Noise Between Stations

Category: Design

  • Innovation in cartoons



    New Yorker cartoon taxonomy
    The cartoon editor mentally classifies cartoons in a 2 by 2 of normal/abnormal setting vs. normal/abnormal caption.

    We just saw Bob Mankoff, New Yorker cartoonist and cartoon editor, talk about his job. I was happily surprised to see the magazine using both sides of its brain in figuring out which were the best cartoons for the magazine, trying to innovate in the unlikely area of cartooning.

    He and the other editors ultimately use editorial judgment to select pieces for each magazine from among thousands of submissions. But he also uses group discussion (in which he noted the inevitable group think involved). He uses surveys, and found that women consistently rate cartoons funnier than men. He’ll test one illustration with multiple captions. He considers the psychology behind cartoons (“It’s the opposite of empathy, and closely paired with fear. If you want to get children to laugh, run at them with a snowball in your hand.”) The University of Michigan’s Humor at Michigan study started with the complete collection of New Yorker cartoons and used eye tracking to analyze how people look at the illustration and the caption in different kinds of cartoons. And lately they’ve encouraged participation from readers with a caption contest on the back page.

    It all adds up to make Mankoff a highly educated student of what is funny and why. And it makes me think: if they can do this for cartoons, what can’t we do this for?

  • Opportunity for handling a crisis: Guidant

    Barry Meier of the NY Times reports the Guidant recall story…

    The Guidant Corporation said yesterday that it was recalling about 29,000 implanted heart devices because of flaws that might cause them to short-circuit when they are supposed to deliver a potentially life-saving shock.

    What makes the product flaw so important in this case is that the defibrillators are located inside the users’ chests. If quality control alone wasn’t bad enough,

    The recall, which comes at the urging of the Food and Drug Administration, involves three models of defibrillators made by Guidant. In the case of one model, the Ventak Prizm 2 DR Model 1861, Guidant did not tell doctors for more than three years that it was prone to electrical failure because of a design flaw. The company also disclosed yesterday for the first time that two other Guidant units had also repeatedly short-circuited.

    So not only is the device rather difficult to “recall”, it happened only when the government stepped in, has been an undisclosed problem for years, and incidentally there’s a couple more products that are now revealed as flawed. I guess that last disclosure signals they are owning up to the problem, but one wonders if they’re doing enough to fix the problem.

    The company said it was aware of two recent deaths involving the units at issue. It is not clear how much the recalls may cost Guidant.

    I’d bet Guidant has a pretty good idea of how much it will cost, that cost is the reason for their delay in disclosing the problem, and accounts for their passive position on the issue…

    While the action is technically a recall, it will be up to patients and their doctors to decide whether to undergo surgery to replace the affected devices. Such decisions are typically based on the age and health of a patient and the physician’s assessment of a device’s risk.

    The physician’s assessment of the device’s risk? Wouldn’t physicians want to avoid the risk of recommending the use of a flawed product (and be paid to replace it)? Hasn’t Guidant learned from the Tylenol crisis how to save a brand even when your product has led to accidental deaths? Do they perceive this as a product issue or a brand issue? Or a moral issue?

    Ironically, Johnson & Johnson — makers of Tylenol — is currently in talks to buy Guidant…

    “The events reported by Guidant are serious matters, and Johnson & Johnson is engaged in discussions with Guidant to help the company understand the issues,” the statement read.

    So is that J&J getting help understanding the issues, or Guidant?

    Update: Meier updates the story today: Defective Heart Devices Force Some Scary Medical Decisions

    …some patients like Ms. Alexson and Mr. Parsons are sharing a similar emotion: a sense of betrayal that Guidant did not disclose the problem earlier so that some people might have been spared the tough choice they now face.

    While Guidant has offered patients a free replacement unit, Ms. Alexson plans to get one made by a competitor, Medtronic Inc., and battle out the financial issues later. “I can’t trust these people who sit around in their offices and decide whether I’m going to live or die,” she said

  • If you like coffee you might also like…

    I was talking to a manager at one of the big ecommerce websites recently and she predicted that collaborative filtering is reaching the apex of usefulness. The below recommendation from Fresh Direct had me laughing at their clever suggestion. Are customer behavior and needs just as much if not more important than purchasing patterns in making recommendations?

  • Columbia’s Ideas At Work

    In a valiant attempt to connect research and industry, Columbia University Business School launches a new site called Columbia Ideas At Work. The first issue focuses on entrepreneurship.

    Here’s one interesting research brief from the site:

    People take more risks when they judge from experience rather than from other sources of information.

    Ralph Hertwig, Greg Barron, Elke Weber and Ido Erev studied how people make decisions of two kinds: when they do or don’t have information that describes the risks involved. When they do have such information, it’s a decision from “description.” When they don’t, it’s a decision from “experience.”

    The study asked 100 students at a technical university to make six decisions. Half got a description of the risks, and the other half did not. For each decision, before making your final choice you could try out different answers to see what result each gave. Then you moved on to the next decision. So both groups were able to learn from experience, but only one had description too.

    The results showed that the pure experience group made dramatically riskier choices than the description group and the description group made more accurate choices; the experience group underweighted the risks. Also, the experience group did not do more sampling beforehand to compensate for the lack of description; sampling came out about the same for both groups.

  • “Designer” of the year

    Shaggy at Core77 reports that the Design Council’s Hilary Cottam has won the Design Museum’s (UK) 2005 Designer of the Year award and the resulting controversy around her selection. It illustrates the confusion and emotion possible when designers of the intangible mix it up with the traditional sort.

    The Observer reports two points. One is that Cottam didn’t work alone. But what designer does these days?

    The other point is that she’s not a designer. This assertion can get us into a long semantic debate, but the design community has persistently pushed for larger and more inclusive defintions of design. Now that someone who embraces that larger definition and applies design thinking to intangible problems wins a traditional design award, we’re surprised.

    I needed to ask, why was she actually nominated? The Design Museum says,

    Hilary Cottam has been nominated for the Designer of the Year prize for her achievements in championing a more inspiring and efficient approach to public sector design by demonstrating how design can be used as a tool to “tackle some of the more intractable social problems of our day”.

    and the chair of the award committee says of the award decision…

    ‘Hilary Cottam is not a designer in the traditional sense, but she is a wonderfully worthy winner of Designer of the Year for the imaginative and innovative way she uses design as a strategic tool to modernise schools, prisons and other critically important areas of our lives.’

    I applaud the Design Museum for taking such a progressive stance. It’s unfortunate they may make a few enemies along the way, but hopefully the award will act to widen our understanding of how design thinking helps solve problems and not just make things.

  • Design –> Business –> Culture



    Fund culture

    Seen in the Vitra store in Manhattan.

  • Business, design and class

    This New York Times app allows you to determine your class based on your occupation, education, income and wealth.

    It looks like a “management analyst” is three times classier than a designer. Let’s ponder that and how business designers should be positioned to exert influence in organizations.

  • Kelly Johnson’s Rules for Skunk Works

    Kelly Johnson standing next to U-2

    I’m doing research on high-performance teams that can evolve how they work to changing environments. I see it in the best designers, agile programmers, engineers and others. And I’m not too surprised to see it in Skunk Works, a book about the famous Lockheed Advanced Development Projects group. The man who ran the group during the early years — Kelly Johnson (shown with the U-2 spy plane) — wrote up a set of rules that emphasize small teams, close collaboration, low ceremony, iteration and testing, relationships built on trust, and constant communication…

    1. The Skunk Works’ program manager must be delegated practically complete control of his program in all aspects. He should report to a division president or higher.
    2. Strong but small project offices must be provided both by the military and industry.
    3. The number of people having any connection with the project must be restricted in an almost vicious manner. Use a small number of good people.
    4. Very simple drawing and drawing release system with great flexibility for making changes must be provided in order to make schedule recovery in the face of failures.
    5. There must be a minimum number of reports required, but important work must be recorded thoroughly.
    6. There must be a monthly cost review covering not only what has been spent and committed but also projected costs to the conclusion of the program. Don’t have the books ninety days late and don’t surprise the customer with sudden overruns.
    7. The contractor must be delegated and must assume more than normal responsibility to get good vendor bids for subcontract on the project. Commercial bid procedures are very often better than military ones.
    8. The inspection system as currently used by the Skunk Works, which has been approved by both the Air Force and the Navy, meets the intent of existing military requirements and should be used on new projects. Push basic inspection responsibility back to the subcontractors and vendors. Don’t duplicate so much inspection.
    9. The contractor must be delegated the authority to test his final product in flight. He can and must test it in the initial stages. If he doesn’t, he rapidly loses his competency to design other vehicles.
    10. The specification applying to the hardware must be agreed to in advance of contracting. The Skunk Works practice of having a specification section stating clearly which important military specification items will not knowingly be complied with and reasons therefore is highly recommended.
    11. Funding a program must be timely so that the contractor doesn’t have to keep running to the bank to support government projects.
    12. There must be absolute mutual trust between the military organization and the contractor with very close liaison on a day-to-day basis. This cuts down misunderstanding and correspondence to an absolute minimum.
    13. Access by outsiders to the project and its personnel must be strictly controlled.
    14. Because only a few people will be used in engineering and most other areas, ways must be provided to reward good performance by pay, not simply related to the number of personnel supervised.

      15. And a last rule passed on through oral tradition…

    15. Starve before doing business with the damned Navy. They don’t know what in hell they want and will drive you up a wall before they break either your heart or a more exposed part of your anatomy.

  • Refresher on critical thinking

    Stever Robbins pens a critical thinking refresher in the new HBS Working Knowledge…

    1. Make sure you understand the logic behind your decision.
    2. Identify your assumptions and double-check them.
    3. Collect the data that will support or disprove your assumptions.
    4. Deliberately consider the situation from multiple frames.
    5. Remember the people!
    6. Think short and long term.

  • Product instinct & venture capital

    I had a great conversation with Phi-Hong the other day about how despite our having seen the insights and risk management that user research can achieve, some companies seem to do just fine without it, thank you very much. Apple’s product design, the early Google, much of Amazon.com.

    While teaching others the product development process, I know there’s a point at which one synthesizes audience desires, trends, content, function, esthetics, price point, revenue model etc. etc. etc. together not in some grand spreadsheet but in our subjective little minds. It’s a hard thing to teach, and not terribly surprising that companies could produce great products by hiring individuals who are very good at this synthesis.

    I witnessed this recently watching a CMO reviewing new product concepts. He wasn’t too interested in concepts that were mostly new UI ideas; I think it’s hard to look at a couple screens and see a whole new product, much less a whole new business. Who of us who saw Google in 1999 saw the potential? I know I was skeptical, figuring any algorithm that relied on popularity would devolve into presenting a tabloid. Their modest response seemed to acknowledge that even they knew they were running a big experiment…


    I don't think we will turn into a tabloid. But, time will tell.

    -Larry

    Reading through Google’s official history paints a picture of UI+algorithm innovation being tough to identify, based on the highly subjective perspective of whoever they presented it to…

    Among those they called on was friend and Yahoo! founder David Filo. Filo agreed that their technology was solid, but encouraged Larry and Sergey to grow the service themselves by starting a search engine company. “When it’s fully developed and scalable,” he told them, “let’s talk again.”

    …

    Andy Bechtolsheim, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems, was used to taking the long view. One look at their demo and he knew Google had potential — a lot of potential. But though his interest had been piqued, he was pressed for time. As Sergey tells it, “We met him very early one morning on the porch of a Stanford faculty member’s home in Palo Alto. We gave him a quick demo. He had to run off somewhere, so he said, ‘Instead of us discussing all the details, why don’t I just write you a check?’ It was made out to Google Inc. and was for $100,000.”

    The lesson? Designers need to shop their idea around to different people before giving up. Investors — whether it’s CMOs or venture capitalists — need to occassionally throw money at an idea to try it out in the real world to ultimately know if it’s successful or not.

  • Options for Ground Zero

    The architectural planning for Ground Zero in New York serves as a good example of where design thinking could have helped. Paul Goldberger’s recent New Yorker article, “A New Beginning: Should Ground Zero be Used for Housing?” (unfortunately not online) describes the emotional situation four years ago when it failed to occur to anyone that the new World Trade Center plan should focus on housing, not office space. In retrospect, it seems obvious. Manhattan needs more residential space, has an office surplus, and the trend in lower Manhattan is toward residential offerings.

    An approach that explicitly goes looking for more and different options might have uncovered the obvious sooner. But it requires diligence to honestly question the available options in the midst of emotional rhetoric. Design thinking is, as the name implies, a particular way of thinking, and so not easy to invoke against the tide of conventional judgment thinking. I think some of the advantages we attribute to design thinking will actually come from the courage and cleverness to evoke design thinking at all.

  • Stealth research & development

    I’m reading Skunk Works, a book about the famous Lockheed Advanced Development Project that has an amazing record of innovation. It reveals the source of the F-117’s stealth technology not as an American invention, but as an idea that was passed from scientist to scientist for a century. The idea centers on calculations describing how a given geometric configuration will reflect electromagnetic radiation (e.g. make a plane invisible to radar). Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell first derived the set of formulas, a German electromagnetics expert Arnold Johnnes Sommerfeld refined them, and the Russian radio scientist Pyotr Ufimtsev further developed them. They lay hidden by obscurity, in an untranslated Moscow scientific journal for ten years. Eventually the US Air Force translated it and Lockheed radar specialist Denys Overholser read Ufimtsev’s dense 40-page paper out of pure geek interest, finding the key to stealth technology near the end. It’s ironic that an American used this information, as it was 1975, during the cold war.

    There’s a lesson here we all know already, about connecting research and development, about helping academia and industry cooperate in ways that profit both parties. It happens now, but there’s still plenty of universities and companies that could benefit from a relationship.

  • Authentic Brands

    My recent post about brand layering reminded me of something Kevin Fong mentioned at the ID Design Strategy conference. Companies like Polaroid and Westinghouse are now renting out their brands to other manufacturers, while the parent company puts an ironic layer of marketing frosting on top: “You can be sure… if it’s a Westinghouse.” Um, apparently we can’t. Click through to the small appliance category and the mask comes off, a giant list of “Salton Brands” (not “Salton Products” mind you).

    With brand layering, brand renting, and consumers taking the situation literally into their own hands, an authentic brand backed by an authentic company will be a rare and valuable asset. My current client has two offices full of authentic people doing authentic work under an authentic-but-little-known name, they’re feeling the pressure to grow, and the pure marketing path (as opposed to marketing great work) tempts them. It’s easy to talk about doing the right thing and focusing on the customer, but the reality — even in “good” companies — is much messier, requiring thoughtful conversation within the organization of how the products and processes on the drawing board will change the way they are perceived.

  • Brand Layering vs. Customer-Made

    Last Saturday I sauntered into Urban Outfitters to see what they were selling these days. Their inventory is pretty edgy and feels like a bellweather of what fashion is moving from the lead users to everyone else.

    I was drawn to this line of relaxed suit jackets, which mix business and design in a way you might think I’d want them mixed. The line is called Urban Renewal (a house brand?) and which — according to the tags — might be vintage clothing, might be new, and/or might be modified somehow…

    Some of the jackets had added stiching patterns or an ’80s iron-on or patch on the back. On this particular specimen, the jacket was vintage and simply rebranded, which is only appropriate as the original was created by Needle Craft for another company called Good Friends of Athens, Tennessee. Notice how Urban Renewal leaves the original label inside…

    It was only $59, so I had half a mind to buy it and add my own layer of branding to it. But, now inspired, I instead headed for the vintage store where I found a mint DKNY suit jacket for $15. After spending another $10 in funky buttons at the sewing store and a half hour of sewing, I had a Noise Between Stations brand jacket. The customer-made approach was more fun, an exercise in play, and saved me $35.

  • Lawrence Lessig on innovation vs. the law

    Lawrence Lessig’s recent speech, Clearing the Air About Open Source actually focuses more on the war between innovators and those that profit by impeding innovation: lawyers, lobbyists, and the companies that employ them. He illustrates how the courts are used to litigate companies into bankruptcy, how companies like Microsoft are hiring boatloads of lawyers to use the reality of patent law to fend off open source, and how on the macro level it is countries who are making decisions about patent law and software investments to further their interests.

    Most importantly, he points out that these arguments are rarely framed as threats to innovation, but that they need to be to protect innovation. You can see his influence on the EFF’s website.

    During the Q&A he offers some specific ways the open source community can fight this war, e.g. by supporting political points of view that both embrace liberal (allow innovators to compete against BigCo) and conservative (stop government from meddling in the market) points of view. Still, he paints a dire picture for anyone building software from the OS to the application layer, and I’m glad I’m not in that business.