Category: Design

• Handles On Everything

  Remember when everyone copied the translucent color of the old iMacs and missed what made them special underneath? Here’s a surface feature that’s incredibly useful, seemingly obvious, and worthy of copious copying: a big handle to reposition your lamp, courtesy of Tobias Grau. The rubber feels great in your hand. The ball joint allows positioning in any direction. You grab it and put it where it belongs and focus concentration on your work, the way it should be.

  On the same trip to Europe we rented an Opel Meriva that used a similar big handle to reposition the side view mirrors (and similar-feeling big, grippy volume knob on the stereo) instead of timid little electronic buttons. Such a simple thing, and yet the physicality evokes an emotional response that makes me smile and pull out my wallet.

  10/15/2005

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• Marketing & mental models

  I sincerely think human-centered designers’ (I use the term designer in the widest sense) ability to regard problems in a personal way results in drastically different solutions. Lately I’ve been looking at how marketing programs are designed to fit customers’ mental models, or not.

  For example, here’s JetBlue’s frequent flier program: short flights earn 2 points, medium flights earn 4 points, and long flights earn 6 points. Book online and you get double points. 100 points earns you a free flight.

  Compare this to the American Express rewards program, where I just scrolled through pages of Terms and Conditions text. The eligibility section has five paragraphs, here’s the first paragraph (that last sentence kills me):

  The program is available to Basic Personal Card, Gold Card, American Express® Preferred Rewards Green Card, American Express® Preferred Rewards Gold Card, Platinum Card,® Rewards Plus Gold Card, FSA Gold Card, Fidelity American Express® Card, Fidelity American Express® Gold Card, Fidelity American Express Platinum Card® and some Blue from American Express Cards, Basic Optima,® Optima Platinum, Optima Gold Card or Business Management Account members whose American Express® Credit Card or Optima Card account is associated with an eligible AMEX charge Card account enrolled in the program (“Eligible Amex Credit Card”). Basic and Additional CMs holding a Business Card from OPEN: The Small Business Network (“Business CMs”) who have one of the following Cards may also enroll in the program: Business Gold Card, Business Platinum Card,® Business Centurion® Card, Executive Business Card, Business Purchase Account, Business Costco Card or Business Membership Rewards Card. American Express® Rewards Green CMs and American Express® Rewards Gold CMs may also enroll and remain enrolled in the program as long as they have another eligible AMEX charge Card account enrolled in the program. Basic and Additional Corporate CMs may enroll in the program unless their company has chosen not to participate in the program. Accounts or Cards not listed in this paragraph (e.g., Student Optima Card, American Express® Credit Card for Students, American Express Costco Cash Rebate Card, Hilton HHonors Credit Card, Delta SkyMiles® Credit Card, Starwood Preferred Guest ® Credit Card, IN:NYCsm, Incentive Funds Cardtm, Golf Card, American Express® Cash Rebate Card, Blue Cash from American Express, Corporate Purchasing Card, Corporate Meeting Card, Corporate Defined Expense Card, Business Travel Accounts, line of credit accounts, Delta SkyMiles Business Credit Card, Gold Delta SkyMiles Business Credit Card, Platinum Delta SkyMiles Business Credit Card, Community Business Card, Business Cash Rebate Card, Cardless Central Billing Accounts and other non-Card accounts) are not eligible for enrollment in the program. Card eligibility is subject to change.

  10/14/2005

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• New business design blog: bplusd.org

  My friend Jess and I have shared hotel rooms at two recent conferences, where he gently challenged and explored my thoughts on design and business. He’s smart, humble, and dedicated, so I’ve taken his skepticism seriously and use this space to address the criticism he offered. I’m happy to see he’s now doing the same on the bplusd blog, where I’m looking forward to hearing more from him.

  10/13/2005

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• GM’s enterprise product development

  Bob Lutz explains plans to centralize their design and engineering budget and what that means for building automobiles worldwide…

  We expect a reduction in our architecture count over time of 50% as we introduce more converged architectures replacing the regional architectures we have today… For example, as we develop our new global mid-size architecture, which will replace such vehicles as the Opel Vectra, Chevy Malibu, Pontiac G6 and Saab 9-3, we’ll realize significant savings as a result of this new system. We’ll move from three closely related regional architectures to one global architecture serving nine different models in all four of our regions. We expect a 40% reduction in our prototype builds, a 20% reduction in material costs as a result of the common components, and 25% reductions in both engineering costs and overall investment. That one program alone could save us more than $1 billion over the course of its lifecycle.

  Having just drove an Opel Meriva in Italy, a mini minivan not available here in the U.S., I can see the wisdom in leveraging great architectures worldwide. But we’ll have to see if a Saab is still a Saab when it has a Chevy chassis.

  10/13/2005

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• It’s alright to cry at work

  Stephanie Rosenbloom’s Big Girls Don’t Cry in the NY Times offers many opinions on women crying in the office, all of them against it. When I was a young manager, a woman in my group came to my desk to ask about a resourcing decision I had made. Unhappy with it, she broke into tears. In the middle of an open landscape office. With everyone looking on. It was uncomfortable, but this is a biological reality…

  Scientists do not know exactly why women tend to cry more easily, but Dr. Frey said several factors may be at work. One is the hormone prolactin, he said, which is present in mammary glands and induces lactation but is also found in the blood and in tear glands. Boys and girls have about equal levels of prolactin levels in their blood during childhood. But from ages of 12 to 18, the levels in girls gradually rise, and that may have something to do with why women cry more than men.

  In my case, we stepped into a conference room, closed the door, and I explained my decision. She agreed, ended the conversation by giving me a hug, and we went back to work. Ever since I’ve thought crying in the office is not only a normal part of work, but to discourage it is to discriminate against women. The 21st Century organization needs to be different from the factory or office of the 20th Century. Especially in companies that strive to push the boundaries of design and innovation we tap into the personal and emotional conduits of our customers and ourselves to create new products and services. That can’t happen when we deny our own emotions.

  10/13/2005

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• Peter Rowe on design thinking

  …design has often occupied an ambivalent position, being characterized as either a form of fine art or a form of technical science. From all perspectives, however, design appears to be a fundamental means of inquiry by which man realizes and gives shape to ideas of dwelling and settlement. Furthermore, design is a practical form of inquiry insofar as it is concerned with making and a certain commonplace usefulness, quite apart from its more esoteric benefits.

  Design Thinking

  10/12/2005

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• Chuck Owen on design thinking

  Design thinking, as a complement to science thinking, embodies a wide range of creative characteristics as well as a number of other special qualities of distinct value to decision makers. In advisory roles, properly prepared design professionals could make substantial contributions to a process now dominated by political and economic views….

  I would nominate for design thinking the following characteristics and ways of working:

  • Conditioned inventiveness.
  • Human-centered focus.
  • Environment-centered concern.
  • Ability to visualize.
  • Tempered optimism.
  • Bias for adaptivity.
  • Predisposition toward multifunctionality.
  • Systemic Vision.
  • View of the Generalist.
  • Ability to use language as a tool.
  • Affinity for teamwork.
  • Facility for avoiding the necessity of choice.
  • Self-governing practicality.
  • Ability to work systematically with qualitative information.

  Design Thinking: What It Is, Why It Is Different, Where It Has New Value (.pdf)

  10/12/2005

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• Dave Pollard on design thinking

  …the rule set above is a mechanism for the intellectual process of intentional creation. It is much more than just imagination, or invention, or creativity, or project planning, though all of these are a part of it.

  10/12/2005

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• Designers and cultural influence

  I’m at the New Challenges retreat in upstate New York this weekend. Whereas the last retreat was unexpectedly diverse by background, this one has attracted a geographically diverse audience, both ex-pats living on the East coast as well as visitors from Europe. Pouring rain is expected all weekend, so I expect folks to hunker down into a long stream of conversations.
  
  So far there’s been a lot of explicit mention of organizational culture in the presentations, influenced by everything from translation to business process change. Talking through the MIG “trailmarker” model has resonated with folks who are seeing the bigger ramifications of product and process work. A longer explanation can be found in Design [is not a] Strategy.

  10/8/2005

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• CMU design management reading list

  Someone published a list on Amazon covering the reading list from Carnegie Mellon’s graduate Design Management class.

  10/6/2005

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• Better management at younger, more competitive, freer companies

  Management Practices across Firms & Nations is a survey of management practices in over 700 firms in France, Germany, the UK and the US with interesting results and implications for innovation capabilities…

  …We also find a surprisingly large dispersion of management practices across firms with a long ‘tail’ of poorly managed firms. This presents a dilemma – why do so many firms continue to exist while apparently deploying inferior management practices? Our analysis suggests that this is due, in part, to a combination of: (i) competition, with tougher product market competition fostering better management practices; (ii) firm age, with younger market entrants utilising better management techniques; and (iii) regulation, with stronger labour market regulation apparently inhibiting the deployment of best practice management.

  9/15/2005

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• Mondo list of idea generation techniques

  http://www.ideagenerationmethods.com/

  The methods have been drawn not just from the worlds of creative problem solving and innovation, but also from other worlds such as organisational change, strategic planning, psychotherapy, the new sciences and the creative arts.

  9/8/2005

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• Your personal connection to Katrina

  Lou linked to an inspiring report of Alan Gutierrez’s wiki set up in the wake of hurricane Katrina…

  When I awoke, I found that the Xavier families, has simply kept the Wiki page going without me. I cleaned up the their markup, buth the information is there.

  Now, I’m finding the page gets updated, nice and neat.

  Xavier Wiki

  Wiki works.

  I received a request by more pedestrian means — email — from old university friend Shel who safely fled New Orleans for Florida but who must now settle anew sans possessions. Her list of things needed made it easy for me to provide specific help to someone I care about, lifting me (selfishly, I know) out of a feeling of uselessness here in NYC.

  And I started to think how others might do the same. Who do we know, or who is in our network, that was affected? How can we find out? We have tools now. Social network software like LinkedIn lets you search by number of degrees from you and zip code (here’s FEMA’s list of aid-eligible areas, New Orleans is 70112).

  

  9/4/2005

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• Madelon Evers on learning from design

  I added another quote — notably from a woman — to the Design Thinking and Business page, courtesy of Madelon Evers… “…To achieve superior design thinking in business, we need to facilitate learning from design across organisations.”

  9/3/2005

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• Gladwell on why focus groups suck

  Malcolm Gladwell recently gave the keynote at the American Association of Advertising Agencies’ Account Planning conference in Chicago. It’s excerpted on Advertising Age ($). If you’ve worked in design or product development (or read “Blink”) you know the drawbacks of focus groups. But what Gladwell does here is describe the solutions as ones of management. Not surprisingly, I agree.

  Here’s the ending…

  Now think about the Aeron chair. [The focus group participants] say they don’t like the chair, of course they don’t. The chair is nothing they’ve ever seen before, but that was the whole plan in designing the chair. But that’s what’s wonderful about it, that’s why this chair will make billions of dollars for Herman Miller, but it’s also what dooms that chair in the focus group, because people don’t have the language.

  Market research, when it is observational or when it is interpretative, is profoundly useful. But those are two critical things. They require the intervention of the person conducting the research. They require the findings that are gathered are considered, and thought about, and processed and interpreted. Back in the 1950s, most of the major advertising agencies on Madison Avenue employed Freudian psychoanalysts for this precise reason, and you don’t see that anymore. I think that’s a big mistake.

  This understanding about what’s so terrible about focus groups ought to pave the way that we manage people. First and foremost, it’s very important for management to trust the creative talent.

  The second thing is patience. The more breakthrough, the more revolutionary and the more innovative an idea is, the longer it will take for people to come to appreciate it.

  The third thing is it requires people in management to tolerate uncertainty. The thing that’s driving all this focus-group and market-research data is the desire of people with the management power to make every decision as methodical and thought out and certain as possible.

  9/2/2005

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