Noise Between Stations

Author: Victor

  • Wurman on Healthcare

    I hadn’t realized Richard Saul Wurman extended his Understanding book — which sumarizes an entire subject with information design — into a series, first with a volume on children and now one on healthcare.

  • Redesigning American Business

    Bruce Nussbaum’s Redesigning American Business for Business Week identifies what my company is doing: “Designers are teaching CEOs and managers how to innovate… They pitch themselves to businesses as a resource to help with a broad array of issues that affect strategy and organization — creating new brands, defining customer experiences, understanding user needs, changing business practices.”

    It’s interesting that a year ago only a handful of people were talking about applying design thinking to business management, and now the mainstream media has caught up.

  • Victor

    They say the fish will be the last animal to discover water. Walking down the street the other day I wondered about the meaning of my own name. Victor means winner, but in my case I was simply named after my maternal grandfather. And Lombardi, especially when I was born in 1969, was synonymous with winning because of the coach by that name (people still occasionally slip and call me Vince). This pairing never occurred to me, and now it suddenly strikes me as quite odd. I wonder if this occurred to my parents at the time, but they were probably too busy with the other four kids to give it that much thought. I’ll have to ask my father at Christmas.

  • Cockroaches stage coup in Ukraine

    Actually, no. But not so far off when you learn a rat brain has been taught to fly a jet.

    Gibson extends: “…Thunderbolt IIs have Night Vision Imaging Systems (NVIS), rat brain compatible cockpits forward of their wings and a large bubble canopy which provides the rat brains all-around vision. The rat brains are encircled by titanium armor that also protects parts of the flight-control system…“

  • Business fuses with design

    Niti Bhan’s While you were out: changes in the global design industry for Core77 is a good overview on the fusion of business and design, including some nice words about my new company.

    Niti is from IIT’s Institute of Design who, incidentally, has a newish Master of Design Methods program for those who want a 9 month deep dive into this area.

  • The ‘fend for yourself’ brand

    Gerber makes pocket knives and tools, but not the kind of knives I’d feel comfortable pulling out in an office to adjust a screw on my laptop… these are serious knives. Their branding is a direct extension of the products, summed up in the words Fend for yourself…

    When did we decide campgrounds needed laundromats? When the car stalled, whose bright idea was it to reach for a cell phone instead of a tool? …Our nation’s great accomplishments were a testament to hard work, sweat and ingenuity. After all, we not only put a man on the moon, but built him a rover to drive while he was up there.

  • How good are doctors?

    Atul Gawande’s The Bell Curve in last week’s New Yorker…

    It used to be assumed that differences among hospitals or doctors in a particular specialty were generally insignificant. If you plotted a graph showing the results of all the centers treating cystic fibrosis—or any other disease for that matter—people expected that the curve would look something like a shark fin, with most places clustered around the very best outcomes. But the evidence has begun to indicate otherwise. What you tend to find is a bell curve: a handful of teams with disturbingly poor outcomes for their patients, a handful with remarkably good results, and a great, undistinguished middle.

    It’s an excellent look at how honestly hospitals are dealing with their patients. Also of note is Tom Peter’s reaction.

  • Ethnoclassification and retrieval

    I’ve been doing some product development consulting for a content-centric company, and started to wonder if ethnoclassification could benefit them somehow. I was hard-pressed to think of how, after the content was tagged, the tags would lead to better sets of content. Although they have a lot of content, they only have a few authors who do the classification. When I returned to what others have written on the topic, I think the idea of ethnoclassification was so enthralling we didn’t look as closely at how it facilitates retrieval and the relationship to the content set and authoring process.

    It seems that selecting a classification technique should factor in how much control we want over retrieval, how much content there is, and how many authors there are. Ethnoclassification becomes more useful when there’s a ton of authors and you can start to see relationships emerge among tags.

    For example:

    • Large content set, many authors, low control over retrieval: Ethnoclassification makes sense when seredipitous retrieval is desired and a critical mass of authors are generating tags, like on Flickr
    • Large content set, many authors, high control over retrieval: A robust structure is needed to ensure end users can find information, like the ontology-driven Cisco.com
    • Medium content set, medium authors, medium control over retrieval: This situation allows for interesting hybrids, like the Pratt Talent site that balances ethnoclassification with a controlled vocabulary
    • Medium content set, medium authors, high control over retrieval: traditional controlled vocabularies/taxonomies make sense, and scale down to the point where there is so little content/few authors that no classification is needed

  • Sorry, I’m not sorry

    I’ll go on the record here and say that Sorry Everybody is contrary to the ideals that make America what it is. I voted against Bush, but that doesn’t make me want to apologize to the rest of the world that he won. He won because we are a Republic with a democratic voting process that elected him. To say that we screwed up just because our guy didn’t win is to say there’s something wrong with democracy. Until something better comes along, I’ll stick with democracy, thanks.

  • Recent reads

    William Gibson, blogging again

    Tom Peters, dispatches from the new world of work

    Havard Business School, working knowledge

  • Distributed processing on a chip

    Details are emerging on IBM’s “supercomputer on a chip”, which essentially seems to take the logic that distributes operations to multiple chips that used to be done in applications or the operating system and integrate it at the chip level. This has the potential to exponentially speed up everything that’s not already a supercomputer, as software doesn’t have to change to accommodate more than one processor per machine.

    From a design perspective, we could think of this as a process innovation rather than one of hardware engineering, as the advantage was gained by taking work from one stage of the system and moving it to another stage.

  • Get paid for your great IA ideas

    We just rolled out the AIfIA Information Architecture Progress Grants:

    Two grants will be awarded in February, 2005… Each grant is for US$1000… Applications should propose work that has the potential to benefit information architecture practioners in a practical way. This includes, for example, original research, a new synthesis of important existing research, or development of an innovative new technique. The resulting reports will be published on the aifia.org website.

  • WiMAX vs. Hi-Gain

    While microwave-powered WiMAX is getting more attention these days, I was fascinated to learn on Thanksgiving of a relative’s plan to simply use a hi-gain setup instead. His plan is to go to markets that don’t already have wired broadband internet access — in his case rural Virginia — and put hi-gain antennas on the hills to reach those who don’t have access to cable or DSL. The market may not be as profitable, but the equipment and real estate costs are proportionately low. It’s a disruptive move, and there might be plenty of room at the bottom of that pyramid.

  • Political framing: Taxes

    After Christina shared George Lakoff’s ideas on framing, I’ve been thinking about developing new frames from a progressive political point of view. We can’t simply react to what the conservatives do, we must proactively create the future.

    Under the radar, President Bush is gradually moving towards a flat tax, and along the way the changes to the tax code will benefit the rich and hurt the middle class. The goal of my frame is to communicate to the middle class (many of whom voted for Bush against their own economic interests) how this harms them.

    My idea is to succinctly and consistently repeat one phrase that communicates how this personally hurts a middle class American. I started by finding the average salary in the U.S., which is $36,520. I’ll round that up to $40K for my purposes, both to use a nice round, memorable number and to be appeal to people’s aspirations. Then I checked the tax tables which are available back to ’92. I came up with:

    “Just before Bush was elected, a married person making $40,000 a year paid $6,000 in taxes. Now that person pays ____ in taxes.”

    Theoretically taxes will be higher by the next presidential election. As of 2003 they were actually lower (which is even more scary, in that taxes were lowered and a war is being paid for at a time of historically high debt), but that will probably change, even if we have to crash first.

  • Wikipedia

    If you haven’t already discovered the Wikipedia then you should, if you at all like encyclopedias. And even if you dislike wikis it’s alright, there’s proper search and navigation elements, and enough content there already to be quite useful so that one need not feel guilty for not contributing.

    Surfing it reminds me of when I was young and visiting a friend who had a set of encyclopedias, lying on the floor on rainy afternoons, paging through them.

    Here’s a telling excerpt from the Creative destruction page:

    Most economists agree that long-term economic growth is largely the product of technological innovation. Thus, some see it as a scandal that Schumpeter is absent from many 600 page elementary economic texts’ indexes. Schumpeter’s solution would be for a new generation of textbooks to emerge, which students would choose, in partial defiance of their lecturers. Wikipedia is now one of those texts!