So said automotive designer Lowie Vermeersch about the Pininfarina Nido. When you make something so incredibly simple, a bit extra makes the entire thing pop.
The equivalent of nice rims in a security capability is that one thing we do that goes just a little bit further to make the end-user happy. It’s not something we have to do. We’re going to need wheels anyway. It’s a little extra.
It’s not something that adds much to the cost of the project. A nice set of rims runs around $1,000 with the average price of a car being $40,000. But its something the end-user notices and appreciates far above the price tag.
The path for designing a security capability goes from complexity to simplicity, taking those steps with empathy and understanding. As we follow that path, keep an eye open. Find opportunities to spend a fraction of the budget (say 1/40th?) on one detail that pleases people.
This article is part of a series on designing cyber security capabilities. To see other articles in the series, including a full list of design principles, click here.
“I want to be Batman.” This is the greatest answer I’ve received to the interview question, “where do you see yourself in five years?”
I hired him. Of course.
If only stopping criminals and villains was as simple as hiring superheroes. But we need equipment. We need partners and support. And before we get our batcave and police commissioner Gordon, we first need to reach people.
Leaders excite and engage people to get things done. We use strong clear communication that cuts through debate and doubt, and provides a solution we can agree upon. It takes strong visual and verbal communication.
Superheroes
One more thing about superheroes, what happened to them visually? The Golden Age and Silver Age comic books were full of bright bursts of primary colors. These days, superheroes have been drained of color. DC’s Superman’s original bright blue and bright red are so muted, they look nearly black-and-grey. Marvel has taken a similar approach. Looking at you, WandaVision. The Scarlet Witch isn’t scarlet but a dark burgundy. Modern heroes are a study in dark contrast.
Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy takes the blame. The films defined the noir look which has played out across all recent comic book movies. But who inspired Nolan?
Visual Contrast
The answer is Johannes Itten from the Bauhaus. That’s Bauhaus the design school, not Bauhaus the band. t’s final form was in Berlin, where Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was the director. Before that, the Bauhaus was in Dessau, getting its start in Weimar in 1919. Many great names, and many great designs, trace back to this time. But in Weimar? In the start? There was Johannes Itten.
Johannes Itten taught art and color at the Bauhaus. Had a blast doing so, from what we can tell. “Play becomes joy, joy becomes work, work becomes play.”
While with the Bauhaus, Itten studied colors, establishing the fundamental categories for contrast: hue, light-dark, cold-warm, complementary, analogous, saturation, and extension. This work, specifically with contrasting seasonal color palettes, inspires painters and artists to this day. And nearly a century later, Christopher Nolan would turn to Itten’s desaturated and muted color palettes when establishing the mood of The Dark Knight Rises.
Contrast is what makes the visual beautiful.
Verbal Contrast
The communications expert Nancy Duarte studied storytelling and presentations. She looked at superhero movies, she looked at boardroom talks. “After all this study, it was a couple of years of study, I drew a shape,” Duarte recounted on the TED stage. “There is this commonplace of the status quo, and you need to contrast that with the loftiness of your idea.”
It was a pattern I followed when establishing the vision for my monitoring program. I explained the status quo of audits and manual efforts. I painted the picture of automation and visibility. I showed where we were weak, and pitched how my team could be stronger. I leaned into the contrast. In the end? I obtained the funding for the SIEM and equipped my team’s Batman.
Contrast is what makes the verbal actionable.
Sell the Vision
“The objective laws of form and color help strengthen a person’s powers and to expand his creative gifts,” Johannes Itten once said. Duarte’s research shows similar laws of form and content strengthen a person’s persuasive powers.
Explain your vision by contrasting what is and what will be. Use this approach to gain buy-in, support, and budget. That’s how hire the Batman, and that’s how we get those wonderful toys.
A noir color study in contrast.
This article is part of a series on designing cyber security capabilities. To see other articles in the series, including a full list of design principles, click here.
Lack of sufficient budget and inadequate staffing, those are among the top challenges CISOs report when surveyed.
Oddly enough? No one ever asks CISOs what they have too much of.
With that one question, Gunpei Yokoi created the handheld video game console market. The Nintendo game designer was behind the Game & Watch and Game Boy. He called his combination of disciplined focus on play and radical use of legacy components “lateral thinking with withered technology.”
It’s a philosophy with repercussions for security leaders.
Withered Technology
When Yokoi spoke of withered technology, he meant technology which had matured to the point where it was plentiful, affordable, and well-understood.
The Nintendo Game & Watch series was built on an advantage in the market which Sharp and Casio’s competition created. These two companies emphasized leading edge technology. The result was older black-and-white LCD calculator screens where readily available at a very low cost. Yokoi embossed the screen to compensate for manufacturing imperfections. To get color? Yokoi had colored lines printed on the embossed screen. This also reduced the need for lighting up the entire display, saving battery and extending game play.
The first way to apply Game & Watch thinking is finding similarly seasoned technology in our security stack. We might not have budget for an advanced user behavior analytics platform with machine learning. But we do have a logging platform. How far can we take what we have? Find the correlation-and-alerting equivalent of embossed-and-painted calculator screens.
A deeper way to apply Yokoi’s philosophy returns to the question: what do we have in abundance? I once collaborated with an organization that had built out an access review and certification process in IT service management. Why? Well, they had extra ServiceNow licenses. Abundance isn’t only technology, however, it can also relationships. I know another organization with strong relationships with marketing and corporate communications, who used this to great effect, producing a slick internal campaign which drove adoption of password vaulting.
In one context, it is withered. In another context, it is ripe. The trick is to see a new context.
Lateral Thinking
As a discipline, lateral thinking offers several methods for seeing things differently. One that comes to mind when studying Yokoi is the provocation and movement technique.
The first step is stating a provocation. This statement can negate the status quo, change the logical order of things, or exaggerate an aspect of the strategy. If our current security model depends upon network visibility, for example, one provocation would be “our defense doesn’t require anything from the network.”
The second step is determining how we move from our current thinking towards a context which satisfies the provocation. The general path is to extract a principle, focus on the difference between the contexts, imagine a movement to close the gap. Using the above example, that may be “we shift monitoring from the network to the endpoint.”
The Game & Watch version of Donkey Kong offers a perfect example of provocation and movement. The arcade version of Donkey Kong required a joystick. The variable resistance joysticks used in arcades required bulky potentiometers. The provocation is an exaggerated arcade joystick taped onto a Game & Watch. The underlying principle is up/down and left/right movement.
The resulting move was to create the plus-shaped cross control pad. These controls require only four buttons, fit the Game & Watch, cost a thousandth of an arcade joystick, and became Yokoi’s most widely copied innovation.
Ripening on the Vine
Yokoi’s “lateral thinking with withered technology” principle culminated in the Nintendo Game Boy. Released in 1989, it had a cross control pad and a black-and-white LCD. The processor was from the 1970s. Specifically, Sharp’s response to the Intel 8080 and Zilog Z80. In every way, the Game Boy was under-powered compared to the competition.
The Game Boy went on take the market, and to sell 119 million units. It remained Nintendo’s highest selling game system for nearly two decades. Nintendo DS finally overtook the Game Boy in 2016. And withered technology? Withered won.
Gunpei Yokoi began at Nintendo as a maintenance man working the assembly line. He once said, “I don’t have any particular specialist skills. I have a sort of vague knowledge of everything.” His strength was finding strengths in areas others overlooked, then strategically applying them to great advantage.
When determining how best to protect the organization, think like Yokoi, and look for areas of abundance ripening on the vine. Calculator screens, surplus processors, existing technology, working processes, strong relationships. Identify strengths. Be provocative.
Nintendo Game & Watch: Donkey Kong. Photo courtesy WikimediaImages from Pixabay.
This article is part of a series on designing cyber security capabilities. To see other articles in the series, including a full list of design principles, click here.
“So does a table whose name is Ingo,” sang Jonathan Coulton in his IKEA song, “and the chair is a ladder-back birch but his friends call him Karl.”
I can’t speak for Karl. But Billy, well, Billy has an interesting backstory.
In the late 1970s, an IKEA advertising man named Billy Liljedahl complained about the state of bookshelves. They were heavy, expensive, and often missed the point by not actually being sized for books.
Gillis Lundgren, head of design at the time, began to sketch. “I drew the first sketches on a napkin,” Lundgren would later recall. “That was often the way we worked. Ideas are perishable and you have to capture the moment as soon as it arrives.”
Billy the bookcase would debut in the IKEA catalog in 1979. By 2009, IKEA had produced and sold more than 41 million bookcases. It remains one of the most popular products to this day.
Why? Regardless of Billy Liljedahl’s complaint, there were other shelves. IKEA had previously produced the Tiga. An early competitor inspired the Tiga: the Lundkvist shelf or Lundkvisthyllan. Not to mention the countless options we have today for shelving, storage, and more.
The reason is modularity, scalability, and extensibility. If there’s a room, if there’s a style, if there’s a need, there is a Billy configuration. The result has been pages on pages of Billy hacks. (Here are 45 ideas to get you started. Ironically, many without books. Sorry, Billy Liljedahl.) We’re seeing the power of architectural patterns playing out over 41 million use cases.
When IT security leaders envision future security capabilities, we must ground them in repeatable patterns. A thousand apps individually implementing controls can quickly lead to sprawl, gaps, and waste. Equip these same teams with a pattern, say for authentication or fraud detection, and we can standardize the building blocks. Even if each app is different. Even if it looks as different as a standalone bookcase in a young person’s first apartment, or a built-in bookcase in an adult’s work-from-home study.
“Books should talk but the bookshelf should be silent.” This is the motto of the Lundkvist shelf. They never said hello. Perhaps that’s why Billy won the market.
And there’s a lesson for IT security. Products should talk but security shouldn’t be silent. Architectural patterns speak softly long after security has left the room.
This article is part of a series on designing cyber security capabilities. To see other articles in the series, including a full list of design principles, click here.
Early hacker history is intrinsically tied to the telephone. Early hacker movies, too. Sneakers, WarGames. Hackers, Matrix, all have phones central to the plot. Yet before there was hacker history, there was phone history.
The form factor of the telephone, at the dawn of the twentieth century, was the candlestick. That’s where the mouthpiece is on top of the stand, and the earphone is a cup you hold to your ear. This was the way a telephone looked for nearly forty years. The first phone to break free of this form? Came from the Bauhaus.
Richard Schadewell and Marcel Breuer designed the first cradle telephone in the late 1920s. Created for the Fuld Corporation and used in 1929 for the Frankfurt housing program, the phone is often called the Fuld or Frankfurt phone. Regardless of what you call it, Schadewell and Breuer’s design re-imaged the telephone. But it didn’t get much reach beyond Frankfurt.
Johan Christian Bjerknes and Jean Heiberg took the Fuld phone further with Ericsson’s Bakelite telephone. Ericsson began producing the phone in 1932, and it became popular across Europe. But the design did have problems. The handset was heavy, a problem when holding for an entire conversation. As time went on, repair and maintenance also became a growing concern.
Henry Dreyfuss began working the problem for Bell Telephone Laboratories. Dreyfuss studied the Ericsson and Bauhaus phones. He did field research with telephone repairmen. Dreyfuss studied how people used the phone, held the phone, moved with the phone. Dreyfuss then spent over two thousand hours prototyping, testing, and refining for usability and maintainability. The resulting telephone — Western Electric Model 302 — went into production in 1937. Dreyfuss designed the successor, Model 500, a decade later. The form factor of the 302 and 500 was the dominate phone design well into the 1990s.
Arguably, for fifty years after the 302, the only innovation on the American stock telephone was changing from rotary to push-button dialing with the Model 2500. Ask any hacker who was a kid in the 1970s or 1980s, and they’ll have a story about how they messed with the ubiquitous and cheap 2500 phone. Mine involves playing spy as a kid, “wiretapping” the phone. When Windows 95 and 98 arrived on the scene, the icon for telephony? The iconic Western Electric telephone.
Steve Jobs announced the first iPhone in 2007. He did so with an icon which traced back in time to the Bauhaus school. Our collective understanding of how a phone looks runs from Dreyfuss, to Bjerknes and Heiberg, back to Schadewell and Breuer.
The telephone offers many lessons. Adoption can make or break an innovation. Thinking about the end-user can lead to devices better tuned to their needs, even something as simple as the swoop of plastic that makes a handset comfortably rest on the shoulder. The customers are more than the end-users. Considering how the device will be serviced and maintained over its lifetime leads to sustainable designs. The backwards compatibility, too, provided by telephones is admirable. But when it comes to determining security controls, there’s a more powerful lesson.
The choices we make today will shape how the organization thinks for years to come. Ideas have staying power which outlives any given technology. Choose wisely.
Bauhaus Fuld telephone, Ericsson Bakelite telephone, Western Electric Model 302, Model 2500, Windows 95 telephony icon, iPhone 1 phone icon
This article is part of a series on designing cyber security capabilities. To see other articles in the series, including a full list of design principles, click here.
