I just discovered the work of Mark Allen Nakamura who designed some of the old Quokka Sports site, still one of the most daring and bold layouts to appear on a mainstream site.
Category: Design
-
Tom Peters on TV
Tom Peters: Re-imagine! Business Excellence in a Disruptive Age comes to PBS (in NYC, on Monday, Nov 22 at 10pm)
Each of the companies profiled faced revolutionary business challenges and responded by inventing entirely new opportunities. Each had to re-imagine the nature of work itself—and did so by soliciting the energy and engagement of each and every one of their people.
-
Open, Subsidized Innovation
The company suggestion box is growing in size and sophistication. Taking a cue from the software industry which subsidizes innovation by letting passionate customers beta test new products, companies like Bose are setting up forums for ideas. They recognize that innovation needs to be open, tapping creativity from inside and outside the organization.
The system that Bose is using, Informative, stresses the importance of the brand relationship. It’s interesting that they go for this softer, more ambiguous benefit than simply saying they help commpanies harvest more ideas. Though they do realize this is a conversation and not just direct mail in reverse…
Our real-time interactive communications tools allow us to engage large numbers of consumers in ongoing, concurrent dialogues, and our patented systems explore these conversations and consolidate actionable insights based on what your customers want and need right now, next month, next year and beyond.
-
Frontline dissects brand marketing
Frontline is doing the Frontline treatment on brand strategy and the latest marketing. There’s a few refreshingly honest people, and the rest are either critical of the methods or vary from slightly to very silly… A market researcher probes a participant, “Would you say you feel lonely when you eat white bread? Anxious? Trusting?”
Read Montague’s Neuromarketing — potentially the most far-fetched method — sounded the most convincing, mainly because he’s an actual psychiatrist and not a hack. “I get to the reptilian brain… in France cheese is alive, you don’t put it in the refrigerator just as you don’t put your cat in the refrigerator. It must be marketed as alive. In the U.S. cheese is dead, it must be pasteurized and put in the refridgerator, and it is sealed in plastic like a body bag, and put in the cold, like a morgue.”
From a design perspective, it strikes me that this approach could be upstream of designers, displacing parts of ethnography. The design brief may come from the psychiatrist.
And of course there’s the deeper issue of marketers creating an alternate reality, going beyond selling to obscuring the truth of issues. And that’s why I like Frontline, they’re very good at exposing the truth.
-
The new MoMA architecture goes *POOF*
The architect, Yoshio Taniguchi, of the new addition to the Museum of Modern Art in New York said to the trustees at the beginning, “Raise a lot of money for me, I’ll give you good architecture. Raise even more money, I’ll make the architecture disappear.”
John Updike adds,
And disappear, in a way, it has. The customary sensations that buildings give us—of secure enclosure, of masses of matter firmly supported—are diluted by a black gap, a mere quarter inch wide, that runs along the bottom and top of every interior wall, and even at the base of weight-bearing pillars, so that everything, subtly, floats. The gaps are useful for heat and air-conditioning, too, but their aesthetic accomplishment is to dematerialize the walls; the visitor moves through spaces demarcated as if by Japanese paper screens.
-
Backwards process
A friend just reminded me of a story from some time ago. I was giving a short presentation at a financial services company on the user-centered design process. The audience was a project team. I threw up some slides illustrating the various activities: researching users, designing the interface, implementing it, etc. Toward the end, the database programmer said, “Ohhhhhh, I understand, you do everything backwards!”
That’s because his process was: build a database, slap on a user interface, and test it… the exact opposite of what I would do.
I wonder if this is a way to explain UCD to technical audiences? “OK, what I’m about to tell you may be hard to believe. But there’s this whole field of people achieving great results by doing everything completely backwards!“
-
Making advice palatable to CEOs
I had just read What New CEOs Need to Know (here’s a free, shorter version) and was contemplating the CEO’s experience (expressing a strategic vision, trying not to send the wrong signals, not in power but reporting to the board, not in touch with operations, balancing obligations inside and outside the company…) when I came across Darrel Rhea’s post about selling a CEO on a new branding campaign.
So what compels them to invest in solving their brand problems? When a CEO perceives brand as tool to express his or her vision for the organization, they fully support it.
Yet another good example of applying empathic design (researching your audience and tailoring your work accordingly) in yet another context.
-
From anger springs innovation, sometimes
Tom Peters in Re-Imagine!
For me business is personal, not an abstraction… I’m writing another book because I’m pissed off… I happen to believe that innovation comes not from market research or carefully crafted focus groups but from pissed off people….
Many people I’ve met who strive to be designers and innovators are driven by frustration with the world as it is, wanting to make it what it can (and should!) be. Anger acts as a useful driver for innovation; I know I nurture my inner fiestiness. But I also think anger acts as a hindrence to getting things done. You can’t always work angry, you can’t always communicate angry, and you can’t always lead angry.
Peters goes on to describe how innovation suffers when mostly well-intentioned people are thwarted by organizational barriers. True enough, but aren’t those organization barriers constructed of and by other people? Well-intentioned people get charged by inspirational ideas, but — my gut tells me –feel scared as hell to quit their own jobs and follow his advice. At some point the anger must turn into empathy in order to make progress. Fear of change and risk can be alleviated, but it requires more than anger or prodding.
There’s a function of emotional intelligence that must initially let the anger flow, and then when an idea has momentum the strong emotions should be channeled into more productive means. “I’m so angry and want to fix this stupid product/company so bad that I need to stop being angry and start understanding. I need to look for commonalities with people who act differently and find whichever approach is right for the situation to make progress.“
-
Product naming as lifestyle signal
A product named FreeStyle Flash is…? Take a guess, then look at the answer.
-
How a competitive stance blocks innovation
W. Chan Kim and Ren̩e Mauborgne in Think for yourself Рstop copying a rival make a great case for reducing the focus on competition and refocusing on innovation:
Assisted by new means to analyse competitors and influence their behaviour, companies [in the 1980’s] placed competition at the centre of strategic thinking, where it has remained ever since. But should organisations be motivated in this way? Our research suggests not. Focusing on building competitive advantages detracts from reshaping old industries, driving young industries to new frontiers and building entirely new industries. It blocks creativity.
I experienced this first-hand years ago while working on a project alongside one of the big management consulting firms. They had morphed the best practices mantra into a design method, aggregating disparate features of the competitors products into our product, and viola — this would somehow result in a cohesive whole that would trump the competition.
Seth Godin says, “The reason it’s so hard to follow the leader is this: The leader is the leader precisely because he did something remarkable. And that remarkable thing is now taken — so it’s no longer remarkable when you decide to do it.“
-
Those wonderful blue Greek coffee cups
…you find all over New York are now available in a more environmentally-friendly ceramic version.
-
Ketchup desire lines
Just finished Malcolm Gladwell’s article on ketchup, which Peterme and Christina liked so much. The article explores the connection between consumer research and our tastes. The best quote: “The mind knows not what the tongue wants.”
Immediately afterwards I was grocery shopping (and bought some Gulden’s mustard, incidentally) and saw this:
I wouldn’t be surprised if the upside-down ketchup bottle came out of similar ethnographic observation that resulted in the “EZ pour” child-friendly bottle. In this case it’s about adjusting the product to fit the way people actually use it, like desire lines. I just wonder if they had to educate stock clerks on which way to display the bottles.
Also, Nick writes in with a pointer to their bitchin’ label copy.
-
What’s next for iLife: Film Direction
iLife let’s you be composer and editor with production capabilities that required an entire studio 15 years ago. The next logical step in consumer production is full-on film direction, a combination of simulation and multimedia that completes the DIY promise. An example of what amateurs are hacking together is Mike Fraser’s 100 years (Windows Media), made using The Sims 2 and set to Five for Fighting’s 100 years (iTunes). It’s rough but wonderful. Wait for the ending.
Update: Brett writes in to compare this to machinima, which it is, and which I should have thought of after discovering the hilarious Red vs. Blue last year. But what if Apple comes at it from the other direction – building a complete production studio on your mac, instead hacking together a movie using a game engine — it could suddenly own the commercial machinima market before others realized there was a market.
-
Steve Jobs on managing for innovation
From an interview in BusinessWeek…
On motives:
…motives make so much difference. …our primary goal here is to make the world’s best PCs — not to be the biggest or the richest. We have a second goal, which is to always make a profit — both to make some money but also so we can keep making those great products. For a time, those goals got flipped at Apple, and that subtle change made all the difference. When I got back, we had to make it a product company again.
On creating a design culture:
You need a very product-oriented culture, even in a technology company. Lots of companies have tons of great engineers and smart people. But ultimately, there needs to be some gravitational force that pulls it all together. Otherwise, you can get great pieces of technology all floating around the universe. But it doesn’t add up to much.
…and losing it:
Some very good product people invent some very good products, and the company achieves a monopoly. But after that, the product people aren’t the ones that drive the company forward anymore. It’s the marketing guys…
And who usually ends up running the show? The sales guy. John Akers at IBM is the consummate example. Then one day, the monopoly expires for whatever reason. But by then the best product people have left, or they’re no longer listened to. And so the company goes through this tumultuous time, and it either survives or it doesn’t.On juggling:
I did everything in the early days — documentation, sales, supply chain, sweeping the floors, buying chips, you name it. I put computers together with my own two hands…. Not everyone knows it, but three months after I came back to Apple, my chief operating guy quit. I couldn’t find anyone internally or elsewhere that knew as much as he did, or as I did. So I did that job for nine months.
On systematizing innovation:
The system is that there is no system. That doesn’t mean we don’t have process… But that’s not what it’s about. Process makes you more efficient. But innovation comes from people meeting up in the hallways or calling each other at 10:30 at night with a new idea… And it comes from saying no to 1,000 things to make sure we don’t get on the wrong track or try to do too much.
On the company story:
When I got back here, Apple had forgotten who we were. Remember that “Think Different” ad campaign we ran? It was certainly for customers to some degree, but it was even more for Apple itself.
You can tell a lot about a person by who his or her heroes are. That ad was to remind us of who our heroes are and who we are. We forgot that for a while. Companies sometimes forget who they are. Sometimes they remember again, and sometimes they don’t.
-
PBS series on innovation
They Made America is a four-part series in November:
American history is filled with the stories of influential innovators, whose ideas and entrepreneurial spirit gave birth to commercial milestones like the steamboat and cultural touchstones like the Barbie doll. Twelve of these individuals are profiled in They Made America, a four-part television series from the producers of American Experience.