The U.S. Army’s new combat uniform is an interesting study in apparel design. Whereas before they needed three different uniform colors for camoflage in different environments, this one does a pretty good job in all cases. It has a reflective material that allows them to identify each other at night through night glasses. And there’s more changes in the fit, pockets, use of velcro, etc.
Here’s some video.
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 hi.
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 for Business, Leads to Greater Innovations Says IDEO President & CEO
“Whether you like it or not, the more innovative you try to be, the more you are going to affect the business and the business model.”
Intelligent Design is Key to Our Success Says Four Seasons Hotel President
“…last but not least is our decision to focus all of our energy and expertise on hotel management rather than ownership.”
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
That’s what Outward Bound does. They take you out into the wilderness and show you a plethora of new skills, everything from navigating dangerous white water rapids in a raft to campsite cooking for 30. The next day you’re not only expected to do these things, but to also lead your peers through them. It’s deliberately very hard, and forces people to step up and achieve more than they could before, and become more comfortable as leaders. It seems to me this is a great model for consultants to use when the goal is to create lasting change.
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 fax wherever you are.
Update: Fax mail may be turned off by default(!), mine was. Call customer service to get it turned on.
“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
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 of the decisions the company makes. …these companies aren’t choosing to apply design to their respective business strategies, but have chosen design as the fundamental strategy itself. Design is the philosophical core of the company. Everyone in the company becomes involved in designing, whether that means creating financial plans or selecting casing materials for an industrial product. Design isn’t something that the design department does. It’s a way of operating the company. It’s an ongoing set of choices about how the company is going to exist, to compete, to grow.
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 off.
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.
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:
For more information about the seminar, please check the Institute’s website at http://www.aifia.org/news/ or to register for both the Seminar and the IA Summit, go to http://www.iasummit.org.
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, erased the difference by bringing us small, high-quality separates mostly by reducing speaker size and increasing speaker efficiency, thereby requiring smaller amplifiers.
Next we saw stereo-computer communication and integration. There’s stereo components with computers inside (e.g. CD+DVD+MP3 for $39) and “sound cards” have turned into receiver replacements. Naturally there’s the next generation of devices that distribute the signal throughout the home. The big question for the consumer amid this mess is: does my computer become the audio hub, do I bridge the computer and stereo together, or do I buy duplicate functionality and keep the systems separate? Expecting the consumer to be home audio network architect isn’t helping anyone, except those who install custom setups for the wealthy.
The phase that’s emerging now is the audiophile killers, true audiophile sound in small packages at previously unthinkable prices. This was started by 47 Labs’s Gaincard amplifier that works not via tubes or traditional solid state circuitry but by using a single chip for amplification. Because it so reduced complexity, the DIY contingent created copies called gainclones that achieve the same sound quality at prices you might pay for an average consumer amp. The next, inevitable, step was to mass produce this approach, which is what Sonic Impact did with the Class T amp ($39, and as low as $19 recently at PC Mall). Audiophiles are going ga ga over it.
The next phase — the distruptive bit — is a when a clueful industrial designer (e.g. Bose, Apple, Griffin, or Taiwan’s BenQ) leverages the chip amp’s low complexity, price and small size to create a $199 stereo system that also solves the audio network architecture problem. The latter, IMHO, means a stereo that is still a stereo (or home theater) that let’s the computer handle the digital audio file part of the equation. This is based on the premise that listening to music/watching television is usually, for most families a different and sometimes simultaneous activity from computing. In this scenario, all the stereo has to do is receive an audio signal over wi-fi and — via a user interface — send some simple signals back to the computer (“Give me the X .mp3 file now”). The computer continues to do everything it does well, with a simple mod to the mp3 player software to broadcast music over wi-fi, as iTunes does today. This results in ease-of-use that crosses the usability chasm, and control over music selections from either the computer or the stereo, something you don’t get with most systems today. All this in a great sounding, small package (chip amp + efficient, small speakers) that will be better than anything home audio can currently offer short of a professionally designed custom system. We could see this by the end of 2005, with competitors playing catch up in 2006.
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 make decisions that would “maximize†its returns would bankrupt itself in a never-ending search for the best option. What firms do instead is “satisfice,†to use Simon’s term: they content themselves with results that are “good enough.†Schwartz, who is a close reader of Simon, worries that the profusion of choices we face—a hundred varieties of bug spray, breakfast cereal, extra-virgin olive oil—is turning us into maximizers, and maximizers, he thinks, are prone to misery and depression.
Daniel Kahneman and the late Amos Tversky… once asked subjects whether they’d prefer to be making thirty-five thousand dollars a year while those around them were making thirty-eight thousand or thirty-three thousand while those around them were making thirty thousand. They answered, in effect, that it depends on what the meaning of the word “prefer†is. Sixty-two per cent said they’d be happier in the latter case, but eighty-four per cent said they’d choose the former.
In a study conducted several years ago, shoppers who were offered free samples of six different jams were more likely to buy one than shoppers who were offered free samples of twenty-four. …Schwartz suggests that it has to do with the irrational way people measure “opportunity costs.†Instead of calculating opportunity cost as the value of the single most attractive foregone alternative, we seem to assemble an idealistic composite of all the options foregone.
There are even cases, as Schwartz notes, where just one additional choice can produce outright paralysis. Tversky and the young Princeton psychologist Eldar Shafir asked experimental subjects how they would react to a desirable Sony appliance placed in a shopwindow, radically marked down. The offer met with predictable enthusiasm. When a second appliance, similarly marked down, was placed alongside the bargain Sony, enthusiasm—and sales—dropped. Some hypothetical customers were evidently frozen by indecision.
What about the other approach—trying to choose less? In some measure, we all do this, using a strategy that the Columbia social theorist Jon Elster calls “self-binding.†Gilbert and Wilson note that there is one exception to the rule that hungry people overbuy and sated people underbuy at supermarkets: it’s people who bring a grocery list, which the two psychologists call “a copy of A Theory About What I Will Want in the Future.â€
People are consistently puzzled that so many things they had dreaded—from getting fired to being ditched by a spouse—“turned out for the best.†…A tendency to overestimate the joy we’ll get from buying baubles and winning honors is only half of a complex predisposition. The other half is our enormous capacity for happiness, even in the absence of such things. The surprise isn’t how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
It’s little experiments like this that reassure me there’s still fun to be had on the commercial web.
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 “cardreader” to your pics.
