Noise Between Stations

Category: Design

  • Design is to design a design to produce a design.

    I was at Brand Experience Lab last week and David Polinchock was describing how he talks to clients about the potential of cutting edge interaction design hardware. He quoted someone else who pointed out that our children could have access to 3D printers and so, just before leaving to live away at university, they’ll print their furniture.

    A neat concept, but what put the clutch pedal down in my brain is what David said next: “We’ll all design, because we can.” That shifts designers from primarily makers of products to makers of design tools.



    David Polinchock

  • The new posters

    A bit of fun for Monday morning: AMPs – Alternative Motivational Posters, office art for the other side of your brain.

    I like Focus

  • Premature optimization

    “Premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming.” — Donald Knuth

    I think you can replace the word programming with the word design and that would still be true.

  • Programming language design

    For some reason I’m fascinated by programming language design. One reason is that innovation can happen at the tools level, and the tools that fuel software are undeniably important.

    In the hands of a great author, writing on this topic weaves together the technical, the social and the personal forces at work. One of my favorites is Worse is Better, an analogy that applies beyond programming languages. Another is Paul Graham and his work on Arc.

    In The Periodic Table, Primo Levi tells a story that happened when he was working in a varnish factory. He was a chemist, and he was fascinated by the fact that the varnish recipe included a raw onion. What could it be for? No one knew; it was just part of the recipe. So he investigated, and eventually discovered that they had started throwing the onion in years ago to test the temperature of the varnish: if it was hot enough, the onion would fry.

    We’re going to try not to include any onions in Arc

    An exciting part about Graham’s work is that he starts by admitting Unix/C has won. Then he proceeds to set his goal even higher. This is the spirit of design, of always turning whatever situation you have now into something even better.

  • Creativity, logic and hindsight

    Edward de Bono on the interaction between creativity and logic:

    …every valuable, creative idea will always be logical in hindsight. If an idea were not logical in hindsight, then we would never be able to appreciate the value of the idea. The idea would remain valueless. So we are only able to appreciate those creative ideas that are indeed logical in hindsight. Then we go on to say — as we have been doing for 2,400 years — that if an idea is logical in hindsight, then better logic should have found it in the first place. So we try to teach more logic instead of taking creativity seriously.

    Or as James says, “That’s Common Sense You Didn’t Have 6 Months Ago.“

  • It’s Synergistic!

    I saw this posterboard in a conference room in corporate America recently:

    definition of synergistic, which is the same as synergy

    …and I just had to take a picture of it. While at first it strikes me as a funny word, I’ve been seeing more and more corporate language bashing, and I find it discouraging. It’s too easy to position people who use corporate-speak as the other and label them corporate drones. Language is learned, and so this language acts as useful shorthand to the initiated — which is true in any discipline. If creative and analytical people are going to work together, we need to jump this hurdle.

    Synergy is usually the word I think of to illustrate this. It’s hard not to say it without sounding silly because of its use in dot-com exuberance. And yet it has a specific and important meaning to business; the merger of AOL and Time Warner could have resulted in synergy, and that should have been a focus of their integration efforts.

    Corporate speak really only fails in two cases:

    1. When the speaker incorrectly assumes the audience knows the vocabulary, as when government speaks to the public
    2. When fancy words substitute for substantive ideas. This is really a case of bad thinking and not a language issue.

  • Business design in Fast Company

    Bill Breen’s new article on business design in Fast Company does a good job at bringing the topic down to a more concrete level than other articles to date.

    The below quote resonated with me emotionally, as I encountered this situation exactly during a seminar I taught last week:

    The trouble is, when confronted with a mystery, most linear business types resort to what they know best: They crunch the numbers, analyze, and ultimately redefine the problem “so it isn’t a mystery anymore; it’s something they’ve done 12 times before,” Martin says. Most don’t avail themselves of the designer’s tools — they don’t think like designers — and so they are ill-prepared for an economy where the winners are determined by design.

    The link is courtesy Diego Rodriguez, whose blog entry has an interesting discussion of where the “good enough” in design thinking should be applied.

  • Tool: chain of meaning

    If you ever get a chance to hear Andrew Zolli make sure you do. He’s a great speaker, weaving compelling ideas and statistics into a story and injecting it with the right amount of humor.

    I saw him last week where part of his talk included his idea of the “chain of meaning” where a raw material can go from commodity to product to service to experience (see a summary at Core77 and in an older deck from Zolli). It’s not too different from Tom Peters’ progression of products -> services -> experiences -> dreams.

    from coffee beans to coffee grinds to coffee to starbucks

    It occurred to me this is not just a way of understanding what has been done, it’s another business development tool. And it’s not just a one-way progression; there may be times when, for example, you’ve created an experience but also see an opportunity to compete on price and move down the chain to product.

    Lately I’ve seen the result of not understanding the chain of meaning. In Manhattan on 23rd St. between 7th and 8th Aves two businesses opened in the past few weeks: a bakery and a barbeque restaurant. Both are charging well above market prices, presumably because they think customers want to trade up. But neither offers an experience, and neither has the brand pull of a Nathan’s on Coney Island (where they can charge something like $4 for a hot dog). As I stood at the window of the BBQ place reading the menu I heard a man next to me talking on a cell phone: “They want twice as much as anyone else for barbeque? They’re crazy.” When New Yorkers call you crazy, you’re really crazy.

  • Beta is the new black

    Brett tracks the coinage of the phrase beta is the new black. While the idea isn’t news to the web-savvy, it’s still a scary concept to product developers in the corporate world.

  • Tool: levels of abstraction

    In 1960 Theodore Levitt wrote “Marketing Myopia” which questioned which level of abstraction was right for businesses to match their capabilities with the desires of customers:

    Those behind the railroads are in trouble not because the need for passenger transportation has declined or even because cars, airplanes, and other modes of transport have filled that need. Rather, the industry is failing because those behind it assumed they were in the railroad business rather than the transportation business. They were railroad-oriented instead of transportation-oriented, product-oriented instead of customer-oriented.

    In the dot com boom this was taken to absurd extremes, but I’m finding it using as a tool for product development, considering different levels of abstraction as an idea-generation tool. For example, we might generate different ideas for Sony as a portable cassette player business, a portable music business, a portable entertainment business, a ubiquitous entertainment business, and so on. Each time you go up a level, the possibilities also branch out.

    But I figure someone must have already done this. Does it already have a name?

  • Daniel Pink’s “A Whole New Mind”

    Recently I was emailing with Andrew about Daniel Pink’s new book “A Whole New Mind”. Andrew caught Dan’s great talk at SXSW and was reading his book, one chapter of which is devoted to design. There’s a review at the CEO Read site.

    “His key thesis is that the future no longer belongs to analytical professionals—the linear, logical knowledge people (the “SAT people,” he calls them), It belongs instead to creators and empathizers.”

    Dan writes in big strokes, talking about the right-brain in revolutionary terms to make his audience of left-brain-heavy business people sit up and listen. The reality of the situation is probably more subtle: we need to build on, not replace, the left-brain thinking of the last century or two. Arthur D. Little introduced science to management in the 1880’s and it has benefited us greatly. Adding creativity and empathy to that will improve management even more.

    Looking for examples, I think of people like Paul Ford who can think and discuss politics, literature and programming simultaneously without switching gears. We might ask if this isn’t just another way of talking about “Renaissance Men” or polymaths. What I think is different — especially in America where we’re not shackled to titles and degrees — is the blurring together of these fields so that it resembles the early days of science when everything was simply philosophy.

    What’s important, as Dan Pink says, is that we need this thinking more than ever. He cites the three-headed terror of “Asia, abundance and automation” that forces us to respond with higher-performance thinking. Austin identifies what I think is a fascinating but no less daunting other side of this coin:

    …in the past business had to manage constraints (time, money, products, manufacturing, markets) to create possibility. In the new age (of imagination, conception, or whatever), we’ve removed all of the constraints (except for time), so now businesses have to create constraints to manage possibility.

  • Herbert Simon on design

    Everyone I’ve come across thus far who has written about design thinking cites Herbert Simon’s book The Sciences of the Artificial. Simon was a great thinker in economics (Nobel Prize), computer science and cognitive science. For considering the construct of design at the cognitive level, this book is part of the canon. In it he identified one aspect as what we now call abductive thinking — the mental creation of something new — as opposed to inductive or deductive thinking. A favorite quote:

    “Engineering, medicine, business, architecture and painting
    are concerned not with the necessary but with the contingent —
    not with how things are but with how they might be —
    in short, with design.”

  • Dan Pink podcast

    Todd of 800-CEO-READ interviewed Dan Pink, author of A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age.

  • Empathy and the design of JetBlue

    David Batstone recaps a conversation with David Neeleman, the CEO and founder of JetBlue in the March 2005 Harvard Business Review and shows perfectly how the empathy of great design thinking improves both human experience and the bottom line simultaneously:

    For starters, Neeleman was troubled by the vast inequities of privilege and poverty he saw firsthand in Brazil. Note that JetBlue today tries to eliminate stark differences that affect how customers are treated. The airline offers only one class of seats. In fact, the seats that have the most legroom are the situated at the back for those people who have to get off the plane last. In-flight services as well are offered to all customers with equal attention. In return, JetBlue enjoys an unusual depth of customer loyalty.

    This begs a direct comparison to Herb Kelleher of Southwest Airlines who included employee job satisfaction as an integral piece in his strategy, a key differentiator in an industry in “a race to the bottom”.

  • metacool is itself cool

    Diego Rodriguez — instructor at Stanford’s d.school — has a blog called metacool that’s the product of an engineering + MBA educated brain, definitely worth a look.

    For example, he discusses Nike’s Considered line of shoes:

    Considered shoes generate 63% less waste in manufacturing than a typical Nike design.  The use of solvents has been cut by 80%.  And a stunning 37% less energy is required to create a pair of shoes. Is Considered a perfect example of green design?  No, but when was the last time anyone did anything to perfection?  I’m just happy to see a big, public company like Nike — with everything to lose, and not so much to gain — take a leadership role in trying to forge a new market space for environmentally friendly, socially relevant products.  This is a wonderful first step.

    I think green products will soon hit a tipping point, making Nike’s gamble pay off big. More on this in a future post.