Noise Between Stations

Category: Design

What’s Your Favorite Book on Building Digital Products/Services?

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 you need to figure out a process for creating the product, a process with activities like generating ideas, creating conceptual designs, analyzing business factors, working with partners, etc.

Do you have a favorite book on this topic? And by the way, what term do you use to refer to this?

Again, I’ll start with mine…

1/17/2008
DIY Multi-Touch/Finger Tracking Using the Wii Remote

Johnny Chung Lee at Carnegie Mellon shows how to enhance a Wii remote to build user interface tracking hardware. Here’s the multi-touch video:

1/16/2008
Two Tips for Keynoters
A friend about to give her first keynote speech asked my advice on how to approach it, then suggested I post the advice for others to see. So here it is:
1. Keynote content has a large burden. Ideally it provides context — or at least controversy — for the rest of the event. It should have big ideas of where we’ve been or where we’re going, but also be grounded in the practical in a way that makes it relevant to attendees. It isn’t very difficult to strike this balance, but probably different topically from what we do day-to-day, so give yourself extra time for research and imagining.
2. The keynote speaker also becomes an implicit ambassador of the event. While some may board their private jet immediately following the talk, I found that I felt I should continue the keynoter persona throughout the event, answering questions and socializing with everyone, including the organizers.
1/16/2008
What’s Your Favorite Innovation Book?

Happy new year my readers and friends.

While I once wrote that everything written about innovation is useless (including my own writing), we continue to write about it because writing is thinking, and there’s a lot of problems to think through. The result is some writing that is truly insightful and/or based on hard-won experience, and other writing that is boastful noise. In the spirit of avoiding easy answers and helping us think through tough problems, I’d like to know…

What’s your favorite innovation book (a book that helps you be innovative)?

I’ll start with mine…

1/2/2008
Hamel and the Technology-Driven Future of Management

Here’s some terms from a recent interview with Gary Hamel, management guru…

digital device
Internet
the Web
Googlers and bloggers and mashers and podcasters
community
open source projects
PCs, routers, and hubs
social network
MySpace
…

I’m fascinated by his view that technology — particularly Internet tools — will change management. This isn’t just the hyper-hype of the Cluetrain Manifesto, this is a top-tier business professor who regularly publishes in HBR. When I wondered aloud a couple years ago, Who are the new rebels? (Managers?), I saw this as daydreaming, but perhaps the entrepreneurs of the Internet will also influence future management techniques.

12/17/2007
Alex’s Draft Business Model Innovation Manual

This draft from Alex Osterwalder is very very interesting…

Yesterday I finished a draft for a simple business model innovation manual… The manual will help business people describe their business model step by step, assess its strengths and weaknesses in order to then improve it.

I’ve tried teaching business model creation before, and it’s not easy. In opening Alex’s manual, I immediately looked for his first step; in a model where so many elements are inter-related, where does one start? He starts with customers, which I think says a lot about this perspective of the business world, and how we do business in the 21st Century.

12/11/2007
Business Design Term Alert: “Hybrid”

Not that Crain’s NY is any sort of reliable trend watcher, but this me-too article on people who combine technical and artistic skills comes with an interesting frame: hybrids. In one word it sums up a natural blend of two or more disparate skill sets and perspectives, and does so with a term that’s in vogue for its ecological connotations. The business design community, with its confusing label, could do worse than steal this one.

12/5/2007
Make Tools: My IA Konferenz Keynote Slides

In my keynote talk at the 2007 IA Konferenz in Stuttgart, Germany this month, I argued we need to create fewer artifacts and more tools. We’re already doing this, but it’s easy to get stuck in a make-more-web/mobile-sites rut and that could lead to irrelevance.

Here’s the slides…

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By coincidence, Joe Lamantia’s The DIY Future: What Happens When Everyone Is a Designer addressed a similar theme through a different lens soon after at the Italian IA Summit. Joe and I are friends and hang out in Brooklyn, but I can’t recall us talking about these presentations. Must be something in the air…

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11/24/2007
When Design Innovation Comes Down to Execution

Matt, formerly of Nokia, counters the notion that Apple alone has the best touch user interface ideas, but also that it’s not the idea that won that race, but execution…

In recent months we’ve seen Nokia and Sony Ericsson show demos of their touch UIs. To which the response on many tech blogs has been “It’s a copy of the iPhone”. In fact, even a Nokia executive responded that they had ‘copied with pride’.

That last remark made me spit with anger – and I almost posted something very intemperate as a result. The work that all the teams within Nokia had put into developing touch UI got discounted, just like that, with a half-thought-through response in a press conference. I wish that huge software engineering outfits like S60 could move fast enough to ‘copy with pride’.

Sheesh.

Fact-of-the-matter is if you have roughly the same component pipeline, and you’re designing an interface used on-the-go by (human) fingers, you’re going to end up with a lot of the same UI principles.

But Apple executed first, and beautifully, and they win. They own it, culturally.

11/23/2007
Agile with a capital/lowercase A

It looks like agile software development is having the same growing pains, expressed through semantics, as the design field (or the Design field). It’s the perceived misapplication of language that catches my eye…

Jason Gorman argued that the meaning of Agile was ambiguous and was being inappropriately applied to a very wide range of approaches like Six Sigma and CMMi. He also argued that “Agile”, “evolutionary”, and “lean” (as in Lean software development) did not mean the same thing in practice, even though they are all lumped under the banner of “Agile” – possibly for marketing purposes. Gorman argued that process-oriented methods, especially methods that incrementally reduce waste and process variation like Six Sigma, have a tendency to limit an organisation’s adaptive capacity (their “slack”), making them less able to respond to discontinuous change – i.e., less agile. He also argues in later posts that “agile”, “lean” and “evolutionary” are strategies that need to be properly understood and appropriately applied to any specific context. That is, there is a time to be “agile”, a time to be “lean” and a time to be “evolutionary”.

Fascinating, but a nuance that will be completely lost on business clients who are focused on other matters. But just as IDEO shows what they do instead of only talking about it, I think making it all tangible will be a way around the semantic mess. I’d like to see the Agile Alliance produce a “shopping-cart“-like video of an agile project.

11/12/2007
Interview on the State of Information Architecture

I’m on my way to the IA Konferenz in Stuttgart this week where I plan to talk about the future of the web design profession by learning from other technology-related professions and projecting out the current trends.

To preface that, Jan Jursa invited me to answer five questions on his blog, for example this one on collaboration…

Information Architects can’t simultaneously become experts in their field and in finance and accounting. The reverse is also true: people trained in business can’t also become experts in design. We need to collaborate. And to collaborate we have to know enough to understand each other, and build respect for each other. Therefore, we should become better at explaining what we do to business people — now I think we spend too much time just talking to ourselves.

11/6/2007
IDEO’s UMPC Vision Video

A nice example of what I call a tangible future. I like how it starts with more conventional examples and then ends with others that have believable gestures but without clear intentions, which could make it a good conversation starter between IDEO (the design firm) and Intel (the client).

10/28/2007
Print Media I Like These Days
- The Week is a compilation of world news in a thin weekly magazine format comprised of tiny articles. You can read the whole thing every week and stay current. The Week is smaller than newspapers and with more breadth than traditional weeklies.
- Monocle might be the best example of a business design journal because it doesn’t try to be one, it just naturally combines business, culture, and design issues with a serious, authentic voice.
- Play is the New York Times occasional magazine of sports. If, like me, you don’t have time to follow sports, or think you might like knowing more but need an intelligent introduction to the games and personalities, Play is a great read.
10/28/2007
Scrybe invite?

I’d love to check out Scrybe to try the innovative interaction design for myself. If you have a beta invite can you share?

10/23/2007
New Classes on IA 3.0, Prototyping, and Managing UX

We have three fantabulous new classes at Smart Experience, and they’re yours for 10% off when you register using the discount code NBS.

Online Event Registration – Powered by www.eventbrite.com

10/4/2007