Context Response

Design Strategy Efficiency and the Economics of Product Design

2011-04-20T16:43:00.000-07:00

Designers are great at brainstorming ideas: "what if we could do this?. What if we could do that?". Even some consultancies encourage their clients to "let's brainstorm 100 ideas". And when participants are done "Now let's go for 200 ideas!!". And soon enough you have a whole wall covered with post-it notes and people are not sure what to do next..

What most designers fail at is at deciding which ones to keep, which ones to merge, and most importantly, which ones to throw away. And not that we are bad at actually doing in some way or another. We are often bad at doing it in a strategic way. And by strategic way, I am not talking about creating power point slides to pitch it while using business jargon and choreographing other stereotypical mannerisms of strategy. What I am talking about is 'strategic' in an economics sense, and with an intention of managing scarcity. Strategy is absolutely necessary when deciding what to do and what not to do because as they say: "you can do anything, but you can't do everything". Given a limited amount of resources to launch a product or a service, what design strategists should aim for is at maximizing the value of a product for every feature added to the the of service. If we had to reduce this mindset to a mathematical formula, it would look like this:

Product value/ Product features = Design Strategy Efficiency Quotient

That is the way we can measure the value of design strategy, which by the way is the same way economics works when studying how people attempt to make rational decisions: given a certain amount of options available to me,which one would give me more utility (i.e. Benefit)? Needless to say, the higher the quotient, the better.

So yes, all in all, design strategy properly practiced in a business setting is inevitably ruled by the laws of economics. And that is why is so important for every design strategist, product manager, entrepreneur, or anyone involved in defining a product, to have a good understanding of decision-making, tradeoffs, and scarcity management. The ultimate goal of design strategy is to be as efficient as possible to create maximum value given a limited amount of resources.

Buckminster Fuller, very much inspired by the highly resource efficiency of nature, talked about this as a design science revolution:

"Amongst other grand strategies for making the world work and taking care of everybody is the design science revolution of providing ever more effective tools and services with ever less, real resource investment per each unit of end performance. For instance, a communications satellite, weighing only one-quarter of a ton is now out-performing the transoceanic communication capabilities of 175 thousand tons of copper cable"

It is also worth reading the description of Design Science's approach to solutions' performance:

"[...] Fuller became convinced that all of humanity could be “successful” if we apply our knowledge to finding ways of gaining the greatest possible advantage from the least possible investment of available resources. Each technological process can be measured by its performance. Because know-how can increase when humans experiment with new technologies, performance can be continuously improved. Though there is some material and energy loss with all technological processes, the percentage of waste can be progressively reduced. Design science is concerned with improving the performance of both the components and processes of specific technologies, and the larger systems of which they are a part. It is concerned with applying our evolving know-how to reducing waste and better allowing more people to support themselves."

How can design drive break-through innovation?

2011-03-04T14:21:00.000-08:00

There are a lot of disruptive products in consumer market, and many of them are driven either from technology or business. (Kinect vs. Netflix) However, it is harder to see design-driven break-through products. Design has been a good contributor of incremental changes (so as design research as Don Norman speaks), making things more usable and desirable.
Are we set up ourselves right for cultivating and integrating disruptive ideas? The complexity is that it is hard to make good ideas survive to all the way through product release because the constant battle between alignments with the existing product and the need of reinventing. (There is fine line between crazy idea vs. break-through idea)
Then, how can we create process, team and culture that help design can drive break-through products? We should consciously try different models to how it cultivates the culture and process in a way that can balance alignment and disruptive ideas.

Integrated Design process

Design process is structured, waterfall model. It is model of “narrowing down” the options and synthesizing to “scoped” chunks. While you are going down to the funnel, your criteria can be easily ‘how much does this make sense to be integrated to our current brand and product?’ or ‘how measurable the success is’? , then a lot of good ideas are tossed away on the journey, even they are good candidate of break-through ideas. In contrast to design process, engineering is heading for agile, quick prototyping process for the web era with faster product cycle. Shouldn’t we re-think about our design process?

Team setup that is sustainable and actionable

The team needs to be structured in a way it cultivates out-of-box thinking. There are many conscious experiments among various teams and companies. A good example is Google’s 20% personal work model. (Doing this within design team might be challenging considering Enric’s article on the designer ratio below)In contrast, Apple takes very top-down approach on this. I’ve seen also many cases that there are setups which separates incubation and product team. Brining outside perspective by partnering with consulting firms is a common example. All has pros and cons in terms of sustainability and alignment to existing portfolio.

Culture that cultivates out of box thinking and constantly integrate

Team needs to realize there is different approach to come up with ideas. It may seems to be some crazy, “out-there” ideas, but the culture needs to support where there are coming from and how we can integrated it smartly without being irrelevant. (Balance between discovery culture vs. synthesis culture) It can’t live one or the other. The reason why there are many failures in incubation teams and big projects with consulting firms are there wasn’t enough effort or set up for integration. If we focus too much about integration and existing portfolio, it becomes Borders example that couldn’t adopt the e-book era and reinvent themselves.

How can we change in a way that it makes sense for the product and the existing team? Is there any good examples that other companies are trying? Who are the great partners for this thinking? I have still a lot of questions that I want to update on future entry.

p.s. Thanks for albertS for food for thought.

How big should a corporate design team be?

2010-11-02T18:16:00.000-07:00

“What are good benchmarks for setting up a corporate design team?"

These are the questions I have been trying to answer in the last couple of weeks. Nothing academic, just a ‘guesstimate’. For that purpose, I contacted a bunch of colleagues who work in web companies in the Silicon Valley and tried to collect a basic amount of data that would allow me to abstract some learnings and hopefully also metrics.

The companies I chose to talk to have revenue well above $1B, employee numbers on the 4-digits range and above, and have successful on-demand products used by literally hundreds of thousands of people globally.

The reason I picked large web companies with a constant stream of revenue from their products is because 1) they have more established and efficient organizations (not dramatically growing like a start-up, neither shrinking like a decaying company) and 2) because by having products with such large amount of users in the market, is hard to argue their products are not well designed given the low cost required by consumers to switch to other on-demand applications and services.

Here are some of the lessons learned:

Corporate design teams are chronically understaffed
Not all product teams have design resources assigned to them. Only the products that are more strategic or are top priority get assigned design resources (even when they get them assigned, they are not always dedicated to it full time). A common practice is to have 'design office hours' so product managers in need can get some advice from designers. Sometimes, designers end up helping out product managers in their spare time either because they are passionate about the product and want to see it launch or because they would like to have on their CV a line that talks about their involvement with a product that hit the market (an asset quite scarce sometimes among designers). Not surprisingly given the potential savings, companies encourage their product managers to apply design thinking as much as possible so they don't have to rely always on the design team for basic product design tasks and product development can be sped up.
Wide design diversity within the team
People within these design departments have different skills and different tasks. No radical homogeneity. All bundled together under the same leveling label ‘design’. The most common disciplines by far are interaction designers, followed by visual designers, and the tiniest group, user researchers. Some of the companies also have a special group of design strategists who engage in new product development rather than “product maintenance” of an existing mature product, but that is still not really common among large companies.
The corporate design team golden ratio is 1:100
As I was looking for a metric that would allow me to compare a company with each other, I realized that a good indicator could be the investment each company dedicates to design resources. Since I had no access to design departments budget, the assumption I made is that the size of the design team in comparison to the number of employees a company could be a good proxy to measure the corporate understanding of design value . Triangulating the data I got from my interviewees with some public data from finance.google.com I managed to calculate the ratio, and surprise surprise, most of the companies had a very similar number: 1 design team member for every ~100 employees.*

Do this learnings resonate with the the way your design department works within your organization? Does your company have a more sophisticated way to organize design departments? Does the designer vs. employee ratio apply to your company as well?

* Disclaimer: the subject sample is on the single digits but still, I thought this initial metric could be a good starting point for further and more accurate benchmarking

Photo credit: Guardian Eyewitness

An innovation lesson from Chez Panisse: stick to your vision no matter what

2010-10-26T18:31:00.001-07:00

Today Michelin announced the list of restaurants that have been selected to feature in their 2011 San Francisco, Bay Area and Wine Country guide. To many people's surprise, Chez Panisse, the restaurant known as the birthplace of California cuisine, lost their star.

What was Chez Panisse's reaction? Mia Morgenstern from the Chez Panisse Foundation said:

“When Alice Waters opened Chez Panisse almost 40 years ago, she intended to create a place where people could come together with friends and family to eat a delicious, thoughtfully prepared meal in beautiful surroundings. To this day, that is the restaurant’s highest priority. Although Ms. Waters respects the traditions upon which the Michelin Guide bases its awards, she acknowledges that they aren’t the same traditions upon which Chez Panisse has built its reputation and success over the years.”

In summary this is like them saying: "We appreciate Michelin has recognized our work in the past, but we don't care if they don't do it anymore. We have had the same vision for 40 years and the way we measure success is based on how close we get to our vision, not to someone else's idea of what our vision should be."

It takes courage and confidence to be that bold, but doing the opposite and changing things just because they have lost a star would be a betrayal to all the people who have helped Chez Panisse become the culinary symbol that it is today.

The Umbro turnaround: a master class in Design Strategy by Nike

2010-10-22T12:10:00.002-07:00

It has barely been three years. On October 23rd, 2007 Nike bought Umbro for $582.2M, paying a 61% premium on that day’s share price to discourage potential counterbids. At that time, Umbro was a company in clear decline. Their only valuable assets were the contracts it had signed to supply uniforms for multiple club and national teams (being the one with the British Football Association one of the longest lasting in the industry, spanning more than 20 years) and its history as a company that has deep roots with professional football since 1924.

Why buy another football apparel company? To keep the contracts and kill the brand? As a late newcomer to the football business in the 90s, Nike was not so much interested in the contracts but on the brand heritage. The global market for football kit and equipment is around $5B, and Nike's rationale to add another brand to their football portfolio is the same they had when they diversified their basketball brand portfolio: to segment the market not just by product category but by brand promise.

Nike Basketball started its brand multiplication process in 1997 by spinning off the Air Jordan brand (who in his sane mind would not turn the most recognizable logo of basketball into a standalone brand?), then bought Converse in 2003 ($305M for the brand that invented the very first basketball shoe), and by now it is becoming clear the LeBron James brand will become a solo subsidiary pretty soon.

With football, a sport mainly dominated by deep-pocketed European clubs that until recent years did not benefit from the sophistication of American marketing, we are witnessing the start of the same maturation process: a departure from a strategy based on a single lowest-common-denominator brand that tries to appeal everybody equally, to a more sophisticated strategy based on a multi-brand ecosystem that has the agility to be more diverse and vibrant. And this trend will only increase in the next years as football’s audience grows even bigger and more global.

Without quite going multibrand for football yet, Puma already started the lifestylization of football few years ago by positioning itself as the brand that “really loves football” (in their own Milton-Glaser-esque 'I <3 football' they replace the heart with a football). In their campaigns they frame African football as the purest and less money-fueled manifestation of the sport in order to leverage their sponsorships of African national teams. That's what they sell now: the innocent and untarnished soul of football.

With Umbro's acquisition, Nike went even further and enriched their portfolio by adding additional dimensions to it. Just take a look at how complementary the brands are:

The way the Nike Football brand has been developed in the last years makes it stand for performance, high technology, and success. As a token, just look at their latest performance boots, the Vapor Mercurial Superfly II. These are boots that go for ~$400 and embody everything the brand wants to be: they are the lightest thanks to the materials used and the way the boots are built; they come in a wide range of screaming colors because, hey, if you are the best and you know it, you want to signal this to the rest of the world, right?; they have special cleats with exclusive advanced technology so you can have an edge over the rest and win; and they are endorsed by arguably the most famous and notorious football player now, Cristiano Ronaldo.

In contrast to all this edgy 21st century agressive brand attitude, Umbro clearly positions itself as a more emotional organization. The company not only is based in Manchester, England but it is also proud to be British as their tag reads: "Tailored by Umbro in England". Having started so early in the 20th century in the land of football (the foundation of association football rules were established in a London pub in 1863) is not only a key identity asset; this is something that virtually no other brand in the world will be able to brag about ever no matter how much money they have. And that's exactly what Nike was buying when they shelled out $582.2M for a dwindling company: a symbol in football history.

Umbro had potential. And they saw it. Fast forward three years to today and all the signs indicate there has been a massive turnaround: Umbro stands now for incomparable football heritage and craftsmanship, creative lifestyle, and a strong passion for the game beyond the competitiveness of winning or losing. How did Nike manage to do this? What strategic decisions were taken that had a positive impact on the Umbro brand? More on this in follow-up posts.

Are VCs gearing up to invest big in qualitative research tools?

2010-10-12T22:41:00.000-07:00

The qualitative user research field might have reached a significant milestone today on its path to mainstream. Techcrunch, the place-to-go for news about start-ups, published today:

“Denver-based GutCheck is trying to offer a self-described do-it-yourself platform for qualitative market research. [...] The startup, founded by CEO Matt Warta, Carl Rossow and Jen Drolet, has just raised $2 million in a Series A round led by Highway 12 Ventures. [...] GutCheck’s goal is to be the SurveyMonkey for qualitative research by simplifying the process and bringing it all online.”

Wow. A $2 million investment for a qualitative user research tool. What is going on here? Have venture capitalists completely ran out of ideas about where to put their money? Did Gutcheck founders simply pitched the right product to the right VCs (actually they have an advantage here: one of the founders is actually a former VC)? Is Gutcheck sensing something no one else is?

Let’s look at what is under the hood: the app basically provides marketers with a service to identify research subjects based on a target demographic from a large database (populated by revenue-sharing partners) and the communication tools to interview them by means of an online chat.

Looking at the features, there is nothing revolutionary from a mainstream marketing methodology point of view but surely an incremental shift that will appeal to many marketing managers willing to try something different, but not that different. Not sure how many social researchers would call this a ‘qualitative research’ tool (maybe the label ‘real time interactive survey’ would apply better?), but there is something in there for new product development projects that care about empathizing with users at some basic level.

Why VCs are starting to invest just now in this area if the widespread buzz around user-centric innovation has been around for a while now (the famous BusinessWeek special 'Get Creative'on innovation dates back from August 2005)? What took them so long?

One explanation could be the fact that people are now sharing online more than ever and marketers realized the power of online media to have easier and faster access to consumers. Sentiment analysis tools for blogs and public tweets are just the tip of the iceberg. The amount of information of each one of us in the internet is only going to get bigger,and marketers can't wait to have access to all this information.

So what is next in the VCs investing pipeline? Is this the start of a trend? Are on-demand solutions so fast, so cheap, and so hot nowadays that we are going to have an explosion of applications related to finally truly understand users and markets?

Maybe Gutcheck's case would lead us to believe that we are witnessing the nascent of a new product category of solutions. But it may be surprising to some to know that this application space has already existed for a while. Yes. Even before VCs or marketers looked at it.

In the last years, more and more innovation consultants, design strategists, ethnographers, researchers, etc.. all over the world who have been practicing for years and had been frustrated by the shortcomings of existing digital tools, have decided to stop complaining and to apply their own knowledge to build the tools that would help them and many other user researchers get their job done better. First 'scratch your own itch' and then (since the cost of bringing to market an on-demand app to the whole world is so low...) why not try to make a business out of it! As an example, here a handful of solutions I have been looking at in the last years, and in some cases test-driven or even used:

Revelation, an “online qualitative research software to help your market research project capture reality” developed by Steve August “after many frustrating years of using blogs to do ethnographic-inspired online qualitative research”
Guapovideo, an “online video collaboration for market research pros” developed also from Chicago and used and endorsed by ID IIT professor Chris Conley
Piipl, a tool to “easily gain insights by involving piipl [sic] in innovation processes” is developed in Denmark by an ex-Jump Associates consultant
Ethnoken, a "visual market intelligence" tool developed from Chicago and “created by ethnographic researchers for ethnographic researchers”
7daysinmylife, an "online research environment in the form of a diary’ started by Dutch consultancy Zilver innovation

The level of product maturity in many of them is still not 100% market ready but there is not a lack of great product ideas out there. And the interest and money to be made with this kind of apps is only going to grow. And VCs will surely follow.

It would be very interesting to follow how this market evolves in the next years. Will bootstrapped startups sell part of their business to VCs for faster growth? Will they try to do it solo and grow their business without backseat-driving investors dictating the pace of development and the features that have to be released first? Will they have a huge expertise advantage over entrepreneurs coming from traditional quantitative marketing simply becoming entrepreneurs to make a fast buck? Will established design consultancies (that rely on quality user research) develop similar tools to increase output, productivity and (most importantly) margins? How long before larger, more powerful and better funded marketing companies start swallowing these startups as they mature their offerings and increase their user base?

Update: Matt Warta, CEO of GutCheck has shared in the comments section extra insightful bits about the vision behind his product and the potential reasons why VCs are interested in the space. Additionaly he has also provided some additional examples of related solutions in the online market research application space:

Markettools, the same creators of the early Zoomerang , provides a full and diverse range of “software and services for Enterprise Feedback Management (EFM) and Market Research”. The company has been around for quite a bit now and it definitely seems one of the bigger and more mature ones out there. (Based in San Francisco and 471 employees according to Linkedin)
Communispace. Claiming to be “The Leader in Online Consumer Insights”, Communispace story has been covered by the popular book Groundswell written by Forrester analysts. They pitch themselves to potential clients not as a technology company but more as a ‘strategic partner’ probably alluding to the fact they offer strategic expertise through professional services. Check their multimedia area for an interview with CEO Diane Hessan. (Based in Massachusets and 281 employees according to Linkedin)
uSamp . With a more traditional survey methodology approach, uSamp’s strong points are (according to them) better subject matching, higher data quality, and a large pool of subjects. We can already see a numbers 'battle' going on between competitors: uSamp talks about “3.1 million actively engaged panelists” while Gutcheck promises a pool with “roughly 4 million subjects”. (Based in California and 61 employees according to Linkedin)
Vovici Offers basic online survey capabilities with additional analysis reporting tools. (Based in Virginia and 98 employees according to Linkedin)

[image credit: Fatboy Slim's Bird of Prey ]

Does working for the DoD increase your chances to become a successful innovator?

2010-10-05T14:42:00.001-07:00

While searching for quotes related to design I accidentaly stumbled on this Larry Keeley quote that Bruce Nussbaum captured at the last ID IIT design conference Innovate Now :

"Leonardo Da Vinci made money as a defense contractor"

I obviously lack the context in which the statement was made, but I would not be surprised if someone told me that after this sentence Keeley said "... like Jay Doblin did right after graduating from Pratt Institute".

Surprised? Take a look at a fragment of an interview I did with Keeley for the ID student publication back in 2007:

A designer in camouflage

"Jay Doblin went to Pratt Institute and his degree was in camouflage, which will surprise some modern ID students. But, remember, it was the war years and people were trying to do things that were relevant. I can remember more than one vivid conversation with Jay were he was teaching me principles of camouflage. What do you do to disguise a tank, or a factory, or ammunitions plant, or ammunitions storage facilities so that anybody on a bombing strafe will go past it and tend to drop their bombs in a way that misses the target? It is not a question of making it completely disappear. It is a question of actually trying to get it to appear somewhere else."

Did anyone attend Keeley's talk? Was there any mention of Jay Doblin? Any parallelism drawn, either implicitly or explicitly, between both innovators?

Behavioral economics applied: Nike Innovation Lab trades skill analysis for insights

2010-10-01T19:55:00.000-07:00

Very interesting peak at Nike's football boot innovation lab where both professional and promising players can get an hi-tech analysis of their skills and learn how to get better. In exchange Nike gets really valuable research insights that are used later on for product innovation. This is a great example on how to align users self-interest in excellence with corporate interest in product innovation.

Corporate customer development model: oxymoron?

2010-09-21T14:54:00.000-07:00

It is definitely the fad du jour in the field of innovation: customer development model (if you look it up on google today you will find 322,000 results). People ‘in the know’ are throwing left and right its signature terms: customer discovery, pivoting, minimum viable product, lean startup, etc. And it is not just start-ups, consultants, tech visionaries, and VCs the people who are talking about it. People in big companies as well! (especially the ones in the Silicon Valley). Corporations want the cool factor as well and to be perceived as relevant actors in the valley, they have to claim they are also innovating. And how are they backing their statement? They will confidently tell you they have a handful special crack teams that ‘operate like a start-up’ right inside their headquarters.

Just for the record, I have nothing against applying a start-up mentality to traditional product development. In fact quite the opposite. I am a total believer of Steve Blank's model. I even read his book “the four steps to the epiphany” and I was ecstatic to discover he managed to write the book many people in the design field have tried to write for years but have failed miserably: a book that defines a needs and customer-driven product development process (which not surprisingly shares many customer-centric principles of the design thinking process) in a way that anyone can understand. Along the way, the author, with his clear and well-defined process, manages to demystify the ‘secret sauce that can’t be taught’ in the innovation process that many innovation and design consultancies are happy to charge a premium for when passing the bill to their clients.

Perfect then. Corporations now have a roadmap for how to increase the chances of success when innovating. The rest should be easy, correct? Just a matter of highlighting the interesting parts of the book, evangelizing them to the whole team, and following them step by step, right?

Well, not quite. Reality is that as much as maverick product managers would like, they will never be able to operate as a start-up inside a big company. Why? It could be because any or a combination of this factors:

Internal Politics: executives/founders making undebatable decisions that affect your product
Dependencies with the larger organization: product/technology platform related, budget decisions, shared supporting processes, etc.
and probably most important, the rewards and risks involved in operating as a start-up: why would someone in a big corporation work 80 hours a week if the upside is maybe a 10-15% extra bonus compared to working at a start-up where you can make 200-300%?

The only way large organizations can successfully apply customer development model is by funding truly independent startups inside the company: no strings attached to the mother ship, no interference whatsoever, and all the incentives in place for its founders to do what is necessary. These companies should feel comfortable giving shareholders money to a group of 4-5 employees and invite them one year later to see what they have come up with. For the rest who are not brave enough, the highest they can aim is to foster a culture of customer-centeredness, comfortable with chaos and change, and most importantly willing to learn from failure.

[Photo: Dawn Endico]

Design Battle Cry

2009-12-01T19:23:00.000-08:00

...or how prototyping should be done

[photo: frozenchipmunk]

Google Wave and the emergence of intelligent advertising bots

2009-10-28T17:04:00.003-07:00

People have been pretty excited about Google Wave since its unveiling. Most of this excitement though has been triggered by its new communication possibilities from the user point of view (synchronous multiparty collaboration, threaded messages, extended functionality through wavelets, etc.)

But what about Google’s plan to monetize it? What about the ads they most likely will want to display inside a wave? Plain non-flashy text boxes like the ones discreetly displayed in gMail? A sidebar full of ads like in a search results page?

Or.. what about forgetting the tried-and-true dumb visual ad that is asking for two milliseconds of eyeball attention and instead act boldly and create ‘intelligent ad robots’ who can actually assist you to accomplish any activity you are trying to in a non-intrusive and natural way? That would be something different and way more interesting for companies that want to avoid the classic ad bombarding to the masses and instead laser target their consumers in a more friendly way.

So far, the lineup of robots available now for gWave is not very extensive but it is already big enough to helps us understand the huge potential of having virtual agents inside a wave who can analyze the conversation, look for related data, and communicate back to the human participants inside the wave itself.

It is not difficult to imagine a ‘travel planner’ robot that would be added to a wave you just created with your friends in order to plan your next summer trip. As you start throwing around ideas about locations, dates, and budget with your friends, this travel robot would analyze the conversation and bring you travel suggestions from sponsoring companies related to the travel industry (airlines, travel companies, hospitality, etc..). Everybody would win here: you save a lot of time you would have spent digging for deals, and the travel companies can offer their products to a very receptive and targeted audience. Oh, and Google makes some cents for every ‘touchpoint’ a robot does inside a wave. Deal!

There is one 'but' though. Will people really allow someone foreign to their group of friends to ‘interfere’ with their travel plans? Probably yes, but it will all depend on the way the robot's behavior is designed. Too intrusive, out. Too low quality suggestions, out. Too inaccurate, out. Too passive, out. Not easy to get it right. That’s the fine line engineers, designers, social researchers and anyone involved in designing these robots will have to walk. Unless these ad robots act as minimally amicable humans and provide a useful suggestions service, ads inside gWave will pretty much look like all the ads we have seen so far: a simple and ignorable chunk of text.

[photo: 'Fortune telling robot' by Paul Keller]

Can we prime ourselves to be better analysts and designers?

2009-10-07T14:45:00.000-07:00

Recent studies by psychologists in California and British Columbia have shown that being exposed to nonsensical data improves ability to find patterns. This probably doesn't come as too surprising to most of you (after all, it supports the fact that creative types tend to be explorers, travelers, experimenters, always looking to experience something new), but what if we could prime ourselves to be better at our office design jobs in a way that doesn't require investment in air travel or special equipment? What if all it took to be more analytical and synthetic in our work was to read a Kafka story every before as a warm-up?

And the award goes to... the supply chain guy

2009-07-16T08:04:00.001-07:00

A recent Wall Street Journal article has a very interesting data point on the impact Apple’s COO Tim Cook has had in the company’s turnaround:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124571582988539249.html

"Mr. Cook joined Apple in 1998 from Compaq Computer Corp. to fix Apple's then-troubled supply-chain system. At the time, Apple was dealing with bloated inventory and an annual loss of more than $1 billion. Mr. Cook was instrumental in closing down factories and outsourcing manufacturing to contractors.“He turned a company that was on the brink of bankruptcy into one that is generating a huge amount of free cash," says Charlie Wolf, an analyst at Needham & Co."

People who preach about innovation love to bring up Apple as an example: how cool the products look, how seamlessly all the products and services integrate as part of a larger system, how delightful the user experience is, and how edgy their stores look and feel.

But what many of them forget to mention are all the behind-the-scenes and not so salient strategies Apple has chosen in order to deliver these customer experiences in a more profitable way: simplifying the product portfolio to reduce manufacturing costs and increase profit margins, making a product available simultaneously in multiple countries to increase product launch impact while reducing marketing costs, making a one-size-fits-all cell phone without a physical keyboard to accommodate any current and future keyboard configuration and decrease localization costs, using open-source FreeBSD as the core of Apple OS X to provide stability to the OS and focus precious development efforts in a market-differentiating OS experience, locating the core of their developers in Cupertino, CA rather than outsourcing development to India to make development tasks more effective and achieve better alignment around user-focused corporate culture, and the list goes on.

All these decisions might not be obvious to many of Apple's users, but they definitely have been relevant in order to turn Apple's inventions into innovations. These decisions that influence both the user experience and the cost to bring it to market are made possible by the supply chain guy. Unfortunately for innovation practice, the work of our guy doesn’t get as much press as the eye-candy photographs of the products. But the reality is that the entirety of product decisions that affect the way you structure your company are equally important to succeed. While a great supply chain will not help you be more innovative (think about Dell’s recent troubles with waning demand in spite of having one of the most sophisticated supply chains), a bad one will definitely keep your great invention from the market way too long. Again, an innovative product can’t succeed without a well-thought-out way to bring it to market.

So how this relate to designers? Face it, talking about supply chain and the way a company structures itself to deliver its products is not the best way to get designers’ attention. All these behind the scenes processes and its consequences can cause designers' eyes to glaze over. "Supply chain" is neither shiny, nor glamorous, does not help win design awards, and is an unsexy term.

But if the designers’ goal is to really help companies to launch successful products, they really will have to start thinking about it next time they present their glossy reports to clients. No doubt clients will ask: “And how will my company launch this product?”

The answer "focus on the user experience" is not enough for a company, it is just the starting point. Companies need a routing plan. They need to find out the best and most creative ways to organize themselves in order to deliver (supply chain). Different products require organizations to structure themselves in different ways (supply chain, again), and innovators have to pay close attention to this if they want to increase the chances of market success.

So here is my message to all the judges that give yearly innovation awards. The next time you give an innovation award to a designer with black frame glasses and blinding white shoes, please have another one for the supply chain wiz who orchestrated the whole show to put that designed experience in the users’ hands.

update: An example of how efficient Apple is at running their business, look at this graph that shows their really high operating profits of the market compared with its revenue. [Apple Is In The Middle Of The Pack On Revenue, But Crushing On Operating Profit]

[photo: dead reckoning]

How we learn in the dark

2009-06-22T17:20:00.000-07:00

A recent visit to Paris's Dans le Noir restaurant got me thinking about visual, auditory, and kinesthetic (VAK) learning styles and what happens when one of the most heavily relied-upon modalities among seeing people is taken away from them.

This restaurant chain (in Paris and London) sells a unique dining experience by removing all light from their dining area and employing legally blind persons as waitstaff. You enter into a (lit) bar waiting area, empty all of your belongings and sources of light (including cell phones) into a locker, order your meal (a set menu with several mix-and-match course and drink options--we chose not to know the actual dishes before we ate them), perhaps enjoy an apertif, and then you're led by your blind waiter through two black velvet curtains to your table, which is in a room so dark that you cannot see your own hand 2 inches in front of your face (though one of my dining companions insisted he could--and later joked that he spent much of the evening waving his hand in front of his face while his mind filled the images in his head). You drink your wine, pour your water, and eat your dinner with a knife and fork completely in the dark. The noise level of the dining room quickly elevates as people who normally rely on vision for so many communication cues are forced to focus their auditory sense on identifying speakers and maintaining conversations; the waitstaff must come in to shush the room periodically throughout the service.

I am a predominantly kinesthetic learned myself, so my first instinct was to feel out my surroundings and understand the size and shape of the table, where the table settings were located, what material the furniture was made of, and how far the wall extended behind and beside me. My eyes instantly interpreted the tactile information into a mental picture of my surroundings, and I used this mental map to "see" the world as dinner went on. As soon as the dinner plates came to the table, there was nothing I could do but stick my left hand into the food and feel for textures, heat, and moisture. Most of the ingredients were eventually recognizable by smell and taste (we later cross-checked with a photo-album menu in the waiting area) but, to quote my fellow contextresponser Enric, "Food should be enjoyed by all five senses." Perhaps we are particularly sensitive to the visual aesthetics as designers, but I realized during this meal how much my enjoyment of food is influenced by visual data--and how this particular meal was less culinarily meaningful to me because I couldn't see the structure and the colors on my plate.

Nevertheless, a trip to Dans le Noir is truly a "walking in someone else's mocassins" worthwhile experience for creating empathy. I'm sure people with other learning styles will have different stories to tell about how they adjust to the darkness.

Virgin America: The blogosphere at 38,000 feet, -69 degrees and 529mph

2009-06-16T18:04:00.000-07:00

This post is coming to you from above. WiFi's new dimension: get connected while flying high. And, no, this is not a medical marijuana joke. I am blogging from my flight back from Boston to San Francisco from seat 13C, Virgin America flight #...who cares, I'm online. So far, I've skyped with my work colleagues, caught up on some work emails, got on HuffPo, paypal'ed a friend. What better to do on a flight than pop open your laptop and take care of some errands?

So Virgin America takes one of the first steps and offers onboard WiFi. At first, I am elated. I can get online and make this 6 hr flight go by a LOT more quickly than trying to sleep or listen to my iPod. Then I imagine more and more people with their laptops on the plane, kind of a scary thought, but then I imagine the tiny netbooks now and I'm less anxious.

Back to the WiFi. I am impressed.

Signing up was a charm. Finally, an airline who gets experience design. From the boutique-hotel style check-in to signing up for WiFi in a jip, this airline is getting my attention. I appreciate the screens on the back of the seats, but full-on access to the interweb is my cup of tea.

Rapid heuristic evaluation of Caltrain ticketing (a.k.a. rant about the 8-ride pass)

2009-05-05T10:10:00.001-07:00

Most people who know me would characterize me as fundamentally an honest and upstanding person. I've broken very few laws in my life and suffer from a torturous amount of guilt any time I feel like I've wronged someone. True, I run the occasional stop sign on my bicycle when there are no other vehicles in sight, but on the whole I'd say I'm a law-abiding citizen who has no intention of cheating others and would immediately attempt to right the situation if I felt I had.

You can imagine how frustrated I am, then, when the ill-conceived experience design of Caltrain ticketing labels me a criminal for forgetting to validate my 8-ride pass a couple of times. Now, the first time I got a citation was a fluke: I'd never used an 8-ride pass before and didn't even know what it meant to "validate" the ticket, much less when and where to do it. My assumption had been that the Caltrain official would stamp or punch one of the rides on my ticket as he made his rounds through the car. Instead, the official unforgivingly cited me for fare evasion, when anyone who looked at the pass could have plainly read that I'd purchased that ticket exactly 11 minutes before he laid eyes upon it.

I have been racking my brain trying to come up with reasons for a ticketing and boarding design that punishes (criminalizes!) honest but forgetful people, but I have yet to come up with a good one, so will offer my critique, propose a new solution and invite the rest of you to share your perspectives....

The problem

The basic reason why the ticketing experience sucks is that there is no consistency in how riders are accountable for these different passes. You can buy a number of different kinds of passes for Caltrain: one-ride passes, round-trip passes, day passes, 8-ride passes, monthly passes, etc., and this is great because different riders have different needs and should have options for the kind of ticket that best suits their riding habits. What's not so great is that, as a rider, you are responsible for remembering different behaviors depending on which pass you happened to have purchased the last time. I purchased a monthly pass for April and all I had to do was get myself to the station, get on my train, and pull out the pass to show the conductor if/when he passed through my train car during that month. Being that my project is finishing up this week and the monthly pass is no longer the best economical choice for me in May, I purchased an 8-ride pass last Friday to use for the rest of this month's estimated rides. Yesterday, I showed up at the Redwood City train station 20 minutes early and passed the time studying for an exam, completely forgetting to validate the ticket and not even realizing I'd forgotten until the official was coming through the train car. I didn't bother arguing with her (she didn't make up the rules, after all) but was doubly pissed off when I later discovered that she hadn't even written "VOID" across one of edge of my pass to validate it and hold me accountable for that ride.

In every other transit system I've ever ridden, there is a single point in the experience at which all riders--no matter what their transit needs or pass types, and no matter whether they swipe or insert or drop coins into a hole--have to provide proof of payment for that ride. On Muni, it's when you board the bus. On BART, on DC's Metro system, on Chicago's CTA, and on most metropolitan public transit systems around the world, it's when you go through the turnstile to get to the platform. Why, then, would Caltrain require some people to do something extra to a ticket they've already paid for before they board the train, when the rest need only to show their ticket aboard the train?

The solution

This is really such an easy problem to solve that I can't believe Caltrain makes it so hard for everyone involved--especially for all those officials who have to deal with pissed-off riders when they issue citations. All 8-ride passes already come with an expiration date, so what is the need for additional validation? I only have 2 weeks to use it, anyway. Call it a 2-week pass, if you want, and charge a little bit more money--but do away with the ride limit. Or, keep it an 8-ride pass and don't make me validate it beforehand if an official is going to pass through my car to check it, anyway; Caltrain officials always carry little tools with them to punch mysterious strips of yellow paper, so it can't be any more work to punch one of my rides as validation.

In the larger scheme of things, Caltrain needs to think about redesigning a better system of ticketing and payment so that it won't need to employ so many grumpy officials to be ticket police. We frequent riders appreciate the service and are willing to pay for the convenience it provides in our life, but everyone could be a lot happier--and things would run a lot more smoothly--if a more considered and use-centered approach to design were applied to the overall experience.

Frank Zappa spotted it before Apple

2009-04-15T19:01:00.001-07:00

In the next meeting with a client or a design neophyte, refrain yourself from using the overused quote "people want a hole in the wall, not a drill". Every single marketing student has learned it and repeated it ad nauseam. Better than that, you can use a quote from the visionary Frank Zappa:

"Music consumers like to consume music... not pieces of vinyl wrapped in pieces of cardboard."

Back in 1983 he already identified the motivations of people for buying music beyond the artifact itself (accessibility to a virtually infinite catalogue and playable from multiple devices with no physical limits) and triggered him to propose a system 'where you could subscribe to whatever genre of music you wanted and get it delivered in batches' which sounds a lot like iTunes music store but many years ago:

"We propose to acquire the rights to digitally duplicate and store THE BEST of every record company's difficult-to-move Quality Catalog Items [Q.C.I.], store them in a central processing location, and have them accessible by phone or cable TV, directly patchable into the user's home taping appliances, with the option of direct digital-to-digital transfer to F-1 (SONY consumer level digital tape encoder), Beta Hi-Fi, or ordinary analog cassette (requiring the installation of a rentable D-A converter in the phone itself . . . the main chip is about $12)."

Pace of decision making as a factor of corporate innovation

2009-04-09T18:09:00.001-07:00

Within big companies everybody wants to be an innovator. Innovation projects are started by executives and managers across the board and all of them want their teams to come up with the next big thing.

Unfortunately, no matter how well equipped these teams are in terms of skills, talent, and resources, one of the reasons why many of these projects end up going nowhere is because these teams have terrible decision-makers as stakeholders. Here are some symptoms:

Different project sponsors have problems aligning among themselves and they take too much time to make a decision on the direction of the project
Same sponsors spend an inefficient amount of time waiting to syndicate results with the involved executives and when the long awaited meeting happens no clear decision is made
Teams completely demoralized by all the constant changes in project scope, timelines, and resources

Needless to say, when I came across Scott Anthony's post "3 ways to fail cheap", I felt someone finally had the guts to talk about the not so rosy aspects of executing innovation.

"Increase the pace of decision making. Entrepreneurs with clearly bad ideas typically don't have the luxury of spending money on those ideas for too long. Companies, however, can let bad ideas linger for inordinate amounts of time because of slow decision-making processes. Shutting down flawed projects early avoids needless spending — and focuses resources on the best ideas."

The lesson here is that internal innovation teams who are ready to tackle any big hairy problem need managers and executives that can think in an agile way, make decisions quickly and enable the teams to move at the speed that is required.

On the contrary, managers who take a lot of time making decisions, are unfocused on their point of view, and fail at requesting prompt decisions from their superiors are just simply condemned to fail for good.

Photo by Sam UL

Rapid heuristic evaluation of the new Facebook interface (a.k.a. Top five reasons why it sucks)

2009-03-24T15:04:00.000-07:00

A friend's Facebook status message recently read that she "is really only on FB for about 60 seconds every other day now that the design sucks." Here's why:

1. Feed takes up more screen real estate
Less dense information = more scrolling to ingest everything.

2. Unclear use of grid/column spaces
There are photos on the right, photos in the middle, status/Twitters in the middle, random events ("Highlights") that have nothing to do with me on the top right. What gives? Where is the logic? My favorite part of the screen is the extra white space on either side of the content when I maximize my browser window. Ahhhhhh.....

3. Awkward information hierarchy
Here is why I completely glaze over the rightmost column (aside from the "Highlights," which seems like it should be relabeled "Ads"): because hell if I know that my friend named her new photo album "Living la vida loca," I just know that I like to see Jane Smith's photos, and photos of Jane Smith. Um, it's "social networking" for a reason--make the people the focal point!

4. I have to work harder to get to the stuff I care about
...Therefore, I am less likely to stick around to find it. If Joe Bob is an OCD status updater, I have to read 5 of his status updates in a row before I get to learn something about my other friends. If I "x" him out then I lose all of his status updates. Shouldn't there be a middle ground, like being able to see just his latest status update? Also, don't make me filter people out. Software should be smart enough to track the people who's photos I comment on most, the profiles I visit (read: stalk) most often, and the organizers of events I attend.

5. Redundancy
What's the difference between the "Home" link and "Friends" link on the top nav bar? If I don't pick a drop-down "Friends" option, it appears that it just takes me "Home." Similarly, what's the difference between the "Profile" link and "Joyce Chen" link? We get seven links for the price of five, which in interaction design is not that great of a deal.

Welcome to the (Design) Machine

2009-03-03T18:39:00.001-08:00

"The idea [behind the Design Machine] was how can we make it easy for nondesigners to leverage the power of good design"

"Coca-cola: Building a Better Design Machine" [BusinessWeek]

This is an old article but I definitely think is an example of where the design practice is expanding to: creating meta-design tools and processes that will enable people who do not have a traditional design background to actually design something. And this something will be constrained and within guidelines, but will be good enough for people to actually make a narrow yet useful use of a design tool.

Design tools have become this uber-monsters that can do virtually everything: think about photoshop CS4 or the latest video editing tool you fancy the most. Is there anything they can't do? These are definitely tools for expert designers, who spend literally 100% of their time designing stuff. But what about the people who have a business function within a company other than design and wants to harness the power of design to do their job better? Do they really have to learn the whole complexity of of an advanced tool just to help them think, visualize, prototype or look for solutions that had nothing to do with the expert practice of design as an end?

The Coca-cola 'design machine' is just an example of how a company is empowering their stakeholders to make better design decissions that are aligned with the overall business strategy in a very friendly and non-obtrusive way. Coca-cola business goal is not to have people spend time thinking about the composition of an ad. They want people to think about how the ads can connect better with their customers giving a set of design guidelines. These design machine users leapfrog the operational aspects of visual design and move to a higher level of thinking in order to focus on what really matters to them which is to apply the best business strategy possible in alignment with Coca-cola brand strategy.

Experience strategy as coreography

2009-02-16T17:25:00.001-08:00

I am always delighted to see Peterme use metaphors to explain in a very understandable way concepts that many people have trouble talking about in a clear way. The latest example I have bumped into is his no-nonesense explanation to the Harvard business suit crowd of what customer experience is:

"[it] isn't about money -- in my work, the biggest impact I've seen a customer experience mindset have is to help companies understand how they can better orchestrate existing elements to realize new value. I'm sure that sounds like some retread of the dreaded "Business Process Reengineering", but there's a key distinction -- this isn't about efficiency and effectiveness and reducing waste throughout your processes. This is about choreographing what you already have (technologies, people, offerings) to better respond to your customers' needs and wants."

When looking around me for the artifacts I enjoy using the most these days, I can't help realize how many of them are choreographed as more than just 'one trick pony' products. They are stupendous ensembles of pieces which are connected in a way that deliver a value to me far greater than the sum of its pieces. Here just some examples of what I am talking about:

Monocle: I like to refer to it as my monthly easy-reading digest on 'wordology'. The paper magazine delightfully covers a wide range of topics from A to E [Affairs-Business-Culture-Design-Edits], which makes it very convenient to stay up to date on current events without having to go through zillions of publications. They do the editing and orchestrating of distinctive non-mainstream stories for you and that's basically what you pay for: convenience . Oh, and also for making the most of your scarce free time, something other media outlets have not fully grasped yet (haven't media executives read about the attention economy in their own publications?). Besides reading the mag on paper I like to complement the experience by listening to their British accent flavoured weekly podcast, and check out every now and then their RSS feeds on my saturated gReader.
Songbird: think about it as an open source patchwork app that uses the browsing capabilities Firefox, an audio player with the capabilities of iTunes, and the flexibility of dozens of extensions to customize your listening experience (think last.fm, contextual song lyrics, concert tickets, related artists, etc.). If all these pieces already existed before Songbird, what is so awesome about this new app? The reason is that you can do everything you used to do with multiple apps (torrent client, browser, audio player) but now without having to leave a single app: look for new MP3s on Hypemachine, subscribe and download songs from mp3 blogs, read music news sites, access your last.fm account, listen to on-line radio, etc.
Garmin Forerunner 405: what i love about this sport watch is how seamlessly all the pieces work together. The wrist watch helps you keep track of time and heat zones during training. The desktop app downloads the data without having to remove the watch from your wrist to do deeper analysis of your workout. And the web app allows you to access your training data from anywhere and share it with training mates. It is so easy to take data into the computer that the first thing I do after running is to upload the data to the computer and review the training. Yes, that inmediate.

So-called innovators are always on the look for the next big thing, thinking such thing has to be a totally new groundbreaking product that no one has ever thought of it. In reality they would probably be better of and way more effective if only the looked into how to do more and better with thet things they already have around. Something a creativity masters already said some time ago when talking about creativity and originality:

“It’s not where you take things from—it’s where you take them to.”
Jean Luc Godard

Pretty things

2009-02-13T16:03:00.000-08:00

This is cute: graphic design inspired by music. My only complaint is the user experience: I don't want to have to click to the next page/song and press Play, although I understand that the former feature could have been purposefully implemented to prevent a listener from missing all of the visuals if he Tabs away listening to the tunes and forgets to for the visuals.

I always enjoy Nicholas Felton's Annual Report and this year is no exception, although I find the triangle pattern obtuse at times and I wonder if there is a way to use such meticulously collected and organized data to tell a more rich and human story?

A timeline of design thinking mental artifacts anyone?

2009-02-05T19:16:00.001-08:00

Situation

According to the IIT ID Methods Archive project, the 'Balance Breakthroughs' Model is a framework "developed originally by Doblin Inc." that "aids in conceiving innovations that cut across the three major areas of change and pull them together". The framework looks at what is possible (what is allowed by technology), viable (how a business can be profitable), and desirable (what people value)

In 1969, Charles Eames drew a diagram to explain the design process as the intersecting point where the needs and interests of the client, the
design office, and society as a whole can overlap. The diagram reads:

"1. if this area represents the interest and concern of the design office
2. and this the area of genuine interest to the client
3. and this the concerns of society as a whole
4. then it is in this area of overlapping interest and concern that the designer can work with conviction and enthusiasm

Note: these areas are not static - they grow and develop as each one influences the others
Note: putting more than one client in the model build the relationship - in a positive and constructive way - "

Statement of the Eames Design Process by Charles Eames for the show "Qu’est-ce que le Design?" (What is Design?), Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, 1969
IDEO repeatedly presents in their IDEO University workshops and inside many of their publications a Venn diagram that explains the area where Design Thinking happens: the intersection of business, technology and people. They don't claim to have authored it but neither I have seen them source it.

Significance

As more and more consultancies have entered the innovation consulting practice, we have started to see mental models that look familiar to all of us, usually reinterpreted and rebranded as unique knowledge assets to their organization. These are used and presented as main differentiators and as clear evidence of thought leadership by business developers around the world looking to persuade 'design-ignorant' companies to spend big bucks on them.
Aiming to get extra points from clients and the larger design community (specially students blinded by the new innovation star system), some of these consultancies even publish and sell PR materials disguised as books, which by the way, are still regarded nowadays as the ultimate embodiment of knowledge ( don't people know about vanity publishing yet?). These will present a couple of thought-in-house mental models and dozens of lightweight case studies directly extracted from previous engagements with companies that have paid religiously hefty consulting fees and whose design managers are more than willing to show up in the book so their companies can be regarded as those who 'get innovation' and are succeeding at riding the new marketing wave (at least that's how they would like to be quoted in an upcoming Bruce Nussbaum's blog post)

Suspicion

Will there ever be someone who creates a timeline of design models evolution so we don't have to see anymore these orphan newborn models grow up by themselves?

Making a case for solitude

2009-01-30T14:38:00.000-08:00

Is it just me, or would everyone suffer from a mild panic attack if one of their friends were to disappear from their gChat list for several days without explanation? I recently experimented with blocking a contact from my list and was both amazed and terrified at how quickly that person ceased to exist in my reality. Another friend of mine explained that her company had allowed its employees to use instant messaging programs at work up until last year; suddenly blocked from seeing which friends/acquaintances were online at any given time, she felt isolated and anxious.

In our day and age, connectivity enabled by technology (whether via cell phones, email, instant messaging, etc.) is so widespread that to remove oneself from that network feels unusual and often uncomfortable, especially for the generation of kids who have never known communication without the Internet. In his article titled "The End of Solitude," published in the most recent issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, William Deresiewicz explores the benefits of solitude and warns against its obsolescence.

He observes that, in our present age, visibility "is the quality that validates us, this is how we become real to ourselves — by being seen by others. The great contemporary terror is anonymity. If Lionel Trilling was right, if the property that grounded the self, in Romanticism, was sincerity, and in modernism it was authenticity, then in postmodernism it is visibility. So we live exclusively in relation to others, and what disappears from our lives is solitude."

What benefits does solitude provide? The impetus for and concept of solitude has changed throughout history. During the Romantic period, the practice of solitude is seen as critical to achieving sincerity: "the belief that the self is validated by a congruity of public appearance and private essence, one that stabilizes its relationship with both itself and others." In modernist society, solitude was seen as a refuge from the city and the masses. "But we no longer live in the modernist city, and our great fear is not submersion by the mass but isolation from the herd. Urbanization gave way to suburbanization, and with it the universal threat of loneliness. "

But Deresiewicz distinguishes between loneliness and solitude: loneliness is the negative experience of solitude, or the state of being alone with oneself. As with all things with which we are unfamiliar, "the less are we able to deal with [solitude] the more terrifying it gets."

What we lose by losing solitude is, "first, the propensity for introspection, that examination of the self that the Puritans, and the Romantics, and the modernists (and Socrates, for that matter) placed at the center of spiritual life — of wisdom, of conduct. Thoreau called it fishing "in the Walden Pond of [our] own natures," "bait[ing our] hooks with darkness." He argues that "no real excellence, personal or social, artistic, philosophical, scientific or moral, can arise without solitude" but admits that "Solitude isn't easy, and isn't for everyone." It's can be both impolite and unpopular.

What place does solitude have in our current society? Do you agree with Deresiewicz's position on the value of solitude? To me, I see the practice of design as an apt metaphor: we need to strike a balance between collaboration and teamwork, and individual focus and intuition, to create great work. In the same way, everyone can participate more successfully and authentically in a visible world if they periodically withdraw to re-examine who they are and what they want from it.

As a final thought, and to play Devil's Advocate: Do these same philosophies and values apply to more interdependent cultures, such as in Latin America and Asia? An American friend living in China once suggested that, whereas Americans will crave the solitude of hiking in wilderness areas far away from any sign of civilization, the Chinese appear to have no such desire. Most of the remote trails he took while hiking through national parks in Western China inevitably led him to incredible vista points that turned out to be fully accessible by tour bus, where his walking meditation would be interrupted as groups of Asian tourists descended to take photos before traveling on to the next lookout. Could our estrangement from solitude as a result of connectivity shape American/Western culture to become more interdependent?

Connecting the other 3 billion

2009-01-20T02:37:00.001-08:00

O3b Networks, O3b stands for Other 3 billion, aims to provide cheap internet access to the remote areas of the globe by 2010. Backed by Google, Liberty and HSBC, O3b is setting up a satellite network to connect the three billion people who currently don't have internet access. In most of the Western world, internet access came as the natural next step in communication technology, we already were enjoying the benefits of TV, telephone, newspapers and what not. These countries, however, will be catapulted into a global information society most of its inhabitants never knew existed.

I can only begin to imagine the impact this will have on these societies. Lack of connectivity and information access are a huge issue in these parts of the world - just think disaster relief, health care and all its related issues like birth control and aids prevention, access to education, access to (alternative) news sources, and most importantly, having the tools to communicate and to organize. Literally, I can see a world of opportunities opening up.

What's in a name?

2009-01-15T15:07:00.000-08:00

[Disclaimer: I used to work at MetaDesign and am still friends with many of the people who work there. I am also still friends with many of the people who left MetaDesign for Ammunition.]

Some of you have already heard my rant about this, but I've calmed down from my initial shock and would like to engage in a civilized discussion about the legality and integrity of Ammunition's decision to showcase on its new website all of the projects that Brett Wickens and Matt Rolandson led while they were Creative Director and President, respectively, at MetaDesign. I counted at least ten projects for which the client had actually hired MetaDesign, not Ammunition, but which are currently displayed in Ammunition's portfolio in addition to having already been on MetaDesign's portfolio for the last several months/years.

Now, it would be one thing if Wickens and Rolandson showcased these projects on their own personal websites; Adobe did, after all, hire Wickens and MetaDesign to design its CS1 and CS2 packaging. It did not, however, hire Ammunition, and while Ammunition attempts to give credit to MetaDesign via a small rollover link at the bottom of each project page, I still find this misleading or, at the very least, confusing.

Legality
I do not purport to have the slightest inkling about what kind of legal contracts were agreed to between the parties involved. Perhaps it is perfectly legal to cite projects in this way, especially since Ammunition founder Robert Brunner came from Pentagram, which operates more as a collective of design teams each led by a principal and each managing its own client accounts than as a single design unit. (When Brunner left to found Ammunition, he took his whole team at Pentagram--and ostensibly his clients--with him.) Perhaps this is the same situation that causes confusion over who designed the first Apple mouse in 1980. At the time it was Hovey-Kelley Design, but David Kelley later merged his company, David Kelley Design (I'm still unclear as to whether this is the same legal entity as Hovey-Kelley Design or a subsequent incarnation of it), with three other firms to create IDEO. So did IDEO create the first Apple mouse if Hovey and the other original team members do not and potentially never have worked there?

Integrity
Even if it were technically legal (with the appropriate credit citations), is it fair? What is integrity when it comes to design, given that so many products are the result of teamwork and designers are so fickle when it comes to firm loyalty? Wikipedia defines integrity as "the quality of having a sense of honesty and truthfulness in regard to the motivations for one's actions." Another definition describes it as "adherence to a code of values; utter sincerity, honesty, candor; completeness." Honesty seems to be a big player here, and perhaps that is why I still feel uneasy about the way Ammunition has represented MetaDesign's work, even though I can convince myself that it could be totally legal. If Ammunition were a person, I can picture him walking around in borrowed clothing and taking all of the credit when others compliment his sense of style, while anyone who bothered to look at the tags would find someone else's initials stitched into them.

When has something like this happened in the past, and how have people reacted to it?

How does a design firm brand itself if its identity is really just a collection of different brands associated with its principals and their past alliances?

Designing a Better Brand

2009-01-05T12:12:00.000-08:00

Adapted from HOW Magazine.

A prospective client asks you, "I've heard of you guys. Tell me about your firm."
You give the wrong answer: "We're a full service integrated design firm serving a wide variety of clients."

HOW TO FIX THIS

Describe your positioning in:
-a sentence
-a paragraph
-a page

Decide what you're not
Standing for everything = Standing for nothing
Goal: not to appeal to a larger number of clients, but fewer.

Go beyond awareness
Name awareness does not equal brand equity

Discover your brand
It's already in your company in the form of natural strengths and core competencies

Consider:
-What kind of clients have you been most successful in attracting?
-What types of assignments have you completed over the years?
-In what areas do you have superior knowledge or expertise?
-What do you do particularly well, perhaps better than most firms?
-What do you most enjoy doing? What do you hate?
-What target audiences have you come to know and understand?
-What distribution channels do you know best?
-What methods, approaches or philosophies is the firm known for?

Connecting value and audience
1) What value do we provide?
2) Who do we deliver value to?
3) How do we deliver it?

Differentiating position:
"We offer [your service] for [your market] by [your method]."

(This is hard because it involves giving something up)

Criteria for strong positioning
Authentic: an honest reflection of what the firm is capable of. Plays to the firm's strengths. Can have aspirational aspects, but only if the firm has the firepower to deliver on the promises.
Exclusive: It excludes as many prospective clients as it includes.
Polarizing: Appeals to only limited number of clients. It may even inspire controversy.

Match position with practice
Question:
"What needs to change in our organization for us to bring our brand to life in everything we do?"
Answer reflected in:
-product
-people
-promotion
-process
-place of business

Socrates said: "The way to gain a good reputation is to endeavor to be what you desire to appear."

Goal of successful branding: Be everything to somebody, not something to everybody.

A Well Designed Business Model

2008-12-03T12:43:00.001-08:00

Hilti, a manufacturer of construction tools, noticed that when tools break contractors can't finish their jobs on time. Hilti realized that contractors don't bring in money by owning tools, they make money by using tools to get their job done as efficiently as possible.

So Hilti developed a business model where contractors pay a fixed monthly fee for a fleet of tools. Hilti replaces or repairs any broken tools and upgrades all the tools when the usage period is over. Contractors can select the type and quantity of tools they need.

As a result, contractors have a streamlined cost structure for tools and are more productive because of consistent high tool quality. Additionally, Hilti has incentive to build a more sustainable, long lasting, high performance product.

Obama is acting as an integrative thinker

2008-11-24T11:08:00.001-08:00

One of the most useful things Roger Martin has done for the innovation community is to saliently describe what are the characteristics that define integrative/design/systems thinking:

"[integrative thinking] is a response when two available models oppose one another, and are each unsatisfactory. More conventional thinkers are inclined to accept the situation, and see their job as making the tough decision of choosing between the two.

Integrative thinkers reject the suggestion that, just because they're the only two models that exist now, those are the only two models possible. There is a sense that there is an opportunity to create something different."

And Today, I look at Obama's press conference announcing his economic team and, voila!, there they are: he does not want to choose and he does not want trade-offs. He just wants the best possible creative solution for all Americans. CNN news has some excerpts:

"I've sought leaders who could offer both sound judgment and fresh thinking, both a depth of experience and a wealth of bold, new ideas, and most of all who share my fundamental belief that we cannot have a thriving Wall Street without a thriving Main Street"

And you can't accomplish this unless you have people who can work with both parties and with people who can listen, question and dialogue.

'Obama described Geithner as having "served with distinction under both Democrats and Republicans and has a long history of working comfortably and as an honest broker on both sides of the aisle.'

"In Romer, Obama said, he has found an independent economist respected by both conservatives and liberals who has done "groundbreaking research on many of the topics our administration will confront, from tax policy to fighting recessions."

Even though is hard to predict what is going to be the impact of Obama's economic plan, evidence so far is demonstrating he is approaching his challenge with high doses of innovative thinking. I am sure professor Charles L. Owen will comment on Obama's way of thinking very soon and without doubt will praise his systems thinking approach.

Picture: http://pol.moveon.org/mh/gallery/artwork.html?artwork=1

Manage Your Energy, Not Your Time

2008-11-23T06:57:00.001-08:00

(The following is adapted from the HBR article Manage Your Energy, Not Your Time by Schwartz and McCarthy)

Working longer hours is rarely the answer for improving performance.

This gets people exhausted, disengaged and sick.

Instead focus on renewing your personal energy by adapting rituals that replenish physical, emotional and mental resilience.

1) Physical Energy
>> Get more sleep
>> Identify energy lapses, such as restlessness, yawning, difficulty concentrating
>> Take quick breaks away from your desk at 90 minute intervals

2) Emotional Energy
>> Through detailed emails, notes or conversations regularly express appreciation to others
>> When an unsettling situation occurs, consider it through a longer lens. Ask, "How will I view this situation in six months?" Then ask, "How can I grow and learn from this situation?"

3) Mental Energy
>> Perform high concentration tasks away from phones and email
>> Respond to voice mails and emails at designated times during the day
>> Each night, identify the most important challenge for the coming day, then make it priority number one when you get to work in the morning

4) Spiritual Energy
>> Spend time on activities you do best and enjoy most
>> Live your values: if consideration is important to you but you're always late, practice showing up five minutes early for everything

Managing Oneself

2008-11-21T18:40:00.000-08:00

Adapted from "Managing Oneself" by Peter Drucker

"Success in the knowledge economy comes to those who know themselves--their strengths, their values, and how they best perform."

To discover your strengths, do feedback analysis.
Whenever you make a key decision or take a key action, write down what you predict will happen. Six months to a year later, compare the actual results with your prediction.

This will show you the following things: your strengths, what you are doing or not doing that prohibits you from enjoying the benefits of your strengths, what you're not that great at, and what you have no strengths in.

Concentrate on your strengths.

1) Position yourself where your strengths produce results
2) Improve on your strengths
3) Identify ignorance toward other disciplines and open yourself to them when they solidify your strengths
4) Identify and remedy your bad habits that stand in the way of your strengths
5) Don't take jobs or assignments in areas where you have no strength.

Put yourself in the following position:
"Yes, I will do that. But this is the way I should be doing it, this is the way it should be structured, and this is the way the relationship should be. These are the kind of results you should expect from me, because this is who I am."

A fair question to ask of other knowledge workers: "What do I need to know about your strengths, how you perform, your values, and your proposed contribution?"

Being thankful; restaurants that create community

2008-11-18T07:47:00.000-08:00

It turns out it can actually be a challenge to be truly thankful. We Westerners are brought up to take pride in being self-reliant and independent--so much so that it sometimes becomes difficult to say "thank you" when someone else performs an unsolicited, unexpected, authentic and selfless act of kindness. Rather than be truly appreciative of and celebrate that person's generosity, we find ourselves guilt-tripped into doing something equally generous out of a sense of obligation, Hammurabi's "eye for an eye" principle applied to philanthropy. The irony is that giving out of guilt does not feel satisfying at all.

Last night, a 70-year-old man in a suit sitting next to me at the bar at Avec paid for my dinner. Both of us were there alone, looking to have an exceptional meal (it was) on our business stay in Chicago, and soon found ourselves sharing our small plates with each other and with the couple on the other side of him, and exchanging stories about the other incredible meals we've had while traveling the world. When our bills came, he insisted on paying for mine and I relented after a minute or so of protest. Walking back to the hotel still trying to process what had just happened (and realizing that we didn't even know each other's names, having skipped the formal introduction part of a typical first meeting), I was momentarily overcome with guilt. Did I give in too easily? Was he regretting his choice? Should I have given him a hug or a granddaughterly kiss on the cheek to show how moved I was, even if it wouldn't have felt completely genuine? I felt buhao yisi, a Chinese phrase that doesn't have a succinct or accurate translation in English but generally feels like a combination of undeserving, ashamed, appreciative, and touched, all at the same time.

A brisk walk in the crisp, cold Chicago evening cleared away all of the negative/doubtful emotions and I convinced myself to simply feel blessed (for lack of a better word with less of a religious connotation), and to appreciate and remember mankind's capacity for giving.

A side note on environment impacting behavior: while other restaurants with more sophisticated or romantic atmospheres that I passed were rather empty and sluggish on a Monday night in a slowing economy, Avec was packed and bustling and couldn't keep a line from forming in its narrow entryway. I'm convinced that it's not just the food that brings people back, but also the sense of community that is fostered by the long bar and long tables where singles and couples are forced to sit elbow-to-elbow with strangers as they enjoy sipping from an impressive selection of imported beer and wine, and savoring the delicious concoctions coming out of the kitchen. It's hard not to want to talk about the food with neighbors when it's so good, and the structure of the restaurant makes these kinds of exchanges easy.

Photo courtesy of tellersfood.blogspot.com

What I Wish Obama Had Said

2008-11-08T12:38:00.000-08:00

During the second presidential debate, which seems like ages ago, the candidates were asked a question that I wish Mr. Obama had answered differently: "What don't you know, and how will you find the answer if you're president?"

Mr. Obama responded that they should ask his wife what he doesn't know, and then went on a tangent about what America needs (tax relief, better health care, etc).

He missed an opportunity to talk about the power of open innovation working in politics.

A better answer would have been while he doesn't know which specific types of technology will bring clean power to American homes, he does know that building the right incentives will inspire Americans to invent them.

Or while he doesn't know exactly how to get Americans focused on preventive care, he does know that if you give employers and doctors and individuals incentives to prevent illness, America can build a healthier country.

Or while he doesn't know what the perfect mass transit system looks like, he does know that if you build the right rewards Americans will develop systems that make us less reliant on foreign oil.

These are just a few of the big problems Mr. Obama faces as president. He should not pretend to know precisely how to achieve these goals, nor should he simply pass slow moving and watered down legislation. But he should use his post to structure markets so they point toward goals that transcend politics.

Obama.

2008-11-05T08:44:00.000-08:00

Good morning world. Yes, Obama was elected yesterday.

What has happened to the state of politics in the USA now? Will people continue to stay engaged? And what were the triggers that led to the highest voter turnout in ages? I believe there were a few things that led to this: the internet, the state of our country, and an Obama campaign that stayed optimistic and focused on resolving our country's issues. It's no question that negative campaigning, while dramatic, is fleeting and doesn't manage a sustainable interest. It's like a sugar high and both are unhealthy.

My mom, I'm proud to say, voted for the first time in her life for an American president after becoming a US citizen a few years ago. Though she's lived in the US since 1970, she is still working on a strong command of the English language. Yet, she had a point-of-view on the key issues being debated. Where, in the past, we avoiding talking politics, we talked genuinely about the economy, health care and education in the days proceeding the election. Something was stirred.

Yesterday, as my mom routinely picks up my nephews from elementary school, my nephews called to say hello on their way home. One of them had a mini-election in their classroom and Obama won handily 17-3 (this in NM which voted Republican in the '04 election). 10, 9, and 8 years old, they were screaming for Obama to win (even though their parents seemed to oppose the candidate). Something was stirred. I thought more about creative ways that teachers could introduce the notion of a political system at an early age.

This is indeed a new era in the American political system which has (to a pleasant surprise) created a sense of ownership and participation among the masses. The streets of SF were alive and with energy last night - hooligans - but, for an election?! Something deep was stirred and there is great momentum in the country right now. As Obama mentioned yesterday, this first step is but a chance to enable change. There is a responsibility we all carry now. But, no doubt, there is even more confidence in our abilities after yesterday.

Congratulations to Mr. Obama, his family, and the entire campaign. I'm giddy.

On Changing Yourself

2008-10-30T11:06:00.000-07:00

The following is a summary of the article by Geoff Colvin found here.

Success is not based on natural talent. It is a choice.

Studies of accomplished individuals show that few of them achieved anything great before the individuals started intense training.

What separates high achievers from everybody else is something researchers call "deliberate practice." Deliberate practice is a set of elements that, when combined, form a powerful system to improve performance.

The elements are:
1) DP is designed to specifically improve performance. The idea is to constantly stretch yourself beyond your current abilities. This requires you to identify those parts of performance that need to be improved, then work on them. For example, Tiger Woods drops golf balls into a sand trap, steps on them, then hits them out.

Great performers isolate very specific aspects of their game and work on just those things until they get better, then they move on to the next thing.

2) DP must be repeated a lot. But you must choose an activity that is just beyond your current capabilities. Then repeat. For example, Ted Williams would hit baseballs until his hands bled.

3) Get regular feedback from somebody who knows what they're talking about.

4) Expect a mental exercise. This is not mindlessly hitting tennis balls against a wall. It is identifying and focusing only on unsatisfactory areas and working to improve them. Famous violin teacher Leopold Auer told his students, "Practice with your fingers, and you need all day. Practice with your mind, and you will do as much in 1-1/2 hours."

5) It's hard. Seeking out what you're not good at puts you in an uncomfortable spot. But overcoming those situations makes the difference. The fact that it's hard will prevent most people from doing this, which will set you apart.

6) Before work: Set goals. Poor performers set no goals. Mediocre performers set general goals that are focused on a good outcome (win an order, finish a proposal). Excellent performers set goals that improve their own process of reaching outcomes.

7) During work: Observe yourself. Novice runners think about anything that gets their mind off of running. Elite runners focus intensely on their bodies by counting breaths and strides to maintain set ratios. At work it's called metacognition, or knowledge about your own knowledge. Top performers do this as part of their routine.

8) After work: Average performers tell themselves they did fine, great or poorly. The best performers judge themselves based on what they're trying to achieve. You must select a metric that is just beyond your current limits.

So where do you start? By asking what you truly want, and what you truly believe. The more you want something, the easier it will be to keep at it when it's difficult. And the more you believe that if you put in the work you will eventually perform at a high level, the better chance you have of making it real.

How To Recession Proof Your Job

2008-10-28T12:47:00.000-07:00

(the following is a summary of the HBR article "How to Protect Your Job in a Recession" by Janet Banks and Diane Coutu)

Lighten up. People prefer working with those who are easy to get along with, even over colleagues who are more capable but less friendly.
Look forward to a brighter future. Anticipate a state where things will improve.
Anticipate customer needs, both internally and externally. Make your contribution indispensable.
Become ambidextrous. Volunteer to take on more responsibilities.
Offer solutions to corporate leaders. Show why your department matters. Showing empathy for a leader improves your chances of keeping your job.
Unite and inspire colleagues. Revive spirits, get people talking to each other, have fun.
Become a good corporate citizen. Show up at the informal meetings you're used to skipping. Participate.
Get your ducks in a row. Revise your resume now. Make a list of contacts. Think creatively about your future. Make a Plan B that is better than your Plan A.

In tough economic times, INNOVATE!

2008-10-27T16:29:00.000-07:00

In an article by Kellogg School of Management's Professor Andrew J. Razeghi, the author urges people not to cut back on research and innovation during tough financial times, because these are the areas that are most vital to a company's survival. He cites many examples of product inventions that we now take for granted that came about during the Great Depression because smart and creative people discovered and catered to unmet needs. For example, Miracle Whip was invented during the Depression and marketed as a tasty new dressing to make vegetables and sandwiches more appealing during a time when meat was scarce and expensive. It outsold all other brands of dressing and mayonnaise within six months of its initial launch.

Razeghi's six tips for innovating through economic downturns are:

1. Listen to the market. It's quieter when it's less crowded. Unmet needs abound.
There is no better time to invest in user and market research!

2. Invest in your customers. Now they need you most. Loyalty hangs in the balance.
Offer all kinds of services to keep your existing customers loyal to you.

3. Rather than reduce price, offer more value to your customers and demand greater value from vendors.
Reducing prices for the sake of reducing prices only serves to negatively impact the perceived value of your product.

4. Increase communication with your customers.
Don't let up on advertising; studies have shown that it is critical to maintaining sales.

5. Move longer-term projects forward, not back. Now is the time to grab market share.
Improve product quality and invest in new opportunities that will help gain you market share while other companies lost market share by cutting innovation resources.

6. In recession, not all costs are created equal. Maintain or increase investment in "good costs," prune "bad costs," and use judgment on "it depends costs."
"Good costs" are marketing, innovation and customer quality. "Bad costs" are fixed and working capital, manufacturing, and general and administrative expenses.

This article (which you can download here) definitely helps to promote the creative industry as our jobs are to help companies communicate to and develop new products for its customers. Still, part of me wonders if there is data out there that suggests otherwise? Who wants to play Devil's Advocates and do a little more research?

Walter Kitundu and instrument innovation

2008-10-22T23:15:00.001-07:00

"I don't have a background in woodwork. I don't have a background in music. I just have a background in trying" Walter Kitundu

Nowadays we are used to see new and innovative musical instruments coming out from digital technology - think synthesizers, sound modules, samplers, etc. All very polished, very perfected, and with thousands of features to master if we want to take full advantage of its power.

What we are not so used to see is the creation of new musical instruments that come from a fresh mechanical remix of parts and acoustic principles of existing instruments. Enter the 'phonoharp': a mix of turntable, harp, dj mixer, resonance box, and analogue drum box.

It would take longer to try to describe how it sounds when it is played than to just hear Mr Kitundu playing this new breed of postmodern instrument. Not surprisingly, just a month ago the MacArthur foundation has awarded him one of its presitgious fellowships together with a half a milion dollars that will surely help him experiment with larger and more complex instruments that he has already sketched in his mind. Stay tuned.

Walter Kitundu demonstrating the PhonoKora
A KQED story on Walter Kitundu

Towards a Delicious Culture of Transparency

2008-10-21T09:09:00.000-07:00

Isn't it nice when you spot the leftovers in the back of the fridge wrapped with a thin spread of saran wrap and you realize, "Oh, it's the spaghetti with the delicious pasta sauce I made yesterday!"

Now imagine if that dish were either covered in a paper towel, aluminum, or better yet, dreadful styrofoam. Your thoughts might change to, "Crap. Must. Explore. Further." And then you rationalize how important it is to you at the time and either move the milk carton and OJ to see what's lurking or just leave it. Let's face it, mystery is fun, but only when its entertaining. Otherwise, it can be a frustrating nuisance.

Well, how about a new (more transparent) way to package some good ole' fashioned politics? Enter an industrial-sized roll of The Internet. I agree with A Huffington in that the web is changing the game of politics in two very distinct ways. One is that it's creating access, thus generating interest, to a generation of people who now head online for current events instead of buying a newspaper or watching TV.

The second, and more to the benefit, is that it's helping to establish a culture of participation and transparency. It's not at all perfect, but this election has employed a 'wiki' approach to fact check or provide a counterpoint to what the campaigns are saying via blogs, emails, and video on the web. The politics of before where lies were too much work (and possibly old news the next day) to chase down and verify by the media are coming to a close.

A Huffington mentions that, "Traditional media like moving on to the next shiny thing. But bloggers love revisiting a story." This has all but truly played out, for example, by the vast amount of user-produced video series on YouTube, highlighting the controversies, misleadings and obvious contradictions of the campaigns. Not to mention access to the syndicated debates and speeches one may have missed the night before.

Onwards towards a culture of transparency. The only way to build genuine trust is not so much by what people say, but by what they do. And if the people in public office behave in a more transparent way, this will bring back a trust in our government that hasn't been there for a while. Oh, and private companies, you're not out of this either. The same concept applies to you and your responsibilities to investors. The internet is coming for you.

Zara turns sales people into customer insight providers. (Did you hear this you user researchers?)

2008-10-20T10:48:00.001-07:00

Businessweek explains how Zara incentives store managers worldwide to provide meaningful insights about customer preferences to designers located in the factories in Spain. Surprise, surprise, it seems like commissions are the secret sauce that makes sales people bond with product development, something that in many companies is completely inexistent (sales people don't even know where prod dev people sit)

"Along the way it has broken almost every rule in retailing. At most clothing companies, the supply chain starts with designers, who plan collections as much as a year in advance. At Inditex, Zara store managers monitor what's selling daily—and with up to 70% of their salaries coming from commission, there's a lot of incentive to get it right. They track everything from current sales trends to merchandise customers want but can't find in stores, then shoot orders to Inditex's 300 designers, who fashion what's needed instantly."

Fail fast and fail often.. now from the mouth of a CEO

2008-10-20T09:52:00.001-07:00

"Our willingness to be misunderstood, our long-term orientation and our willingness to repeatedly fail are the three parts of our culture that make doing this kind of thing possible”

Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon [nytimes]

"Design thinking" makes it into the NYTimes

2008-10-10T10:06:00.000-07:00

It's a little strange (and doesn't necessarily help our reputation in the business world) that this article chose to share the story about the High-Tech CFO Action Figure to demonstrate what design thinking can do, but hey, the more people that know about us, the better....

Design in a downturn

2008-10-08T16:12:00.000-07:00

What happens to the design industry in a downturn? I am a little young to have much experience in this matter, but I recall having a terrible time trying to find a job after college in 2002 and ex-Sapient designers still grumble about how the creative team there was the first to be cut in the dot-com bust.

Perhaps, then, it is wise to follow the lead of certain design consultancies in opening up new revenue streams in order to decrease the risk of relying solely on in-house talent. Method Ventures is the VC arm of the SF-/NY-/London-based brand experience firm that buys equity in start-up companies in exchange for interesting and cutting-edge work. In a DesignWeek article, Chief Innovation Officer Chris Tacy affirms this business practice:

We realised that we could create a venture practice that provided the sort of design services that create the innovation and differentiation needed for start-ups. And we could do so in a manner that met their needs, would be affordable and which enabled us to find revenue streams not tied directly to head count.

Fahrenheit 212 takes a different approach with a royalties model: it puts

...up to two-thirds of our fees at risk, making them contingent upon the achievement of success. Our success is your success, and our reward is tied directly to very concrete, pre-agreed commercial milestones within the prescribed time horizon. These milestones are client-specific, typically mirroring the dates, gates and metrics of the company’s prevailing innovation best practice. This model…is about creating a seamless alignment of our client partners’ ambitions and our own. It ensures we run the project for success rather than cozy meetings. And it makes us the only innovation company on Earth that doesn’t get paid more the longer it takes to get somewhere.

I have written them to learn more about how this impacts their creative process and what kind of pre-engagement analysis is involved in scoping projects, and am waiting to hear back. (Anyone else know?)

Many other companies publish books, teach courses, and host events and conferences to bring in extra cash. IDEO additionally utilizes the vast body of architectural, anthropological, and sociological knowledge it has gained through research projects over the years to contribute to the tourism industry in its “IDEO Eyes Open” city guide series.

The (hidden) power of optimism

2008-09-24T15:27:00.001-07:00

"Perpetual optimism is a force multiplier"
Colin L. Powell, former U.S. Secretary of State

Always thought optimism was a very powerful perspective on life to have, specially for people who design and have to always apply constructive criticism in order to improve the current state of things.

But what I never expected is that a military guy would regard it as a valuable asset for the army to win wars. yikes

Don't let the engineers throw their products over the cubicle-wall to designers

2008-09-24T11:49:00.001-07:00

Businessweek has an article with a couple of interesting insights on the development of Google Chrome

Hold engineers accountable from end to end

“Clearly, Google is also rooted in engineering, but in its case neither technology nor aesthetics has a superior role. Instead, engineers are as invested in the design as in the functionality. As Rakowsi put it: “It’s an integrated approach where engineers are responsible from start to finish.” Such continuity ensures that aesthetics and functionality are one and the same. […]some designers might feel that they’ve been left out of the equation altogether, but the logic of the approach is hard to reproach.

Design decisions are not made based on people’s opinions

"A lot of our design is opinion driven but we do usability testing to make sure what we're doing is well received," said Pichai. "We don't go with something just because someone feels strongly about it, if the data says people aren't clicking on it."

(back to the) life in the woods

2008-08-22T10:59:00.001-07:00

No. I am not suggesting that anyone should spend two years by himself in the middle of a thick forest. The only thing I am saying is that lately I have been detecting more and more signs that indicate our culture is going back to our most primitive roots (obviously I am not taking into account the hyped eco-sustainability trend that everybody is trying to embrace, either because of fashion or money)

An example of this contemporary return is the eclectic Kimmo Pohjonen, a Finish artist who hacked an accordion with midi capabilities and delivers an astounding show of Earth Machine Music, a mix of avant-garde, folk, and natural roots :

"Finnish accordion adventurist Kimmo Pohjonen’s singular mission is to expand the capabilities, sound, scope, performance and experience of the accordion to levels never before attempted, seen or heard. Accordion, voice, effects, surround sound and light show combine to make a unique and captivating performance event.A visionary of boundless energy, Pohjonen’s roots go back thirty years in all forms of accordion music including folk, dance, classical, rock, experimental, theatre music and more."

Watch or listen by yourself Kimmo's sounds.

It is anger, and not fun, what drives innovation

2008-08-21T13:05:00.001-07:00

"Anger doesn't appear on many business plans and he feels this is a great shame because it's the most important emotion when looking to create a new product or service. The reason is straightforward: angry people approach a problem with more heightened feelings. They can then equate a solution to the problem with relief. If the answer leads to the end of anger, it's likely to be a winner in business terms."

"Product managers worrying about adoption curves for their new application should stop concentrating on features and look to the emotions and the experiences of their customers. Consumers change behaviour through anger. Skype, for instance, tapped into a general feeling in the market of "I'm angry at my telco"

http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail1877.html

PC Guy Hides in Pizza Box

2008-08-19T10:03:00.000-07:00

Apple's latest ads for Mac are pretty hilarious. Now that Vista has been out for a while, there's no arguing the issues it has with its operating system. Apparently Microsoft is planning another advertising campaign with the (appropriate) tagline of "Free the People". But it's going to take a lot more than $200M in advertising to try and convince people Vista actually works.

Funny enough on the Mac ads, the Apple guy doesn't even say much, it's mostly the PC guy looking ridiculous trying to make excuses or ploys to convince the audience there is hope.

Ah PC Guy, it's a hard sell...

The restless expats have now an official name: GNE (Global Nomadic Expatriates)

2008-07-22T10:28:00.001-07:00

[via frog blog] Tim Leberecht points at the qualities (as defined by a Mercer study) of these kind of people who can’t stay put for more than two years in once city and need more and more excitement as they burn stages in their life. Interesting to see its pros and cons.

The rosy I-am-a-citizen-of-the-world side:
"For GNEs, home is where they're going to, not where they're coming from. They move on for the sake of moving on, always on the hunt for the better opportunity, the richer cultural fabric, the more exotic and adventurous experience."

The not-so-glamorous side:
"The unhappiest people I know these days," writes Pico Iyer in The Global Soul, "are often the ones in motion, encouraged to search for a utopia outside themselves."

'Citizen User Research': turn every employee of your company into a user researcher

2008-07-02T11:06:00.001-07:00

Situation

[wikipedia.org] "Citizen science is a term used for projects or ongoing program of scientific work in which individual volunteers or networks of volunteers, many of whom may have no specific scientific training, perform or manage research-related tasks such as observation, measurement or computation.

The use of citizen-science networks often allows scientists to accomplish research objectives more feasibly than would otherwise be possible. In addition, these projects aim to promote public engagement with the research, as well as with science in general. Some programs provide materials specifically for use by primary or secondary school students. As such, citizen science is one approach to informal science education."

Significance

Citizen science leverages the enthusiasm of amateur science lovers to conduct very basic data collection tasks that simply require basic scientific skills and a personal interest to conduct
A lot of people within a company have in one way or another contact with customers/users and constantly gain insights on how are they using their products and/or services: sales, engineering, support, partners, etc..
Companies can use the same 'citizen science' concept for allowing all customer-interacting employees to contribute with their customer insights to a central repository, where these data will be available to anyone within the company who can act on it and turn it into an improvement or innovation.

Suspicion

As good as the citizen science model works for passionate amateurs: in which ways companies can incentive their employees to contribute with their customer insights?
Can a 'pay-per-insight' incentive model succeed without being abused?
How do you ensure insights quality if you are paying per amount of insights?

Self-teaching

BBC 4 Radio special on Citizen Science

Corporate Design Strategy defined (back in 1989)

2008-06-19T21:20:00.001-07:00

For some time now, I have been interested in finding out more about the practice of design strategy within corporations, from the point of view of the in-house strategic design team. More specifically I wanted to read about the differences, nuances, and constrains of applying the traditional design process that most design consultancies use nowadays in a corporate setting (with all the advantages and disadvantages this approach carries).

After much 'googling', I came across a New York Times article from 1989 titled 'Designing for profit'(1989) which, many years before the whole innovation hype sparked, had a very simple way to refer to the practice, and an even simpler (if not obvious by nowadays standards) definition for it:

"A few corporations have developed a ''corporate design strategy'' as a way of projecting the design of their full range of products three to five years into the future. The Xerox Corporation's design strategy, culminating in the most recent 50 series of copiers, has been a key factor in that company's dramatic recovery of lost market share. The model 1075, the first copier to come from this strategy in 1983, was one of the most successful products Xerox has introduced."

It's seems like 'Corporate Design Strategy' seems like a very suitable and descriptive name (quite aligned to its sibling 'Strategic Design Consultancy'), but confusingly enough, when you keep on searching for these keywords, you end up coming across many articles that refer to the practice of 'corporate [brand] design strategy', i.e. logotypes, imagotypes, and the way they are applied across media.

Can a professional practice mature and progress without a commonly agreed term that helps aggregate discussions among its members to define its boundaries? Remember the verbal wars fought in discussion boards between Information Architects during the Internet bubble days to see who was right about what really defined IA? Is there anything to be learned from this?

Two management mindsets: Producer and Director

2008-06-16T13:21:00.001-07:00

Situation

Yves Saint Laurent, the French couturier, died on June 1st. Like in many successful enterprises, the visible public figure is always the creative one and the behind-the-curtains person is always the one who has the business insights. The Economist obituary reads: "As it was, a series of innovations followed, with Mr Saint Laurent responsible for the designs, Mr Bergé for the business, including the scents, scarves, unguents and over 100 other products marketed with a YSL label."
In Raphael's "The School of Athens" painting, Plato is the "old, grey, wise-looking, bare-foot" who "gestures upward to the aetherial realm of his eternal forms". By contrast Aristotle, "in mature manhood, handsome, well-shod and dressed", "stretches his hand and indicates with his gesture the worldliness, the concreteness, of his contributions to philosophy"

Significance

A professor at IIT ID once mentioned the idea of splitting the figure of design project lead and creating the figures of director and producer. Like in the film business, the director would care about the vision of the project and the producer would coordinate activities to make sure the project stays on track, within schedule and with the right talent in place.

Suspicion

What are the reasons why it is so difficult to have both skills in one single person? Is it the time it takes to manage both streams? Is it because of the 'switching costs' of multitasking? Is this the reason why some of the brightest managers seem to suffer a case of acute schizophrenia?

After innovation, consolidation.. and then go back to innovate

2008-06-15T17:25:00.001-07:00

Situation

Apple's stated goal for OS X Snow Leopard: "Taking a break from adding new features, Snow Leopard — scheduled to ship in about a year — builds on Leopard's enormous innovations by delivering a new generation of core software technologies that will streamline Mac OS X, enhance its performance, and set new standards for quality. Snow Leopard X will focus on improvements of the OS"
Mozilla Firefox 3 development team has focused on stabilizing the innovative features introduced to Firefox: "Mozilla have gone back to basics and worked on what really matters to users — security, speed and ease of use ... Everything about Firefox 3.0 beta 1 is fast. The download package is small which means that it comes in fast, the installation is fast, the browser fires up fast, pages and tabs open fast, the browser shuts down fast, and the uninstall process is fast and painless.'"

Significance

Products can't be in an endless race to add features and functionality without looking at the quality of its products.
Interestingly enough, the companies/organizations that have managed to be bold enough to break the cycle are the ones that have better products and felt they could lose the lead if they overlooked the most basic advantage they had: the basic performance of their products

Suspicion

What are the companies that will be next to ignore the media and market pressure to 'be innovative' at any breakneck pace and choose to consolidate functionality and focus on making their products work better? Do these companies have to be companies that already are leading the pack in terms of product excellence or can they be second tier players that decide to take over?
Will Apple and Mozilla reintroduce revolutionary features in their next release? It seems like Firefox 4 definitely will...

Simplicity should not come alone

2008-06-07T22:53:00.001-07:00

Situation

Came across today an article that talks about how abstract/simple/minimal experiences have the tendency to be accompanied or adorned by surrounding artifacts to complete its significance. "Kodwo Eshun claim was (in his 1998 book 'More brilliant than the sun') that, as the sound became more abstract and impersonal, the obstensibly peripehral material that surrounded and packaged it - the sleeves, the titles, the online communiques - bore all the conceptual weight" [via The wire magazine, issue 285]

Significance

Products and experiences can be very cheap to create (made of simple elements) but at the same time be very meaningful for people as long as the concepts, emotions, and cultural values around them are valued by people and are holistically transmitted (by means of product semiotics, rituals, history, narratives, ads, accessories, etc..)

Suspicion

Will we ever see a completely dematerialized society where products have been reduced to its minimal form and 99% of its value comes from its surrounding intangible artifacts?

PS: don't ask me why but while writing this post I could not help thinking about Glenn Murcutt and his simple yet inspiring architecture

Aircrafts are the reason why Japanese car manufacturers are so successful!

2008-06-07T21:57:00.001-07:00

Situation

A special survey on aviation in this month's Monocle magazine has the following fragment: "Japanese car companies are entering this new field [aviation] for two main reasons: first, they already have invaluable in-house expertise because they hired thousands of brilliant engineers who could not work in the aircraft industry after the war. Most of the technological advances in the Japanese car business were due to people who used to build planes. Yutaka Kume, the president of Nissan in the 1980s came from the aircraft industry. So did Kenichi Yamamoto, who created the rotary engine for Mazda, and Shoichiro Irimajiri, who designed the first Formula One engine for Honda."

Significance

The secret sauce behind Toyota's engineering excellence was to bring talented engineers who were used to extreme levels of mechanical complexity and had no problem translating the manufacturing rigor from one industry to another

Suspicion

Couldn't American car makers snap some big brained engineers from one of the many billionaire Department of Defence contractors to get out of their crisis?

In-store cozy contextual experiences

2008-06-07T20:10:00.001-07:00

Situation

Aquarius records, a record store in San Francisco, has been regularly scheduling almost weekly free in-store concerts of bands that are touring the area or just happen to pass by the Bay Area. In most cases, these bands already have a concert in traditional venues in town, but somehow they feel like offering another, more intimate, type of concert that allows them to experiment and play without the pressure of a traditional concert. [via Aquarius mailing list]
Stupido, a record label and store in Helsinki Finland, also organizes free concerts in-store for followers of alternative Finish music. [via Monocle]
At a corporate level, Apple stores have a consistent program of workshops and events related or not to their products. The store's auditorium can host anything from a live performance of a band to a Photoshop tutorial, and are offered for free.

Significance

Now that recorded music is virtually 'free' and people are listening to more music than ever, the live music industry is expending beyond big arenas for superstars and small venues for alternative bands
Traditional events-only venues can't rival in terms of intimacy, context, and relevance with music stores where workers are more accessible, the experience is unique and, most importantly for 'the youth of today', costs nothing

Suspicion

What other industries are already following or will follow the same practice of bringing the core of a 'product' closer to its consumers in a more suited environment?
When will the major record labels start investing in small venues and offer boutique concerts of their multimillion dollar artists to offset the declining revenue of selling plastic?

Internet users' behavior: a zero-memory consciousness game

2008-05-26T09:50:00.001-07:00

Cory Doctorow gives in his blog a great example on what is the mode of thinking of internet users while surfing the web and how this has to be taken into consideration when trying to communicate or persuade them:

"[...] A friend who runs a small press recently wrote to me to ask if I thought he should release his next book as a Creative Commons free download in advance of the publication, in order to drum up some publicity before the book went on sale.

I explained that I thought this would be a really bad idea. Internet users have short attention spans. The moment of consummation — the moment when a reader discovers your book online, starts to read it, and thinks, huh, I should buy a copy of this book — is very brief. That's because "I should buy a copy of this book" is inevitably followed by, "Woah, a youtube of a man putting a lemon in his nose!" and the moment, as they say, is gone."

What are the implications of focusing on the now and on the external stimuli that invades our senses? Is the internet a medium that by definition can't make people reflect on a profound topic? Is the internet mainly a place where to look for instant gratification and stimuli?

Buy NAU before it's gone!

2008-05-05T10:08:00.001-07:00

When Nau came onto the fashion scene a few years ago, it appeared to be an even higher end, more exclusive PataGucci-type urban-outdoor hybrid fashion house, with an emphasis on urban style and sustainably sourced materials. Those of us who went to the compostmodern conference this year remember hearing Mark Galbraith, VP of Product Design, answer tough questions about why they grew their organic cotton in Turkey and manufactured their clothing in Thailand. (It turns out that Turkey is the world's largest supplier of organic cotton--a burgeoning industry initially launched by demand from companies like Nike and Patagonia--and that Thai textile companies were the first to develop ways to process organic cotton.)

What I wondered from the beginning, though, was whether Nau could survive with sustainability as its only real point-of-view. They attempted to come out with some unique designs, but weren't innovative enough in this department to justify the cost of their products. They sat the fence between functionality versus style, and with the slowing economy this ambiguity is likely a major cause of their failure to generate sufficient operating revenue.

Lucky for us, this means you can buy Nau's high-quality clothing made of recycled polyester and organic wools and cotton at half-off the original price, until they sell out. They only sell through their retail stores or online, so don't bother looking for their products at REI or Nordstrom.

In other eco-fashion news, Patagonia has uploaded the Footprint Chronicles, an interactive and informative module that provides transparency on the design, manufacturing and distribution of their products.

Behavior-inducing design

2008-04-03T12:12:00.000-07:00

Designers talk about wanting to design "intuitive" and "easy-to-use" products, but in many cases a great deal of value can come from designing products that teach new behaviors, or create new mental models. The invention of the QWERTY keyboard, for instance, has enabled the creation of a string of new communications tools in the last century, and has increased the pace and scope of communication. Everyone who remembers struggling through Reader Rabbit tutorials in elementary school will agree that mastering typing was no easy task, but we certainly have expanded our ability to communicate as a result of doing so.

But can you design for health and longevity? Artists/architects Arakawa and Madeline Gins seem to think so. Whereas most of us will take ourselves to the yoga studio or gym to stimulate the muscul0skeletal, vascular, excretory and other physiological systems that keep us healthy, they've designed housing that forces people to move in unusual--and often uncomfortable--ways. The uneven floors, the unconventionally-placed electrical outlets, and other challenging features effectively force your body to exercise strength, flexibility, and balance just to perform daily activities.

This project raises a plethora of questions, not the least of which concern safety, legality, and the cultural construct we call "home." As designers, how do we strike an appropriate balance between user-centered design and behavior-inducing design? What conditions are necessary for one or the other to succeed in the marketplace? In a world that is caught up with terms like "human-centered," "humanistic," "empathic," and "user-friendly," "intuitive" and "easy-to-use" may not always be the most desirable or significant attributes of what we create.

Craft, authenticity, and the future of design(ers)

2008-03-31T15:34:00.000-07:00

A recent conversation between me and my good friend Molly, an MFA student at CCA:

J.C.: Do you think there is a contradiction or paradox between the trend of people valuing craft and authenticity vs. the trend of democratization of high design? An example of the former would be wanting to buy Italian-made housewares because Italians are historically great houseware designers, or wanting to eat and buy whole food from farmer's markets. An example of the latter might be people who are willing to buy knock-offs of iconic products--the IKEA phenomenon, in a way.

M.A-B.: I don't think its a paradox so much as a challenge; people are trying to integrate the two. I think its about appropriateness, locality, human sensitivity. I think those things can be a part of democratized design. It's important to retain local culture and values without being overly nostalic about it

J.C.: So are you saying that to imbue these products with "craft and authenticity" is the challenge of the designer or the vendor?

M.A-B.: No. I don't think "imbuing" design is really right; I think if we value "authenticity" and craft we have to ask ourselves why--what are those things actually? What are the values in those things that we are looking to maintain and multiply? Is it diversity? Is it the low-tech usability? Is it sustainability?

J.C.: I guess what I'm trying to get at, at a more general level, is what kind of relationship, if any, do these two trends have? Are they correlated?

M.A-B: I think people are paying attention to the objects around them. My program has sort of taught us that the modern-day citizen is really looked at and treated only as a consumer. But people take pride and interest in their role as consumer; identity is all wrapped up in buying and owning and, as a result, people not only want to have a role in the things around them (hence DIY and craft), but they also want to be experts (hence democratized design). Plus, manufacturing is so cheap. The leaders in design are trying to figure out ways to integrate the two better--like nike's ID labs. And designers are building in variation into the manufacturing process.

But the real money is in services, so I'm told. You can't really make money off a product any more.

J.C.: Yes, Enric is always talking about "servicizing." It's true, just look at Flor carpet, Patagonia, etc.

M. A-B: Most ID [industrial design] people seem to think completely personalized ID products built on rapid prototyping machines are the wave of the future

J.C.: Which makes it both democratized design, as well as authentic, in a way--authentic to the consumer, for him- or herself.

M.A-B: Then, the question of the role of the "designer" comes into question. I think people still like brand (going back to identity issues).

J.C.: I think identity is how you combine brands and your own personal POV or remake of products. Ironically, at a meta level, all of this "eclecticism" (if we can call it that) starts to look the same.

M.A-B: It is pretty homogonized at this point. In his writings, Adorno talks about how, as new things are created, they are pulled towards the center, keeping everything much the same. I don't know if I completely agree with that. Maybe we're all just more accepting of differences, more accustomed to them. Identity is more subtle. That will be the tag line of my brand when it comes out! "Identity is more subtle."

J.C.: Yes, girlfriend.

Working online?

2008-03-27T11:34:00.000-07:00

The word has been going around and around that software would be going online and subscription based, or free, in the near future. This future is slowly becoming more evenly distributed. We all know about Google's apps and are starting to see Adobe and Autodesk come off the shelves and into the cloud with Photoshop express and Project Draw.

However, these tools don't leverage the richness of the online environment very deeply. In trying to replicate the functionality of their shrink-wrap ancestors, they have ignored many of the realities, let alone the possibilities, of working online. Google spreadsheets and gmail get it half right with the chat box in the window, but integration between google apps and gmail and calendar is shallow. The different parts of the "ecosystem" are strictly task centered, with little acknowledgement of the users' life outside of google land. Photoshop Express lets you upload to a few different photo sharing sites while the smart folks at picnik.com found a home in a real community of photographers.

Compiler asks, "Are you more loyal to a photo editing site, or a photo sharing site?" but I don't think it is a matter of loyalty. People stay with the things that match their values and needs. In the case of Photoshop Express vs Flickr w/picnik, I doubt that anyone will feel the need to add that step to their workflow on a regular basis.

photo by: Maggie's World

Art vs. Design

2008-03-12T07:43:00.000-07:00

In Loic Prigent's documentary "Marc Jacobs and Louis Vuitton," the fashion designer, an avid art collector, is quoted as saying something to the effect of, "I am always so inspired by what these artists are doing. Fine art is like a higher form--I think of fine art as being up here [indicating a level with his hands], and fashion as being down here."

Which brings back that hairy, age-old question of the distinction between art and design. The borders are fuzzy, and now Jacobs has applied a hierarchy to the two areas of practice. Perhaps what he is getting at about fashion (and, presumably, other design practices as well) being "down here" is the fact that it is constrained by the consideration of use, whereas art is free of such constraints. Yet from an interaction and product designer's perspective, fashion is far closer to art on the scale of art to design than the type of work I dabble in on a daily basis--and I do consider myself a designer. After all, much of what you see in haute couture is barely wearable, primarily expressions of an artistic mind (or a team of minds) that happens to make use of the human body.

At first I resented the fact that Jacobs' statement implied the subservience of design to art, but now I understand that both coexist is this hierarchy to serve different purposes. Design is functional and for people, and art is commentary on or reflections about people, for whoever wishes to engage with it. In my world of design, if it doesn't work--and, increasingly in our socially-conscious society, if it doesn't last--it doesn't matter how beautiful it is, it's not good design. In Jacobs' world, whether it works (is wearable and a manufacturable) is less important than whether it effectively and aesthetically conveys the thoughts and feelings of a particular person at a particular moment in time.

Disembodied Renaissance

2008-03-11T09:57:00.001-07:00

This is one of the best quotes I have come across lately that highlights the importance of collaboration, cross-disciplinary teams and communication. Bill Buxton, spot on, notes that given the increasing complexity of the world, complex design projects will be increasingly handled by teams of people who have backgrounds in a wide range of fields:

"There is no such thing as a Renaissance person anymore. We have to have a Renaissance team."

Remember... technology is with us so we can be more human

2008-03-06T09:37:00.001-08:00

John Maeda is participating in the Economist debate series, and in his opening statement, he makes a great reflection on what's the best use we can make of technology :

"Recognize simplicity as being about two goals realized simultaneously: the saving of time to realize efficiencies, and later wasting the time that you have gained on some humanly pursuit. Thus true simplicity in life is one part technology, and the other part away from technology."

What I liked about Maeda's statement is that he reminds us something that many seem to have forgotten: technology has to help us avoid the tasks we don't want to do so then we can focus our attention on what makes us happier (and here I am connecting happiness with freedom).

For example, what is the point on giving so much attention to all these social networking tools if at the end, we end up spending the whole day behind a computer, 'maintaining' our relationships with our 452 Facebook friends, poking and twittering them, and spending less and less time doing the activities that characterize us as humans?

[Edouard Manet "The picnic". 1862-63]

Globalization is actually GOOD for developed countries

2008-03-05T16:02:00.001-08:00

The economist shows the data that demistifies the 'globalization is bad for western economies' cliche used over and over by US politicians, specially when campaigning in the depressed Mid-West:

"European consumers (ie, all Europeans when they are shopping) are big winners from globalisation, which has delivered cheap imports, held
down inflation and kept interest rates low. Despite the fuss about China and India, the EU's share of world exports rose slightly between 2000 and 2006. What is more, two-thirds of Chinese exports involve foreign brands, a good chunk of which are European. Nor does a “made in China” tag mean big revenues for Chinese firms.

In a recent speech defending globalisation, the EU trade commissioner, Peter Mandelson, cited a University of California study into who gains when an iPod is sold in America for $299. Only $4 stays in China with the firms that assemble the devices, Mr Mandelson explained. $160 goes to American companies that design, transport and retail iPods. A similar pattern holds for many European products."

Will any democrat have the courage to bring this issue in the upcoming US presidential election?

Update on the Designers Accord

2008-02-26T17:33:00.000-08:00

The February Progress Report for the Designers Accord is out and my fears of this organization being merely a well-intentioned handshake between designers and affiliates are allayed. The list of guidelines has been stream-lined and a helpful introduction about carbon footprints from Natural Logic is a good starting point for fulfilling Step 4: Measure your carbon/greenhouse gas footprint and pledge to reduce it annually.

In other musings on sustainability, I found it interesting to see that, in a Levi's Store in Chicago's Wicker Park, their Capital E line of jeans made from organic cotton were integrated into the rest of the clothing display. The only indicator that they were eco jeans was the white-and-green Levi's label replacing the signature red label. A great example of how to effectively market (or not market!) green products.

The youth wants more urban, interactive and creative ways of amusement

2008-02-26T12:05:00.001-08:00

What Banksy started as a prank on Paris Hilton's last music CD has become a participatory distributed art movement that anyone can do: shopdropping ( or 'reverse shoplifting' as some define it). From the shopdropping.net web:

"SHOPDROPPING is an ongoing project in which I alter the packaging of canned goods and then shopdrop the items back onto grocery store shelves. I replace the packaging with labels created using my photographs. The shopdropped works act as a series of art objects that people can purchase from the grocery store. Because the barcodes and price tags are left intact purchasing the cans before they are discovered and removed is possible. In one instance the shopdropped cans were even restocked to a new aisle based on the barcode information."

Another example of urban amusement: The guys at Blast Theory created another hybrid urban virtual game few years ago that became quite popular at multimedia festivals around the world: Can you see me now?

And the latest and most popular one: "Improv Everywhere"'s Frozen Grand Central in the middle of NYC

Now that the city is the urban playground for all these modern activities, how traditional providers of amusement will react to that? Will we see a distributed Walt Disney embedded in the city?

Sharepoint and Facebook are now friends.

2008-02-20T17:55:00.001-08:00

There are a lot of challenges in this very interesting shift of enterprises becoming more web and mobility-centric. We are just at the beginning of businesses coming to grips and embracing concepts like social networking and mobility to be more productive, though they do come with the complex requirements of keeping company data secure.

However, more and more we are hearing of the shift in the way we communicate and how that is impacting the way we work, not only the way we live our personal lives. Philips, Intel, and now post merger Alcatel Lucent are publicly stating and developing strategies to develop offerings for the "dynamic enterprise".

The right offerings for this shift will be more transformational and less incremental; they will initiate behavior change in enterprises. More than ever, design is in a better position to help understand how people communicate and interact and imagine the future of work. Designers who leverage the social sciences into their work will provide the most value. So, let's step it up guys!

The vanishing Nike brand?

2008-02-19T22:43:00.001-08:00

A couple of weekends ago, I got hooked watching the North Carolina basketball game, amazed at how fast and flexibly these gigantic kids could play and jump. Later on, during a timeout, I realized how their pristine light blue uniforms had the very recognizable 'jumpman' imagotype on it.

No traces of the Nike word nor the famously trademarked swoosh. Just a simple abstraction of the silhouette of Michael Jordan about to dunk, evoking the perfect 50 he scored in the 1988 All Star dunk contest. How has this happened?

What started with a simple sponsoring of a sneaker, the famous Air Jordan I, has turned into a full-fledged brand, with so much presence that has managed to displace the omnipotent Nike. Other sportsmen, such as Stan Smith or Chuck Taylor, have given their name to sneakers in the past, but no company had dared to turn them into a full clothing collection across materials and product categories. Is the Jordan brand the first one to achieve this? More importantly, is it going to be the last? Probably not..

Nike's symbolic juggernaut presence has disappeared from the Basketball line, but if you pay attention to all their sponsored athletes, it is starting to play a secondary role visually speaking. Nike-sponsored Tiger Woods and his TW logo embody excellence and precision in golf. Lance Armstrong and the 10//2 logo, signing the date he was diagnosed with cancer, symbolizes tenacity and will to overcome difficulties. Roger Federer RF aristocratic serif logo symbolizes elegance and style.

If you think about it, is quite incredible no one thought about this before: why put so much effort and money on building a brand through an explosion of advertisements with cultural references and sports culture values when you can actually have the embodiment of the values, the best sportsmen themselves, be the brand?

And the question remains: Will the Nike swoosh ever disappear forever ever and leave its throne to a constellation of brands? If still in use, will it be exclusively used as a trump card when trying to introduce the company into sports in which they have not sponsored any legend? Will they ever buy Pele's image to create a football line?

Are we witnessing the dusk of Nike as we know it?

You might be a redneck if you click banner ads.

2008-02-18T20:05:00.000-08:00

[via apop henia] I always wondered who clicked on banner ads. There don't seem to be perfect data, but apparently "the 6% of the online population accounting for most of the click-throughs skews toward male Internet users ages 25 to 44 with household income under $40,000." I love the author, Danah Boyd's, beautifully politically incorrect hypothesis that, and I paraphrase, only dumb poor guys from the country click on banner ads. The best thing is the part of her hypothesis that says, and again I paraphrase, the same dumb people are the ones who meet up with strangers on social networking sites.

For most of us, this is no surprise. Nobody you know clicks on those idiotic epilepsy inducing things. You probably couldn't find anyone who does within a mile radius of your house, but there are probably at least one or two people making money off of them in your neighborhood.
The funny thing is, even though there is a lot of money being paid for clicks, these are not the clicks that most advertisers want. For instance. In meantime, other models of ad pricing are getting more traction.

Even though some are saying that this discovery has laid bare one of the biggest problems with online advertising, the real interesting thing to me is these people seem to actually be interested in the contents of banner ads. I have been known to fall for an especially funny or useful marketing ploy, but what is going on with these guys? They meet up with strangers online and then click a bunch of banner ads? I guess I never really thought about it, but I'm not surprised that the two activities are related.

How the 'strategy' and 'innovation' fad is changing not only job titles but also book names

2008-02-18T10:42:00.001-08:00

Nobody that is trying to sell cutting-edge knowledge and expertise (like independent consultants), wants to be perceived as 'yesterday'. So, when a fad is as hot as the current Innovation, Design Strategy, <insert the latest combo of words of your choice here> fad, it is inevitable that people will position their 'knowledge artifacts' to benefit the most from consumers' eagerness to jump into anything that bears these magical keywords.

Last example, Indi Young's new book:
Originally, as it is described in Adaptive Path's page, her book was titled "Alignment Diagrams: Product Design for Real-life Activities"

New name? You guessed it right: "Mental Models. Aligning design strategy with human behavior"

Obviously she is not the first one to do so. Don Norman already did it with when 'redesigned' the title of "The Psychology of everyday things"

Made to Order Mobility

2008-02-13T11:25:00.001-08:00

Another brick crumbles for the walled garden.

zzzPhone, a US-based startup, is selling phones where you select the features and then get them within 15 days. Is it perfect? Hell no, but it is opening up the business model for device manufacturers and will impact carriers. There's no way the carriers can continue in their current model and there will be a tipping point soon where, if they don't adapt to these changing conditions, they will ultimately lose in the market.

Keep in mind the 700 MHz auction, $G,000,000,000,000gle, and what these two things working together can do.

Data, data everywhere.

2008-02-12T21:12:00.000-08:00

The folks at attentiontrust.org know that, "What we do online increasingly represents who we are." The issues of ownership and privacy are daunting, especially when dealing with data like health-care history, but that is a short term problem. Privacy will have to be figured out because here is no holding back the flood of personal data. Companies want it too badly. The real question is, once we have it, what will we do with our personal information?

The problem is we are all essentially illiterate in terms of personal informatics. Pioneers like Feltron are trying to make sense of what has gone beyond info-overload, but it still doesn't seem very actionable. The prophetic types at iA Japan are predicting an "infolution" that will take us into web 3.0, but they don't say what that will mean in people's everyday lives.

Similar to the way that social networks like twitter and dopplr let us channelize and streamline communication online, we will need the tools to help us understand our personal and social information so that it can be useful to us, not just to Google and Amazon. Visualizations are an obvious (and cool) first step, and the infrastructure is being built, but real tools are the future.

Got any good ones?

UPDATE: I just found a highly related link here, with some google account data horror stories to boot.

Gaining and Losing Services

2008-02-06T09:23:00.001-08:00

Now that the whole economy is ‘servicizing’, Financial Times highlights a study on how the crisis is impacting the service industries.

"According to ISM, only three services industries - utilities, educational services, and professional, scientific and technical services – registered growth in January, with the remaining 14 experiencing a contraction. These included construction, financial services, healthcare, and agriculture. Overall, it marked the first contraction in the ISM’s survey of the services industry since March 2003, when the Iraq war began"

It is interesting to see that the services that will sustain growth are related to the knowledge economy (with the exception of utilities) and innovation, and the shrinking ones are related to dispensable activities or activities that support the growth of the economy or are the symptoms of extra money to spend by society (better spaces to live, better health, better and healthier food,etc.).

This study resonates with the experts who are encouraging companies to invest more in innovation now in order to soften the landing and speed up recovery. Will the companies listen?

Why need-finding design is important right now

2008-02-01T17:17:00.001-08:00

"Imagination is the only thing is limiting now what we can do with technology"

In addition to this insight, Azim Premji, CEO of Wipro, a $5 Indian IT consulting services company, offered 8 lessons related to leadership when addressing the employees of SAP Labs in Palo Alto:

Ask a lot of yourself and others including colleagues and boss
Respond, don’t react. Respond gives you a different mindset and being forward thinking
Trust your intuition
Team work is key
Innovate continuously
Listen to customers, uncover hidden messages and emerging trends. Customers may not know them themselves
Social vision: Social responsibility, social conscience
Play to win: Excellence is a habit, not an act

Motorola spin-off of mobile business?

2008-02-01T10:42:00.001-08:00

Motorola is considering a "structural realignment" to spin-off its mobile device business. The article mentions that Motorola's main problem is its inability to come up with something new to follow the one-hit wonder Razr. If it does, in fact, move in this new direction, Motorola should consider two things.

The first is to structure the organization so there is a sustainable creation of value; this means using design and design thinking to help explore and expand growth opportunities. The second is to think more systemically about its design. Let's face it, after getting my iPhone, I've never thought twice about the horrible user interface on the Razr phone. Motorola took the design only so far. Kind of like an attractive person with ugly teeth.

No doubt the Razr introduced a new dimension to what's possible with industrial design on handsets, but it needs to put as much emphasis where a product's personality really comes to life: the user interface.

Adapting Google usage for checking grammar

2008-02-01T00:10:00.001-08:00

I never had the feeling I was the only one, but somehow I never thought it would be so common. Yes, more people you imagine use google as an English grammar-checker. If Microsoft Word sometimes can't get the grammar on your document correct by means of rules, how does Google do it? By taking advantage of a massive indexed database of English language.

Type the sentence you are unsure about and depending on the amount of results, you will know whether more people have use it in the past (thus most likely grammatically incorrect) or whether what you are writing is pure and creative grammar-fiction. When unsure about two sentences, you can compare them with web app not belonging to google: Googlebattle.com.

When looking for new products, designers always look at alternative ways people use tools so they can be studied and perfected. How long it is going to take before Google adds grammar check to their google docs and completely makes Word obsolete?

update: I just found a website that demonstrates how bad MS Word's grammar checker is. Here a token:"[Microsoft Word] is so bad that I am surprised that it is even being offered and I question the ethics of including a feature that is this bad on a product that is so widely used."

Does the "Secret Sauce of Change" have anything to do with age?

2008-01-31T16:23:00.001-08:00

Here's a quick article on a California court case regarding age discrimination at Google. Does Google really put more emphasis on things like an employee's age to build a high performance culture that fires on all cylinders? It's interesting to debate how much age plays a factor in an organization's ability to adapt, refresh, or shed its skin. After all, instrumenting change is all about people. And Google is no exception. Read more...

More signs of a Peter Pan society

2008-01-28T22:02:00.001-08:00

How it is reflected in the market the fact that many people still live with their parents beyond their 30th birthday, want to have a 'living apart together' relationship, or just prefer to lock themselves inside their room and play, play, and nothing but play?
How about this:

adult designer toys and flashy apparel that can sell for up to few hundred dollars
parties full of people well beyond their 'young-adultness'
Hollywood movie blockbusters based on comic book characters
entertainment where protagonists behave like 8 year olds
...

It strikes me as very ironic that such things are becoming so popular and so mainstream right when population is becoming older and older, and some experts even advent the coming of the Gerontocracy!

What will happen once the baby boomers and the 'silvers' decide to exercise their purchasing power? Will all companies start to look at them instead of the Peter Pans? Will we finally see pimped street golf-carts in our streets driven by young lads with pink shorts and white-dyed hair?

In times of crisis... spend more

2008-01-26T12:27:00.001-08:00

I am not the one who says it. I have read it from two different fronts in the last days:

Bruce Nussbaum has hammered repeatedly in the last weeks his 'business' readers with advices on what CEOs should not do, in the more than probable event of a recession in 2008.

To-not-dos

Fire talent
Cut back on technology
Reduce Risk
Stop new produce development
Boards replace growth-oriented CEOs with cost-cutting CEOs
Companies retreat from Globalization
CEOs replace innovation as key strategy
Performance metrics are changed
Hierarchy is reinforce over collaboration
Retreat into walled castles

Summary: put more efforts, and money, on innovation.

And he finishes the article mentioning the uber-referenced Apple as the ultimate example of a company that survived the last recession (early 00s) with more innovation. Not that I am against the example, but maybe I would appreciate more data points to support his 10-point list.

Usually, I take everything Nussbaum writes with a pinch of salt. My impression from reading him for the last years, is that he has the tendency to exaggerate, and talk in absolute terms to reinforce the impression that he has a point of view of an expert and he is confident about everything he says ('perception is reality' is key when you are in the business of selling yourself as speaker by means of just words in a blog).

But, my personal consideration of Nussbaum got completely restored when I read today that Robert Barro, acclaimed economist from University of Columbia, recommends exactly the same: in times of war, recession or disaster, the worst thing governments can do is to increase taxes. Instead, what they have to do is to temporarily increase public spending (without increasing taxes) and avoid the temptation to spend less in times of economic hardship. This recipe, Barro advices, will help nations cope with recessions with greater success.

Million dollar question: What economics books has Nussbaum been reading lately?

Organizatonal lessons from Nokia

2008-01-24T18:17:00.001-08:00

[via consultaglobal] McKinsey's has an interview with Jarkko Sairanen, Nokia's former VP of Corporate Strategy, where he talks about how the company is structured to foster innovation. Here some pearls I thought were interesting:

There is no magic formula. Innovation can't be operationalized
Go for platforms not just products
Don't try to control everybody in the company. They are smart enough: let people take decisions.
Everybody in the company (inner and extended) should be involved in talking and discussing strategy
Grow in-house your own competitors of the future before they threaten you from outside

It obviously can't be operationalized, but you can surely describe what makes it innovative: the right pieces (people) in place (structure) and the right rules (processes). And who decides all this? the leaders of the company.

Thus, who are you going to blame next time a company comes up with the 'ipod of cars'?

a life of 'voluntary simplicity'

2008-01-23T09:26:00.001-08:00

Last Saturday at the Compostmodern 08 conference, I heard for the first time the technical term for living a simple life, with less stuff but better stuff: 'voluntary simplicity'.

To me, it was surprising that some had coined such a serious name for such appeased lifestyle. It is interesting to observe how the naming and labeling of movements help them spread so much quicker than undefined or ambiguously branded movements.

Think about the music movements for a moment: once you can label 2 or 3 music bands that have similar style with a unique label (think 'Nirvana + Soundgarden + Pearl Jam = Grunge music = the soundtrack of Generation X) you immediately have an abstract labeling entity that people can attach themselves and their personality to (and they can talk about it and spread it in a more agile way).

So considering the gradual increase of meme-ability of the Simple Life:

What will happen to the consumer markets if the voluntary simplicity or simple living, catches among people?
How the companies who are in the business of selling a lot of stuff will react to people demanding less stuff? What role will design play in this transformation?
Is there a connection between the simple life (less stuff but also sharing stuff) and the transformation of western societies from 'industralized' economies to 'servicized' economies (the private non-good producing industries account for approximately 70% of total economic activity in the US)?

the holy trinity of design (axioms)

2008-01-21T15:01:00.001-08:00

As a premiere of the new tag 'Imaginatory', which will capture insights and thoughts about envisioning change by means of design, here 3 design axioms from the Stanford professor that teaches the local-famous course ME310 where students have to create paper bicycles, Mark R. Cutkosky:

Design is a social process (Ignore it at your peril!)
All design is redesign
Designers need to preserve ambiguity

Do designers only collaborate with the military on camouflage?

2008-01-20T09:56:00.001-08:00

Accidentally, I have come across a very aesthetically interesting and surprising example of a designer who has collaborated with the war industry:

Around World War I, Norman Wilkinson, a British artist, made an important contribution to camouflage, by creating disruptive visual patterns to erase the outlines of a ship's form and confound the torpedoes of enemy submarines. This technique is known as dazzle camouflage.

Wilkinson's work reminds me of Jay Doblin,who not only designed camouflage for the military, but also got a certificate from Pratt Institute for completing a 'course in Military Tactical Camouflage'.

Is there a pattern of collaboration between designers and the military? Have they limited their collaboration to just camouflage throughout the history of conflict?

Bucky Fuller on beauty

2008-01-19T10:37:00.001-08:00

"When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem.
But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong"

Buckminster Fuller

Different motivations to encourage reuse of mobile phones

2008-01-18T09:10:00.001-08:00

Jan Chipchase just posted a note and a picture on giving mobile phones a second life, and immediately I connected it to the plastic bag giveaway from 'cellphones for soldiers' I found inside the amazon.com box the last time I order a book.

It is basically a 'cellphone recycling program' and its mission is to 'help our troops call home' by sending mobile phones to wherever US troops are (Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran?).

Unlike the examples given by Jan ( Collective Good and Greenphone ) which are appealing at people sensitivity to climate threats, 'Cellphones for Soldiers' is appealing to US patriotic sentiment and solidarity with the soldiers who are so far away from their beloved mothers and motherland.

What other non-ecology related motivations would mobilize people to contribute to use less resources globally?

Who will teach Design Thinking in the future?

2008-01-17T15:56:00.001-08:00

Now that design thinking is hotter than ever, and people with this skill are in high demand by all I-want-to-be-innovative companies, it is probably the right time to think, who will fulfill the demand of training professionals with such skill?

Right now design schools (think about ID, d.school, CCA, etc.) have the knowledge (and brand) exclusivity on the skill. They claim to have the best intellectual natural fit to teach it and feel quite confident they are in a fantastic position to take economic and intellectual advantage of this new fad.

But what about business schools that have to satiate the thirst of MBA students that suddenly want to be as creative as the hippie design students they used to dismiss not so long ago so they can become the 'innovators of the future'? With their fat budgets and their attention to market demands, business schools have already started to put together programs that combine business knowledge and creative knowledge - a few examples I have come across: Zollverein School, 180 Academy, Rotman's MBA in Business Design, and many more.

With the budgets they manage (specially the big ones) and with so much competitiveness in the business school market, there is no doubt that if they are not there today (because they don't have the right talent or the mindset), they will surely be there in the next years, with very powerful programs and attracting all the business suits that dared to hesitate between going to an artsy design school for their master (let's face it, not classy at all in your business resume) or going to a habitat that feels more natural to them which is no other than a business school.

Premortem vs Postmortem : Fixing problems before they occur

2008-01-15T10:00:00.001-08:00

Usually when a project wraps up, a postmortem exercise is done with the goal to anlayze what went well and what went wrong. Quite useful, but only as a learning for projects that are coming up, not for the one just completed.

So what about being preventive rather than reactive? Why note do an exercise in anticipating a project weaknesses? That's what Gary Klein calls a Premortem:

"A premortem works like this: When a team gathers to kick off a new project, people conclude the meeting by pretending to gaze into a crystal ball. They look six months into the future, and the news is not good. Despite their hopes, the project has failed. Then team members take three minutes to run a mental simulation. They write down why they think their work derailed. All sorts of reasons emerge."

Read the rest of the article on Gary Klein [ Fastcompany.com ]

Post from mobile

2008-01-15T05:42:00.001-08:00

Just testing how easy it is to post from a blackberry. I am also wondering how different the on-the-go posts will be from the traditional desk-posts? How the context of being in transition and in an unfamiliar environment influences the posting themes?

I foresee that desk-posts are going to be more reflective (more time to spend thinking about it), with internet-based content (because of richer connectivity) and more analytical (richer input interface),
whereas the on-the-go posts are going to be more about context-related inputs and shorter posts (limited multi-tap blackberry keyboard).

The lifeblood of free markets

2008-01-14T10:16:00.001-08:00

Marketing and Business have been always about pleasing people. The only thing that happened is that many people got caught up with making business efficient and operationally perfect, forgetting the reason of their existence.

That's how Harvard defines Marketing (bold is mine):
"Marketers concern themselves with acquiring and retaining customers, who are the lifeblood of an organization. They attract customers by learning about potential needs, helping to develop products that customers want, creating awareness, and communicating benefits; they retain them by ensuring that they get good value, appropriate service, and a stream of future products. The marketing function not only communicates to the customer, but also communicates the needs of the customer to the company. In addition, it arranges and monitors the distribution of products and/or services from company to customer."

I happen to read this Metacool post as I am reading Sala-i-Martin's book "The Liberal economics for noneconomist and non liberales" where he stresses the value of free market as an environment where a company that tries to make their customers happy (i.e. give them what they need/desire/crave for) succeeds, and the one that does not just plainly disappears because is 'useless' for society.

The battle for the name of the next big business competency

2008-01-14T09:46:00.001-08:00

Some call it "Design thinking" but Roger Martin, in a move that clearly tries to position Rotman as a a Business school with a signature approach related to innovation, is calling it Integrative Thinking, both in his book "The Opposable Mind: How Successful Leaders Win Through Integrative Thinking" and on this winter again in the Rotman Magazine issue "Thinking about thinking".

In these times of change and shift in the business milieu, which will be the term that will stick in the years to come?

Innovation is not only about being smart. It's about courage

2008-01-11T02:36:00.001-08:00

I have seen this written somewhere else a couple of times: in order to create great new things is not enough to have the skills to create them. You also have to want to create it: you need the drive, the courage, and the will to realize it.

And now I come across Maeda's entry on being creative, existing and having the guts to express yourself and taking the risk.
"Creativity is courage. The world needs more fearless people that can influence all disciplines to challenge their very existence. Creativity is reflection aimed not at yourself, but at the world around you."
http://weblogs.media.mit.edu/SIMPLICITY/archives/000494.html

Larry Keeley said it also during a class last year at ID:
“If you want to be great at innovation, notice things before others, commit to them before others, and know the consequences down the road. It’s about courage.”
http://brandingandinnovation.typepad.com/branding_and_innovation/2007/11/more-keeley-ism.html

On context, change-influencers, and artifacts

2008-01-10T04:05:00.000-08:00

How changes in our context affect our future behavior?
What is the scope and scale of these changes, and its effect on us?
How people perceive, react and adapt to these changes by means of artifacts and artificiality(design)?

These are just some questions that guide my perception and my consciousness, and here is where I will annotate discoveries and surprises around it.
welcome.