palojono

Key moments in tech history

2012-01-27T04:19:00.000-08:00

I can still, and perhaps will always, remember:

The first day we connected our NES to our TV and Mario appeared
The first day I instant messaged a friend using MSN Messenger from France to England
The first day I was doing a presentation and said I could get online without a cable
The first day I was carrying my laptop between rooms and an email popped up on my computer - in the air O_o
The first day I tentatively spoke into my computer and my friend's voice came back
The first day the map on my phone automatically figured out where I was

Each of these moments separately blew my mind on the day. It was like magic when they happened. The closest I have had recently was probably the first successful call using Facetime, and waving my hand at a Kinect sensor. (Another, that most people probably haven't experienced was watching a glass door instantly turn opaque at the touch of a button. Unbelievable)

Each of these moments blew me away because things happened that weren't even part of my expectations. I expect our expectations these days have now risen sufficiently high these days that it'll probably take teleportation to get a similar effect from a teenager. Maybe life would be more fun if we kept our expectations low?

Wow! What a Ride!

2011-11-25T07:06:00.001-08:00

“Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming "Wow! What a Ride!”

― Hunter S. Thompson

How to peel a Post-It so it doesn't fall down

2011-11-05T11:00:00.000-07:00

Back in 2005 I submitted a suggestion to the BBC for World Usability day (you're forgiven if you didn't get the memo about the day). They were looking for the easiest-to-use product and I submitted the Post-It which promptly cleaned up.*

How can anyone not use a Post-It correctly?', I argued, the first time you pick one up it's hard to use wrong. But, like my expectation for the end of desktops I was wrong again. While working at Jump we were surely among the highest users of Post-It's per employee in the world and, as a result using Post-Its well was clearly worth learning. Other than basic Post-It hygiene (like using a bold pen, writing large, writing straight, one-thought per Post-It etc.) a common issue with Post-Its is not staying the distance. But we can do better.

The standard way to peel a Post-It is to twist your hand as you peel, removing the Post-It from one corner to the opposite. What you'll find is that the Post-It, though it removes easily, is left with a raised corner. This is fine for recording a phone number for a few days. But if it contains useful information that might stick around for the life of your project, like a quote, concept or insight, you will likely find that after a week or so you'll be picking up once precious Post-Its that have rained to the floor, and writing another.

To have Post-It's that stick around (excuse the pun) for as long as you need them to, you need to eliminate the raised corner, which is where the weakness seeps in eventually unsticking your beautiful board of insights.

Here's how in full blurry colour glory:

(In case you don't see the video here's the link: How to peel a Post-It so it doesn't fall down)

With your thumb under the Post-It, place your fingers flat over the stack covering the Post-It evenly. Hold the stack from underneath with your other hand. Instead of pulling up, pull back in one movement staying at the height of the Post-It and essentially shearing it from the stack. With a few Post-Its practice you'll be able to remove the Post-It leaving it perfectly flat. It will then stick cleanly to any service without a raised corner and hang around neatly for months. A subtle benefit you'll find is that your Post-It boards look smarter too.

Petty though this may seem, I hope you find it useful.

Ironically, I am told that Jump was taught this during a project many years back by employees from 3M themselves.

*it was arguably an unfair competition given that it's fellow competitors included such multitasking devices as smart phones, mp3 players and credit card machines. One might hope that a piece of paper would prevail.

Keep testing those patterns

2011-10-26T01:29:00.000-07:00

A few words of wisdom from Ray Ozzie, Microsoft's ex-chief software architect in conversation with Steven Johnson.

You are the sum in many ways of your experiences and you get these success patterns, failure patterns, sometimes those patterns help—like what you just described. But sometimes those patterns hurt, because they constrain your outlook. Something that might not have worked before might work now, because the environment has changed. But the innovators that I know that are successful keep testing those patterns over and over and over because people around them change and the technology environment changes. And so you might look at somebody and say: “You’re a one-trick pony. You keep building the same thing over and over.” But it’s a good thing! That means you’re taking those patterns and just recasting them continuously against changes in the environment. And if you believe passionately in a pattern, it’s great. Go for it!

via my brother-in-law (who could get a job as an information DJ)

The curious reverse following of following

2011-10-22T05:22:00.000-07:00

If you've been on Twitter a while, tweeting now and then, you'll probably have experienced what I have come to think of as reverse following.

These are the times when I get followed by someone, or more likely, some company, who pretty transparently are more interested in spreading awareness of their services than actually hearing what I want to say. The curiousness about reverse following is that the language of becoming a 'follower' provides a semi-legitimate alibi for reaching out directly to someone with marketing - 'Hey, I'm just following you'.

I guess I have come to think of much of what passes for following on Twitter is really a hint for 'Follow me'. Find someone who you think will be interested in your feed, follow them, and they get the not so subtle hint that they may want to follow you.

There's nothing terribly wrong with this, except that I'm sure it provides dramatic inflation on the number of legitimate Twitter followers who actually want to hear what each other has to say. But it's perhaps also a small lesson in the power of a well chosen word - follow, in this case - to enable and legitimize behaviours you might not have predicted at the start. I would venture that more than part of Twitter's success is predicated on this handy, novel metaphor for online interactions.

Not the end of desktops

2011-10-17T14:44:00.000-07:00

There was a time, a few years ago, when I thought it was the end of desktops. Looking for a replacement to my laptop that had recently run it's course I barely glanced at the desktops. Why would I want one when I could do more or less everything I needed from a laptop that was twice as powerful and half the weight of my previous one?

I was really wrong.

It's not that I shouldn't have a laptop, it helps. It's just that we have it in addition to a desktop, and now an iPad and smart phone. More and more I've found myself wanting to get stuff done on the desktop over the laptop. I crave the faster processor, the bigger memory, the larger brighter screen, no faffing with power cords and batteries, no set up, better ergonomics and the ability to run more serious, powerful programs.

Part of this need stems from wanting to use processor hungry software for more advanced music and graphics processing. The Adobe Suite and music recording and sequencing software are guaranteed to chew up my memory, benefit from a larger screen (or better, two), a mouse and connections to midi devices, cameras and printers. Same with bookmaking, or photo sorting. Using Photoshop and Ableton are really only viable on a large desktop or, like some MacBooks, the screen needs to be so big you may as well put it on a stand or not bother to try lugging it around.

It seems that we're going through a period of specialization of devices where we'll use a kindle for reading, a tablet for web browsing, a phone for short emails, Twitter and shorter interactions. And a desktop is still great for specialized powerful programs, and a large monitor still hard to challenge for watching videos and working.

As a result I find myself eyeing up larger monitors, powerful processors and bigger hard drives and I'm forced to conclude that, for some people, the desktop will be alive and kicking for a long time yet.

How much does an Ironman really cost?

2011-09-17T06:02:00.000-07:00

Because I hadn't seen it anywhere, and because I thought it might be interesting to share, I've collated here the cost for me of participating in the 2011 Ironman France in Nice.

	Cost
Cycling	£1,236
Event	£757
Swimming	£210
Food	£158
Running	£57
Total	£2,418

Spreadsheet of full Ironman costs

What might we learn?

An Ironman is more expensive than you might expect. If you are serious about doing it, it is worth reflecting, if briefly, on the full likely outlay. But don't let it stop you if you really want to do it.
Cycling is the most expensive sport, followed a long way behind, by swimming and then running. If you want to be thrifty just buy some shoes and run. Brilliant.
The costs of Ironman number 2 are likely to be significantly less than number 1, although the event costs themselves are a substantial portion of the total outlay.

A couple of things to bear in mind:

First, this is not meant to put you off from doing an Ironman. Finding out what you are capable of is a worthy activity and I have lost count of how many times during training - say, when out at 6am on a Saturday morning when cycling from London to Paris - when I said that this was totally worth it.

Second, if you're contemplating an Ironman it's very likely that you already have most of the necessary gear. For me, cycling was really relatively new for me. This was my first road bike, and this was in fact my first Triathlon. This said, the cost of almost any of the other bikes alone from participants at the event probably exceeded the total costs I paid. I did however, already own a wetsuit which otherwise rapidly pushes the cost of swimming up by a few hundred pounds.

Third, event costs will significantly vary. I think mine are on the cheap side, as, although we did have to fly to Nice we didn't pay for a hotel. I also intended to sign up for many more events before the actual thing which would have pushed costs up significantly.

Fourth, I was lucky enough to have parents who are supportive of such foolish ideas and significantly helped with bike cost and event registration.

Finally, sadly, I didn't finish as I came off my bike half way through the mountains of the cycle leg requiring stitches in my knee. I have rarely, if ever, been more disappointed in my life to have to stop doing something even if it was terrifically hard. But that doesn't mean that it wasn't worth it.

Looking good

Ironman Nice swim mayhem

Tomorrow's Child

2011-08-22T12:52:00.000-07:00

We just watched Ray Anderson's 2009 TED talk about his mission for his company, Interface Carpets, to climb Mt Sustainability towards mission zero - zero environmental impact by 2020. Ray sadly died just recently, but he shared in his quietly inspiring talk a poem by Interface employee Glenn Thomas about the person who will suffer unless we are responsible with our actions today.

Tomorrow's Child

Without a name, an unseen face,
and knowing not your time or place,
Tomorrow's child, though yet unborn,
I met you first last Tuesday morn.

A wise friend introduced us two.
And through his sobering point of view
I saw a day that you would see,
a day for you but not for me.

Knowing you has changed my thinking.
For I never had an inkling
that perhaps the things I do
might someday, somehow threaten you.

Tomorrow's child, my daughter, son,
I'm afraid I've just begun
to think of you and of your good,
though always having known I should.

Begin, I will, to weigh the cost
of what I squander, what is lost,
if ever I forget that you
will someday come and live here too.
- Glenn Thomas

I also stumbled upon a recent tribute to Ray Anderson, also by Glenn Thomas, as a view back from the future from Tomorrow's Child.

When Love and Common Sense Combined
A Poem From Tomorrow’s Child

Because you cared so long ago
although you know you’d never know
If anything you’d do or say
would make a difference here today.

Though you saw you’d never see,
yet you cared so much for me;
An unknown name, a hidden face,
a future time and secret place.

And when you threw away your fear
like a tired souvenir,
And learned that being strong
meant admitting you were wrong

I marked that day with humankind
when love and common sense combined,
And to my benefit unfurled
a rich endowment for the world.
- Glenn Thomas

Thanks to Glenn Thomas for sharing the beautiful poems.

Custom notebooks from Blurb

2011-08-15T10:45:00.000-07:00

Just learned about Blurb's custom note-book making service. Pretty excited.

Of course it's always been possible to create your own notebooks with some binding instructions and a Sunday afternoon, but it's pretty exciting to me to be able to order some really custom ones with my own templates and illustrations adorning or inspiring in them. And maybe even order 20 at a time (saving myself many Sunday afternoons). There's nothing like a notebook that makes you want to write in it (and a nice pen) to encourage productivity, and hence creativity.

Image from blurb

I just wish they'd release a 'dotted' version, like these lovely dot grid notebooks from Behance - I reckon dots are the best subtle notebook watermarking - all the benefits of a grid without the grid. I would even say that according to trends of technology evolution it's like a natural evolution for the grid. It's kind of fun to speculate on what's next (subtly adjusting the size of the dots according to patterns, coloured dots, uneven spacing according to actual notebook usage...). I guess, being able to lay my own images down in the notebook, perhaps I can create my own dotted pages.

Go create.

Disclosure: I'm a pretty massive Blurb fan

The Power of Templates: Replicate then Innovate

2011-07-24T09:02:00.000-07:00

While creating a new template for the startup I'm working at I was reminded of the immense power of good templates. Not least because I have been reminded a lot in the past months of the drawbacks of not having good templates to hand. I'm thinking of templates for all the regular things - presentations, emails, letters, feedback, photo editing, note-taking, you name it.

The power comes from a principle I learned at Jump Associates which is, when you're still getting going, replicate then innovate. It's fine to innovate once you're a master of your craft, but until you can master the fundamentals it's usually best to stick with replicating from those who have trodden the ground before you, figuring it out as they went along. Before Picasso went cubist, he was first an extremely accomplished traditional artist.

I think templates are worth the time and energy to create well. Here's why it might be worth spending a little time to set up a template you hadn't considered:

It saves time in the future (for yourself or others)
It creates a consistent brand image
You can worry about great information design once and have the joy of reusing good designs again and again
It helps get everybody on the same page
Templates are a kind of institutional memory - connecting people with, and allowing people to build on, good work from the past
Templates are easily shared
The template does the replication, freeing people to innovate

Because you can always choose to ignore a template, or build and modify from them, it's hard for me to find too many drawbacks to them. Worth carving out a little time to make or, perhaps better, go find one someone's already made. More templates please!

Metaphors are heating up

2011-07-16T11:18:00.000-07:00

Metaphors matter more than you think they do. They subtly shape how we think about important, complex, big issues like healthcare, war, love and crime. Two articles that came my way not so long ago keep bringing to mind just how important they are, even if it's easy to forget out about it in the day-to-day grind.

The first is an article that reports on an experiment by my favourite metaphor researcher, Lera Boroditsky, and her colleague Paul Thobodeau. You can read the full article - Is crime a virus or a beast? on Discover Magazine but I'll try to give the gist of it briefly.

Crime is neither a virus or a beast, but the overall concept of crime as a whole is suitably abstract that we naturally use metaphors to get to grips with it. The experimenters found that by playing subtly with the initial framing of an article about crime they could affect how students thought about it, and, more significantly, what students thought was the best approach to deal with it. The researchers used instances of two different metaphors: Crime Is A Beast; and Crime Is A Virus.

For Crime Is A Beast, the framing referenced crime as a “wild beast preying on the city” “lurking in neighbourhoods”

For Crime Is A Virus, the framing referenced crime as a “virus infecting the city” “plaguing” neighbourhoods.

The headline for me is that students who were given the Beast framing for crime were more likely to recommend enforcement and punishment as solutions, while others given the Virus framing were comparatively more likely to recommend social reforms. The effect is somewhat subtle but significant. When asked why the recommended what they did most students tended to point to the stats - the metaphors subconsciously affect our thinking.

I am particularly reminded of the significance of metaphors whenever I hear newscasters talking about the war on terror - with attendant war practices - or the war on cancer.

The second article continues with the war on terror theme reporting on a new initiative by the US government. The initiative is a call for proposals for a metaphor program by the Office of Incisive Analysis. Essentially it's a call for researchers to develop methods for the automatic identification and analysis of metaphor by software.

A metaphor can be harder to defeat than an army. You can beat people down, but you can't easily change the way they think. I've no doubt, for example, that the metaphors people use to talk about the US and its policies have some major variations in pro vs anti US (or UK) nations. I'm not sure that software is necessarily required above smart people doing careful analysis but if they make some headway I'd be interested in the results. It might make an interesting app...

Perhaps the major point though is that metaphor seems significant enough to launch a research program worthy of National Intelligence.

Thibodeau & Boroditsky. 2011. Metaphors We Think With: The Role of Metaphor in Reasoning. PLoS ONE http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0016782

The smart people in the FrameNet and NTL groups at ICSI Berkeley have been working on software analysis for some time

Sketchnotes on Core 77

2011-07-02T05:49:00.000-07:00

As you may know if you've skimmed through some of the note-taking on this blog, I love visual note-taking. The Moleskinerie blog does a good job of dishing out plenty of fun note-taking resources. Beyond that though Core 77 not too long ago launched a blog devoted to Sketchnotes - visual note-taking of talks and events. Plenty of nice looking examples and some handy tips too if you want to be doing it yourself (or just some nice styles to copy).

I think the magic lies really in the combination of visual - to be interesting and accessible - non-linear - to allow browsing - and mindmapping - simple linking that facilitates both the note-taking and the reading.

Of course they can end up as a big mismatch of crazy looking content. But in many cases people would prefer it to a dense transcript or a powerpoint deck any day.

Example pic below (I hope you'll agree that mine would fit in nicely).

Illustration by Craighton Berman

29 Ways to Stay Creative Video

2011-06-12T14:24:00.000-07:00

I thought I'd share this beautifully crafted 1m 50s video on one of my favourite topics. A great combination of fun content, imaginative presentation and captivating music. Love it. I'm off to do some of way 19.

[update]

A good friend added:

30. Have a glue gun, pair of scissors, ruler, knife, spray mount and a variety of card/off cuts close at hand.

31. Buy an adjustable height desk

30 is right on. A good printer, card, scissors and a glue gun can take you a long way.

Via a friend and the moleskine blog. To-Fu take the credit.

Instant landlines using your mobile phone

2011-06-07T15:20:00.001-07:00

Let's face it, most people don't seem to have a landline these days. But most cable and phone services in the UK tend to try and add you a landline deal to whatever you want to sign up for. We went for it recently and still haven't got ourselves a fixed phone to actually make use of the line that now works. Which got me thinking...It would be kind of neat if there was a little dongle or attachment to allow me to use my mobile phone as our landline without us having to go buy another phone. We already have two after all. Kickstarter project anyone? Just a thought...

Improv is Extreme Design

2011-05-06T07:15:00.000-07:00

During a washing-up session with my wife not so long ago (exciting I know), when dealing with the food waste and packaging from dinners we realised that we'd learned a lot about being efficient with waste around the house. Simple things like using a yoghurt pot to collect scraps in, or using a plastic wrapper as a scraper. These little techniques came from the many months in total that we've spent camping, backpacking or generally being in the wilderness without a whole lot of stuff. Backpacking in the mountains is an extreme situation when it comes to waste where you have to be super-efficient with what you've got - pack in, pack out - and whatever it is, you've got to carry it. Even if things will biodegrade California is very strict about what you can leave in wilderness areas: nothing. So we have found that some of the little tricks we learned during those experiences have carried over and make us slightly more efficient in regular life too with less extreme situations such as a small kitchen.

You might recognize this as a more general design approach - learning from the extremes. The OXO good grip is the prototypical example where kitchen implements became better for everyone from an original insight drawn from watching an elderly lady with arthritis struggle to use a peeler (a search will provide you with all you need to know about this story).

Learning from extremes also takes the form of learning from extreme users (see Prof Hippel). In one of my favourite examples Professor Hippel himself related in a talk once, I believe the Camelbak was invented by a curious mix of an endurance athlete living in Texas who also happened to be a doctor. One day, while out sweating on his bike, he had the smart idea of strapping on a drip bag with a tube to give better access to his water. Of course, most of us are not experiencing as extreme environments as cycling through Texas for hours in the heat of the sun, but what works there can sometimes transfer benefits to more regular situations.

All of this brings me to the thought that you have probably connected already. Improvization is a form of extreme design. And this is why design can learn from it.

Lots of people (notably Liz Gerber*, but including me) have made useful connections betwen improvization and the practice of design. Improv rules like 'Accept offers,' and games like 'Yes, and,' are great for teams working for generative outcomes and for creating a productive team dynamic. Here are the reasons that I see design as being able to learn from improv's extreme design environment.

1. You are trying to create something
- now!

2. You need to collaborate
- to make the improv show a success

3. You have an audience
- like a customer through the whole process

4. You need to be consistently productive
- there's nowhere to hide

5. You need to communicate clearly
- because you have nothing to work with

6. You need to build on others' ideas
- because they're coming like it or not

For each of these aspects, the improv community have developed useful guides and techniques to deal with these constraints and make the best of them. Because each of them also apply to a lesser degree to design, we can port much of those learnings across. Maybe it's time to take that improv class after all?

* see for example, her short paper on design and improv from CHI 2007 (pdf)

On Wikipedia and the Bible?

2011-03-30T00:59:00.000-07:00

Not long ago, during a discussion about a game, a friend of mine pulled up wikipedia to help resolve a debate. Where I was working from the rules in the box, presumably written by an expert on the game, she invoked the true, unstoppable power of wikipedia with the line, "That was written by one person and this was written by everyone. It must be true."

Of course, she wasn't wholly serious, and wikipedia did have a pretty good perspective to share, but it wasn't the only perspective, it was a neutral perspective and who the heck knows who wrote it. The incident illustrated to me very clearly of a minor footnote shared by Jared Lanier in his book You are Not a Gadget: that in some ways, conceptually, wikipedia and the Bible are not that far from each other.

Bar subject matter, they have more than a little in common:

- Both the Bible and wikipedia are seen as authoritative sources

- They were each written and revised cumulatively over a long period of time

- Authorship of both is shared and largely anonymous

This obscurity of the individual authors of the Bible Lanier explains "served to create an oracle-like ambience for the document as 'the literal word of God.'" It is harder to engage in constructive criticism of the content of the Bible versus say, a critique of Gladwell's latest book. To critique Gladwell we can take issue with the person, their background, say it is just his perspective, wonder at his methods, know who influenced him, argue against his idea (because his ideas are just as valid as mine), or just plain not like him. In short, I am arguing against the ideas with recognition that they came from a real person, from a particular time in history, who is human like me. It is more difficult to do this with the Bible. There are no easy authors or faces that we can identify behind the words, and therefore noone to argue or disagree with, or otherwise recognise any of the regular human flaws we might ascribe to anyone else. The trouble is, the same is true of wikipedia.

The longer wikipedia is around the more authoritative and refined we imagine each article becoming. The more distant the individual authors, the less we are able to constructively argue with the content. It becomes less an argument of ideas person to person, and more a question of faith in the collective authorship. Much like the Bible. Lanier also points out that wikis and other web 2.0 type designs also "tend to promote the idea that there is only one universal truth in some arenas where that isn't so."

Beyond simply highlighting this relationship, Lanier also makes the simple recommendation to post as much as possible on the internet as who you really are, not an anonymous pseudonym. This is something that I've started to take to heart. I encourage you to give it a go, and you are welcome to disagree.

Jono Hey, London, March 2011

The Teddy Bear Problem Solving Method

2011-03-03T01:26:00.000-08:00

On Monday the manager brought a pen in to the office that he filled with teddy bears. As you might imagine most people thought he was mad, but some were curious. Undeterred, he said this is how it works:

"If you have a problem that you can't solve, you go to the pen. Pick up a teddy bear and explain the problem to the teddy bear. 9 times out of 10 you'll be able to solve the problem."

I was recently told this story by a colleague about a place he worked where this actually happened (bear in mind it was in the '70s). For me this rings particularly true for technical problems; as designated family tech support I very often find that the act of coming to me to help with a computer issue often solves it without me doing anything. I haven't tried the teddy bear method for design problems but my guess is it will probably add clarity to whatever you are facing, in a similar way to walking through a talk in your head helps it improve.

Stuck on a problem? Got a teddy bear who can help out?

Selling out is really buying in

2011-02-19T03:30:00.000-08:00

"Selling out is usually more a matter of buying in. Sell out and you're really buying into someone else's system of values, rules and rewards"
- Watterson as commencement speaker at Kenyon College 20 May 1990.

Bill Watterson repeatedly, and against huge financial incentives, resisted selling out his cartoon strip, Calvin and Hobbes, to merchandising and mega-licensing deals. This is why you haven't ever seen any good, or legal, Calvin and Hobbes dolls, cards, t-shirts, car stickers, or even movies. Bill wants to keep it the way he envisioned it. He also stopped producing the strip before he felt it was running out of steam and before it would have been signed off to a team of artists to keep churning out ever more mediocre strips for years to come. He's the man standing up against the machine.

I find it useful to think about his insight any time I'm offered a deal that might involve compromising my creative freedom, schedule, or preferences for, say, financial gain. What do we really buy into with a golden handshake?

Lessons on deadlines from Cartoonist Number 1: Manage quality by managing time

2011-02-13T03:56:00.000-08:00

Take a moment to learn from, the author of Calvin and Hobbes, Bill Watterson's ideas on quality control and time management.

"The quality of a strip is...determined by the quantity of ideas in the wastebasket. Every cartoonist writes a lot of bad strips, and the never-ending pressure to meet deadlines encourages cartoonists to publish virtually everything they think up. The only way to resist that pressure is to stay far enough ahead of the deadlines that you can throw away mediocre material and write something better"

If you're right up against the deadline, there's no quality control. It's just garbage in, garbage out. I've been in that situation and it's miserable."
- Bill Watterson from Your Career in Comics by Lee Nordling.

Replace cartoonist, writes, and strips with appropriate words from your domain and I'll bet Watterson's wisdom isn't too far from resonating with you too. So while one means of tapping productivity is to work right against the deadline it's also a good means for producing mediocre work. That mediocre work might have been ripped up the following day and replaced with better work had you not already submitted it.

It was something I witnessed very much in my research with design teams who didn't allow themselves sufficient time for design iterations and additional research before major deadlines. The tendency is, in the absence of other ideas and, in particular, research data supporting other ideas, to just go with what you have. And what you have is probably not far off from what you started out with. It may be great, but it's more likely just good.

This is one of the reasons in my research a key recommendation is to manage time for design iterations and learning. Time management is more important than just making sure the job gets done, it affects whether you end up with something great or something that tanks. Time to make that project calendar and start iterating...

Landor video of the design process from the 1960s

2011-01-27T12:17:00.000-08:00

I wanted to repost this fantastic video also posted on The Innovation Process blog about Landor's design process back in the 1960s. I'll be honest it's rare that you come across videos of the design process that you have to enjoy them while you can. That's part of the reason everyone's still so interested in the IDEO shopping cart video.

Apart from the fun of seeing pipes in the design process and the great location they have on San Francisco Bay, it's really pretty cool to watch the modelmakers turn designers' sketches into very realistic prototypes, good enough for testing. There's a lot of know-how that went into it and it's refreshing to see them getting their hands dirty. That said, it would have been interesting to see them tackle a more complex project like those that seem to get pitched today rather than redesigning a decanter. Still, worth sitting back with a coffee for the time it takes to watch it. [it starts slow, but does pick up]

Design story: The Decanter from Landor Associates on Vimeo.

"The Decanter," a promotional film produced by Walter Landor and Associates in the 1960s, shows the start-to-finish process of several of Landor's designs for Old Fitzgerald whiskey. Narrated by Walter himself, the film depicts creative teams illustrating and critiquing designs, industrial designers fabricating models, and research teams conducting focus groups and testing in Landor's supermarket laboratory. All takes place on the famed Klamath ferryboat docked at San Francisco's Pier 5, which housed Landor's offices for some 20 years. (15:34 min)

P.S. It's not the whole of the design process, but there are more and more videos out there that present design research fieldwork. The Dundee design ethnography program for example, posted videos as course deliverables, see Presenting Fieldwork.

Needs last longer than solutions: Filling the Polaroid Gap

2010-12-15T09:01:00.000-08:00

This is a photo from the capital of Laos, Vientiane - also known as the sleepiest capital in the world. But wherever there are people there is innovation and creativity, even if they are kind of sleepy. At each of the major Vientiane landmarks people like the chap above could be found toting a hefty looking DSLR camera and a tiny photo printer slung around their neck. I was pretty impressed. Of course people hate having to wait for a print out of a photo after it's taken, or to receive it later by email. A photograph is often a celebration of the moment and it's great to be able to take something tangible with you there and then. These entrepreneurial photographers would snap a high quality photo of you and your traveling companion in front of whichever landmark was closest and hand you a good looking print-out of the shot a minute later.

This was a great example for me of people hacking together products in unintended ways. That photo printer was made to be small on your desk and allow you to take it with you to your friend's house - instead it's hanging off someone's back who's walking around in the sun all day. But it works. The photographers are meeting the same need that was met all those years ago when Edwin Land came up with the genius of Polaroid.

I enjoyed the interview in a recent issue of Bloomberg Businessweek (Oct 25-31st) where John Sculley shared an anecdote about an early meeting he and Steve Jobs had with Dr Land:

It was a fascinating afternoon, because we were sitting in this big conference room with an empty table. Dr. Land and Steve were both looking at the center of the table the whole time they were talking. Dr. Land was saying: "I could see what the Polaroid camera should be. It was just as real to me as if it was sitting in front of me before I had ever built one."

And Steve said, "Yeah, that's exactly the way I saw the Macintosh." He said, "If I asked someone who had only used a personal calculator what a Macintosh should be like, they couldn't have told me. There was no way to do consumer research on it, so I had to go and create it and then show it to people and say now what do you think?"

Both of them had this ability to not invent products but discover products. Both of them said these products have always existed-it's just that no one has ever seen them before. We were the ones who discovered them.
--Being Steve's Boss, John Sculley interview with Leander Kahney

Polaroid has nearly disappeared (although it may be revived), but the need is still there. In fact, with digital, the hacked together solution is better than the original polaroid as you can first choose the right photo and not waste any paper.

One of the primary reasons to bother to learning about people's needs is because needs last longer than solutions. We may now be sending a whole lot of email rather than paper letters, but the need to communicate hasn't gone away, we just use a different solution to satisfy the same need (Incidentally, it always baffles me why companies like The Royal Mail and USPS weren't among the first to take email seriously). In this curious case, Polaroid the solution disappeared, but the need has remained and these photographers came in to fill it. I love this kind of entrepreneurial activity. It makes me wonder what could I hack together today out of what I have to do something useful for people?

Finally, it was interesting to me that there were lots of these photographers in Vientiane. They were obviously onto something. But step across the border to Thailand, or even on a three hour bus journey in any direction and we didn't see a single one again. It's amazing how localized some innovations still are. A little bit of transfer (as Springwise is always encouraging) could go a long way.

__
This is the tenth post in a series of thoughts about what I learned from 6 months traveling across Central America, Southeast Asia and South Africa.

For the original Needs Last Longer than Solutions see Patnaik, Dev, and Robert Becker. 1999. Needfinding: The Why and How of Uncovering People's Needs. Design Management Journal 10, no. 2:37-43.

Opening the Door on Design Ethnography Workshop - Visual Notes

2010-12-09T09:12:00.000-08:00

Just wanted to share the notes I took from the workshop this week at the Design Council in London. Organized by the University of Dundee, the workshop had three keynote speakers exploring design ethnography in the work: David Prendergast from Intel Research; Rachel Jones from Instrata; and Parameswaran Venkatamaran from IMRB India. I'll let the notes do the talking, but in brief:

David talked about designing technology for ageing populations
Rachel about ethnography as R&D research, framing (and reframing) research, and design-oriented research
Parameswaran talked about innovation in emerging markets (read, India).

There were some great examples of insights from design ethnography that hopefully I'll share later as well as lots of great people attending.

A workshop activity afterwards had teams discussing:

The value they see design ethnography bringing within their organizational context
The barriers to design ethnography use within their organizational context

In case you're interested I have some notes on the workshop activity too, but I'm sure Dundee will be posting some follow-up summary of this activity.

Open publication - Free publishing - More workshop

Talking each other's language: Moving beyond silos

2010-12-07T07:48:00.000-08:00

I recently had the opportunity of guest posting on the Hybrid Thinking blog. The post is about moving away from a mindset of siloed thinking to recognizing and creating a space for people who can work across traditional disciplinary boundaries. I wanted to share my observation that most places I've encountered so far since returning to the UK have tended to want to put people in disciplinary silos - more so than on the West Coast. Of course, it's important to be really great at something, but it's also important to connect the dots among different domains. An engineer who is a strong problem-solver and who can also empathize with the people who use the product they make, is far more valuable than an engineer who can only solve problems. The UK needs growth spurred by innovation right now and we need to start valuing and creating places for those people. The firms that already do - places like Plan, Engine, and programs like Design London - are going to be well poised to be the drivers of this innovation.

In the same vein, yesterday I had the good fortune to meet with two leaders in entrepreneurship and innovation at two prominent London Universities. They both confirmed a need, and also a lack of, design and innovation programs that help develop hybrid thinkers. One related an example to me of a collaboration between engineers at his school and industrial designers at a design college:

It didn't go so well.
The engineers basically said 'Here's our solution. Make it look good."
And the designers basically said 'Here's our design. Make it work."

While the collaboration may have been difficult, my guess is that the students learned a lot from the experience regardless. It also highlights once again the importance of being able to talk the language of another discipline and understand the value they bring. Once you can do this, you're on your way to much more successful collaborations and deeper insight than from individual disciplines alone.

When you find somebody has already released your concept: Celebrate!

2010-11-29T06:55:00.000-08:00

Had that feeling where you have an idea for a great new product or service, or perhaps you've been secretly thinking of turning it into a business for a while, and then you find your near exact concept realized and released by somebody else? Or just as often, when you finally tell someone else about your idea they say, "Oh, you mean like X?"

Most people I know get depressed when this happens. Their business opportunity is gone. But I don't think you should be sad at all. I think you should be happy and here's why:

You just saved a truckload of time - Instead of yourself pouring the time and effort into making it real and then finding out about the existing product you were able to stop yourself before you did. Brilliant. Now go use that time and money on something else (or go use that product that serves your needs).

You just received fantastic validation - You were right. The launch of that product means you are inches away from the next big thing. Keep at it and next time you'll be the next big thing not them.

You just did the ultimate rapid prototyping - Draw a sketch, build a model, get one made, get feedback, build a brand, come up with some marketing and visuals, get your first sales. You just did all of that in the time it took you to look it up on the web. Impressive.

Ask yourself is there's room for another - A market is rarely small enough to be filled up with one offering. When Branson was considering starting an airline he called the reservations line for British Airways and was left on hold. He reasoned that BA were either so busy that there was room for another airline, or so bad that there was room for a better one. Maybe that product you just found is the perfect validation you need to get yours out there.

The real question is, how can you keep that confidence that you're on to a winner of a real product when you are still at the concept stage? Use the concept you just found as inspiration to help give you the confidence that your next project is just as real, valid and potentially successful as you know it can be, even when it's just a fragile idea.

Which Idea is a Good One: What are your Idea Filters?

2010-11-23T07:05:00.000-08:00

It is not a good idea to filter what you say in the moment in an ideation session. It's important to value and build on the input and ideas people bring to those sessions to take the thinking beyond the standard places. But, once you have a set of ideas it's not always immediately obvious which is the big opportunity. Getting feedback from customers on a prototype is probably the best validation (or even just trying to make one). But before you even do that there are a number of idea filters that I often use to decide if an idea is a good one. Try just putting them in a list on the project room wall and run down the list in your head for the concept's you're drawn to asking each question in turn. Here are some of the most important ones:

1. Brand fit

A brand is a filter because it helps explain whether an idea is appropriate for you to do it or whether it needs to be someone else. Sometimes a concept can be dressed up to expand a flexible brand (Microsoft goes into gaming consoles) and other times there's a mismatch that's hard to reconcile (IBM goes into gaming consoles). Alternatively, are you willing to put the work in to adapt your brand to fit a new direction?

2. Desirability

Does it fit the needs we have seen our customer's express? If we went back to our research participants Sally or Mark and showed them our concept, what would they say? More than anything, without a brand strategy and an understanding of your customer then any idea is a good idea.

3. Technical feasibility

Do we have the technology and skills to make it happen? Can we find them?

4. Business viability

Is there a sound business model behind it? Are people willing to pay for it?

5. Time of launch

Is it appropriate to do it now? How long will it take to get off the ground? Will we miss the boat?

6. Economic environment

Is this an idea for a time of boom or bust, expansion or hunkering down?

7. Testability

How easily can you get some feedback to determine if the concept is a good idea? If it requires billions of dollars in investment before you have a technical proof of concept or can get an idea if people like it then maybe the risk is too high.

8. Portfolio fit

Does it make sense as part of a larger set of offerings from your brand?

9. Differentiation

Would implementing this idea make you stand out from the crowd or just join the others?

10. Excitability

Are you excited about this concept? You'll need that excitement as you work to make it happen.

Coming up with an idea is of course just a part of the process; just as important is knowing which is good. A quick scan through the idea filters in your head or by quizzing your team is a low stakes way to help do this.

Doing service wrong: A coffee story

2010-11-18T05:08:00.000-08:00

Not long ago I was passing through the small country town of Devizes on a rainy day in an afternoon that needed some coffee. Preferring to support a local business than one of the big chains I spurned the Costa Coffees and Neros and went into Potter's Tea Rooms that had a counter with an espresso machine and three employees free to serve me. The only challenge, it transpired, was wanting to get the coffee in my travel mug to take with me in the car and save a cup. What followed was the strangest and most trying coffee ordering situation I have encountered. Strange enough for me to write about it here.

"Hi. I'd love to get a regular americano please. And could I get it in this travel mug."
The server turns around and reaches for a styrofoam cup.
"It's OK, I don't need a cup - I'd like to get it in the travel mug."
"OK"
The server reaches again for a cup.
"No, really I don't need a cup, I was hoping to save one by using this."
"Right. But I need to measure out how much coffee it should be to put it in the mug."
"Hm. But then I wouldn't save a cup. You couldn't just estimate could you?"
"But I need to know how much."
Pause.
"OK. It's no problem I'll go somewhere else."
As I start to walk off she turns a little bemused to her supervisor who is also standing there.
"He wants to get the coffee in his mug, but doesn't want me to measure it out in one of these."
The supervisor says to me, "Are you sure you don't want a cup. We have lots of them."
"I'm sure you do - but I wanted to use the travel mug so I could save one."
The supervisor raises his eyebrows and sighs.
"OK. Because I'm a nice guy."
I hand him my travel mug and he completes the difficult process of estimating how much coffee is a regular coffee and pours it into my mug.
"OK?" he asks placing the mug back on the counter.
"Fine with me. Thanks."
As I pay I make a small attempt to share my thoughts on the merits of saving cups. "You know I was recently living in the States and often the cafes will actually give you a discount if you bring your own cup."
"Well, I guess they must care about the environment there."
I die a little inside. "I guess so."
As I completed paying I looked around for milk to add to the coffee. I see none. "Could I get a little milk in the coffee?"
The supervisor looks around the counter then turns back to me. "I'm sorry we don't seem to have any of the...the little takeaway milk packets."
"It's OK. I don't need to take it with me, I just want to put it in now."
"Right, but we don't have any of the milk packets."
Looking a little confused: "Can't you just, pour some milk in here?"
The supervisor looks straight at me, pauses, then says, "You, are being a very difficult man." I raise my eyebrows. He relents, takes the travel mug and turns to the huge milk dispensing machine full of buckets of milk behind him to add a little.
Baffled I say, "How can I possibly be a difficult man asking for some milk in my coffee?"
The supervisor turns back with my mug and clunks it on the counter. "Milk costs extra," he mutters, "Next."
I take the mug and stand there for a moment eyes wide. I say thanks to the first lady I perplexed with my request of filling the travel mug and walk out. I was practically talking to myself all the way back to the car.

Of course, this doesn't represent the service or experience of buying from all the small vendors, but I am still saddened to think that the big chain coffee places will fill my travel mug and give me as much milk as I'd like without missing a beat. I can't tell if it's more an illustration of a rigidity of thinking in the British service mentality, an isolated example, or if it's a lesson for me not to try and order coffee at a Tea Rooms. Oh well.

Where Good Ideas Come From: Visual notes from a talk by Steven Johnson

2010-11-07T10:41:00.000-08:00

Open publication - Free publishing - More viz

Earlier this week I had the pleasure of heading to the London School of Economics to hear Steven Johnson speak about Good Ideas. The impetus is his latest book (of 7), Where Good Ideas Come From. An extra incentive for me was that the talk was being hosted by my collaborator at Berkeley and now Professor at LSE, Caneel Joyce. [update - see her notes from the talk: How to keep an idea log you will actually use]

As it happened, Steven only talked loosely about the new book, instead building a general argument from his previous in-depth analyses of the London cholera outbreak and Joseph Priestley's 'invention of air'. The short story is that the classic presentation of the events that lead up to the great discoveries of John Snow and Priestley is largely incorrect.

For example, the story of the cholera outbreak goes roughly as follows:

the prevailing theory for the spread of cholera is the miasma theory - that it is an airborne disease
John Snow bravely went to the heart of the outbreak and drew a map of all the cholera cases that led him to conclude they centered around a water pump. And hey presto, waterborne spreading - stop the pump - stop the outbreak

In fact, as Steven Johnson briefly covered, the story is longer, more nuanced, and less individual.

John Snow had a pivotal collaborator - a vicar who knew the neighbourhood well
He'd had the idea of waterborne spreading at least 6 years earlier
He'd drawn plenty of maps before the map
The final map acted more as a persuasive marketing tool than a stimulus for pointing his own mind to the discovery

In other words the discovery came about more through what he calls a 'Slow Hunch' that evolved over time and finally came to be. It was also not solely the product of a 'lone genius'.

Clearly, to get more about good ideas you should just go read Where Good Ideas Come From rather than read this. But you might also get a feel of the rest of the talk through my notes, once again in Issuu, above.

I asked Steven after the talk about the surprising tenacity of the Lone Genius story over the Slow Hunch story. Even though the majority of innovations don't fit the Lone Genius pattern, the media loves it and, heck, most people love it. Much of Dyson's brand depends on building off the Lone Genius of Dyson breaking through by himself. Steven acknowledged that, well, they do occasionally exist - it's not an incorrect story, just over-used. The trouble is, the story of a complex development, a slow hunch, a set of people rather than one, lots of ideas being slowly modified is just not as exciting as Archimedes jumping out of the bath and shouting Eureka. I'm still looking for a better story that fits the way most innovation and breakthroughs work. If you have one...

What is Design Strategy? Resonance - a film that answers it

2010-10-29T02:15:00.000-07:00

As a follow-up to the video a few posts ago is a helpful video by Design Continuum named, Resonance: A short film about getting to the right idea. It nicely differentiates between the challenge of figuring out how to do something and the importance of figuring out what it is should be done in the first place i.e. much of design strategy is not just about doing things right, but doing the right things. Or, as Dev Patnaik taught me, not so much about "Making better things, but making things better." They also make the critical point that:

"As important as understanding what to do next is having the confidence in being right to make it real. It's costly doing it wrong. You've got to get it right."

On top of the theoretical distinction, the video pulls in footage from teams at work, and from in-home, open-ended interviews, hinting at what sort of data is collected and how it is analyzed.

It's about 15-20mins long but worth the time. Alas, I can't embed it but check it out on their site:

Resonance: A short film about getting to the right idea

A couple of other minor gems of the many:

Even though we generate 100s of ideas along the way. Our value is identifying the one right idea. The idea that will truly resonate with our customers.

I began to realize the real challenge lay less in the technical problem, but often the real value lay in understanding the human problem.

Because as Tom Kelley said: ""We have great problem-solvers, but, you've got to know what problem to solve."

I'm indebted to a member of the Design Reseach LinkedIn group for pointing me to it.

Don't Expect, Experience: On Travelling and Holidaying

2010-09-16T07:20:00.000-07:00

Let's face it, when I say we were "travelling for 7 months," some people hear "holidaying for 7 months." While there are undoubtedly moments that are pleasurable (the beach at Tulum for example) I believe that they are fundamentally different types of trip with very different value gained from each of them. So to defend a little of what I believe is a very productive way to spend time, I want to piece apart a little of the difference between holidaying and travelling and, perhaps, at the same time give a better idea of what it's actually like.

To illustrate, let's conjure up a prototypical holiday. It's not for everyone, but maybe there's a nice hotel, a beach and a pool, and time sitting in the sunshine reading books before starting on some chilled beers and cocktails in the early evening and heading to a nice restaurant with some foreign waiters but where you probably order in English, then out to party with other holidaygoers. Sure, this is definitely not everyone's holiday, but it fits the prototype pretty well and is a source of an enormous amount of business every year.

Holidaying?

Now let's pick a fairly average day in Laos from our trip. We wake up in a South-East Asian town at 5.55 and make sure all our gear is packed up, tiptoe around a somewhat grimy bathroom and head outside in the dark to look for a tuk-tuk. Eat 2 bananas for breakfast. Fail to pay the right price for the ride to the bus station but jump in the back of a draughty, noisy vehicle to a deserted, or packed, bus station. Try to find someone who works there, say where you want to go and figure out where to get your bus from. Try to avoid letting people take your bags who want you to get on their bus to wherever they're going. Match the letters on the front of the bus to those in your guidebook to make sure. Have an amusing negotiation in stilted English and Lao to try and buy some fried noodles before the bus goes and some difficult-to-identify things that might be snacks for the journey. Sit on the bus trying to figure out which tiny towns you are passing through, gently sweating and watching ear piercing karaoke videos above you and people in bamboo huts pass by. Eat more bananas. Try a couple of unidentifiable but ultimately delicious curries at a stop halfway because everyone else is doing it. Enjoy the locals laughing at you as you try and order some inappropriate combination of dishes. Arrive on the outskirts of what looks like it must be your town looking at the guidebook for any recognizable landmarks. Get off in town, hoping your bags are still below, fend off over-priced drivers while you try to figure out where you are and look like you know what you're doing. Walk around town ignoring strange looks and offers to buy things to check out three somewhat dingy hotels and go for the one that isn't dirty inside. Collapse on bed. Turn on fan. Have a shower. Hide your valuables. Head out to explore for somewhere to eat trying to pick a place that isn't just full of tourists reading the same guidebook.

Travelling?

OK, so not every day is like that, but at least a few times a week, and sometimes more. And what doesn't come across in this narrative is what a fascinating, full, stimulating, and eye-opening day we just had. It's pretty clear there are some fairly stark differences between our prototypical holiday and our average day travelling. I've tried to summarize them in the table below, and I'll try to explain the source of much of these differences after.

HOLIDAYING	TRAVELLING
Organized beforehand	Organized as you go
Spend time with holidaymakers	Spend time with locals
Get up late	Get up early
Feels like vacation	Can feel like work
Is inside your comfort zone	Pushes your comfort zone
Is splurging	Is budgeting
Lots of money for a short time	Little money for a long time
Things are nice	Plenty of rough edges
Stay within your culture	Embedded in other cultures
Local culture is a novelty	Local culture is reality
Foreign language is a novelty	Foreign language is a necessity
Upset when things don't meet expectations	It's an experience when things don't meet expectations

The Travelling vs Holidaying Frame

What explains these differences? Why is it that some trips push your comfort zone, and others you stay comfortably inside it? I think it's to do with a fundamentally different frame for travelling vs holidaying. In essence:

When holidaying: You stay within your culture in a foreign place

When travelling: You embrace the foreign culture and place leaving your culture behind

...and that's pretty much it. One is more about you, and the other is more about others (or indeed, us). Most of the differences I think can be traced to these two frames.

If you're embracing a new culture it's no doubt that you are often out of your comfort zone. If you are embracing a new culture you want to experience different aspects of it and so you travel more and end up working harder for that experience, much as locals work to get around their own countries. If you are staying within your culture a few foreign words are a bonus, but if you're embracing a new culture you'll need those words to operate within it and start to understand, experience it and meet locals. When holidaying then, you often avoid trying wholly new experiences outside your comfort zone and observe, but don't fully participate in, a new culture - save for orchestrated tourist experiences like that marimba band in the restaurant. When you stay within your culture you bring your own expectations and are apt to complain when they're not met. Conversely, when you embrace a foreign culture you try to cast aside your expectations and simply experience. Do you try the mysterious unnamed dish at the restaurant or order the pizza?

It's a little like the difference between visiting a spa for a day and volunteering for a day. While volunteering is undoubtedly less relaxing it's ultimately more rewarding. Sometimes you need the day at the spa to relax and recharge, but you enter each with a quite different mindset and goal.

If you are signed up to volunteering with a spa mindset it's a recipe for disappointment. And in a similar way it is critical to also travel with the right mindset. Travelling with a holidaying mindset (or travelling to areas of the world where you can't bring your culture with you) will conflict on all of these levels and make for a miserable trip. When you're elbowed by old ladies pushing past you in the market, enduring the insanely loud music on the bus or trying to bargain something down to a sensible price you can choose to complain, or, with a traveller's mindset, chalk the 'hardship' down to experience.

Similarly, it can be jarring and unpleasant when, with a travelling mindset, you are confronted with a tourist-front by the locals. It leads to a false experience that's not what you're after. You're not there to eat pizza with other tourists, but the local fare for the local's price with the locals. The trouble is pretty soon locals wise-up to the money coming in, which is why those with a travelling mindset are always heading to the next untouristed destination.

But there is always a contradiction for the travelling mindset. Though you intend to embrace and embed yourself as much as possible in local culture you never can completely (short of buying some land and moving out there). Try as we might, we always stuck out in how we looked during our travels, in our weakness with the language, and in the clothes we wore simply because our clothes need to meet different needs than the locals (think 2 sets of clothes for 6 months), and in our behavior because we were never around long enough to make the strange fully familiar.

Don't expect, experience.

Still, I believe the travelling mindset is also a pretty good frame for operating in life more generally. Embracing other cultures and not expecting, but experiencing, is a pretty good recipe for learning from each day and transforming hardships into experiences. And finally, be nice to tourists as when you are one, boy do you appreciate a kind local face.

Reflections on DMI London: Transforming Design

2010-09-13T05:51:00.000-07:00

Open publication - Free publishing - More design

In the wake of DMI London last week I left with a page full of follow-ups and actions - which I generally consider to be a sign of a successful conference. I also left with a full notebook of notes which you can browse through above. Indeed, as a venue for much of the Who's Who of Design Management in Europe it was tough to beat. All those I spoke with at the conference had good things to say about the range of topics covered by the speakers touching on many facets of Design Management including:

the pragmatic - design at GE Healthcare and learning from failure at LEGO;
the inspirational - Virgin's Upper-class and lounge offerings;
the focus on successful teams, thinking styles and facilitation - Humantific;
the thought provoking - Lucy Kimbell on Designing for Service and Charles Bezerra at GAD;
the refreshing no BS of Michael Schrage;
the ambition of tackling big social challenges - Mat Hunter at the Design Council and Geoff Mulgan of the Young Foundation;
and the entrepreneurial - Julie Meyer on the world of VC-backed startups.

I also benefited from the refreshing multi-nationalness of participants. Coming from recent experience at primarily US-based conferences the range of nationalities present made for interesting discussions, be they learning about the economy in Estonia or the opportunities of doing business in India.

And while the talks were varied, as Clive Grinyer pointed out, the message between talks was often contradictory. While I left with buzz and excitement, I didn't leave with a sense of a community united by clear purposes, definitions and aspirations. While some thought there is a crisis in the field, others disagreed. Where some embrace the notion of Design Thinking, others don't see the substance. While some feel it is still important to listen to customers, others felt it was time for designers to lead with vision. And where some emphasized the Why, others emphasized the How. There is clearly lots of good discussion to be had.

A sense of history was also present at the conference with many talks providing a retrospective and a historical viewpoint. Several talks included analyses of the shifts in how design is viewed by those outside the design community and the changing role of design for example: an increased emphasis on sense-making; getting past the Lipstick Phase and the Shopping Cart Phase of design (designers creating a buffet of products for marketers to gorge on); from Design as a Cult, 1987, to Tim Brown being a big hit at Davos in 2007. The historical perspective was put forward in part because of a concern that designers have a tendency to focus on the now and the future rather than learning from the past. Are we still addressing questions the field was asking 40 years ago or have we successfully moved on? (Maybe both)

Ultimately, there was consensus that designers are well-positioned with the skills required to make things happen in the coming years and tackle the big challenges. Throughout the conference speakers highlighted a number of contradictory traits that designers need to master simultaneously to really succeed. Designers need to:

exercise humility and pride,
to be passionately dispassionate (willing to test and throw away what doesn't work),
to lead with vision and learn from history,
to embrace both the evolution of incremental improvement and the occasional leaps forward of revolution (though it may be different people who work on each),
to be clearer on definitions and not get hung up on words,
to keep pushing design, while helping facilitate the design pullers of this world.

Two thoughts stay with me in particular as design is poised to take the next step in its maturity. Both are a call for greater responsibility as design turns its focus on the big challenges of our society and taking a more equal seat in the boardroom:

"Until design gets involved in the big challenges it won't be taken seriously."

- Mat Hunter of the Design Council and,

"Is design serious enough about business to be taken seriously by business?"

- Mike Ganderton, Creative Senior Director, LEGO

Let's make progress on both of these.

Visual notes from the conference presented with Issuu.

The Trouble with Phrasebooks (and what we can do about it)

2010-09-02T02:30:00.000-07:00

Have you ever tried to read a very foreign phrase from a phrasebook in a language you don't understand? Maybe once you got to the front of a busy train ticket counter or at a market store. In fact, have you ever seen someone stand in a conversation and read from one in a way that's been helpful? My experience is only very rarely do phrasebooks make good real-time tools. They are hard to read from (as the language is usually difficult to pronounce), and the text is small and, quite honestly, reading from a book when you are standing in front of someone you want to speak to is very socially awkward requiring patience from them, and the willingness to look pretty ridiculous yourself. I wanted to show here why I think the current design for phrasebooks is far from perfect, and some directions towards a different kind of more useful phrasebook.

Of course, any issues with phrasebooks aside, we bought several for our travels - for Central America and South-East Asia. They do a good job at grouping vocabulary and are good for a language refresher if you already know a bit. And what's more they have improved substantially from the first phrasebooks I ever saw. They have all undergone some layout magic and they are now often clearly colour-coded into different language situations, they include phonetic pronounciation, some early basics of the language (numbers, time, that sort of thing), and include a small dictionary at the back. Good changes, but still in some ways I think they are fundamentally wrong.

Some Troubles

Firstly, in our travel experience, we found that phrasebooks included far more language than we could ever reasonably use. And we were often in a country for up to a month, so no short span of time. In fact, by the end of our travels we had a selection of language down that helped us get around well and make a little connection with people that was far less than a phrasebook and not always easy to find within one. On page 110-111 of our travel journal we included a language table with some of the more common words and phrases we found useful for four different languages. Our preferred strategy ended up creating our own mini-phrasebook and dictionary of what we needed by finding a friendly, bi-lingual, local in the first days of arriving, say, the hotel clerk.

Part of the reason phrasebooks include more than you need is down to duplication, for example, you will likely find how to say something is too expensive in a hotel section, and a shopping section. Another reason is that they often include hopelessly complex and specific phrases. One phrasebook included an extensive section on love and relationships involving complicated pick-up lines. While it was fun to read we found that for Asian languages at least, we were often so far off the correct pronunciation that anything involving more than a few words we were likely to mangle horribly. So anything long was pretty useless to us.

Phrasebooks also don't make it easy to plan your next conversation (getting a hotel room, or buying a ticket). Usually, unless the conversation sticks to the exact same script in the book, it will be very hard to use the stock phrases anyway. It is often hard to look phrases up, because they are not organised alphabetically and we found any included dictionaries never tended to be big enough either because they are tacked on the end.

But the really big issue with phrasebooks is that, while sometimes we successfully used them to say one line with some practise, we could almost never understand the answer. And they just aren't designed to deal with that.

Language is like Lego

The current phrasebook model fits into a model where rote learning is emphasized and there is little room for understanding. Most phrases are designed simply to be repeated verbatim. For longer phrases it would rarely tell us which word was which so we could deconstruct the sentence and use the words in any other way. It was always 'say exactly this' or speak English.

In some ways I began to think of language like Lego: the task is to collect some useful bricks and then assemble them into something that has meaning for others. Using a phrasebook is like handing over poorly built completed toys - they are a poor substitute for being given a few good bricks and knowing a few rules to put them together well.

New directions for phrasebooks

PACK THEM FULL OF COMMON, SINGLE WORDS

Saying 'bus station' clearly with a lost look and a shrug of the shoulders is almost always better than stumbling through 'Excuse me, where is the bus station?' in case your friendly local gets stuck on how poorly you pronounced 'excuse me'.

SIMPLER AND SMALLER

Focusing on words rather than complete phrases means that a smaller book is OK to carry, it is easier to find what you need in there, and you can actually fit more in.

CLOSED QUESTIONS (OR NO QUESTIONS) ONLY

Open questions are almost the most useless thing a phrasebook can provide. Asking 'How is the beach?' is almost always pointless as you will never understand the locals' freeform answer. We found, in some languages, even asking the time is tough enough to parse out their response. Sticking to closed questions that encourage yes/no or one word answers is far better, or don't even include questions at all - saying "we need a double-bed" is just as useful as "do you have a double bed?"

USE POSITIVE VOCABULARY

A huge part of travelling is about making connections with people who aren't like you. A good friend of ours in Thailand has taken to saying nearly every meal he has is 'delicious' (aroi mak). That is in part because usually the meals are, and in part because saying something positive helps create a positive connection between you and your hosts far better than saying "my soup is cold." We experienced that the only times we were able to connect with some people who gave us 'tourist' looks in restaurants was when we said something nice about their food. So language tools should help people make these connections and it should be simple to find, "this is beautiful," "very good," "exciting," "delicious," and "very comfortable." Travelers would be better appreciated and they would have better connections with their hosts.

USE SHARING-SIZED TEXT

Sometimes, no matter how hard you try to pronounce something, you just don't get the message through. While phrasebooks are usually in tiny text to create a portable package, in places where people can read, showing a written phrase in the local script to someone can really be the easiest way to get the message across. So we should design some sections that are made to easily be twisted around, pointed too, and read by people from a short distance or who may not have great eyesight.

PROVIDE THE PIECES AND THE TOOLS, NOT THE FINISHED WORKS

As with Lego, what's really the most fun is having a good selection of bricks and some useful ways of putting them together. You can create a far greater selection of toys than you can by buying a single ready-made toy. And this is more how phrasebooks should be approached. Instead of providing finished toys, concentrate on providing some great bricks and the simple rules to put them together in ways that are useful to you. This can mean a little more effort up front, but a whole lot more useful output. Just as there is huge satisfaction from creating your own Lego toy, the buzz when someone understands the first sentence you constructed yourself is huge.

So even the idea of phrasebooks I find somewhat problematic - I think it's time to shake up the design. More useful to us would have been a small set of travel cards with the words I needed, some simple language rules, and some of them printed BIG. Some of the cards could even include other tips beyond language that could be helpful like carrying pen and paper, or some ideas to play with kids, after all, you are often more interested in communicating successfully than saying exactly the right words.

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This is the eighth post in a series of thoughts about what I learned from 6 months traveling across Central America, Southeast Asia and South Africa.

Getting People to Talk: An Ethnography & Interviewing Primer

2010-08-17T08:33:00.000-07:00

As a break from travel posts I had reason to revisit this excellent video about good interviewing practise for design research. It's 33 minutes, so get comfortable, but it's great material to review or if you're starting out doing design research.

Watch it directly on Vimeo - Getting People to Talk: An Ethnography & Interviewing Primer, or below:

The video is by Gabriel Biller and Kristy Scovel - thanks to you both!

Look out for spots by some past colleagues at Jump Associates: Colleen Murray; Jordan Fischer and Eric Niu.

Mindmap Travel Journal

2010-07-30T03:49:00.000-07:00

To travel journal, or not to travel, that is the question? I think most people would like to have a record of their travels afterwards, and most people would probably prefer not to have to invest the time during travelling to get it. I think we came up with a pretty decent solution: a Mindmap Travel journal. I'll let it speak for itself below and then say what we liked about it (btw I think the quality improves in the 2nd half - lots of practice):

Open publication - Free publishing - More visual

[in case nothing should appear above try viewing the travel journal directly on issuu]

In total we passed through 12 countries: Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam and South Africa. You can check out our route on the three different sections: Central America Map; South-East Asia Map; South Africa Map.

What is a Mindmap?

If you're reading this you probably already know, but for the record a Mindmap is an easy way to get information out of your head and on paper. Typically you start at the centre with a topic idea and then branch out as you build associations from it. Mindmaps are non-linear (not word-by-word) and so they can be taken in more easily and browsed quickly. We tried to keep our journal pages visual to trigger memories faster and draw a reader into the page. I learned about Mindmaps first from Tony Buzan, and learned more from Jump, and if you like them you might enjoy the RSA talks.

Why a Mindmap?

We found Mindmaps to be a great way of journalling for lots of reasons. Most people these days take on a travel blog - travel blogs are great as they are real-time sharing and people can comment on it and you can link to it after you're done. In practice though, writing a paper journal meant that rather than sit with a netbook or at an Internet cafe, we could be sitting out on a terrace with a beer or a coffee reflecting on our recent adventures. It is perfect then that we could do it as a couple, jointly reflecting and writing together.

Because you can add a little at a time it was also not a big undertaking and it was easy to add back into previous pages as you remember other fun things that happened, or later realise what it was you liked most.

So much of the travel experience is visual. So, while we have photographs too, Mindmapping allowed a quick sketch here or there for whatever was memorable to us - even if we couldn't capture a photo at the time. Being visual hopefully makes it easier to share with others and easier for people to browse through the pages rather than wading through text. And finally, it's a good skill for us to practice while we travelled. Hopefully you'll see some improvement as the journalling went on.

Why share it?

We think you will find this interesting:

If you are thinking of travelling to any of these places
If you have been to any of these places
If you like beautiful hand-drawn pages that people have taken time over
If you want to see some examples of what Mindmaps can be
And if we're lucky enough to know you personally

What's issuu?

The neat presentation is thanks to issuu. Intended for sharing documents and magazines online we were very happy when we stumbled on it as a way to share our journal. It's everything we were looking for and more. Check it out at issuu.com

P.S. It's actually two travel journals condensed into one using the magic of software. And it was all done with a four-colour Bic pen.

This is the seventh post in a series of thoughts about what I learned from 6 months traveling across Central America, Southeast Asia and South Africa.

Street Food and the Art of an Open-Air Kitchen

2010-07-24T01:43:00.000-07:00

A huge feature of traveling is street-food. Delicious or scary, it's usually cheap, everywhere, and a major source of meals if you're on the road for a while. We were very impressed with the whole outdoor kitchen thing, and many places had it down to a fine-tuned work of art. This post is mainly a pictorial tribute to what makes it work (see below).

An outdoor kitchen makes good sense in many ways. Transparency is it's greatest benefit - we loved seeing the people who would make our food, the ingredients they made it with, and how they did it right in front of us. It is hard to complain about freshness or ingredients when you can see it done under your noses. Kitchens have very slowly crept closer to diners in Western restaurants but they are still far from doing it as well as in the places we visited. I found myself with immense respect for an unassuming person who would casually whip-off incredible meals in minutes all night long. Sadly, they haven't typically realised how much they could charge for cooking lessons. Open-air kitchens also create a great atmosphere with the sizzle of cooking and the light of the flames bringing streets alive.

Reluctantly, we admit that open-air kitchens are harder in places where the climate is less conducive to sitting out of doors in the evening - when it may be cold, windy or rainy. And bringing kitchens closer to diners indoors creates both safety hazards and can make smells and smoke an issue where they gently float away out-of-doors. Still, I marvel at the ability of so many people to whip up a wood fire and cook up meals right out on the pavement.

Enough talk - below is a picture of what makes a great open-air kitchen and what makes it work. (you may have to make it big)

Click on the image to enlargify it

Compared to the astounding variety of street-food on offer in South-East Asia and Central America, Europe and the US look boring and unimaginative. Here's a taster of some of what we saw.

Spiral crisps (chips) in Chiang Mai, Thailand - yes, it is one connected piece of potato:

The usual exciting array of Asian salty snacks, Thailand:

Micro-restaurants - like this one in Chiang Rai, Thailand:

The curious history of eating fried spiders* in Skuon, Cambodia (No, I didn't):

The ultimate portable restaurant able to be carried by a tiny, old lady - two baskets include teeny stools, plates, food and a stove. Wow. - Laos

This is the sixth post in a series of thoughts about what I learned from 6 months traveling across Central America, Southeast Asia and South Africa.

P.S. All photographs by me or my wife. See more on flickr/photos/palojono

*Apparently it all started during the Khmer Rouge regime when you literally ate whatever you could lay your hands on, and it has stuck.

Strategy As Wayfinding

2010-07-21T01:19:00.000-07:00

My previous boss was good at reminding me that strategy is not an exercise to be performed once a year and put in a binder, but is what should guide the 10,000 small decisions made in a company every day. Every company, to be successful in the long-term needs to have a strategy, even if that strategy is to be alert and responsive to what comes its way. One of the problems with strategy is the abstractness of the concept. When I'm at a party, and I say I work on strategy people tend to be interested and intrigued, but naturally pretty clueless on what it means I actually do each day (so I usually say I design things instead). The standard way we understand abstract concepts is to map them to something physical using metaphor. You can see this in a good deal of the standard language we use to talk about (among others) business strategy, for example:

This company's really lost its way
We need to follow our guiding star
They have two very different paths ahead of them
Our strategy enables us to get to our vision
Britain's strategic direction
The competitive landscape

I have come to understand other facets of Strategy As Wayfinding from my very concrete knowledge of hiking in the mountains (hiking gives you lots of time to think). It gives me another angle to get to grips with strategy.

If you think about it, planning a hiking trip is not so different from directing a business.

Goal	Destination
Resources	Food and gear
Motivation	Energy
The competitive landscape	Map
Teammates	Fellow hikers
Deadline	Arrival time (e.g. before it gets dark)
What you're working on	Your next steps

When we're out hiking I tend to do a lot of the navigating. It's not always intentional, I evidently have a need to know that we are, literally, on the right track to reach where we need to get to. As a result I have come to think of good wayfinding as needing three separate pieces of knowledge. If I am missing one of these then I start to worry.

1. Do I know where to step next?

Is the next minute of hiking obvious to choose?
Can I negotiate any obstacles immediately in front of me - rock faces, logs, or marsh?
Can I see the trail right in front of me?

This first set of questions lead to clarity of execution. Everyone knows what they need to do now and it becomes a question of mind over matter to push yourself through it, or over it. If it's really obvious and we're not traveling fast we can even enjoy the scenery as we go.

2. What nearby landmark are we headed to?

This is about mid-term navigation - the next 5 minutes of hiking. Are we headed up to the top of the rocky outcrop, curving around it, or descending underneath it.
Is the trail going to peter out in just a few minutes or stay clear?
What is your next goal in the hike? Reach the lake, climb the ridge, cross the meadow?

Knowing where the next five minutes of path are leading to ensures that I can enjoy each step to get there. It's a little like Flow: Where to step next is knowing what to do to move forward; and knowing the landmark you're headed to allows you to see if you're making the progress you need.

3. Is this the right overall direction?

Are we heading down the right valley?
Should we be on the West side of the mountain or the East?
Is this even the right mountain?
Do we have time to hike this mountain or are we better off enjoying the lake before it gets dark?

While you can be confident about near and mid-term navigation and be very much enjoying your hike, this one is the really crucial one. It's the one I got wrong on the day I proposed to my fiancee by clearly seeing a trail heading down from the cloud in Mt Snowdon and marching us down the wrong valley (fortunately she still said yes). In that case I could clearly see 'the' trail and even the trail a little further down in the cloud, but I had no confirmation that we were on the correct trail in the first place. This last one is also the innovator's dilemma one - it's following the route you know gets you to the top, and then another group finding a shorter and easier way to higher up the mountain by coming up the other side.

We experienced the challenge of difficult mid-term wayfinding in Jonkershoek, South Africa

I have found that these same guidelines I use for wayfinding in the mountains help me think about strategy more clearly. I need to know:

The next steps - It should be clear what we are working on now
The nearby landmark - It should be clear what our immediate (say, quarterly) goals are and that what we're working on will help us achieve them
The right overall direction - are we on course to achieve our vision for the company

While it's nothing new to break up strategy into say, now, next, later, actions, I do find that the concreteness of wayfinding while hiking gives me more clarity about how these all fit together - plus, lots of first-hand experience to draw from. I haven't tried it yet, but maybe I'll risk saying strategy at the next party and start talking about hiking instead.

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This is the fifth in a series of thoughts about what I learned from 6 months traveling across Central America, Southeast Asia and South Africa.

Cross-Cultural Moments

2010-07-14T08:29:00.000-07:00

A particularly fond memory I have of our recent travels was our second day arriving in Cambodia from Laos. We were at at a decent-sized town called Kratie on the banks of the mighty Mekong river which had spectacular sunsets from the riverside food vendors. Starting early, we took a boat across the Mekong to an island several kilometres long. Landing on the island was like stepping back in time. We rented bikes for a dollar each and took off round the small dirt road that follows the edge of the island. Even at 8am it was hot so when we passed a house with some of the family out front and a prominently displayed cool-box - we decided to stop and get ourselves a drink. With only one day's Khmer language under our belts we managed a few words and together with some pointing ordered some cold juice. It felt good to be sitting with the family in their front yard in this remote spot smiling, and trying a few halting, mispronounced words of Cambodian we'd learned from our hotel clerk the night before. What really got things friendly though was when we took out a pen and a notebook and drew a bike for the kids. They were fascinated and before long were drawing their own things and asking us to draw more. Though we could barely say more than the country we were from, drawing a few things in a book meant we stayed for another half hour. It was an enriching experience for both sides no doubt.

Schoolgirls cycling on Koh Trong Island, Cambodia

Soon after that we bought a small pad of post-its and carried them with a pen wherever we went. It was amazing how a quickly sketched balloon or smiling face could instantly break through cultural barriers with children. And one of the beauties of post-its for this was we could always leave them with whoever we met. I'd recommend all travelers to keep them handy.

Communicating across cultures and languages is difficult. This much is quite evident in a foreign country like Cambodia with radically different written and spoken language, clothes, background, education, religion, climate and way of life. Having a meaningful interaction that goes beyond exchanging money for products (one of the few now nearly universal communication means) is not a trivial thing. Yet, that is exactly the sort of interaction that leads to better understanding between different cultures and a lasting impression for both parties.

Communicating meaningfully is also difficult across smaller culture gaps - say finding something in common with elderly relatives, or between a junior employee and their boss, a banker and their plumber, or connecting with young kids.

But, along with the simple drawings we did in Cambodia, there are some moments and some activities that we noticed consistently seemed to transcend many of these cultural boundaries; some moments that have a transparencey and simplicity of purpose that remains common to both cultures allowing a connection to be made. Below are some of the moments we noticed that enabled the locals to forget we were tourists from the West (and vice-versa) and a smile to be exchanged.

Offering to carry some of an awkward load
Waving
Bumping into each other in the street
Offering a ride
Admiring something others own or wear
Kicking a ball back
Reaching for something
Sharing food or drink
Offering a sweater for the cold
Dropping something and trying to pick it up

Like the set of near universal facial expressions - these experiences seem to be simple enough to tap into what makes us human and what everyone can see we are all trying to do. I'm sure you will have experienced other moments like these in the past, like perhaps when you unexpectedly made a connection with an elderly lady in a store as you helped get something from a high shelf.

These moments tend not to require words, simply physical gestures will do. And often, they are responding to the most basic human needs like eating, warmth and getting from A to B.

And I think you don't have to go to Cambodia to benefit from a little thinking about these moments. It may sometimes be beneficial to create opportunities for these interactions to arise: you might find that doing an activity with your grandparents rather than having a polite tea party talking about the weather (common, but uninteresting to both parties) will help build stronger connections and mutual respect; dropping your papers on the high school steps to allow your sweetheart-to-be to help pick them up; or at a party where different groups of friends meet, try providing guests with small jobs to do that require two people (like setting up some tables) as a great way to start conversations.

While we were traveling we became very aware of all the moments we were able to truly connect with locals, and, like the pen and paper, maybe there are some ways we can build more of these into our everyday lives as well. If you have any stories to share, please pass them on.

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This is the fourth in a series of thoughts about what I learned from 6 months traveling across Central America, Southeast Asia and South Africa.

Eco-Packaging: Lunch boxes Thai Style

2010-06-28T08:12:00.000-07:00

For another post on the sustainable materials front I wanted to share this photo of our packed lunch on a trek in Northern Thailand.

Wrapped in a banana leaf (another incredible material from Nature), tied with bamboo, and with chopsticks cut from lotus (I think). It unfolds into its own little bowl for eating from. Cheap, readily available, secure, waterproof, light, strong, beautiful to hold and look at and it'll biodegrade with the rest of the forest. Brilliant.

p.s.
The lunch itself was a delicious home-cooked stir fry.

p.p.s.
While we were eating our lunch, our guide built a small fire and started roasting a rat he'd caught. We stuck with our packed-lunch.

The Magic of Bamboo

2010-06-28T06:47:00.000-07:00

One of my continual fascinations on our travels was the remarkable use of bamboo in South East Asia. It became clear to me that bamboo is a building material to die for. Strong, tall, straight, segmented, hollow, lightweight (relatively) and grows prolifically. Now wonder there are now neat materials like plyboo.

It seemed that much of the population of Laos and Cambodia lives in huts made entirely of bamboo. Clearly you can imagine the main support poles, but the clever part is that with a cut down the middle, a bamboo pole can be crushed flat and make a near waterproof, thin, flat plank that is perfect for floors and walls. They won't survive a hurricane perhaps, but they do survive the monsoon rains every year, and it's simple (or at least pretty cheap) to keep them in good condition by collecting more bamboo and replacing any parts that are getting old and re-leafing the roof. Cheaper than a trip to Home Depot.

Bamboo is divided into segments every foot or so by water tight dividers. If you cut it at one end of the segment you get a handy drinking cup. The segments are also nifty little air pockets. Another of the uses of bamboo then was to make rafts, just lash a few poles together. How to lash them? Bamboo again finds a way: simply running your knife along the pole produces thin cables that are surprisingly strong and resistant to tearing during bending. Bamboo cable is used for tying many things together and finds a lot of use in Asia.

If it all sounds pretty flimsy still, you may be impressed by the largest bamboo construction we came across - a full half mile bridge at Kompong Chom in Cambodia. It's all bamboo - supports, foundation and comfortable floor. Strong enough for motorbikes and maybe cars, but no one seemed to drive one anyway. As the level of the Mekong rises after the wet season the bridge washes away so they rebuild this baby every year - amazing - fortunately bamboo biodegrades nicely.

It is also a suprising sight to see construction workers in SE Asia building a four storey house while standing on scaffolding constructed entirely out of bamboo. Bamboo was also used for making tracks that allow you to ride a motorbike on a beach, and for making neat chicken enclosures and fishing traps. On an even smaller scale we saw, with a few choice cuts, how a single piece of bamboo makes a neat cowbell. I tried to sketch it below so you can see how a cow can't fail to advertise its movement with this neat creation.
Bamboo leaves are not useless either and many of the classic Asian conical hats are woven with bamboo strips and covered, so they're practically waterproof, with bamboo leaves.

Wherever you are it's a good idea to do your best to make do with what you've got - in SE Asia they have a lot of bamboo, but that doesn't mean they wouldn't like a good plank of lodgepole pine or oak if they could get it. Unfortunately, I don't think bamboo is great for animals (except of course for the giant panda) so bamboo plantations are probably little better than pine plantations ecologically, though bamboo does grow at an incredible rate. Still, for all the uses it can be put to perhaps it's worth a few more.

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This is the second post in a series of thoughts about what I learned from 6 months traveling across Central America, Southeast Asia and South Africa.

New Perspectives from Travel: Drinking

2010-06-17T01:53:00.000-07:00

It's been a while. Giant posting gaps have been thanks to experiencing a worldwide travel journey with my wife over the last 6 months or so taking in Central America, Southeast Asia and South Africa. Fortunately, gaps in writing are easily outweighed by the rich new cultural experiences that comes from traveling outside your comfort zone and in very different cultures. I have many insights and stories to share from our travels but the most valuable to me is the fresh perspective that travel brings. When you start thinking you know how the world works, go travel somewhere new and you'll always find plenty yet to learn.

One of the experiences, and widespread products, that was refreshingly new to me on our travels involved drinking. In Europe and North America, at least, if you have a drink it's from a glass, cup, mug, carton, or bottle. There are variations but you can pretty much count on it being fairly hard-sided with a flat bottom. Every drink. Which is why I was surprised and happy to find my conceptions of drinking thrown into turmoil as early in our travels as Belize and continuing into Asia; in many parts we visited a large amount of drinking vessels are small transparent plastic bags.

It actually took a while before we did drink from the bags. It broke my frame on what is needed to hold a drink: I should be able to put it down; I should be able to hold on to the container as the liquid will keep sloshing around; it should be narrow and tall; it should be easy to reuse. Bags are none of these things - it's hard to put a bag of drink down without worrying it's going to spill everywhere; you squeeze the liquid as you hold the bag and it changes shape meaning you have to hold it differently; they can be low, squishy and fat; and they're difficult to clean and reuse. Of course, using bags allows different ways of drinking too. So, instead of sitting them down you can hang them easily, and instead of drinking and resealing and storing you drink them in one go. They made me realise that they respond to different needs and support different ways of drinking better. And, they're cheap and lightweight (almost always good characteristics for a high volume product).

They did however create problems of their own. Small presealed bags of water are difficult to reuse and invite one-use drinking: tear, drink, and throw it. In Nicaragua, for example, cold water pouches were thrust at you any time a bus slowed down enough for someone to get close to the windows. The water pouches were becoming a major litter problem as they encouraged instant drinking and then throwing them directly out of the window. And in fact a clearer indication of a coming water seller was not seeing the seller herself, but seeing an increasing number of blue water pouches strewn in the grass by the side of the road. Here the consequences of a design decision have not been entirely thought through.

In any case, for me, drinking from bags represents a clear example of the value of travel for reframing what is normal. If you'd have asked me before we left I would have said I know how people drink - turns out I don't. And I'm happier, and perhaps smarter, for having learned a little more about it.

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This is the first post in what will be a series of thoughts about what I learned from 6 months traveling across Central America, Southeast Asia and South Africa.

Testing the power of stories at The Significant Objects Project

2009-12-31T08:45:00.000-08:00

As a fascinating build on The Story Behind the Product a good friend alerted me to The Significant Objects Project via Dan Ariely´s Predictably Irrational blog. Very much in line with the power of story to make or break a new product, the project is intended to test the hypothesis that “narrative transforms the insignificant into the significant.” Hopefully, with just a little reflection it´s not hard to persuade yourself this is true (just think souvenirs, or family mementos, or read my post), but what´s neat about the project is that it is actually testing it with experiments.

The premise is simple, to endow otherwise trivial objects with an intriguing story and see what value the newly story-endowed objects can reach on an eBay auction. So far the return of a few good stories is over 28 times the original value of the storyless objects. A compelling story indeed. Follow along at the project or read Dan´s better coverage of it than mine.

In other news the silence of late is due to me traveling in Central America. All sorts of interesting design-related thoughts are provoked from being on the road. If only I could afford the internet cafe time to tell them. Later!

Tackling Procrastination

2009-08-15T16:33:00.000-07:00

Two videos, one a Masters and another a senior project, came by me recently that both tackle the sensitive and ever present topic of procrastination. When you have something you really need to do, but you can't motivate yourself, or figure out how to do it. Both have some delightful animation. I think we'll all recognize a little of ourselves in both of these videos.

The first is a 2007 animation by Johnny Kelly at the Royal College of Art. I've embedded the youtube version below but you can check out the website of Mickey and Johnny to see other cool stuff he's done.

This second (much shorter) is a recent animation by Bang-yao Liu at the Savannah College of Art and Design, not exactly on procrastination, but deadlines (not too far off). Ah, Post-Its. What would the world be without them.

(It struck me by the coincidence that perhaps Masters and senior projects are the only time where you have enough time on your hands and are faced with procrastination so strongly that you can actually make a film on procrastination.)

Coroflot's 8th Annual Design Salary Survey Results

2009-07-17T11:29:00.000-07:00

Although based on, at times, spotty data, it's definitely enlightening to check out Coroflot's Survey of Design Salaries. Especially nice is their design salary calculator (or corculator) that enables you to put in your field and see what others are getting - even ballpark figures help either reassure you or give you something to strive (or bargain) towards.

They also post a few simple graphs about the overall data from which I drew, at a short glance, a couple of things.

Increasing experience steadily increases your salary - which is nice to know, though I couldn't tell if it becomes diminishing returns or increasing at the top-end
A Masters degree will serve you as well as a PhD in most fields (which makes sense and something I can attest to - not that you get a PhD studying design to be able to do it a whole better)
Design management's the place to be if you're into the $

Try it out.

10 (more) skills for designers

2009-07-14T10:57:00.000-07:00

Another post from Fast Company - this time from Dell's Ken Musgrave on the additional skills that designers need beyond the design basics. I pretty much agree with his selection, though I can also see that if you honed each of these 10 you could just as well be a politician or a celebrity as a designer. Put together they'd be a pretty good description of Barack Obama. Of course, I'd rather be a designer in any case. Here they are:

Passionate Curiosity
Imagination
Objectivity & Self-Awareness
Crisp Communication
Effective Storytelling
Flawless Execution
Business Acumen
Global Awareness
Context
Talent

10 Things to Demand from Design Thinkers

2009-05-28T16:48:00.000-07:00

I wanted to link to a post on Fast Company by Mark Dziersk on Design Thinking. Mark sees Design Thinking as playing a significant role in the way we will, and need to do our work. He also sees Design Thinking as something that is not exclusively the realm of designers, but is regularly picked up by people from many disciplines (politics and business are two notable examples).

He lays out 10 things to demand from design thinkers, which I see perhaps more as 10 important things to remember about design thinking. Some are more transparent than others, so for details check out Mark's original post. I modified some of the titles to make them make more sense to me. Here goes:

Brand equity starts with the consumer*
Designers are the storytellers
Desing Thinking starts with empathy and perception*
Good design is good business
Design thinking starts at the very beginning
Designers need to manage cross-functional teams*
Keep design assassins in the crosshairs*
Be strategic and think big picture*
Aim for biggest bang for your buck*
Good enough is no longer good enough*

*Original titles:

1. Get clarity about equity

3. The ergonomics of understanding

6. Designers need to be orchestra conductors

7. or don't let the bozos grind you down (Guy Kawasaki's advice)

8. Use your head before your hands

9. Be a good shepherd

10. Obsessive compulsives welcome here

Roomba Revealed

2009-05-20T17:47:00.000-07:00

Came across this fantastic shot at signaltheorist.com of the path Roomba takes around a room. Although it's hard to see any method to the movement when you watch one for a bit (as, yes, I did), it's clear that he does a good job of covering the space (he has little brushes that sweep up along the edges). I particularly like the graceful spiral on the left.

Navigating Roomba round a room never seemed like such a difficult problem to me until I spoke with a friend of mine about a year ago. He recently completed his PhD at Berkeley studying the problem of unmanned planes navigating the shortest distance between an arbitrary set of points (kind of like the travelling salesman). While the planes are at least able to use GPS for an absolute position from time to time, he explained to me how difficult it is to actually accurately know where a robot like a Roomba is at any one time. Essentially, the sensor errors for how far he's been and where he's turned build up very quickly to be almost unusable. To avoid the noisy sensors you really have to develop an algorithm that's somewhat position agnostic - it'll get Roomba around the room no matter where he starts (or if, being mean, you were to move him mid-stride). Somewhat more challenging, but signaltheorist's photo at least gives me some hope that Roomba's engineers have done a good job.

Seeing Roomba in action reminded me of Paul Saffo's prediction at the Long Now that "the next big thing is robots." Essentially, pick a technology that's been largely failing for the last 20 years and it's probably about the right maturity level to take off. Maybe this is a good time to invest...

Deep Agriculture: Michael Pollan in defense of food

2009-05-13T13:41:00.000-07:00

Last week I had the pleasure of attending a talk by Michael Pollan, once again hosted by The Long Now, on Deep Agriculture.

I enjoyed myself taking notes on his talk and I think they speak more clearly (and more interestingly) than any summary I could post here. Below I've included a large scan of my notes from the talk (which I asked Michael to sign!). I even bought his latest book, In Defense of Food, after the talk which I've finished already - Michael Pollan is a compelling writer.

To try and sum it up, missing half of his great stuff, in my own words:

Everything is connected - we can't separate our own health from the health of what we eat and the soil it grows in. We need to transform farming from big industry and make farming cool again. We need to design better incentive systems for farming. By paying attention to what we eat and where it comes from, our health, and the health of the planet, will improve.

I hope you enjoy the notes. Read them big.

I first read Michael Pollan in his New York Times Magazine article Unhappy Meals. His manifesto for eaters of 'Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.' counts as some of the stickiest imperatives for action that I've come across. Great journalists have a way of cutting to the chase. Michael Pollan teaches journalism at the UC Berkeley School of Journalism.

You can also read Kevin Kelly (the founder of Wired magazine's) summary of the talk on the Long Now blog entry for Michael Pollan "Deep Agriculture"

You could also do worse than spending 6 minutes watching Grocery Store Wars for a similar message.

Photosynths: Remarkable, fun and practical

2009-05-10T17:05:00.000-07:00

Nearly two years ago I remember marveling at a neat technology demonstrated by Blaise Aguera y Arcas at the TED conference. It was called Photosynth, and if you haven't enjoyed Blaise's Photosynth TED talk yet, it's definitely 8 minutes well spent*. With a camera, no particular photographic talent and plenty of photographs, Photosynth creates a navigable pseudo 3D experience of exploring an environment. You can explore from different angles and even zoom in and out. It's remarkable stuff.

Sometime after Blaise introduced the world to Photosynth, Microsoft made the service available for free at Photosynth.net. Just recently I tried my own hand at creating a Photosynth with the view from our San Francisco balcony: San Francisco Ferry building balcony view photosynth. I also embedded a smaller version below. It's fun to click around. I tried to include a few close-up details you can find with a little searching. The interface reminds me a little of an old computer adventure game; if you find the right way through the maze you may stumble upon something hidden away.

As I mentioned above, the neat thing here is that you don't need any special skills to create a photosynth; just a little thought and a snap-happy trigger finger.

Hopefully, by now I've convinced you of the remarkable and fun part of Photosynths. I recently learned about a more practical use of them too: NASA released a photosynth collection of the International Space Station. With the NASA photosynths (and a fast connection speed) you can really get a feel for the Space Station from all vantage points checking out the big picture and details. I loved looking around the inside of the Destiny US Laboratory. I also enjoyed the photosynth of the Mars Rover.

Photosynths bring a little control to the viewer of an object rather than ceding all editorial control to the photographer - you can explore at your own will and pace. They also turn the viewing of a photograph into a qualitatively different experience - while it's not like being there it's a whole different feel for the environment and context of a site or object. If you make one, let me know. Have fun.

*In fact, almost all of the TED talks are time well spent. We got into the fun habit of watching one TED talk a week over dinner. It's amazing what you can learn.

The road to quality is paved with our failures (lots of them)

2009-05-04T17:47:00.000-07:00

At Jump we recently passed around an entry from Ben Casnocha's blog about the idea generation process at The Onion. While the original reason for passing it on was visual recording, the statistic of note is that the team at The Onion generates ~600 title ideas to arrive at the 18 titles that eventually make it into each issue. That is, remarkably, exactly 3% of the ideas.

Bob Sutton commented on this same fact bolstering an argument for quantity with statistics from IDEO's toy group (now part of IDEO). The numbers go like this:

In 1998, at IDEO's toy group Skyline:
10 employees, generated
~4000 toy ideas.
230 progressed to a nice drawing or prototype.
12 were sold and
fewer of these probably made any money...

It's a tough life being an idea.

At a recent Concepting project here at Jump it's a similar story as the 700 concept ideas generated by the team and clients get distilled down to the few that will make it.

In any case, the reason for posting this is from Jesse Farmer's generous comment on Ben's post sharing with us the following anecdote about quality and quantity. It's from David Bayles and Ted Orland's book, Art and Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Art Making. While (I found) it's been shared in many other places on the web, it's so sticky I thought it worth sharing again. Enjoy:

'The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the "quantity" group: fifty pound of pots rated an "A", forty pounds a "B", and so on. Those being graded on "quality", however, needed to produce only one pot - albeit a perfect one - to get an "A".

Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the "quantity" group was busily churning out piles of work - and learning from their mistakes - the "quality" group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.'

As John Maxwell writes in Attitude 101: Fail early, fail often, fail forward.

--
Just to be clear I take no credit for what's above. Thanks, Ben, Bob, Jesse, David and Ted, John, The Onion and all their sources.

More inspiration from moreinspiration.com

2009-04-26T22:04:00.000-07:00

While we're not all in need of more inspiration, there are certainly times when a little inspiration goes a long way. For a regular dose of inspiration, and some browsing of some really cool bleeding edge technologies you could do worse than check out More Inspiration

One of the free services provided by CREAX - Creativity for Innovation - in Belgium (where I worked back in '03), it neatly ties in over 2500 eye-catching innovations, short descriptions, an email newsletter should you wish, and a technology analysis of each using their own methodology. It's hard to receive the newsletter and not want to take a look at at least one of the new submissions.

It's unashamedly technology inspired innovation. Yet the engineer in me continues to get excited and inspired by the possibility of what these applications of new technologies promise. I'm still yet to see a firm that specializes in offering the ultimate marriage of technology and people-centered design, though I'm looking forward to seeing the day. In the meantime, this is a great place to land.

Trails of the departed: Dealing with death online

2009-04-26T20:20:00.000-07:00

If you've spent any time online it's hard to escape the fact that we all leave trails everywhere. Posts in forums, accounts on sites we no longer use, mentions in blogs, perhaps a website we no longer keep up to date all point to a trail of where we've been. This is all very well while we're still here. But not long ago, I listened to a column by Jeremy Wagstaff on the BBC about the online trails we leave behind when we die.

We spend our time gradually collecting logins, passwords and email accounts that we share only with the makers of the different systems. Should the unthinkable happen noone has access to those login details but you. Jeremy shared the tale of a fellow tech columnist who died and still appeared as a smiling friend on his facebook page. And, for that matter, it would be some shock to see a status update as 'deceased'. They continue to appear on your networks on twitter, dopplr, or linkedin, and Outlook continues to recommend them when autofilling email addresses. Another friend told me of how, with the passing of a friend, their facebook wall evolved into a shared memorial for friends and family to share tributes.

Given that the Internet tools and sites we now know and love have generally only been around 10 or so years, this is clearly going to become a larger and larger issue. When somebody dies no one is able to easily go in and remove their online presence. In my case, no-one person knows all the sites I've signed up to, nor do people really have the incentive to go in and remove me from them.

I think, this becomes an issue both for the makers of sites, and for the users themselves. As a user, is it my responsibility, as it would be in a regular will, to ensure that my online presence is carefully cleaned up online, just as my physical assets, property and bank accounts would be passed on to next of kin to keep or dispose of? As a website maker, how do I tastefully and appropriately deal with the inevitable deaths of site users?

I recently learned from Springwise about Legacy Locker, a site that aims to tackle this growing issue.

Legacy Locker is a safe, secure repository for your digital property that lets you grant access to online assets for friends and loved ones in the event of death or disability.

I think they're one of the first in which is clearly going to be a growing segment - just as, though we don't often like to acknowledge them, cemeteries, funeral directors, and morticians play a critical role in keeping the world turning. As our presence is increasingly also online, we also need similar roles for the online world. And, in fact, these already exist. Should you perform a search for online memorials, you'll find that the space is rapidly being catered to. Here, the online world has some advantages over the physical, with online memorials allowing many forms of tribute to loved ones that go beyond a mossy gravestone in a rarely visited cemetery.

I since found Jeremy's radio broadcast online on the Jakarta Post: The comforting presence of absent friends.

Designing emails for busy people

2009-04-13T22:41:00.000-07:00

It's no secret that genuine work these days is done through email. In the sense that "doing email" is a legitimate work task even though email can encompass a vast array of things.

I've been in the position recently where I have had the pleasure, and challenge, of working with senior leaders at a large awesome company who have many other pressing demands on their time besides what I'm asking of them in my email.

This has caused a necessary reflection on designing even regular emails to make it easy for the person on the receiving end. To that end, I tapped my colleague at Jump, Lara Lee, for her experience in writing emails that work. She picked out four principles that have helped her emails see their way through crowded inboxes by making life easy for the recipient.

The real secret is to treat emails more like a user-centered design situation. It's real people on the other end, so use whatever empathy you have for their situation, and some thoughtful designing, to write in a way that resonates with them.

Et voila:

1. Put the subject box to work

The subject box is your main communication to get you out of the inbox. A Professor I know at Stanford tends to do 90% of his communication through the subject line. If you're fighting for attention, make the subject box get the information across you need. So it's...

Less: Mockup thoughts
More: Input needed on mockups by Tuesday

It doesn't have to be an entire sentence, but the more information carrying words you can load upfront the easier it will probably be (a little like this).

2. Consider writing in 2 sections

Consider splitting the email into two main sections: the first with the need to know; the second with the nice to know. The email cuts to the chase fast: what it's about, and what's needed from them (if they didn't already get it from the subject). After the chase, for a reader who finds themselves with more time, there's space to add the detail and extra context that you were tempted to put up front.

Like a lot of our work here at Jump it can help to think of an email having 3 reads:

1st read - the subject line
2nd read - cut to the chase, the need to know at the start of the body
3rd read - the delicious context below for those who want to know more

3. Provide easy visual navigation

Words and paragraphs are great, but we have an extra means to help get our message across: how we lay out the email. Provide easy visual navigation through the email by using the visual structure of the mail to help tell your story. That means things like, breaking several actions into a list. Having a clear intro paragraph, or using emphasis to pull out headers or actions.

Don't bury your message in dense text. Use a layout that makes it evident.

4. Use categories to clarify

It's not appropriate for all emails, but for those in a hurry some simple categories can work wonders for rapid comprehension. If you are organizing something don't shy away from the when, where, who buckets. Add headers of takeaways, conclusions, initial thoughts, or context to more easily describe things. Maybe now, next, later or high, low, medium priorities.

Categories help structure information. Adding them to an email means we've done some structuring so the reader doesn't have to. In the process we make life easier for them, and probably also clear things up in our minds too.

For me, it's somewhat of a frame shift to look at an email as an object to be designed. A tool that can serve a purpose. We don't need to see an email as a next generation letter, or even how we would talk to someone - we have far more flexibility at our fingertips and it can be used in many different ways. Use every tool we have to design an email appropriate for the task and the audience. It's not about being rude or manipulative - it's about thinking about who will read it and making a conscious effort to design your email to make their life easier. And, in the process, you'll also find you're more likely get what you need.

Asking great questions at talks

2009-03-31T20:15:00.000-07:00

Having sat in a lot of dull and interesting talks and classes in my life, I've had a lot of time to consider what makes a great question and what makes a bad one. I expect you may have experienced a similar situation where at the end of a talk the presenter asks "Any questions?" Awkward silence. The Chair looks around hopefully at the audience. The silence persists. Eventually the Chair pulls a somewhat trivial question out of his or her pocket for the heck of it. Everybody claps politely.

Other times I've had the pleasure of listening to a talk with rapt attention and being blank for questions when a colleague puts forward a critical, fascinating and , in retrospect, obvious question that immediately has me thinking, "Why didn't I think of asking that?" So, the seemingly inocuous "Any questions?" is often a surprisingly loaded and complex invitation. Fortunately, I think there's some technique to having great questions to ask that I wanted to share a little of here.

In my experience it's worth asking good questions when you have them. A great question has value to you, to the speaker and to the audience. Here are six of the main ways that a good question helps everyone out:

Great questions...

1. Build a relationship between you and the speaker
A good question is an effective way of telling someone, yes, I get it, and what's more this is interesting to me. It allows them to recognize you and increases the chance and ease of meeting up after a talk to discuss in more depth through the common ground created.

2. Let other's know who you are
Asking a question in a room of strangers is an opportunity to share a little of yourself, what you're interested in, who you are, and what you know about the subject. On many occasions, strangers have introduced themselves to me after a talk simply because I asked a question. In case you can't tell, I think great questions are a great networking tool.

3. Start conversations
In very many talks there is as much to be learned from the audience as the speaker. Asking a great question invites others to chime in and start a natural dialogue that is often more revealing than any prepared presentation.

4. Buy others time
There are many times when the bell sounds on a talk and "Any questions?" shoots round the room before I've barely had a chance to process the last thing that was said. A first question plays the invaluable role of giving others a little chance to think about what they want to ask once the speaker has finished. Sometimes we just need a little processing time before we're ready to share.

5. Relate the content to what you care about
Questions beget answers. Many people forget that a question of a speaker really allows you to learn an answer to your situation. When it's a talented and experienced speaker it's really an incredible opportunity. A great question plays the useful function of steering the talk towards what's more relevant to you.

6. Force you to engage in the talk
Challenging yourself to think of great questions also forces you to think through the content of the talk and compare it to what you already know. It's too easy to let a good talk wash over you, and a bad talk not even enter. I typically write a big question mark in the corner of my page at the start of a talk and use it as the seed for a question mindmap. Setting myself the responsibility of asking a great question means I not only have to pay attention, but I have to think critically about the talk all the way through. What a great cheap way to max out your value.

As great questions have value to you, the speaker and the audience, to ask a great question requires a little consideration of the needs of all three. In fact, the dynamics involved in choosing a great question are somewhat complicated with many choices and stakeholders.

To ask a great question I try to negotiate the following issues.

Issues to negotiate to ask great questions

The speaker must stand a chance at answering
Terrible questions are designed to simply pick holes in what presenters say and make the questioner look smart. No one benefits when a speaker is made to look stupid. Everyone benefits when a question draws out the best thinking from a speaker.

Audience interest
When you ask a question of a speaker there are sometimes a lot of people listening. That's an awful lot of person time to waste should you ask something that's not relevant. It bears consideration, then, for what the rest of the audience may be interested in before you relate a story about your cat. A question that provides value only to you leaves others baffled and the speaker in a tricky situation - how to answer your question without boring the pants off the rest of the audience.

A good question not only elicits the best of a speaker, but has the audience thanking you for raising such an interesting issue.

Raise problems or issues in a productive rather than offensive way
I've sat in many conference rooms where an audience member has launched into a long-winded question which really turns out to be little more than a thinly veiled attack on the content of the talk or the speaker themselves. If there's an important problem with the content that other members of the audience should be aware of it's important to raise it. Raising an issue respects the speaker as it gives them a chance to address something the audience may otherwise assume the speaker had ignored. The challenge is how to address the question productively.

Useful methods include reflecting on your own experience - "In my experience x is usually an issue in these kinds of studies. Did you consider that as part of your study?" - opening the question to the room - "I'm wondering if others can see how the researcher effect could be minimized in this kind of setting" - or simply suggesting to discuss it afterwards - "One concern I have is the researcher effect on subject's responses. Perhaps that's something we could discuss afterwards if others would be interested."

Build on other questions
Like a good story, the best questions build on and reincorporate what has come before. A question that seems to come from left field will never be as good as one that credits other contributions already and acknowledges the small journey the audience has come together during the talk.

Stick to the content, not the questioner
Unless I'm a particularly fascinating topic of conversation for the current audience, questions that relate too closely to my own situation rather than the subject at hand are best avoided. Great questions focus on what's been shared while bringing in small elements from the outside. Together the participants have built a shared understanding about the content of the talk. For a question to be of interest it needs to not stray too far.

There are other factors involved in the best questions too. For example, a question should provide enough context, but not be too long; if appropriate, lighten the atmosphere by including a joke or a short related story; connect the content to current events. There are plenty more.

The list above is perhaps most reflective of some of the less obvious value in great questions, and some of the things most routinely missed by many questioners. If we all tried to keep some of these in mind, I expect we'd have more enjoyable talks for all. Having personally spent this time thinking about what makes great questions I found I could answer my own question: the answer to "Why didn't I think of that?" usually turned out to be simply I wasn't even thinking at all.

Saving GM and Chrysler: Voting with your wallet

2009-03-30T14:38:00.000-07:00

I was driving to work this morning as I listened to President Obama's announcement on the auto industry in the wake of reviewing GM and Chrysler's proposed restructuring plans. Undoubtedly, GM and Chrysler have done a lot for the US auto industry and they continue to do some great work. Yet around me this morning it was difficult to be convinced of any plan for saving them bar charity and a concern for workers jobs. Bay area residents had been voting with their wallets a long time ago.

I counted for 4 minutes of Obama's speech and of 32 cars around me only 3 were American.

Irrespective of the jobs they provide, my small sampling showed me the roots of a much larger problem: over the last ten years foreign cars have evidently offered a better combination of features and price for bay area residents. They've met the needs of Americans better than American cars have. My observations included Hondas, Nissan, Toyota, Hyundai, BMW, Mercedes, Audi, Volvo, VW, Mini, Lexus and others. One Chevy, a Ford Windstar and a Lincoln were the only US cars.

My biggest struggle then with the aid that has been offered GM and Chrysler, is not whether it's a good idea to be preserving US industry, and keeping American jobs in suppliers across the country, it's whether or not any restructuring of these companies (or sale in Chrysler's case) will address the real issue - which is a deeper understanding, and proprietary insight for what Americans across the country really want in their cars. It's difficult to know how any restructuring can simply promise to deliver it. Maybe we need some face time with Obama to talk about design research and design strategy.

Celebrating Ada

2009-03-24T22:00:00.001-07:00

Today is Ada Lovelace Day. Ada Lovelace is remarkable for writing the very first computer programs when working with Charles Babbage on the Analytical Engine. She is also remarkable for doing this all in the early 19th century and before her 36th birthday.

Ada's imagination didn't stop at calculations either. She even suggested that:

the Analytical Engine “might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent.”

In a roundabout way of honoring Ada I wrote a short piece of music for another Ada, the child of some great friends of ours. You can listen to it or download it here: Ada.mp3.

And if you're into playing like I am then please try out the piano sheet music for Ada (pdf). Do let me know if you try it out.

We still need more women in Science like Ada and my PhD advisor Alice. Go Ada.

Empathy and Self-Centered Design

2009-02-26T18:14:00.000-08:00

Not so long ago, I read a very interesting post about user-centered design vs self-centered design. In the post, Chris argues that the best outcome usually happens from designers designing for their own needs rather than trying to design for the needs of others. I don't fully subscribe to that view and I tried to explain how I thought about it. While there are undoubtedly many failed products and services out there due to designers trying to design for people unlike them, I think there are likely at least as many from designers assuming that the people who use their services are just like them.

That said, it's a difficult sell to persuade entrepreneurs that they need the sorts of services that Jump provides. When you're starting out it seems you may as well take a shot based on your own intuition and observations instead of embarking on intensive user research before doing anything. While useful user research doesn't have to be too intensive, waiting to get started also goes against sound advice from people like Guy Kawasaki and Paul Graham.

But I can't deny that most companies simply fail to really understand who uses their offerings, and that's a huge reason of failure for companies and frustration for regular people. So I was cheered to read, towards the end of Wired to Care, a short piece that helped me better understand what I was feeling:

Many companies follow [the] same evolution, from solving their own needs, to asking what others want, to finally tapping into a mission with far wider relevance. Often a firm is started by an entrepreneur who creates something for herself. She caters to her own needs. If she's lucky, she soon finds that other people share those needs as well. She's able to build a company. As long as she's there, the company can enjoy a focus and clarity that other firms might lack. However, to remain successful, most companies eventually need to become less reliant on their founder's singular vision. They discover that their charismatic founder isn't always an accurate reflection of the rest of the world. Sometimes she's right, and sometimes she's wrong. People worry about whether the company can outlive its founder. Investors start clamoring for something more reliable.

At that point, companies start to establish methods for figuring out what the rest of the world wants. They gain a broader set of opinions to help mitigate the risk of being wrong. But they often lose clarity and passion in the process. If they stop there, companies can soon find that they're asking people what they want without really knowing why they want it. They have understanding without empathy. That can result in a lot of really awful solutions. People start making geriatric kitchen devices that they themselves would never think of buying. They shrug and say that this is what the customer wants. They have some understanding of the outside world, but they still view it as a weird place, populated by people who are not like them. That's a dangerous situation for a company to be in. And it's where most companies end up.

Wired to Care, Patnaik and Mortensen, p. 171

So, my concern, and where Chris and I really agree, actually stems from the progression companies go through as they grow - from the solidity, based on empathy, intuition and understanding of founders' visions, to the regular employees disconnect from their real users as the company matures.

So, perhaps, a different understanding of user-centered vs self-centered design, would really reflect the transition in the life of a company: with self-centered design being a good bet for many (but by no means all) founding visions, and user-centered design becoming the dominant mode as the company grows.

At last: a shaving, projecting, Coffee Brewing Pomegranate Phone

2009-02-10T12:56:00.000-08:00

To experience a really awesome marketing campaign and some seriously cool web design at the same time check out the Pomegranate Phone.

Still, there's some under the surface truth of the campaign. Flights of fancy and Science Fiction have long pushed science, engineering and product design forward - think Star Trek and Arthur C Clarke.

The Pomegranate Phone is also not so far off, even in jest, from a concept car or Microsoft's Home of the Future. But here, the chosen features are beautifully picked to clash with our current cultural frame of phones. Perhaps if it wasn't called the Pomegranate Phone, but simply the Pomegranate, we'd be able to entertain it further.

Fanciful new ideas often leave out the reality of use and consequences of failures. Set Phasers on Stun is a neat book whose title points to a simple example of how new products invented in fiction so easily go wrong in reality (and the recent gun/taser catastrophe on the Bay Area's transit system is another more serious example). As Larry Niven said,

"A good SF author invents the car; a great SF writer comes up with the traffic jam."

Don't forget to enjoy the Pomegranate Phone.

Wired to Care: How companies prosper when they create widespread empathy

2009-01-26T13:10:00.000-08:00

I've talked about empathy a number of times in the past year, in the context both of having empathy for eventual users of your offerings, and having empathy for other members of your design team. In particular, my thesis, Effective Framing in Design, was about getting these two aspects to align. Being able to put aside your issues and put yourself in other's shoes is a key ingredient to eventual market success because it allows you to develop offerings others really want.

I'm excited to talk about empathy again because Jump's CEO Dev Patnaik (and Pete Mortensen), who together with Michael Barry taught me needfinding at Stanford, just released a book on how creating widespread empathy - empathy across a whole organization - helps companies prosper. It's called Wired to Care.

~~I'm not all the way through it yet, but so far~~ It's packed with engaging stories about different companies' efforts to understand their customers through empathy. It also makes a great case for why empathy matters to business and, ironically, how the skill we all have wired into us is so easily lost in the setting of large organizations. Fortunately, there's also plenty of examples of how some companies manage to build and keep a sense of empathy.

For an interesting exercise take a look at the Wired to Care website's empathometer: a popular gauge of how empathic different companies are seen. As of writing, for example, Delta Air Lines, whose employees I am told always get to fly first class, score low, while Virgin who seem to constantly be trying to make flying a nicer experience, score high empathy.

The low-granularity of the empathometer also signals an important challenge we continue to face, which is how to put a number next to the gut-feel sense of empathy if it really can have the impact we think it can have. In my research I drew from both self-assessment survey data and team interviews, but tying this back to business $ is an interesting challenge.

From my perspective it's great to see a topic that's received much academic research attention step over into the mainstream bookstore.

To get a better feel for the book you can also watch an early Wired to Care presentation by Dev at a General Mills speaker series.

9 Characteristics of Top Small Workplaces

2009-01-09T18:40:00.000-08:00

After my long Winter hiatus I wanted to share some interesting characteristics that distinguished some of the top small workplaces of 2008 in the US. Jump was fortunate enough to be part of the 15 that were selected, and I think we admirably embody some of these characteristics below - particularly the one about Teamwork but also many others. This list was put together by the presenters of the Wall Street Journal Top Small Workplaces Award so I take no credit.

As a respected business friend of mine said of this list, if you're trying to build a great place to work, ignore these at your peril.

1. Take a long view of their business

Great workplaces have a commitment to building something that lasts – not for just 5 years, but for 50 years. A great place to learn about that is Collins and Porras' Built to Last.

2. It's not just about profits…they intend to change society

These companies care about their impact in the larger societal context. It's not just about a quick buck. This keeps the work meaningful and fulfilling.

3. Open communication engages employees in good times and bad

This includes being honest with employees about the state and direction of the company including, in many cases, open books.

4. Teamwork – it's how the work gets done

Great teams have a common purpose with no egos, bring diverse perspectives, can tackle complex problems and share in team-based rewards

5. Employee development is key to consistent execution

Top workplaces look to grow their employees through tuition programs, growing leaders from within and hiring carefully for attitude and fit, not just skills.

6. Workspace matters

Making workplaces that facilitate collaboration and where people want to work is a priority.

7. Employees share in the risk and rewards

Top workplaces make sure to tie incentives and bonuses to business achievements, focus on key goals and, in general, have an open book policy so everyone is aware and feels they contribute to the success of the company.

8. Focus on well-being, prevention and health builds endurance

This includes great benefits packages and wellness programs. Top workplaces look after their employees. A win-win if ever I saw one.

9. Through their employees, these firms compete on quality and service

This leads to, repeat business, an engaged workforce, employees who act like owners, and, though you're not the cheapest, clients who keep coming back.

If you'd like more depth coverage, including examples from each of the companies, they also put together this richer top small workplaces 2008 report (pdf).

Why a switch from academia to industry is a good thing

2008-12-07T21:33:00.000-08:00

I recently completed five excellent years studying user-centered design teams for one of the few PhDs that explicitly studied the needfinding process. Since finishing my research (if it's possible to ever finish research) I've spent an excellent half a year doing design strategy for real with Jump Associates. They say that if you ever harbor ambitions that include academia it's not a good idea to spend too long in industry, but, so far I've found it an excellent experience for at least five reasons:

1. Pace
It's refreshing to be able to make serious progress on projects in a short space of time. Most of academia is not built around speed, it's built around thoroughness. It's also very much built around individual ambition and interest, with the result that projects, staffed by one graduate student, can take a long time to make real progress. It's been a refreshing change of pace here at Jump to have the harnessed expertise of 4-5 talented people working full time on projects. This allows us to cover in 2-3 months what might take a year in academia. The pace also enables us to take on more time sensitive projects which are almost off the books in academia from the get-go. You wonder if more of this model might be possible in Universities...

2. Experience building
While I developed my design experience tremendously at Berkeley it's great to once more be doing design rather than just studying it. Indeed, for design-related research, including design practice as part of the requirements might in fact lead to more relevant research output (although restricting researchers to studying design probably helps with objectivity). What's more, with design, more than many other subjects, if you want to feel comfortable teaching it, gathering your own experience and credibility within the field is critical. Right now the cutting edge of design practice is in industry, so spending time there would usefully be required for all design educators.

3. Proving myself
Starting at a, at least somewhat, new company once more brings with it the great challenge of proving my value once more - to others and to myself. After spending time as one of the senior graduate researchers it's a great switch to have to build up your own respect from scratch once more. No sitting on laurels, you have to put yourself out there and show your worth.

4. Reinvent myself
I believe everyone should give themselves the chance to reinvent themselves. Switching to a new institution, place and social circle allows you to choose who you want to be again. More or less free from any existing associations people hold it's great to once more have the chance to decide who I want to be. I have found this of tremendous value several times in my life each time as I moved away to start fresh. I'd recommend it to everyone.

5. Pausing the self-promotion
While much of life is slowly building a brand around yourself, coming to Jump has been a nice change from my time in academia. In academia you follow the research that is of most interest and importance to you. This means that you have to spend time persuading others that your research is both interesting and relevant; no one has any incentive to listen to your talk or read your paper unless you can sell that it will be valuable to them. In consulting however, once a project is launched, the client has every interest in listening to what you have to say. Which, interestingly, allows you to tune-down the self-promotion and focus on doing great work.

The culmination of this experience means I would wholeheartedly recommend any graduating design researcher to consider heading out to industry once more before taking that design teaching post.

The trouble with needs: Needs are solutions

2008-11-14T14:00:00.000-08:00

Needs and Solutions

A huge first step, perhaps the biggest step, for a designer to make is to think in terms of needs, not just solutions. The simplest way to really appreciate the difference between needs and solutions is that needs are verbs and solutions are nouns. Hence, to say someone needs a flashlight is not really a need. The person doesn't need a flashlight, they need to be able to see in the dark. A solution is the flashlight (noun), but the need is to see (verb) in the dark.

When you stop thinking in terms of solutions and start thinking in terms of needs a number of useful things happen. For example, you now open the door to all sorts of other ways to meet the need. Rather than setting out to make a better flashlight, setting out to help people see in the dark opens the door to fixed lights, matches, lanterns, infrared goggles and so on. Another benefit is that needs tend to stick around longer than solutions. I don't need to send a telegraph any more, but I still need to keep in touch with my family in England. But perhaps the biggest benefit is that thinking in terms of needs helps keep the people in mind and not the technology - after all people have needs, products don't. A simple change in phrasing is going to work wonders in making sure you're keeping empathy for the people you're designing for, rather than focusing on the technology.

So tip number 1 is to watch your language and make sure you're designing for verbs not nouns.

Needs and Wants

This distinction also makes it much easier to highlight the difference between a need and a want. Most simply, a want is when a person has chosen the solution to satisfy the need. The morning after a late night when I say I want a coffee, I don't really need a coffee, but I do need to wake up (verb). A coffee (noun) is the way I've chosen to satisfy that need, but you might decide that a bucket of cold water over my head might serve me just as well. A small corollary from this is that even if people say they want something, providing another way to meet the underlying need may leave them pleasantly surprised (except in the case of the cold water).

Needs are Solutions

But I was really writing to highlight a trouble with needs and solutions which results in us having to take a little extra care. And the trouble is this: as far as I can tell, when we identify a need we're also identifying a solution direction. To go back to the original example of seeing in the dark, we can appreciate this by just asking why: "why do we need to see in the dark?" In this case, let's suppose it's because I need to sneak downstairs for a late night snack without waking anyone up. And why do I need to do this? Because, I have a friend staying and I don't want to wake my housemates. Looking at it this way, seeing in the dark is just one possible direction I could take in the overall goal of having fun with my friend. If I need to sneak downstairs we don't necessarily have to see, I could just need to find my way, in which case, luminous strips on the floor might work just aswell. Or the fun could just as easily be satisfied by trying to sneak actually in the dark - so we don't need to see at all. If the real need is to eat, then a fridge in my room might have served me better than a kitchen downstairs. If we just need to have fun then there are a thousand other things we could have done other than get something to eat.

At each level of asking how we satisfy a need - such as the need to have fun with my friend - when we identify a need, we are also identifying a solution direction - whether that be finding great ways to eat, sneak downstairs, or watch a movie. The real trouble with needs then is that needs are solutions.

So I guess there's three main things to keep in mind:

Thinking in terms of needs is much more beneficial than restricting yourself to solutions
Watch your language to make sure your needs are verbs, not nouns
Watch your needs, because you're also deciding solution directions

If you want to read more about why designing for needs are a good idea, and get a better understanding of a useful hierarchy of needs, check out Patnaik and Becker's articles on Needfinding and System Logics (pdfs) in the Design Management Journal.

I'm still figuring out exactly how this plays out so I'd love to hear your thoughts so we can figure it out together.

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Thanks also to Michael Barry who helped me understand these concepts.

User Experience Research Methods

2008-10-25T10:01:00.001-07:00

I wanted to tip my hat and provide a link to Christian Rohrer's helpful article on When to Use Which User-experience Research Methods on Nielsen's alertbox.

Rohrer uses a couple of frameworks to help make sense of how the wealth of methods available relate to each other. Most helpful is distinguishing the methods along three dimensions:

1. Attitudinal vs Behavioral

2. Qualitative vs Quantitative

3. Context of website or product use

The first, attitudinal vs behavioral essentially distinguishes between what people think and say (attitudinal) and what people do (behavioral). Hence some methods focus on measuring and observing what people do, say, eye-tracking studies, and others on what people think and say, for example, interviews.

You can then map the same methods together with whether they are primarily quantitative or qualitative. So, on the attitudinal side a qualitative method would be interviewing, while a quantitative method would be surveys. And on the behavioral side, a moe qualitative method would be usability studies, and a quantitative would be A/B testing. (of course a picture says a thousand words at the original article)

For the qualitative vs quantitative dimension, Rohrer makes a useful distinction that qualitative methods are better suited to answer why and how to fix questions ("Why does nobody click on the contact page?"), while quantitative methods are better suited towards how many and how much ("how many users follow one or two step payment?") questions.

Finally, it's clearly worth keeping in mind when to use which methods. Given that there are more why (and what) questions at the start of the process, qualitative methods tend to be used earlier and more quantitative methods used when you have a clearer idea what you're doing. Though this sounds obvious in this context I find myself regularly advising design teams to hold off on surveys until they know more about what is actually important to ask. The basic danger is if you haven't gotten the correct qualitative understanding at the start, you'll likely be asking all the wrong quantitative questions and it'll do you more harm than good. Once you're on the right track then dial up the quant.

When it comes to attitudinal vs behavioral though, perhaps the strongest techniques involve both: listening to what people say about what they do. That's the beauty of usability studies, shadows and, probably most importantly, the stories people tell, which are in essence what people say about what they did.

Anyway, it's worth taking a look at the short article: When to Use Which User-experience Research Methods

Incidentally, Nielsen's alertbox is one of the few regular newsletter/article posts that I actually read. I often find something useful on it, and Nielsen's writing, evidently after a long career of making websites simple, tends to helpfully cut through the jargon and get to the point. Worth a look.

Good design processes encourage Outsights and stimulate Insights

2008-09-20T10:45:00.000-07:00

In some ways I think the word 'Insights' is problematic for design, even though we spend much of our time trying to get them. It's problematic because we actually spend so much of our time designing processes and collaboration tools to keep us grounded in the data we collect and in the collective workings of the team. To say we have insights - thoughts from inside us - glosses over the key role the data and our teammates have on pushing our project and thinking forward.

In some ways our entire process is geared towards getting as much of the thinking as we can external to our minds and therefore unreliant on a flash of insight. If we could present, visualize and organize data in a way that themes emerged naturally, obviously, and inevitably we'd be in good shape. I'd argue 'Insights' found in this way are better called Outsights. And these are a huge part of a successful team design process and so probably deserve more credit than they get. Of course, your own experience is a terrible thing to waste so I guess the ideal process would excel at both encouraging outsights and stimulating insights.

Outsight \ˈau̇t-ˌsīt\ the power or act of perceiving external things. (Merriam-Webster, 1605)

Great design rests on empathy: for your customers and your team

2008-09-09T10:28:00.000-07:00

Suppose you have to buy a present for your best friend. If you put a little thought into it, there's probably a bunch of ideas that spring to mind - you could even find them a present that they didn't even know they wanted. You can do this because you know your best friend really well. You have some empathy for what it's like to be them, how they feel, what makes them feel good and what makes them feel bad.

Now consider buying a present for a brand new coworker who you've barely met. So what do you choose? This decision is more difficult, of course, because you know very little about them. You might go for something that you think fits some rough stereotypes about them - it's for a guy, so maybe something to do with sports, he's in his twenties - maybe a comedy DVD. To guide these choices people may temper it with what they in fact think is cool. In the absence of knowing what the recipient likes, knowing what I like is surely a pretty good indicator because at least my taste is pretty good. The result is typically either a blander present - suitable for anyone - or a present that may be great for you, but not so much for them (consider the classic knitted sweater from grandma - no doubt she thinks it's great).

Now imagine buying a present for the new coworker from the whole office. Together you have to come to an agreement about what present to buy. This is much more of a challenge. On the one hand you have a whole lot more ideas - some from each person. But on the other hand each person's idea of what would make a great present is likely to be different. A safe bet is to compromise, why not get something that no one couldn't like - how about a box of chocolates or a gift voucher?

I think buying a present for someone, or gift giving in general, is a lot like user centered design. Just as buying a great present rests on empathy, so great design rests on empathy. This is because you are not doing something for yourself (who you have great empathy for), but something for others.

Great design then is not about building what you think is cool, it's about building what the people you're making it for think it's cool - the end customers, users or target market.

Much design unfortunately gets done by good designers who nevertheless don't know a great deal about the people they hope will use their products. In the absence of this knowledge they make what looks good to them. In other words, there's a designer-user gap. I think this accounts for much of the product churn in our economies each year - as we make products that don't meet the real needs of the people intended to use them. The good news is, the bridge for this gap is empathy.

Learning what others need involves building empathy for their situation and being able to see the world, at least a little, as they see it - understanding how they frame the world. I'm not saying that people always know what they need, much less know the product that would meet it - but I am saying having empathy for them and their needs is a great first step to ensure you're making something people want.

But it turns out that's not all that's required to design great products that fit into people's lives, because few really successful designs are the work of one person alone. The complexity involved in the vast majority of products means that design is typically done in teams. And each team member brings with them different skills, expertise, background, experience and goals. One member may be an anthropologist, another an engineer, another a designer, another a marketing specialist. Each team member is going to see things in a different way and see different challenges and possibilities. And at the end of a project the team has to propose one course of action. So much of the challenge for an effective team is to get on the same page about what they're doing by the end of the project.

Many researchers have studied teams and the evolution of a shared understanding, team mental model or the building of a shared frame about what it is they're doing. This is the process of team members gathering sharing, interpreting, evaluating information, and persuading each other towards a common, or at least similar, perspective. A more common term for it is getting on the same page. The general consensus from these researchers is that teams entirely on the same page and teams on a completely different page are largely dysfunctional - the first because there's no creativity, the second because it's not possible to make a decision. The golden balance is somewhere in the middle.

Sounds OK. But, again, it's not the whole story. Because a team follows a path through a design project where it both learns about the needs of its target market, and also trys to get on the same page. If we stretch the two axes we've drawn across each other we build a space within which a team could be at any space at a different time. At the end of a project we would hope that a team is in the upper right of the 2x2, on the same page, and having built empathy with their eventual users. But along the way, the team can pass through almost any other space drawing out a team's path through the process.

The bigger message here is that it's fairly well understood that empathy with those you are designing for is likely to lead to offerings that meet their needs better. Yet it's less well understood that at the same time you are developing empathy for your users, you also need to develop empathy for each other as a design team. The team needs to get on the same page by understanding how each other sees the world. Fortunately, there are some good ways of doing both of these activities to end up with a successful project. It's what a great deal of my PhD research was about. And, just maybe with this framework in mind, we'll also be able to buy some better presents for each other. Here's hoping.

5 hidden benefits of ideation sessions

2008-08-08T12:52:00.000-07:00

To follow on from the post about ideating and brainstorming it's worth considering what makes an effective ideation session. It turns out that evaluating team ideation sessions is not as simple as "did we get that one great idea?" mainly because team ideation sessions provide different types of value.

Getting that one great idea, or frame-changing framework, is definitely a potential benefit. An ideation session can lead to finding that one great idea that's going to solve the problem or start a new business. One of the difficulties with this though is that too often teams, or individuals, do just one ideation (or brainstorming) session with this goal in mind. There's then a lot of pressure to find that one great idea and it's easy to not get it and conclude that you wasted time. Instead, if you build in short ideation sessions regularly throughout a project you'll find they're actually great learning opportunities too.

I see at least 5 alternative benefits of team ideation sessions.

Uncover implicit knowledge
Get on the same page
Purge your mind
Get different perspectives
Recover enthusiasm

Perhaps the most important in a team is to uncover implicit knowledge. Things that you know but didn't know to say or hadn't put your finger on. Even in a 'bad' idea there'll be good parts you can learn from that made you suggest it in the first place. For example, after having spent time in the field or digging around the situation you'll often have understood more than you realize. Shooting out an idea that's not perfect - and then asking, "well, what's good about it?" can help you figure out what's really key.

The second, again in a team, is to get on the same page. The ideas team members put forward tell you a lot about what they think is important for the project. If you're coming up with product ideas, and a team member keeps suggesting services you'll realize there's some below the surface differences that might be worth discussing.

A third is to purge your mind of what you think are the best ideas. Purging your mind actually then leaves you free to explore other options as you know your ideas are at least out there and heard. It helps you develop an attitude of learning, not confirming.

A fourth is to get different perspectives on a situation. Some carefully constructed prompts to get you thinking about the situation in a different way, even for a short time, can be a great way to recover new eyes. Ideation sessions are low stakes, timebound situations where you can play around with viewpoints that you normally wouldn't allow in your 'serious' work time.

And the fifth is to recover enthusiasm. Ideation sessions, even by yourself, are fun. It's fun to find solutions and it generates energy in a team.

So I think evaluating the effectiveness really depends on all these things. An ideation session could be very worthwhile if it gets the team once more excited about a project.

It's also worth bearing in mind that ideation sessions don't have to just be about ideas or solutions. You can have an ideation session about possible frameworks, potential problems, key themes, what if situations and more.

As far as individual vs solo storming. There's plenty of studies that show that individual brainstorming can generate a wider variety of ideas, and greater quantity of ideas than a group can (I talked about it a little in the post on measuring creativity - also try this google search). But I think there are some difficulties with these metrics. As you can see they count the effectiveness in terms of the ideas, when there are many other benefits of ideation. Sutton and Hargadon have an interesting study of brainstorming at IDEO that shows that it has other subtle benefits at the organizational level, such as providing ways for employees to prove themselves and preserving corporate memory. Another difficulty is that most of the studies don't have experienced teams and great facilitators, and they don't always follow the brainstorming rules such as really building on each other's ideas. Great teams are so different from a group of people who haven't met before or practiced ideation together.

So when you're considering whether an ideation session was a success, and whether it's worth the time to do one, don't forget the hidden benefits that are often overlooked.

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This post started as a reply to a comment in the previous post, but I thought it may deserve a url of its own. Thanks O.

Few People Brainstorm but Many People Ideate

2008-07-26T15:37:00.000-07:00

Most people say they brainstorm. But very few actually do. So what's going on?

Brainstorming is the name coined by advertising executive Alex Osborn for a specific way of generating creative ideas. Interestingly, I've heard the term derives from the practice of barnstorming - basically doing crazy things in small planes. Stunt planes aside, since the release of his 1963 book Applied Imagination, the term brainstorming has spread like wildfire and has been further developed and popularized, most notably by the design consultancy IDEO. Essentially, everyone loves to brainstorm, or at least say they do.

The original four basic rules for brainstorming from Mr Osborn are:

Focus on quantity
No criticism (at least until later)
Unusual ideas are welcome
Combine and improve ideas

More recently, in The Art of Innovation, Tom Kelley puts forward an updated version of those same rules and adds a couple more:

Sharpen the Focus
Playful Rules (e.g. Encourage wild ideas, Go for quantity, Be visual)
Number your Ideas
Build and Jump
The Space Remembers
Stretch your Mental Muscles
Get Physical

The general theme is the same, but with a few added tips to make it work well such as using the space effectively, (most ideation sessions need either a big table or plenty of wall space), bringing in physical props to spur ideas, and numbering ideas to help keep mental momentum.

It's true that there's not a whole lot you really need to do it properly - which partly accounts for its popularity. Probably at the most basic you need to Defer judgment, Go for Quantity, Encourage Wild Ideas and Build on Other's Ideas. Doing brainstorming as intended, and doing brainstorming well, however, are two different things. To do brainstorming really well you need to keep your mental muscle honed by doing it often and have it run by a facilitator who knows what they're doing to free the group to engage.

It's pretty clear then, that most people when they say they brainstorm are not really doing it as intended, and also not getting the benefit from it they could. In my experience of teaching brainstorming, people happily eat up the rules when presented to them, but when they head out to do some brainstorming in teams they rapidly revert to the familiar norms. The term brainstorming has been expanded so broadly that most people's understanding is that it is the activity of sitting down with a few friends or colleagues and beating about some ideas. Hence the idea that everyone brainstorms. That's fine, but in my experience, it's definitely suboptimal.

An alternative term to brainstorming is ideation, or ideating. Ideation means generating ideas, but, compared to brainstorming it's relatively agnostic about how it happens. Ideating is a broader term than brainstorming, such that brainstorming is one specific way of ideating. Ideation is a useful term because, depending on the context, there may be many different and useful ways to generate good ideas. One time it may make sense to get your hands dirty with some prototyping supplies and generate through building, or tinkering. Another time it may be more appropriate to generate new ideas by acting out scenarios. The type of ideation session depends on your needs, yet all of these activities are forms of ideation.

So just as brainstorming is a skill to be mastered, effective ideation depends on careful choice of activity, prompts and the environment you create to ideate in (such as psychological safety and a time limit). You can ideate well or poorly.

When framed in this way we can better understand why few people actually brainstorm, but, in fact, many people ideate - because sitting with your friends and beating around a few ideas is one way of ideating, albeit not the best.

About the best description of effectively running an ideation session I think is by George Prince in his book The Practice of Creativity. The book is really about the Synectics method but he provides some really instructive examples about classic meetings and well run ideation sessions. It's particularly useful because he quotes extensive transcripts from real sessions and then analyzes what's good and what's bad. At this micro-level the usefulness of the classic rules such as deferring judgment can really be seen. He also carefully discusses the different roles to play by folks in these sessions and how to effectively facilitate. I highly recommend it, and you'll learn something about Synectics too.

An alternative take on the creative process is by James Webb Young in A Technique for Producing Ideas. Using an Ideas Are Food metaphor ("The mental digestive process") he talks through the more standard method of filling your head with fodder and "constantly thinking about it" until inspiration strikes. It's a useful introduction to a common way to think about creativity, though it won't take you much further for how to organize that brainstorming session next Tuesday...

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p.s. There's been a mighty break on this blog due to a PhD graduation and starting work at Jump Associates. Plenty to catch up on.

Respect for designers

2008-05-08T17:33:00.000-07:00

If you've read any of this then you already know that I think design is important, but I found Paola Antonelli could say it a whole lot better than me. Paola Antonelli is the Senior curator of MOMA's department of architecture of design and, in particular, of a new exhibition Design and The Elastic Mind, which, if I was in New York, I'd be at tomorrow. She's also a very articulate and compelling speaker.

In particular, she was addressing a question about why she feels design is one human's most creative expressions. This is something I'm also particularly passionate about as I think the creativity in design and engineering too often gets overlooked. I thought it was worth sharing.

When you look at design it has to be a synthesis of so many different things, and, in the end also be functional and elegant.

But you know when a designer is really tackling an important object such as, let's mention it, the ever present iPod, there's so many things that go into it. There's technology, there's interfacing with people, there's marketing considerations, there's the engineers that can use only certain amounts of materials that might be toxic, and then they have to think about how to reuse the taken apart object. There is considerations of economics; macro-economics and micro-economics.

So, can you imagine the complexity? And then you have this beautiful object. In that object is a whole universe, a whole synthesis of human interactions and human activities that needs to take into account many different pieces of information that other forms of creativity might not be obliged to take into account.

That's why I have such respect and adoration for designers. They're truly amazing people when they're good.

Thanks Paola. Spot on.

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You can watch the full interview of Paola Antonelli by Charlie Rose it's long, but always interesting. This quote is from around 19min 30sec
Design and The Elastic Mind is also online
Another excellent use of 20mins is to watch Paola Antontelli's talk at TED
Photo from Paola's TED bio

Empathic Design Methods in HCI

2008-04-22T15:15:00.000-07:00

Building empathy for those you are designing for is increasingly seen as a prerequisite for effective design. Peter Wright and John McCarthy's recent CHI paper, Empathy and Experience in HCI, provides a useful survey of design methods either to evoke or employ empathy for design. I found their organization of empathic design methods useful so I wanted to post a summary of the different methods they highlight and their sources.

Before I get to it though it's worth excerpting a quote from their paper that emphasizes that while an empathic designer seeks to understand how an-other feels they must also maintain their own perspective as a designer. This is in contrast to a common view where a designer actually seeks to 'become the user'.

"Central to the dialogical approach to empathy is the importance of each person engaging from their own perspectives and appreciating the other's perspective as other. In an empathic relationship the 'designer' does not relinquish his/her position to 'become the user', a position from which nothing new can be created, rather the designer responds to what they see as the user's world from their own perspective as designer. By holding onto their own perspective each person is able to creatively respond to the other from their own perspective. In contrast with philosophical debates that have separated the sociocultural and agentive self when conceptualizing empathy, adopting a dialogical perspective does not diminish the importance of individual intuition and agency."

To the design methods:

Empathy through ethnography and related methods

Participant Observation - Probably the most effective and widely cited means for developing empathy (e.g. Clifford, 1983; Dourish, 2006, or a million other places)
Technology Biography (Blythe et al., 2002)
Cultural Probes (e.g. Gaver et al., 1999; Gaver et al., 2004) - participants capture their own experiences and these artifacts are then used to stimulate a conversation about their experience
Cultural probes in bespoke design (McCarthy et al., 2005)
Games (Blythe and Wright, in press) - using a game to develop dialogue and elicit responses, also I know in use by several contemporary design consulting firms

Empathy through narrative
(e.g. Bruner, 1992; Wright and McCarthy, 2004)

The ethnographic vignette (Orr, 1999) - a distillation of ethnographic fieldwork into a kind of short story
Scenario-based design (Carroll (Ed.), 1995) - capturing a setting, agents, actors, and their goals and purposes. Although they claim scenario-based design is "not enough for empathic understanding and dialogue."
Character-driven scenarios (Nielsen, 2002) - moving from the plot-driven approach of scenario-based design to the more character-driven approach of flim script writing.
'Personae' driven rather than 'user' driven design (Cooper, 1999) - emphasizing specifics and unique characters and histories over abstract or generalized users. Although according to Wright and McCarthy, "while character and persona-based design pushes towards empathic relations, the characters and personae generated can be somewhat two-dimensional and lacking in depth."
Pastiche scenarios (Blythe and Wright, 2006) - generating scenarios using well-known cultural characters such as Miss Marple.
Filmmaking (Gaver, 2007; Raijmakers, et al., 2006) - using screenwriters and filmmakers as 'cultural commentators' to open the world of others and create 'design documentaries'

Empathy through the imagined other

Roleplay and experience prototypes (e.g. Buchenau and Suri, 2000) - the designers themselves play the role of users or experience what users would feel.
Autobiographical Design (Sengers, 2006) - careful consideration of which elements of a designer's own experience they would like to propagate and how these relate to others. Although it is recognized that empathy is actually a prerequisite for autobiographical design rather than autobiographical design helping to create empathy.

To McCarthy and Wright's list I would also add tools such as Sleeswijk et als. (2005) personal card set - editable cards for each research participant designed to support inspiration, engagement and empathy. In their paper, they tested their the effect of the personal card set, statement cards, written reports and posters with designers to determine their efficacy in supporting inspiration, engagement and empathy (to positive results).

It's maybe also encouraging to note that Wright and McCarthy explicitly see empathy not as a mysterious gift or skill, but as something that is amenable to training and improving. Citing a training program to help develop empathy in nurses (Ancel, 2006) they explain,

"Such training programmes are evidence that empathy need not be dismissed as some form of mysteious subjective state intractable to analysis and training."

For a more business oriented primer, including learning why empathy is important, you could do much worse than Spark Innovation through Empathic Design by Rayport and Leonard-Barton (1997) and Get Inside the Lives of Your Customers by Patricia Seybold (2001) in the Harvard Business Review.

If you know of more design methods that should join this list please let me know.

__
References:

Ançel, G. Developing empathy in nurses: An in-service training program. Archives of Psychiatric Nursing, 20, 6 (2006), 249-257.
Blythe, M., Monk, A., and Park, J. Technology biographies: Field study techniques for home use product development. In Proc. CHI '02 (Extended Abstracts), ACM Press (2002), 658-659.
Blythe, M. and Wright, P.C. Pastiche Scenarios: Fiction as a resource for analysing user experience. Interacting with Computers. 18, 5 (2006), 21-29.
Blythe M., and Wright P. Technology scruples: why intimidation will not save the recording industry and how enchantment might. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing (in press), on-line first, http://www.springerlink.com/content/106503/?k=enchantment
Bruner, J.M. Acts of Meaning. Harvard University Press, Harvard Mass., 1992.
Buchenau, M. and Suri, J. F. Experience prototyping. In Proc. DIS 2000, ACM Press (2000), 424-433.
Carroll, J. (Ed.) Scenario-Based Design: Envisioning Work and Technology in System Development. Wiley, New York, 1995.
Clifford, J. On ethnographic authority. Representations, 2 (1983), 118-146.
Cooper, A. The inmates are running the asylum: Why high tech products drive us crazy and how to restore sanity. Sams, New York, 1999.
Dourish, P. Implications for design. In Proc. CHI 2006, ACM Press (2006), 541-550.
Gaver, W., Dunne, T. and Pacenti, E. Cultural Probes. Interactions, 6, 1 (1999), 21-29.
Gaver, W., Bowers, J., Boucher, A., Gellerson, H., Pennington, S., Schmidt, A., Steed, A., Villars, N., and Walker, B. The drift table: designing for ludic engagement. In Ext. Abstracts CHI 2003, ACM Press (2004), 885-900.
Gaver, W. Cultural Commentators: Non-native Interpretations as Resources for Polyphonic Assessment. International Journal of Human Computer Studies, 65, 4 (2007), 292-305.
Raijmakers, B., Gaver, W., Bishay, J. Design Documentaries: Inspiring design research through documentary film. In Proc. DIS 2006, ACM Press (2006), 233-240.
McCarthy, J., Wright, P.C. Wallace, J., and Dearden, A. The experience of enchantment in human-computer interaction. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing. 10, 6 (2005), 369-378.
Orr, J. Talking About Machines: An Ethnography of a Modern Job. Cornell University Press, New York, 1999.
Nielsen, L. From user to character: An investigation into user descriptions in scenarios. In Proc. DIS 2002 ACM Press (2002) 99-104.
Sengers, P. Autobiographical Design. Paper presented at the experience-centred design workshop. In Ext. Abstracts, CHI 2006, ACM Press (2006), 1691-1694.
Sleeswijk Visser, F., Lugt, van der, R., and Stappers, P.J., 2005, “Participatory Design Needs Participatory Communication: New Tools for Sharing User Insights in the Product Innovation Process,” Proceedings of 9th European Conference on Creativity and Innovation, Lodz, Poland.
Wright, P.C. and McCarthy, J.C. The value of the novel in designing for experience. In A. Pirhonen, C. Roast, P. Saariluoma, H, Isom (eds.). Future Interaction Design. Springer, Amsterdam, 9-30, 2004.
Wright, P. and McCarthy, J. 2008. Empathy and experience in HCI. In Proceeding of the Twenty-Sixth Annual SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, (Florence, Italy, April 05 - 10, 2008).

Wright and McCarthy are the authors of Technology as Experience (which I haven't yet read)
attunement fork from steveweissmusic

Celebratory design, bug-listing and needfinding

2008-04-15T16:49:00.000-07:00

At the recent CHI conference in Florence, a paper I was pointed to discussed directions for designing for food. While the review of food-related design research - like projecting cooking instructions by the Counter-Intelligence project or sensing the nutritional content of the food you're preparing - is interesting, the discussion raises a more interesting point around designing when there is nothing wrong. Rather than designing for needs to be 'fixed', designing for practices to be celebrated. The authors (Andrea Grimes and Richard Harper) put it like this:

"In this paper, our argument has been this: it is one thing to examine the social world and identify the gaps, limitations, and struggles that individuals have when it comes to engaging in their daily lives. It is a very different thing to look at that same social world and identify the ways in which people are succeeding in their actions, valuing their current practices, or even not paying attention to these practices because of their commonplace nature. In the first endeavor, the goal is to find a remedy, a way to improve the state of affairs. In the second case, the goal is to design technology that might augment the state of affairs. Notice that augmenting something is not the same as improving it: improving focuses on diminishing the negative, while augmenting focuses on increasing the positive. Thus, the difference between treating individuals' actions as undesirable versus desirable is that the former generates designs of a corrective nature, whereas the latter generates designs of a celebratory nature.

We are not advocating one line of research over the other–for corrective technologies over celebratory, or vice versa. We are arguing that to engage solely in one line of research is to miss the opportunity to design for a whole host of other interactions."

Though food is perhaps an unlikely venue to raise this distinction it's definitely worth some thought. Most current 'enlightened' design practice these days makes at least some attempt at identifying needs. A need is something that is missing or wrong or unfulfilled. Hence dawns the paradoxical practice of needfinding - looking for something that is missing (which largely accounts for how tricky it is). Looking for needs presupposes that there are things worth fixing, that the world can be made a better place, and that designers are reasonable people to be doing that. Another popular design practice is buglisting - finding inspiration for innovation by noting the little irritations, inconveniences, problems and compromises that we experience in our everyday life. These 'bugs' are things that we can then set out to fix.

I recently had an interesting discussion with Erin MacDonald who studied the construction of preferences - the idea that we don't know what we want until we see it, and we didn't necessarily need it in the first place - the need was created in the moment by the introduction of the product. A small example might be that I had no idea I had to buy an optical mouse until I'd tried one. My preference for optical mice didn't exist before I saw it, and I may not even have recognized any frustration with regular mice until I'd tried an optical one. If needs can be constructed by new offerings, then how much sense does it make to look for them?

Still, that people are often happier with a new product than before (though not always) is perhaps some justification for a need-centered approach to design. Coupled with the clear recognition that there are some things that are clearly not so great in the world and our lives at the moment. That people think in terms of solutions doesn't mean that they won't recognize a need if it's pointed out.

An assumed corollary perhaps to the maxim "if it ain't broke, don't fix it," might be, "if it is broke, fix it." So if you can find a need to meet, satisfy or fulfill, something wrong to be made right, or something broken to be fixed it seems a reasonable thing to do. But to live by "if it ain't broke, don't fix it," seems to deny the value of celebratory design. Much of the danger of augmenting actions we already succeed in is breaking something we didn't expect. I would argue though, that there are many things that weren't considered broken that we're very happy they're 'fixed' (like GPS navigation). Perhaps "if it ain't broke, don't fix it," would be a maxim for an experienced mechanic, but maybe it doesn't influence the optimistic, idealistic, fresh engineer hired at BMW. In considering why it's worth studying design teams there was an interesting discussion questioning whether the best action for designers might actually doing nothing - or mitigating against the things that we break because we tried to fix stuff...

But in other ways, the idea behind celebratory design fits well with Guy Kawasaki's first tip on the Art of the Start. He encourages startups to set out to make meaning through: 1. Improving the quality of life; 2. Righting a wrong; or 3. Preventing the end of something good. Celebratory design could certainly fit into "improving the quality of life," while regular need-based design would probably fit all three.

--
Read more:
Grimes, A., Harper, R., 2008, Celebratory Technology: New Directions for Food Research in HCI, Proceedings of CHI, Florence, Italy, pp.467-476.
Awesome champagne from oskay

A note on not so human engineering

2008-03-27T13:11:00.000-07:00

Some time ago I was in the Berkeley engineering library when I was drawn to Jones' text 'Engineering Design'. Jones has a whole chapter devoted to human engineering. In particular, he discusses human engineering as 'optimizing the man-to-machine interface.' (Jones, 1988, p.61) He lists a table of areas of concern for human engineering in the design of work environments that includes considering the physical man-to-machine interface, the physical comfort of the operator, temperature, humidity, safety equipment, vibration, effects of special clothing e.g. gloves, coat and so on.

It is perhaps telling that nowhere in the chapter concerning Human Engineering is discussed actually testing systems and designs in place with real operators. Although designers are encouraged to consider safety gloves for instance, nowhere is it considered to check whether a real operator will actually work with them, if for example, it's too hot, or they need to perform other tasks like writing at the same time. Though there is a lengthy analysis of ergonomic requirements including designing for different sizes and reaches of operators it doesn't consider other factors like whether an operator will become bored, actually enjoy their task, or have any control over it to adapt what they are doing.

All of these things are potential showstoppers in the design of products and machinery to be used by people. Products regularly get used in unintended ways. Last night I was at a health club where they have some pretty sophisticated lockers that allow you to punch in a 4-digit pin to lock them. No key to lose or pin making a whole in your swimsuit - they're great. But last night I learned that each member now needs a locker key card - kind of like a credit card - that has to be inserted into the back of the lock before you can add your pin. Without a card you can't use the lockers. We asked why they had to change the old system and an employee explained, "We discovered that people were regularly locking a set of lockers around them to prevent people taking a locker right next to them - so they have more space to change. Using the cards makes people only able to use one locker. " People weren't even using the extra lockers they were locking. It sounds crazy at first but makes a lot of sense if you don't like people near you when you're changing. The initial system still worked fine but people were using it in ways they didn't expect (the workaround also suggests a need that could perhaps be met in some other way than restricting people).

Back to Jones, in the environment of a manufacturing company where employees are under strict regulations to 'do as instructed' it is possible that activities will be performed as designed. But in the world of products where the users will choose to buy and continue to use their products in the absence of supervision, usability, and factors like enjoyment, aesthetics, 'coolness' really matter if you want your product to still be used.

Much of this view stems from the Taylor-esque viewpoint that designers know best and the people themselves are components to be optimized (I particularly like Taylor's finding that employee productivity increases as the workplace temperature decreases, as far as I know they didn't find a bottom limit). But people, unless forced to, do not behave like machines. We behave according to complex social rules and behaviors, acting from habits, norms and traditions based on experience. Forgetting this, and designing as if the designer knows best, is a recipe for poor design. As Paul Graham writes: "If you think you’re designing something for idiots, odds are you’re not designing something good, even for idiots. (Graham, 2004 p.218)
__
Graham, Paul, "Hackers and Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age," O'Reilly books, 2004
Jones, James V., Engineering Design: Reliability, Maintainability and Testability, TAB Books, Blue Ridge Summit, PA, 1988.
picture from The Computer Desktop Encyclopedia

Under the hood design, Meaningful Design and Framing

2008-03-26T13:15:00.000-07:00

Thesis
My PhD thesis is about how New Product Development (NPD) and design teams can successfully make products that people want. It is partly motivated by the reality of 30,000 new products hitting the shelves each year but only 10-30% of them lasting into the second (Gavetti and Rivkin, 2005). The vast majority of new products, in other words, fail. Assuming that companies don’t manufacture and release products that simply don’t work, then a major cause of these failures is making products that people don’t really want or need. To help avoid this an NPD team needs to frame the design challenge based around real user needs. I set out to find out how to do this better.

Yet while most NPD and design research focuses on process, I found that process alone didn’t account for the difficulties NPD teams encounter. The second challenge was getting a diverse team of engineers, marketers, industrial designers and more, to agree on what it is that people want; the team needs to be on the same page about what people want.

These two goals, figuring out what people want, and getting on the same page, are intertwined in the design, research and sharing activities that a team performs. In my thesis I investigate the process of design team framing, piecing apart design practices and activities that both help teams build empathy with their target market, framing the situation based around real user needs, and help teams build shared understanding about this framing.

Motivation
As an engineer by training, I have spent many years making products, devices and systems to meet the specifications given to me. If something needs to be designed to withstand 300Mpa of stress and fit within this space then an engineer harnesses all their creative and professional expertise to meet the challenge. Sometimes the challenge is too much and we may question the specifications. Does it really have to be 300MPA or is 200MPA enough? Can I break the system into two to allow me to free up some space? Engineering design can be a highly creative activity, though it is often overlooked as such. Less often, however, does an engineer question the entire form and purpose of what it is they’re creating. Do we need a device at all? Maybe a service would do? Will people feel comfortable using the product or might they be embarrassed and it soon get put to the side?

These kinds of questions are usually left to the strategic leaders in a company and the marketing folks. Often then, an engineer’s role is more of an implementer, someone who can make it happen and solve some tough challenges along the way.

This approach can work very well. For example, when designing the guts of an engine, the engine seals say, the customer is far away. There are few customers who have bought a car because of the engine seals, but no cars that would work without them. In these circumstances an engineer’s work is a technical design challenge. The seals need to be made to work as efficiently and cheaply as possible. I call this Under the Hood Design.

Yet the experience is very different when designing products that a customer interfaces with, creates perceptions of and associates with. The steering wheel of a car has to turn the wheels easily and reliably yet it also has a greater meaning as something a driver touches each time they use the car. A leather steering wheel brings forth different associations to a plastic one. A pink steering wheel different associations than a black one. The choice of material has functional characteristics – how well you can grip it, whether it heats up in the sun – but it also has other less tangible attributes that play a part in the self-presentation of the driver. Leather may be look sophisticated, but maybe a new plastic would perform better. Replacing a steering wheel with a joystick brings associations with jet planes; but would that be appropriate for a family car? How can designers and engineers begin to make these kinds of decisions? This is Meaningful Design.

A product’s success or failure rides on getting these kinds of decisions right. Sometimes failure is a result of not realizing the social implications of a product or a feature. Other times it’s misidentifying what people really want.

This perspective is also supported by economic analysis. The UK’s Design Council created an index of over 150 firms recognized as effective users of design and design research. Tracking the stock market performance of these firms has shown that this emphasis on design pays off financially. The Design Index firms outperformed the standard FTSE (Financial Times Stock Exchange) 100 companies by 200% between 1994 and 2003 (Design Council, 2008). There is something to be learned from firms that do design well.

...this post is an excerpt from the start of my PhD thesis. Just putting it out there for comment...

--
Gavetti, Giovanni, and Rivkin, Jan, W., 2005 “How Strategists Really Think: Tapping the Power of Analogy,” Harvard Business Review, April 2005.
The Design Council's Design Index

Dreams, metaphors and similes

2008-03-19T15:02:00.000-07:00

From Gregory Bateson's, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, University of Chicago Press, 2000

An excerpt from a metalogue betwen a girl and her father, p.56.

D: But, Daddy, you still haven't answered the question about how dreams are put together.

F: I think really I have answered it. But let me try again. A dream is a metaphor or a tangle of metaphors. Do you know what a metaphor is?

D: Yes. If I say you are like a pig that is a simile. But if I say you are a pig, that is a metaphor.

F: Approximately, yes. When a metaphor is labeled as a metaphor it becomes a simile.

D: And it's that labeling that a dream leaves out.

F: That's right. A metaphor compares things without spelling out the comparison. It takes what is true of one group of things and applies it to another. When we say a nation "decays," we are using a metaphor, suggesting that some changes in a nation are like changes which bacteria produce in fruit. But we don't stop to mention the fruit or the bacteria.

D: And a dream is like that?

F: No. It's the other way around. The dream would mention the fruit and possibly the bacteria but would not mention the nation. The dream elaborates on the relationship but does not identify the things that are related.

Simple really.

San Francisco and Bay Area Design firms

2008-03-15T17:55:00.000-07:00

[Last updated February 2011]

Here is a list of primarily Bay Area Design firms (some exceptions). I hope it will be useful for people looking for jobs, careers and internships in the field of design, and also people just curious to see what's out there. Maybe it'll also be useful if you're looking to hire some design.

These companies should appeal to, and need, a range of skills, from sociology, design ethnography, human factors and anthropology, to mechanical design, industrial design, electrical engineering, software development, experience design, interaction design, strategy and business. The list is roughly structured by an affinity diagramming using my (incomplete) knowledge of the kinds of projects they most commonly do. Of course, firms do a range of projects and large firms especially may have very different departments.

I'd like to keep the list up to date so please email me (address on my homepage) if you feel I've missed important firms.

Good luck!

Jump Associates
IDEO
Sonic Rim
Point Forward
The Curious Company

Smart Design
Design continuum
2nd Edison
Lunar Design
Frog Design
New Deal Design
Whipsaw
fuseproject
function
Acorn Product Development
Skyline (toys - subdesign studio of IDEO)
Timbuk2 (bags)
Moto Development Group
Astro Studios
Squid Labs (they run a number of small firms)
Synaptics (primarily interfaces)
Aaron Marcus and Associates
Vestal Design
Sparkfactor
Studio RED
Daylight Design
Speck Design
Portigal Consulting
Meyerhoffer Studios
Christensen Product Design
Compass Design

Hydrant

Pentagram (graphic design and branding)
Adaptive Path
Avenue A Razorfish
solutionset
stamen design
Freshout

Method
Stone Yamashita
Cheskin

Boston Consulting Group
McKinsey

North Face
BMW Designworks
Accenture Technology Labs
HP Technology Labs

Apple

Yahoo
Google
eBay
PayPal

HP
Johnson & Johnson
P&G

Intel Research
PARC
FXPal
Microsoft Research
Nokia Research
Adobe

Pixar
MTV
NBC
Time Warner

Some more distant, but pretty cool, options:
Ziba (Portland)
Doblin (Chicago)
Steelcase (Grand Rapids, Michigan)
Insight (Chicago)
Gravity Tank (Chicago)
Herbst Lazar Bell (LA, Chicago, Boston)
Fahrenheit 212 (New York)
Ecco Design (New York)
Henry Dreyfuss Associates (Michigan)
Super Happy Bunny (LA)
Metaphase (St. Louis, MO)
M3 Design (Round Rock, TX)
Ethnographic Insight (WA)
Innosight (MA)
Peer Insight (VA)
Strategos (Chicago)

Cloverleaf Innovation (Chicago)
?WhatIf! (New York, London)
Cinco Design Office (Portland, OR)

If you want to find more try http://www.designdirectory.com/

Do let me know if you found the list helpful or how it could be more helpful.

Disclaimer: Not all of these companies would easily classify themselves as design firms either citing, for example, new product or opportunity development, design strategy, design research, market research, marketing and branding, or just straight up business consulting. If I have misrepresented your company or you're not on the list and should be just let me know.

The Flow checklist, PhDs, Creativity and User Experience

2008-03-07T18:14:00.000-08:00

I often find myself referring to psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's theory of Flow. The basic idea being that when we are enjoying ourselves most we are in a state Csikszentmihalyi calls Flow. Given that it gives us pleasure it's worth knowing what that is.

The original study that lead to the construct involved giving pagers to lots of participants from all walks of life. The researchers then pinged the pagers at different points throughout the day and the participants had to answer a few questions about how they were feeling right now and what they were doing. You probably recognize the context surrounding Flow experiences: you lose track of time (you look at your watch and suddenly realize you've been in the lab for 3 hours when it felt like 10 minutes); you lose your sense of ego - in that you are totally absorbed in what you do that you're not really aware of how you're presenting yourself, it no longer matters; and you are in total focus - you don't notice what else is going on around you.

Csikszentmihalyi gives as classic examples, activities like climbing or playing tennis. Both activities when you're living in the moment, totally present.

What's special about these activities that help them be Flow experiences? I often find myself using the following simplified mental Flow checklist when I find myself stuck, worried or frustrated:

You know the overall goal - you know where you have to get to
You know what to do next - the next step towards the goal is clear
You receive feedback of your progress towards that goal - as you do that next step you can see if it's getting you closer or not
The challenge is matched to your ability - it's not too hard or too easy

These four are pretty powerful indicators of current happiness. So, for example, when rock climbing you know you have to get to the top of the wall, you can see where you have to go next, you can tell if you make any progress with your next move and, if the wall is not too easy or too hard, the challenge is just enough that if you're working at your best you think you can make it. You are in control.

Another activity, say, data entry, passes 3 out of 4 and so isn't such a Flow activity. The goal may be clear, as is the next data you have to enter and you can see you're making progress, but it's not challenging for you so you're not likely to experience Flow.

And this brings me to why I'm writing this - how does it feel to do a PhD? I am soon to graduate from the UC Berkeley Institute of Design with a PhD, but it has not been an easy path and at times it's very challenging. Much of this, I think, can be explained by going back to my Flow checklist:

Goal - the end goal of a PhD is usually so far off, elusive and changing that it's tough even to know what it is
What to do next - there is often much uncertainty about what to do next. Study A, Study B, write something up, look again at the data, read some more...
Feedback - Possibly the least clear of the four. A great deal of PhD time is spent without really knowing if what you're working on now will contribute towards the final outcome. Will the experiment turn out to be useful or not? Is this paper worth reading or not? Are you really making progress?
Challenge - At least you can safely say that most of it is challenging. However, largely, the challenge is to figure out the previous 3: Goal, next step, progress...

Which is a long-winded way of saying that doing research, and an undertaking the size of a PhD in particular, is hard. And it's not always fun because of so much uncertainty in the Flow checklist. But that's not to say that it's not ultimately rewarding. There's no question that my time here has been fantastically well spent.

It's also a way of pointing out some of the value good mentors and advisors can bring: Helping you figure out goals, next steps, progress and a topic that is challenging, but not too challenging. Then, maybe, your PhD could be one big Flow experience, both productive and enjoyable, and you'll wake up thinking, "Wow! Where did those five years go?"

Traditional notions of creativity suffer from similar Flow problems to PhDs. It's part of the reason I think there's the stereotype of the tortured artist or the depressed poet. If you're waiting for lightening to strike (incidentally, not a good way of helping it strike) there's certainly not a lot of feedback that you're making progress and you don't know what activity will eventually result in that creative insight. Which is also partly why if you think creativity happens this way then you'll struggle to enjoy yourself. Creativity is more often the result of hard work and structured progress. Even Da Vinci helped fuel his productivity by taking on regular jobs to pay the bills.

The four items are also a handy list to run through whenever you're trying to design and evaluate a user's experience. For example, when watching a user's path through achieving a task on your website check that 1. the user's goal is clear, 2. their next step is obvious, 3. they can see that they're making progress and 4. they're using the abilities effectively, for example, if they're experts they should be able to do it smarter and faster.

Finally, I've found that if I'm not enjoying something it's a useful and simple step to run through the 4 items on the Flow checklist to see if anything's missing. Most of the time it accurately puts the finger on why I'm not enjoying what I'm doing, and, more helpfully, points the way to how I should fix it.

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If you're still interested: Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention and Good Business: Leadership, Flow, and the Making of Meaning, by Csikszentmihalyi both have nice summaries of Flow in action. Plus there's the original book on Flow itself called, wait for it, Flow.

Tinnitus.mp3 -

2008-03-04T10:27:00.000-08:00

Tinnitus (pronounced /tɪˈnaɪtəs/ from the Latin word for "ringing")

"Tinnitus can be perceived in one or both ears or in the head. It is usually described as a ringing noise, but in some patients it takes the form of a high pitched whining, buzzing, hissing, humming, or whistling sound, or as ticking, clicking, roaring, "crickets" or "tree frogs" or "locusts", tunes, songs, or beeping. It has also been described as a "whooshing" sound, as of wind or waves." (wikipedia)

This morning my bus journey was accompanied by the usual buzz of earphones set way too loud by someone behind me. But why do people listen to music way too loud? Almost certainly they've heard that it can lead to long term damage with symptoms like Tinnitus and, surprise surprise, reduced hearing.

It seems that the consequences of playing music too loud is too separated from the action of doing it to actually encourage people to change their behavior. Much like getting lung cancer seems far from that cigarette in the pub, the can of coke seems distant from the tooth cavity or driving to work tomorrow seems very far from raising the planet a few centigrade, the consequence is very separated from the action so it's difficult to encourage people to do something about it. It also has elements of Gore's frog in hot water metaphor where we don't notice the gradual accumulation of effects - we are much better at noticing sudden ones, like, say, going to a loud concert rather than listening to a loud album each day on the way to work.

Soooo, I was thinking that trying to make those consequences seem more real and more immediate might be a good strategy for helping change behavior. I think that the tinnitus from the sounds you may end up hearing would make a good brief start or end to your playlist once a week or so. Maybe it would help save some ears.

Listen to tinnitus.mp3
courtesy of Jonathan Hazel at the Royal National Institute for Deaf People

baby Charlie courtesy of alphababy.net

The Art of the Start - Guy Kawasaki keynote

2008-03-02T15:32:00.000-08:00

Along time ago a good friend and entrepreneur recommended to me a keynote by Guy Kawasaki about his book 'The Art of the Start'. Finally, I watched it, learned some things and enjoyed it too. Guy, now a venture capitalist but previously a product evangelist for Apple, tends to put forward tips in sets of 10. The talk is about 10 tips getting a company started.

I took a few notes in the video and thought that some may appreciate the summary below instead of taking the 40mins to watch. Though I don't think you'll be disappointed if you do.

Guy's tips for the Art of the start:
(very slightly adapted for easier reading)

1. Set out to Make meaning (not just money) (~4:30)
3 ways to do this:

Improve the quality of life
Right a wrong
Prevent the end of something good

2. Make a mantra not a mission statement (~6:30)
Not:

"The Mission of Wendy's is to deliver superior quality products and services for our customers and communities through leadership, innovation, and partnerships."

But:

"Healthy fast food"

3. Get going (~12:10)
Don't spend too much time with research, focus groups and such - just get going.

Think different - "don't be content with doing something 10-15% better. Do something 10x better."
Polarize people - "If you try to create this perfect product [that satisfies everybody] you will create mediocrity"
Find a few soul mates - e.g. "If you're the youthful visionary you'll need adult supervision."

4. Define a business model (~15:00)

Be specific - "Who is my customer. How do I get my money out of her purse?"
Keep it simple - "Innovate on technology. Do not innovate on business models."
Ask women - "Do not waste time talking to men about your business model," because if you say you want to bring down a mighty company, men will always agree.

5. Weave a MAT (milestones, assumptions, tasks) (~17:00)

Milestones - e.g. "finish the design," "a milestone is something you would call up your spouse and say, 'honey today, we shipped'."
Assumptions - e.g. "sales calls/day" write them down and test them
Tasks - e.g. "rent an office"

Priorities in this order: M-A-T

6. Niche thyself (~20:00)
Surprise, surprise, you want to be high and to the right

7. Follow the 10/20/30 rule (~24:00)
A pitch should have 10 slides:

Title
Problem
Solution
Business model
Underlying magic
Marketing and sales
Competition
Team
Projections
Status and timeline

be delivered in 20 minutes
using no less than a 30 point font - it "forces you to know your presentation," "if you need to put 8-10 point font it's because you don't know your material"

You can always use the algorithm: Take the oldest person in the audience and divide their age by 2

8. Hire infected people (~27:40)

Ignore the irrelevant - "Most people only consider two things: work experience; educational background. I suggest that you also consider whether they are in love with your product."
Hire better than yourself
Apply the shopping center test (you need to want to rush up to them when you see them around)

9. Lower barriers to adoption (~30:20)

Flatten the learning curve - "How many of you can change the time on the VCR?"
Don't ask people to do something that you wouldn't - such as fill out lots of data on a form in order to sign up
Embrace your evangelists

10. Seed the clouds (~31:30)

Let a hundred flowers blossom - embrace people using your product in unintended ways
Enable test drives - "Let people take your product home, download it"
Find the true influencers

11. Don't let the bozos grind you down (bonus!)
Can you imagine when Google launched telling them "we don't need another search engine," sure.

Finally, Guy told an interesting story about he turned down the offer to reject being the CEO of Yahoo! because:
"It's too far to drive and I don't see how it can be a business." So keep at it - don't let the bozos grind you down (particularly the bozos in suits)

What do I think? Sounds like pretty good advice for startups to me.

How electronic music needs a new story

2008-02-13T20:19:00.000-08:00

I was recently listening to the Bach Cello Suites played by Yo Yo Ma. They're pretty amazing as both pieces and performance. Yet, it struck me that, though I hear the sound of a cello, I'm really getting a whole lot more from the recording that makes me love it.

When you hear a cello, for me it conjures up a frame. There may be a conductor, a talented composer and a musician who's trained all their life with years of dedication. There's a peaceful focused relaxed setting - only the music to concentrate on. The craftsmanship of the instrument, the technique of the bowing, the tradition...

The sound of the cello is what we hear, but it means so much more.

I'm also a big fan of some electronic music. There's some segments that are so good I have to stop what I'm doing whenever I hear them. Some really amazing sounds that transport me every time.

But when you hear electronic sounds, it means a very different thing than hearing Yo Yo Ma's Bach Cello Suites. It evokes a very different frame. For me it evokes dance music founded in the late-night clubs of Ibiza, London and Amsterdam rather than the symphony hall. The sounds are generated by a synthesizer. The equipment comes from Yamaha and Korg rather than Stradivarius. The music's composed in late night sessions by a lone producer rather than inspired genius by Bach in a stately mansion. It's painstakingly pieced together rather than produced in a virtuoso performance. The artists are more likely to be called "DJ X" than have a double-barreled last name. I suspect it's hard for anyone over 40 or so to relate to any of this.If electronic music is to appeal to a broader audience than clubbers it also needs a story that other people can relate to. I don't yet know what that story may be. Maybe people need to be let into what goes into making it. Maybe there needs to be some ways of performing it that people can relate to. I always remember the strange dissonance of Robert Miles performing Children on Top of the Pops (a UK show about chart music). A live performance of a bar or two of piano to a beat is a strange thing; it doesn't perform well. It's harder to involve people in your electronic music track at a party than it is to pull out a guitar and start strumming.

And I think all this is a shame - millions of people are missing out on some amazing music. And perhaps all for want of a good story.

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What got me thinking about all this is I've been having a ball playing with some awesome music software making songs like Rhyme and Reason.

Thanks to propellerheads for the sequencer shot and courtney and walker for the cello.

Lessons from Improv for Design: Be obvious, accept offers, fail cheerfully

2008-02-11T10:10:00.000-08:00

I had the fortune to attend a day long improv workshop with Dan Klein and Liz Gerber at Stanford University in 2006 as part of a Needfinding course. Last year, I saw Liz again as she gave a short paper at CHI (Computer Human Interaction) in San Jose, in which she shared three pieces of advice from improv*:

Be obvious
Accept offers
Fail cheerfully

I've found myself coming back to these so often in my mind that I think they're worth sharing as advice for designers, and probably just advice for life.

1. Be obvious
William Strunk Jr. said, "If you don't know how to pronounce a word, say it loud!” Being obvious helps avoid misunderstandings. And a lot of conflict started with a misunderstanding. This advice encourages me to state what I think clearly, with the reasons why, and also, to select a point of view. Life is more interesting from a point of view. Not a lot happens in neutrality. In the immortal words of the neutrals in Futurama - Neutral Official: "Your neutralness, it's a beige alert." Neutral Leader: "If I don't survive, tell my wife: Hello."

In design teams I think this translates well to having clear dealings with your team: don't be vague; make your thinking visible; be bold; be intentional; and if you don't know, say you don't.

2. Accept offers
At its core, accepting offers is about respect and trust of others. Too often are ideas and opinions dismissed because at first they seem conflicting or irrelevant. George M. Prince's book, the Practice of Creativity, taught me to trust the suggestions of others on the simple idea that they wouldn't have said it if there hadn't been something to prompt it, something that made it relevant for them. This is particularly relevant for brainstorms. If someone suggests what seems to you to be a crazy, impossible idea, don't dismiss it. While the idea as it is may not work, the general goal may be a good one, and as a team you may be able to attain it another way. If the 'offer' is dismissed at the outset then this promising line of reasoning may be lost. Prince suggests looking at ideas as a spectrum with good parts and bad parts. Focusing on the good parts first helps address the bad parts.

The attitude of accepting offers results in getting the best out of everyone's input to a team. It encourages building on each other's ideas, respects everyone's contributions and builds trust between team members.

3. Fail cheerfully
One of those good suggestions for life. Liz recommends acknowledging failures with a "ta-da." Acknowledging failures is hard to do, but a failure acknowledged becomes no longer a failure but something to learn from. It doesn't stick with you, detracting useful attention later on through guilt or fear. You put it away. In a team, when comments are easily taken the wrong way, failing cheerfully is a recipe for keeping things lighthearted and positive.

Of these three I find Accept offers the strongest. Even the metaphor of seeing others contributions as 'Offers' to be built on and accepted rather than 'statements' to be bowed to or dismissed seems a huge step forward. Seeing criticism as an offer can help turn it from personal to constructive.

I think these ideas have relevance to design because design is not so far away from improv. You work in a team, each with different skills, strengths and interests, you have customers that you can choose to learn from and include (or ignore at your peril), and you have a product - an experience and a story that you weave.

If you don't agree, then perhaps just think of this as an offer. I'll do my best to fail cheerfully.

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*I believe the advice originally comes from Keith Johnstone

There's more information about Johnstone's suggestions on the improv wiki, including some useful advice for accepting weak offers

Before I attended the workshop I wrote a little about design, improv and metaphors

The Sociability of Sports

2008-02-06T17:55:00.000-08:00

"The best managers are on the golf course,"

I remember Professor Tony Medland of Bath University saying. At the time it made me reflect on the manager's role of creating the well-oiled team that, if the manager has done their job well enough, don't need them at all. Many sports games later however, it's had me reflecting not on the managers, but on the golf course. Why is the genesis of so many business deals on the golf course rather than the tennis court?

It doesn't take long to realise that golf has many aspects to it that make it a great venue for business deals. It takes 3 hours to play, long enough to get well past pleasantries, you walk - so you're not out of breath. It's quiet and private. Every 20 minutes you have a little time together - at the tee and green - and a little time apart to reflect - while searching for your ball. It's usually a gorgeous setting, perfect for contemplation of bigger things and away from the fire-fighting of an office. There's a handicap so nearly anyone can play anyone and still have a good game. And it has a clubhouse to sit in afterwards. With beer.

Contrast this with tennis as a forum for business deals. It's hard work, mentally and physically, requiring plenty of focus all the time. You're sweaty and often out of breath. Your potential business partner is at the other end of the court, too far away to comfortably talk. And there's a high chance that one of you is playing down several levels or it quickly becomes a hammering.

Squash is a little better. At least you are on the same side of the court so you can talk easily. But you're probably sweatier, more focused, and more out of breath.

Team sports would be terrible if it wasn't for before and after them. Who ever heard of a business deal struck in midfield? You can go for beers afterwards, but after playing football people are often too tired to talk shop.

I remember the insight of a talented set of students working on sports for kids. Team sports would be much less interesting for kids if it wasn't for the breaks. Imagine a team game where you were dropped directly on to the pitch and left the pitch straight in the car to go home. Most of the fun for kids is in the travel with friends, the warm-up, half-time, messing about at the sidelines. Kids don't care nearly so much about the result on the pitch as the whole experience.

And it's a little like that with our managers on the golf course: much of golf's success is not so much in the sport itself as in the social context it's played. I'm not saying we should go about reinventing tennis or rugby, but I do think there could be room for a sport designed also for its sociability. Somewhere between pool and tennis maybe...

Thanks Amazon for the image

Why study design teams?

2008-01-24T18:46:00.000-08:00

To many people I speak to, studying design teams seems a somewhat esoteric and maybe even trivial subject to study. Why not use my talents and time in academia tackling a problem that people really care about? Here's why, for me, studying design is one of the most noble pursuits I can think of and a justification for spending the best part of five years (0r more) thinking about it.

I am fundamentally driven in my professional life to help make the world a better place to live in. To help people enjoy our lives (I understand there are some philosophical differences of opinion on this point, but I think to be a designer at heart you have to believe that doing something is better than doing nothing).

If there are people dying of tuberculosis, as there are, it's worth trying to figure out how to stop this pain. If families are drifting apart, which is true, it's worth trying to think how we can design a world that helps them stay together. If people hate their commutes in the morning, which they usually do, it's worth trying to figure out how we might make this daily chore a little more pleasurable or eliminate it.

Of course, many people are working every day across the world to try and solve these problems and improve people's lives. I'd say it's nearly a defining trait of the human race that we design things to to help make our lives better - from when we first started adapting the environment to fit us, with the very first stick as a tool, rather than fitting ourselves to the environment. So, given there's a lot of energy invested in designing a better world and solving our problems, you might think the world would be getting better at a remarkable rate. I would argue that it's not improving nearly as fast as it could.

The rate at which the world becomes a better place due to design is much slower than it could be because we spend so much time and effort both solving the wrong problems and designing things that people don't actually want, designing things that don't fit into the culture, or having internal arguments that stop innovations and new designs coming out at all.

And that's why I study design. Doing design better has the potential to help with all these problems and ultimately make the world a better place to live in. I credit Dev Patnaik and Michael Barry with reintroducing me to Ben Franklin's excellent 18th century poem For want of a nail:

For want of a nail (Ben Franklin, 1706-1790):

For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for want of a nail.

Studying design, according to my chain of reasoning above, is a bit like helping find that nail to keep the kingdom. It may seem a long way down the chain but, to me, it's one of the major sticking points in making our kingdom a better place.*

And, sticking with poems, helping do design better has a further advantage. As the old saying goes:

“Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish; and you have fed him for a lifetime."

Doing better design, to me, is like teaching people to fish. It has the potential to pay off every day. We may design an alternative to TV that helps keep families together, but we may screw up completely on the next thing we try to do. Helping people be experts on the design process I hope allows people to address problem after problem, meeting need after need, ultimately, making the world a better place for you and I to live in. Convinced?

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*There may be many other reasons there was no nail; there could have been a supply chain problem, maybe the nails were too easy to lose, maybe the farrier wasn't motivated due to a poor organizational incentive structure, maybe we should have designed shoes that needed less nails in the first place, or needed less horses...

Weak link thanks to bcjobc.ca

The Long Now, Paul Saffo, Forecasting

2008-01-22T08:20:00.000-08:00

I recently went to the first talk of the year at The Long Now Foundation. It was on forecasting by Paul Saffo. I don't know if I got a lot of tips for the future, other than widespread use of robots being on the horizon (did you know that a third of Roomba owners have given them names?), but Paul Saffo is a great storyteller and full of a seemingly endless number of entertaining stories, quotes and aphorisms. His basic model/framework/metaphor is a cone of uncertainty that gets larger the further into the future you try to look, and "what makes forecasting hard isn't predicting the outcome it's predicting the edges of the cone."

If you live in SF you could do much worse than attend the next two talks by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (author of, among other things, The Black Swan) - who's basic theory is that things happen more by accident (randomness) than intention, but you might as well be trying to do things as you're more likely to have happy accidents - and Craig Venter of genome fame.

I've got in the habit of largely just copying down quotes verbatim from talks these days. Here's a few below together with some of my notebook pages from the talk:

"Don't confuse the desired with the likely."
"History doesn't repeat itself, but sometimes it rhymes." (apparently attributed to Mark Twain though he never actually said it)
"Navigating by dead reckoning; that's navigating by gosh and by golly and by God."
"They were aware of the risks. They were aware of the uncertainty. But they were guys."
"making a small course change 100 miles off the coast is a lot easier than making a big turn 100m from the rocks."
"Son, never mistake a clear view for a short distance."
"The difference between a good forecast and reality is...a good forecast has to be believable and internally consistent." - Schwarz
"Silicon Valley executives sleep like a baby... they sleep 2 hours, they wake up and cry..."

The Bubblegum Sequencer: Making Music with Candy

2008-01-18T08:25:00.000-08:00

Last semester Kimiko Ryokai taught a neat class on Tangible User Interfaces here at Berkeley. It certainly made for a fun tradeshow. One of my favorite projects in the class was the Bubblegum Sequencer by Hannes Hesse, Andrew McDiarmid and Rosie Han. Many years ago I remember first trying out drum loops using a program called Fruity Loops. It's a lot of fun, but making music on the computer is always different from making it in real-life; hitting a drum feels very different from clicking a mouse. This project managed to help change that. It's a sequencer you control by moving different colored gumballs around on a surface. Different colors correspond to different sounds so getting a feel for your beat is easy.

Anyway, if you like the idea you should watch the video below or check out the Bubblegum Sequencer page.