Sticks Of Destiny

Some years back I met a software engineer at Network Appliance who was a huge Burning Man enthusiast. He made the point that, if you're going to go to BMan you want to contribute. You want to bring something that allows others to participate. Don't just go like a tourist, go with something to share, he told me. I liked that.

He had just gotten back and he showed me pictures of a huge electronic harp he had made and taken to BMan. It was 10 feet tall and 30 feet long and each string was some kind of colored lights. People could interact with it and it would light up in different ways and play crazy music. It was bright, cool and complicated!

I was inspired! I wanted to go to burning man and test out some of my ideas about interactivity. I spent years writing games but this would be an opportunity to connect directly with people! A giant LED screen controlled by a computer with sensors on the ground to input what people were doing around it. Design the input to change depending on how interested people seemed and design a genetic algorithm to change the output based on what people seemed to like best. Seemed wonderful.

But reality set in: how would I build this thing? I'm mainly a software guy -- it would require thousands of wires and connections to get everything working and controlled by a computer. If I could build it how could I power it? And how to keep it running in the heat and the dust? This set me back some.

I talked to my brother about his experiences and, while he seemed impressed with the art he had seen he didn't seem to feel that it was necessary to create elaborate art to contribute. Also, the reason I wanted to go to BMan in the first place was to get out of my own thought processes -- developing software for BMan seemed to be the wrong direction. I began to think of a simpler way to participate.

The Seed

My first non-technical idea was to create little cards which directed the bearer to some other place and look for their "destiny". The idea was to get people to interact with people whom they may not meet otherwise. The cards would say something like "You will find your destiny at the corner of 9:00 and Uranus; go forth and seek your destiny there!" I would segregate the cards so that the cards directing one to an area would only be found in distant areas. The cards would have backs and lots of space for printing so I figured I'd put pithy sayings on them. I began immediately to collect pithy sayings for my "Cards of Destiny".

There were some problems with this idea. How do I prevent my cards from simply blowing away in the wind? And how could I ensure that people who arrived at the corner in question would find something that would be interesting, much less destiny-fulfilling? This idea was clearly not very good yet and I guarded it jealously, not sharing it with anyone. I believed (and still believe) that a "young" idea needs to be protected from the nay-sayers; only when it gets strong can it hold it's own.

Charades Anyone?

Some friends of mine acquired a set of "Charade Sticks" which are popsicle sticks that have movie titles, book titles or sayings that people can use to play charades (the idea being, in case you've never done this, that a person with a stick gets up and, without words, tries to get the people watching to say the words on the stick). The sticks were small and light, easy to carry around and to use in the game context but there were too few of them. After my friends had played a few games I observed that a word or a gesture which reminded the other players of past games could immediately elicit the desired response.

For Christmas (2005) I made them a new set of sticks that greatly expanded the things they could draw and, therefor, made it less likely that they would simply guess which stick they were working on. It didn't take me long to realize that the same process I had used to create charade sticks could be used to create sticks with other things on them.

Sticks with printing on them seemed a really elegant solution. They could be easily carried and passed out and they would carry with them a certain tactile quality -- they would seem more substantial. Best of all, they would BE more substantial so they wouldn't be very likely to blow away in the wind.

Making a Good Idea Better

Having the idea move from cards to sticks somehow turned a corner for me. This idea wasn't finished but it somehow felt like a good idea. In February I shyly told my brother about it. I still have my brother's response: he was enthusiastic about the idea and full of positive, useful suggestions. Way to go, Paul! I showed the idea to a few other people and they were positive, too. That's when my really big breakthrough came.

I was trying to get enough sayings for my sticks. I figured I wanted 400 sticks and so I wanted to come up with 400 sayings. Someone at work suggested that I should write Haiku and put one line per stick and then people could try to find the other lines of the poem. This sounded really cool! It gives people something to DO with the sticks. But then I "did the numbers" and realized that the probability of someone finding ANY ONE of the other 400 people who had sticks -- much less the one who had a matching stick -- was about 1/80. This was horrible! I first thought that I needed to make 1000s of sticks but that wouldn't really help -- even if everyone in BRC had a stick people still wouldn't be able to find the people with the other lines of their poem!

Pass it Along!

I pondered this problem for a while. I needed to take this disadvantage -- that I had only a few sticks and tens of thousands of people -- and turn it to my advantage. After only a little pondering, I came up with the idea of having people pass the sticks along. That way, a stick can be used dozens of times and 400 sticks will stretch much farther. But what to say that will cause that yet fit on a stick!?

My first idea was to put a message on the stick that said something like "Give this stick to someone taller than you and ask them about their perspective." Or "Give this stick to someone darker skinned than you and ask them about race relations." This had potential! It would get the sticks moving and it would provide some conversational topics (and possibly start fights). Of course, when it got to the tallest (or darkest or whatever-est) person it would get stuck. How about "Give this stick to someone taller than you unless you're the tallest person in which case you should give it to the shortest person." Too long. How about "...to someone of the opposite sex"? But that could get it passed back and forth between two people or in a slightly longer loop; very boring.

Finally I hit upon the idea of having them say "give this stick to a person you don't know and ask them about their <feelings> about <subject>." This would keep the stick moving, was short and I could use my computer geekiness to come up with a variety of feelings and subjects. All through June and July I worked on the technical ways and means (and, always, more sayings). I met my fellow Oasis47 camp members in June and they wanted to participate so I resolved to make 800 sticks. RJ Mical generously gave me access to his "One Thoughts" database to provide enough sayings and my sister-in-law Paula suggested I match the sayings to the directions (an idea I didn't execute very well but a good idea nevertheless). And my wife Dorita helped me through many iterations of getting all this information to print on something that could then be stuck to sticks.

In the end, I cam up with 810 unique sticks that looked like this:

Lessons

I spent almost a year on the Sticks. I found a huge number of impediments but I never found anything that actually stopped me. Part of this was because I kept the idea to myself until I understood what I was trying to accomplish and had explored much of the solution space. Even then I started by showing it to people I trusted. In my experience, most people's reaction to a new idea is to attack it in a mistaken attempt to "make it better". This kills off most idea before they have a chance to grow into anything useful.

The other part of this was to have a clear idea of what I wanted to do. All the ideas I came up with, whether "good" or "bad" shared a simple goal: to encourage people at Burning Man to somehow interact with their environment. This is, of course, very "Burning Man" and so is, at it's core, a good idea. More to the point, every time I hit a wall I could look again at my goal and ask myself "what would serve my goal best" -- this always led to a better idea than I had originally!