Digital Service Design
This is a book in progress, posted in bits at a time and probably published in another form when it’s done. I started it to help the many designers, marketers, and programmers that want to add to their skills the business knowledge that’s useful in developing digital services. I appreciate hearing your feedback.
-
Stepping Back, Squinting
•
1 min read
I’m finally in a position to use much of my design and business experience and thinking, as well as facing challenges where I have no experience. And the situation is causing me to question much of what I knew about how to effectively deliver design consulting. In short, there’s a lot of blah blah blah…
-
Concepts as Inspiration
•
1 min read
New headquarters and cultural center for China Central Television. Design by OMA. Concepts strive to sway opinion by eliciting emotions. Fundamental to this purpose is the new, the aspect that is beyond question different than what has been done in the past. The new is what causes the audience to pause and react. This reaction…
-
Did You Know Brainstorming Is 70 Years Old?
•
2 min read
That’s right, Alex Osborn started popularizing brainstorming in the late 1930’s. It’s a classic tool I still use, but I have to wonder if there’s something better. Brainstorming is simple, and I would bet this simplicity is the key to its popularity. Yet even the basic rules that Osborn set out aren’t very common. Brainstorming…
-
New Article on Concept Design Tools
•
2 min read
The nice folks at Digital Web Magazine published my new article on Concept Design Tools. It’s already received some nice reviews in the Twitterverse… For those of you who haven’t seen Victor Lombardi’s new article on concept design tools, it’s a must read… …it’s brilliant stuff and super accessible. It’s great to see solid thinking…
-
Using Real Options to Value Design Concepts
•
3 min read
The common way that financial people will judge the potential value of a project, or a design concept representing a potential future concept, is by building a model, usually a discounted cash flow model like Net Present Value (NPV). The calculation essentially asks, if we do this project and gain the profit we think we’ll…
-
Concept Design: Name the Baby!
•
2 min read
When you create a product or service concept, you should give it a name. Sounds like a no-duh idea, but in the heat of the moment we forget to do this. Sometimes… we give them numbers or letters. “You see the change in materiality here in concept 2…” or “Clearly Concept C is a total…
-
Two Things Design Experts Do That Novices Don’t
•
2 min read
In my research on concept design processes, I’ve come across two ideas that jumped out as vital behavior that differentiates expert designers from novices. The first comes from Nigel Cross of Open University, UK, who seems to have studied designers and their processes more than anyone I’ve come across. In his Expertise in Design (pdf)…
-
Here’s a story of how someone might wind up needing this book, and a one-page overview of it all. Read this doc on Scribd: The Right Idea 02
-
Digital Service Design: A Book in Progress
•
1 min read
I recently went looking for and failed to find the book I think so many of us would appreciate and enjoy right now, one that captures the excitement, the emergent processes, and the innovative techniques for designing digital services, particularly for the Internet. There are great product development books, great Internet strategy books, and great…
-
Storyboarding Instead of Writing
•
3 min read
I’ve been doing a lot of “writing” lately, but in an attempt to emulate great, bestselling computer books that are highly visual and concise, I’ve been thinking about layout first and writing second, because we want to learn and not necessarily read. I’ve started mocking up the piece on index cards to get a feel…
-
The responses to my question about your favorite books on innovation were so interesting and useful I can’t help but ask another: Let’s say you’re a manager charged with developing a software-driven product or service like a website or a mobile service. You already have staff to handle the interface design, programming, and marketing. But…