelled the world forward and become synonymous with “innovation”. Such a concept has given us a variety of groundbreaking and inventive products, some of which include levitating home speakers that prevent the bass from vibrating through the floor, electric pepper mills that shine a torch as they’re ground, and even a golf club that doubles as a portable potty just in case you run into an emergency while out on the golf course! It seems that a gadget was created for everything, even for problems that we never knew we had. With so many creative and pioneering minds in the tech world, we may have reached a peak with respect to the innovations we create. The sheer existence of so many “clever solutions to simple problems” requires us to always be on top of our game.

While all of these ideas seem ingenious at face value, we need to take a step back and analyze the externalities involved with simply maintaining our favorite gadgets. We can’t forget to install the extremely idiosyncratic battery that was specifically designed for our levitating speakers and can’t be found anywhere in a 25 mile radius. We mustn’t attempt to store our waste in the dual-purpose golf club in order to avoid a truly embarrassing situation should we ever rapidly pull the club out of the golf caddy. Finally, let’s not forget the “built-in obsolescence” that comes free of charge with some of our society’s preferred electronic appliances.

As the seemingly innovative tech world continues to flood the market with new products, standards, and protocols, we find ourselves at a decision-making crossroad: get swamped with redundant products or accumulate mountains of electronic waste as our current gadgets fade into desuetude. Just think for a second: how many power, video, audio or something-to-other adapters have you purchased over the last decade? How many of those adapters are still in use?  

Tech firms focused on consumer products are far from the only participants in the increasingly important race to think outside the box. More specifically, the same concept is readily identifiable within companies that focus on products for professionals in the digital media industry. That being said, perhaps it’s time to forget Adair’s concept, and instead comfortably nestle inside the box. Maybe we should consider going back in time, but how far back? We certainly don’t want to revert to the Dark Ages, but have we ventured too far into the light?

When compared to its peers in the digital media space, GLOOKAST has a unique profile. Like many companies in this industry, a lot of our programming resources come directly from academia, where research capacities are limited, student (employee) brainpower is affordable, profit is secondary, and a failed program can still be considered an abundantly successful endeavor. Our differentiating factor is quite simple: experience. Our small but effective management team boasts a combined 105 years of experience in broadcast workflows and operations. Similar to most software companies, we often deal with the risk of venturing too far outside the box. However, GLOOKAST is comprised of a very experienced and active team of “broadcast natives” that understand the difference between interface design and interaction design, enabling us to analyze projects from a bird’s eye view and assess the aforementioned risk. Recently we deployed an internal program that ensures our engineering team focuses on innovatively and efficiently updating our product lines by paying attention to the small details that make such a huge difference in our industry. However, the program’s primary goal is actually not innovation. In fact, at GLOOKAST, we want to create user-friendly products that are not excruciatingly difficult to use and take endless hours to learn. In other words, we want to prevent product-related complications by encouraging efficient thinking both within and outside of the metaphorical box.

We call it the WHAT-HOW-WHEN program and, in principle it’s very simple. Our clients and key members of our industry tell us how they see the future and WHAT they need. The concepts are then placed in the hands of our engineering heads, who discuss HOW they can most effectively enable said future. The final step takes us back to the front-lines: our marketing and sales teams receive project-specific details from our clients in order to determine WHEN they need the solution.

GLOOKAST’s Glooport family – media|parker, media|retriever, media|transformer, media|connector – is the first product line to be created based on the WHAT-HOW-WHEN principle. As we continue to expand the solutions offered in the Glooport family, the principle will remain: enough innovation to be well ahead of the Dark Ages, but without allowing the excess light to blind us to the point that usability, efficiency, expandability, and serviceability are ignored.

Thanks for reading!