Author: Victor

In Tillie’s, Fort Greene, Brooklyn

“Hey Man”
“Hey, how’s it going?”
“Good good. You know, I’m sorry to bother you, but I’ve been watching what you’re doing and it looks wild. What is that?”
“Oh, I’m sort of drawing a piece of software.”
“Drawing it? Is that how you do it?”
“Well ya, I draw what it’ll look like, and someone else makes it work.”
“How much of it do you have to draw?”
“Well, it depends. In this case, I’m drawing every screen.”
“Every screen?! Man, that is crazy, that is so far out. I didn’t know people did that. Draw every screen. Man, that’s something. Why do you do it that way?”
“You know, I’m not sure.”
“It’s kinda like an architect. Like you’re drawing a building. But I thought, you know, people just programmed and whatnot and that’s all you had to do.”
“Yeah. Yeah, that would be cool.”

Published
Categorized as Process

Concept: The Food Guide

restaurant.jpg

At the most expensive and sophisticated restaurants, the service tends to be the same as in a diner, just more refined and thorough. But it could be quantitatively different. Elite restaurants feature exotic ingredients and preparation that require an experienced fork and palette to appreciate, expertise many of us don’t possess and for which the menu and momentary description by the server doesn’t suffice.

Enter the Food Guide. In addition to the conventional service, a food guide would join you at the table and guide you through the meal. She would describe the chef’s philosophy, where the ingredients originated, how the meal was prepared, how to eat it, what tastes to tune in, etc. At this level of restaurant, the patrons have no presumption of conducting business or chit-chat; the food is the focus and the restaurant provides a food-centric experience.

If Da Vinci Blogged the Mona Lisa

Comments

Cool! But the background looks all messed up. Is it done yet?

—

The model looks a little schizo — happy and menacing at the same time. Can you fix the smile?

—

yo leo, what’s with the green thing jutting out of her head?!?!

—

Cheap baby furniture. Cheap meepit furniture for neopets. Cheap wicker furniture. Cheap micro-suede furniture. Cheap furniture. Cheap sex furniture. Cheap garden furniture

Why I’d Like to See the 37Signals Urinal

37Signals and Don Norman had a tiff recently, with the lads from Chicago saying they design for themselves first and the Don saying, essentially, That’s not design, Martelli. That’s masturbation. (Whitney has the links).

This strikes me as an argument for gentlemen farmers. What most of us experience most of the time, I was thinking recently in the men’s room here at my client’s office, is poor design. ‘Do I want to stand next to another man as he is urinating?‘ I thought, ‘Does the architect of the bathroom want that?‘ Of course not. Ideally I’d like the architect to design for me. But if I have to accept the design he creates for himself, that would probably still be a better experience than what some administrator has specified.


Update: Just heard Phillip Hunter from SpeechCycle last night who told a familiar tale. As a purveyor of interactive voice response systems, he made it clear the speech recognition technology isn’t the obstacle to improving these systems. And they have lots of great ideas for improving customer service like personalization based on your geographical location or your past calls. The obstacle is the clients. ‘Everyone knows how to talk, so everyone thinks they know the best way to design these interactions.‘

Perhaps what we need is not arguments over what design process to employ but rather better ways of dealing with clients. Everyone I know, despite differences in their process and philosophy, goes through pretty much the same client review cycle. Why not try something else? For example, grab a couple key people from the client and embed them in the design team in the design team’s environment.

Published
Categorized as Design

Concept: Ambient Light-Powered Smoke Alarm

Smoke alarms have saved thousands of lives in the United States since their introduction and widespread use during the past 2 decades. The good news is that more than 90% of homes in the United States now have at least 1 smoke alarm.1 The bad news is that a substantial proportion of those smoke alarms do not work. In on-sitesurveys of homes with smoke alarms, about 25% to 30% of the alarms did not function when tested.2 Some failures are due to malfunction of the alarm itself, some are due to a dead battery, and some do not function because the battery has been removed.

— Smoke alarms and prevention of house-fire—related deaths and injuries

If dead batteries are a problem, we could power them using solar panels and ambient light. The current panels probably aren’t efficient enough yet, but that’s improving.

Ambient Light-Powered Smoke Detector

Most Designers Really Think They’re Dentists

Most designers really think they’re dentists. If the designers are sitting there and they’ve got the stakeholders in the room – the CFO, the CIO and the CTO and the CEO – and one of the clients says: “Boy, my jaw is killing me”, the designers will immediately say: “I can have a look at that!” “Really?” “Yes, I’ll invent something! We’ll get that molar out of your jaw in no time!”

That’s what I, as a science fiction writer, find most attractive about designers. They don’t primly say “I only do plastic consoles” — because that’s not what they do.

from Bruce Sterling — A Conversation About Turin

Published
Categorized as Design

Looking for Examples of Digital Design Concept Processes

I’m storyboarding away and working on a section about design concepts: examples and processes for making them. This write-up of the Chamr concept process is a good overview, and I’m looking for more in case you know of any.

In a nutshell, the Adaptive Path team started with research, then expressed important principles and major user activities to design for. Then they brainstormed hundreds of ideas and filtered them. Then one team member offers a new idea that nails it. I’m guessing the team so thoroughly internalized the research and constraints by this point in the project that they could evaluate a new idea quickly, in addition to recognizing the sexiness of it.

Charmr

Later… There isn’t much online, perhaps because the most mature examples are from non-digital design fields such as industrial design, architecture, and digital art. I have some hypotheses about why there’s little conceptual design in the software world, but they’re still half-baked.

Published
Categorized as Process

Tyler Brûlé on Starting Up

Tyler Brule at CEBit

Some facts about his new start up:

  • No research
  • No focus groups
  • No creative conflict
  • No eating at your desk
  • No PowerPoint presentations to clients
  • No walls
  • No freebies
  • No user generated content

Photo, link courtesy John Maeda

Happy Birthday Noise Between Stations

This here blog turns 9 years old tomorrow. Quantitatively speaking, she’s got 2,041 posts, 590 comments, and 130 categories. Checking the PageRank, it’s a 6, the same as generalmills.com, whatever that means.

Published
Categorized as Blogs

People — Rather than Things — at the Centre of Work

The Harvard Business Review continues to support Gary Hamel’s ideas on management innovation, most recently with a summary inviting readers to contribute their thoughts on the subject. I’m eager to see the response. I think Hamel has a strong argument, yet the topic doesn’t have a handle that’s easy to grasp. “Alright, it’s clear we need to make management more innovative. Now what do we do?” My guess is management innovation will be the outcome of the causes Gary cites, tangible things like collaboration via wikis or recruiting talent on social networks.

Theodore ZeldinI do like the quote from Theodore Zeldin, a British historian of work, who says “the world of work must be revolutionized to put people–rather than things–at the centre of all endeavors.” This isn’t a new message, humanists have been talking about it since the 1920’s or 30’s, but perhaps now information technology will overcome the thing-centered work of the industrial age.

Entrepreneurs: Beware of Big Liabilities

The Zollverein School in Essen, Germany was a great hope for the business design field, starting the first MBA of its kind in Europe. But this newspaper story lays out a tale of caution for anyone starting a venture like this. In short, it seems the gorgeous new building they constructed to house the school has become a real estate liability. Even with taxpayer funding, the operating costs are a burden.

The dot com downturn of 2001 sank some firms like Scient but not others like Razorfish. The difference wasn’t client base or capabilities (or even the fact that I was working at Razorfish :), it was real estate liabilities. Scient invested in a lot of expensive offices whereas Razorfish put their spare cash in the bank for a rainy day.

Let’s hope the Berlin C-School — through partnership with Steinbeis University — avoids this issue.

“Don’t own nothin’ if you can help it. If you can, rent your shoes.” — Tom Peters Forrest Gump

Summary Summary: The Dip — Be the Best in the World

Graph from Seth Godin's book The Dip plotting effort against reward. There's a small initial reward, a long hard slog, then a giant reward for being the best.

The Dip by Seth Godin describes a personal approach to achievement by following a strategy of quality in a world of micromarkets. I’ve read the summary and have tried to further summarize it:

  1. You start by finding a micromarket where you can be the best in the world, whether it’s personal financial planning for new parents in Brooklyn or “gluten-free bialys available by overnight shipping.” What constitutes “best” and “the world” is in the eye of the customer, not you.
  2. Then you work long and hard to be the best in that micromarket, which will involve slogging through “the dip” where reward is low and effort is high.
  3. Along the way you need to be careful to “quit the stuff where you can’t be the best. That leaves you the resources to invest in getting through the Dip.”

That’s the functional summary, you’ll have to read the book to be inspired.

Published
Categorized as Career

Konigi Launched

My friend Michael recently launched Konigi, a site for researching websites. It’s perfect for those times when you’re designing a feature and you want to review all the prior art. There’s screenshots and screencasts and a bunch of community features, but Michael has a lot more interesting things planned, it’s worth keeping an eye on.

Konigi

Digital Service Design: A User Story, and An Overview

Here’s a story of how someone might wind up needing this book, and a one-page overview of it all.

Read this doc on Scribd: The Right Idea 02