The HealthWorks! Kids’ Museum is a unit of Memorial Hospital in South Bend, Indiana and an organization truly focused on health care, not just illness care. In a recent profile, one employee cited the need for trial-and-error in the design of their education programs, “To innovate, we need to make at least eight mistakes a day.”
Author: Victor
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Econ 101
I recently read Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science by Charles Wheelan, a writer for The Economist. He covers many of the more interesting ideas, highlights some underappreciated thinkers, and offers a sound perspective on a field that tries to stay within the boundaries of statistics while undeniably bleeding into politics and sociology. Also see Peterme’s review for more about this.
Here’s some of the concepts he covers, all of which are useful even if you never tread into what is traditionally thought of as economics. Most of the definitions are on the Wikipedia.
Incentives
- Creative destruction
- Prisoners delimma
- Law of unintended consequences
- Principal-Agent problem
- Dead weight loss
- Progressive and regressive taxes
- Externality
Government
- Property rights
- Rule of law
- Public goods
- Supply-side
also…
- Adverse selection
- Our skills and health comprise 75% of our wealth as a nation
- Rule of 72: rate of growth divided by 72 equals how long it takes for a growing quantity to double
- Interest represented as r, the rental rate on capital
- We often receive more utility via relative than absolute wealth
- Catastrophe bonds are a way to spread risk and rewards
- The Tournament model
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Dreams come true
“It’s been my life’s dream to see the parade live. Once it starts, it means the holidays are here. My other dream is to get a jet pack.“
– NICHOLAS PERDUE, a 16-year-old at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.
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Remember Quokka?
I just discovered the work of Mark Allen Nakamura who designed some of the old Quokka Sports site, still one of the most daring and bold layouts to appear on a mainstream site.
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Tom Peters on TV
Tom Peters: Re-imagine! Business Excellence in a Disruptive Age comes to PBS (in NYC, on Monday, Nov 22 at 10pm)
Each of the companies profiled faced revolutionary business challenges and responded by inventing entirely new opportunities. Each had to re-imagine the nature of work itself—and did so by soliciting the energy and engagement of each and every one of their people.
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Open, Subsidized Innovation
The company suggestion box is growing in size and sophistication. Taking a cue from the software industry which subsidizes innovation by letting passionate customers beta test new products, companies like Bose are setting up forums for ideas. They recognize that innovation needs to be open, tapping creativity from inside and outside the organization.
The system that Bose is using, Informative, stresses the importance of the brand relationship. It’s interesting that they go for this softer, more ambiguous benefit than simply saying they help commpanies harvest more ideas. Though they do realize this is a conversation and not just direct mail in reverse…
Our real-time interactive communications tools allow us to engage large numbers of consumers in ongoing, concurrent dialogues, and our patented systems explore these conversations and consolidate actionable insights based on what your customers want and need right now, next month, next year and beyond.
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Selling many to many
Chris Anderson’s article in Wired, The Long Tail, is about making previously unprofitable products profitable by making them more widely available.
C. K. Prahalad’s book, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, is about making previously unprofitable products profitable by making them more widely available.
The primary difference is that Anderson describes it happening in the digital realm, e.g. .mp3 files, in ways that aren’t possible in the physical realm, and Prahalad describes how it’ll work in the physical realm. Anderson’s “tail” is all the products that don’t fit in stores and normally don’t get sold. Prahalad’s pyramid bottom is all the people that are poor and normally aren’t sold to.
Imagine locking Anderson and Prahalad in a room until they figure out how to best distribute our digital and physical surplus to the poor of the world and make money for companies in the process.
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Frontline dissects brand marketing
Frontline is doing the Frontline treatment on brand strategy and the latest marketing. There’s a few refreshingly honest people, and the rest are either critical of the methods or vary from slightly to very silly… A market researcher probes a participant, “Would you say you feel lonely when you eat white bread? Anxious? Trusting?”
Read Montague’s Neuromarketing — potentially the most far-fetched method — sounded the most convincing, mainly because he’s an actual psychiatrist and not a hack. “I get to the reptilian brain… in France cheese is alive, you don’t put it in the refrigerator just as you don’t put your cat in the refrigerator. It must be marketed as alive. In the U.S. cheese is dead, it must be pasteurized and put in the refridgerator, and it is sealed in plastic like a body bag, and put in the cold, like a morgue.”
From a design perspective, it strikes me that this approach could be upstream of designers, displacing parts of ethnography. The design brief may come from the psychiatrist.
And of course there’s the deeper issue of marketers creating an alternate reality, going beyond selling to obscuring the truth of issues. And that’s why I like Frontline, they’re very good at exposing the truth.
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The new MoMA architecture goes *POOF*
The architect, Yoshio Taniguchi, of the new addition to the Museum of Modern Art in New York said to the trustees at the beginning, “Raise a lot of money for me, I’ll give you good architecture. Raise even more money, I’ll make the architecture disappear.”
John Updike adds,
And disappear, in a way, it has. The customary sensations that buildings give us—of secure enclosure, of masses of matter firmly supported—are diluted by a black gap, a mere quarter inch wide, that runs along the bottom and top of every interior wall, and even at the base of weight-bearing pillars, so that everything, subtly, floats. The gaps are useful for heat and air-conditioning, too, but their aesthetic accomplishment is to dematerialize the walls; the visitor moves through spaces demarcated as if by Japanese paper screens.
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Backwards process
A friend just reminded me of a story from some time ago. I was giving a short presentation at a financial services company on the user-centered design process. The audience was a project team. I threw up some slides illustrating the various activities: researching users, designing the interface, implementing it, etc. Toward the end, the database programmer said, “Ohhhhhh, I understand, you do everything backwards!”
That’s because his process was: build a database, slap on a user interface, and test it… the exact opposite of what I would do.
I wonder if this is a way to explain UCD to technical audiences? “OK, what I’m about to tell you may be hard to believe. But there’s this whole field of people achieving great results by doing everything completely backwards!“
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The best source for IA?
Since the 1703 Treaty of Methuen giving mutual trade advantages to Portuguese wines and English woolens, countries have recognized their own expertise and costs and opted to trade rather than compete in particular markets. So regardless of what our re-elected president tells us, the facts of economic life in the modern world will not change: we will lose jobs to less expensive workers elsewhere in the world.
But all is not lost. Everyone in the design world now has the gift of foresight and can adjust career trajectories to not only avoid pain in this, as yet, mostly unaffected field, but to additionally take advantage of the situation (I have). And this is the point I make in a new AIfIA editorial, The Best Sourcing of Information Architecture.
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As for that stupid, damn election…
…I’ve decided to become stinking rich and in my utter richness punish those amazingly annoying “millions of farmers, factory workers and waitresses who ended up voting – utterly against their own interests – for Republican candidates.” Arrrrrrrrrrrgh.
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NYC First Friday, Nov 5
The next social meeting of First Fridays in NYC for the User Experience Design community will be Nov 5, 6:30 at
Hell
59 Gansevoort St at Washington St (Meatpacking District)
(Between 12th & 13th Streets, West of 9th Avenue/Hudson Street)
212-727-1666
Subway: A,C,E and 1239 to 14th Street or L to 8th AveI’ll miss it unfortunately, have a G&T for me.
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The best cooking show ever
New Scandinavian Cooking is just so wonderful. I love when someone takes a format that is already popular and full of variation and just takes it in a whole other direction.
In the episode I saw, host Andreas Viestad skied through a sunny day over to a man pulling three char out of a fishing hole. Andreas immediately pan fried them and served them with an orange-curry filling. And then, on top of the mountain, orange chicken and for dessert ice cream and meringue served in an orange. All done outside, cooling ingredients in the snow, with the mountain range in the background. This has spoiled me for all other cooking shows.
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Making advice palatable to CEOs
I had just read What New CEOs Need to Know (here’s a free, shorter version) and was contemplating the CEO’s experience (expressing a strategic vision, trying not to send the wrong signals, not in power but reporting to the board, not in touch with operations, balancing obligations inside and outside the company…) when I came across Darrel Rhea’s post about selling a CEO on a new branding campaign.
So what compels them to invest in solving their brand problems? When a CEO perceives brand as tool to express his or her vision for the organization, they fully support it.
Yet another good example of applying empathic design (researching your audience and tailoring your work accordingly) in yet another context.