Noise Between Stations

Victor

  • “Designer” of the year

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    2 min read

    Shaggy at Core77 reports that the Design Council’s Hilary Cottam has won the Design Museum’s (UK) 2005 Designer of the Year award and the resulting controversy around her selection. It illustrates the confusion and emotion possible when designers of the intangible mix it up with the traditional sort. The Observer reports two points. One is…

  • Design –> Business –> Culture

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    1 min read

    Fund culture Seen in the Vitra store in Manhattan.

  • More intelligent design blogs

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    1 min read

    Fast Company cited Noise Between Stations as one of seven smart blogs worth following for the latest insider thinking from the design world. Grazie! Link courtesy of Diego.

  • Business, design and class

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    1 min read

    This New York Times app allows you to determine your class based on your occupation, education, income and wealth. It looks like a “management analyst” is three times classier than a designer. Let’s ponder that and how business designers should be positioned to exert influence in organizations.

  • Kelly Johnson’s Rules for Skunk Works

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    3 min read

    I’m doing research on high-performance teams that can evolve how they work to changing environments. I see it in the best designers, agile programmers, engineers and others. And I’m not too surprised to see it in Skunk Works, a book about the famous Lockheed Advanced Development Projects group. The man who ran the group during…

  • Refresher on critical thinking

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    1 min read

    Stever Robbins pens a critical thinking refresher in the new HBS Working Knowledge… Make sure you understand the logic behind your decision. Identify your assumptions and double-check them. Collect the data that will support or disprove your assumptions. Deliberately consider the situation from multiple frames. Remember the people! Think short and long term.

  • Product instinct & venture capital

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    3 min read

    I had a great conversation with Phi-Hong the other day about how despite our having seen the insights and risk management that user research can achieve, some companies seem to do just fine without it, thank you very much. Apple’s product design, the early Google, much of Amazon.com. While teaching others the product development process,…

  • Options for Ground Zero

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    1 min read

    The architectural planning for Ground Zero in New York serves as a good example of where design thinking could have helped. Paul Goldberger’s recent New Yorker article, “A New Beginning: Should Ground Zero be Used for Housing?” (unfortunately not online) describes the emotional situation four years ago when it failed to occur to anyone that…

  • Stealth research & development

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    2 min read

    I’m reading Skunk Works, a book about the famous Lockheed Advanced Development Project that has an amazing record of innovation. It reveals the source of the F-117’s stealth technology not as an American invention, but as an idea that was passed from scientist to scientist for a century. The idea centers on calculations describing how…

  • Authentic Brands

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    1 min read

    My recent post about brand layering reminded me of something Kevin Fong mentioned at the ID Design Strategy conference. Companies like Polaroid and Westinghouse are now renting out their brands to other manufacturers, while the parent company puts an ironic layer of marketing frosting on top: “You can be sure… if it’s a Westinghouse.” Um,…

  • Brand Layering vs. Customer-Made

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    2 min read

    Last Saturday I sauntered into Urban Outfitters to see what they were selling these days. Their inventory is pretty edgy and feels like a bellweather of what fashion is moving from the lead users to everyone else. I was drawn to this line of relaxed suit jackets, which mix business and design in a way…

  • Lawrence Lessig on innovation vs. the law

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    1 min read

    Lawrence Lessig’s recent speech, Clearing the Air About Open Source actually focuses more on the war between innovators and those that profit by impeding innovation: lawyers, lobbyists, and the companies that employ them. He illustrates how the courts are used to litigate companies into bankruptcy, how companies like Microsoft are hiring boatloads of lawyers to…

  • Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare (ISEW)

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    2 min read

    I was exposed to the ISEW by Josephine Green of Philips at the ID Design Strategy conference. She struck me as the female John Thakara: highly intelligent and morally scolding, and dropping in your lap the challenge of solving the problems she just convinced you are vitally important. To understand how ISEW differs from, say,…

  • ID Design Strategy presentations online

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    1 min read

    Now online are the presentation visuals from the recent Design Strategy conference at the Institute of Design.

  • Energy vocab watch

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    1 min read

    Terry just taught me clean washing greenwashing, which is when a company smears on the energy-efficient PR while continuing their old inefficient ways. And now there’s hygrid, a hybrid of electricity from the grid and rolling your own.