Noise Between Stations

Victor

  • Victor’s upcoming events

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    1 min read

    On February 15th I’ll be giving a presentation here in New York titled Can We Run The Company? in which I give designers instructions for taking over the world. On March 6th I’ll be at the IA Summit in Montreal partipating in a panel discussion on career development from management’s perspective. Do come and say…

  • Rotman Business Design Conference

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    1 min read

    There doesn’t seem to be many first-person accounts of Rotman’s recent Business Design Conference. Here’s some of the press releases instead: Shift Needed in Design World, Says Whitney “The power of design thinking must be freed up to deal with all sorts of issues on a global scale.” The Design of Business, Rather Than Designing…

  • Creating change by creating leaders

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    1 min read

    Imagine a consulting organization that not only provided advice, but guided clients through the changes recommended. Imagine further that the client learned and was transformed by being challenged to quickly assume the place of the consultants. Imagine how much more effective the consultants’ advice would be in the long term if they emphasized qualities like…

  • Receiving faxes on your T-Mobile phone

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    1 min read

    Just about all T-Mobile voice mail plans provide “fax mail”. Someone can send a fax to your mobile phone number and the voice mail system holds it there. When you check your voice mail you can specify the number of a fax machine to which to forward the fax. Handy when traveling and you want…

  • The essence of brainstorming

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    1 min read

    “The really good idea is always traceable back quite a long way, often to a not very good idea which sparked off another idea that was only slightly better, which somebody else misunderstood in such a way that they then said something which was really rather interesting. ” — John Cleese

  • Design as a core strategy

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    1 min read

    My business partner John Zapolski will be speaking at The Institute of Design Strategy Conference in May. For a preview of his thoughts, check out the interview with him on the conference website, “Design as a Core Strategy“. …Companies that are successful exploiting the full potential of design do so because it’s present in all…

  • Recycle those old CDs

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    1 min read

    We’re taking the digital+hard drive plunge and getting rid of our CDs. Ulrike discovered Second Spin to buy our used CDs. One just types in the UPC code and they tell you how much they’ll pay. After you’ve entered the discs in their system and get a receipt, you pack them up and ship them…

  • There’s a juicy internationalization problem

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    1 min read

    Hindus in Europe want to take back the swastika because to them it’s a symbol of luck and peace which the Nazis stole. Meanwhile the European Parliment is considering banning the symbol throughout Europe after Prince Harry of Great Britain wore a mock Nazi uniforn to a costume party.

  • IA Leadership Seminar

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    1 min read

    The early registration deadline for the Information Architecture Institute’s Leadership Seminar is January 28th. If you sign up now you’ll get a significant discount for this star-studded event, 1 ½ days including: “Managing Up: The Business Strategy of Information Architecture” – Christina Wodtke and Scott Hirsch “The Enterprise IA Roadmap” – Louis Rosenfeld ”Homeland Security…

  • Disruption in home audio

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    3 min read

    If you’d like to see the process of a disruptive technology take hold before the disruption, look at the home audio industry. In the past year or two home audio has taken some interesting turns. Before you basically had two configurations: simpler, inexpensive all-in-one systems or more flexible and expensive separates. Cambridge Soundworks, then Tivoli,…

  • Why does free tagging seem so familiar?

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    2 min read

    Tim Bray on Technorati Tags: “I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about metadata and have written on the subject; the most important conclusion was: There is no cheap metadata. I haven’t seen anything to make me change my mind. …I think that it would be nice if a huge number of web pages converged…

  • The Paradox of Choice

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    3 min read

    I meant to make a note of Barry Schwartz’s The Paradox of Choice a while ago, and was reminded of it as it’s now in paperback. The New Yorker review is, as usual, the best introduction to the topic. Excerpts: As Herbert Simon, the 1978 Nobel laureate in economics, observed, any firm that tried to…

  • Navigate by fabric pattern

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    1 min read

    It’s little experiments like this that reassure me there’s still fun to be had on the commercial web.

  • Flickr tag: cardreader

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    1 min read

    NYC Subway metrocard slots Mike Lee sparked my interest in observing how many different ways designers tell us to insert a card into a machine. It’s interesting 1) because there are so many different ways, and 2) because many are confusing in that fascinating why-did-they-do-it-that-way? way. If you’d like to contribute, just add the tag…

  • Falseonomies

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    1 min read

    The Clay Shirky spin on the ethnoclassification discussion is amusing. How such a large percentage of the community manages to discuss a classification technique without explicitly illustrating how it aids in retrieval misses the whole point of classification. But I’ve already covered that ground, so let’s move along to the more interesting, subtle developments. At…