Noise Between Stations

Design

  • Why I Think Posture Makes the iPad Different

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    2 min read

    Of all the images to come out of the iPad announcement, the one struck me the most was less about the device and more about the experience of it: Lying back on the sofa — isn’t that a nice way to be? And sitting or lying on the sofa with a 9.7 inch screen means…

  • Support for Innovation is Not the Same as Support for R&D

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    2 min read

    In case you’re wondering how to expose business leaders to the innovative power of design and design research without using those words, read how John Kay does it in the FT: For years research and development scorecards have dutifully recorded how much pharmaceuticals companies spend on the search for new drugs and the expenditure of…

  • Immelt Calls Out Managers for ‘Meanness and Greed’

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    1 min read

    As reported in FT: “We are at the end of a difficult generation of business leadership … tough-mindedness, a good trait, was replaced by meanness and greed, both terrible traits,” said Mr Immelt, who succeeded Jack Welch, one of the toughest leaders of his generation, at the helm of the US conglomerate. “Rewards became perverted.…

  • Who is Advising Executives on Customer Experience?

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    2 min read

    A few years ago I wrote an essay on “Strategic Delivery Points” to try and show how great product/service design, customer service, and other points where we deliver service to a customer can actually be a strategic advantage. There’s nothing new about this idea, of course, except that the emphasis on this approach is more…

  • Stepping Back, Squinting

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    1 min read

    I’m finally in a position to use much of my design and business experience and thinking, as well as facing challenges where I have no experience. And the situation is causing me to question much of what I knew about how to effectively deliver design consulting. In short, there’s a lot of blah blah blah…

  • Presentation Hardware: Tiny USB Speakers

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    1 min read

    I’m learning the hard way that presenting concepts may mean giving them to someone else to show on an unknown laptop across the world somewhere. I can control for many factors by simply making a video of my design concept, with voice over. But that laptop won’t get the audio loud enough, and no one…

  • Do We Live in a Fantasy World?

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    1 min read

    Rolf Jensen says so, but that doesn’t feel quite right to me. Though his point of view is certainly interesting… In the Dreamtelligence era, we trade in stories and dreams, in the extraordinary and the implausible. In this new age, industry can make anything you want, but what it can’t manufacture is fantasy – and…

  • We Put the ‘No’ in Innovation

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    2 min read

    Here’s an ad that I saw in the May 1, 2009 issue of The Week magazine. It’s from Post advertising their Shredded Wheat cereal with creative from Ogilvy: Personally, I love it. Just as wrong-headed financial management is being righted in this economy, we can reclaim the oft-maligned word innovation to mean actual progress. So…

  • Brad Bird on Sacrificing Ideas

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    1 min read

    Here’s a quick clip of Brad Bird talking about the film creation process and giving up particular ideas for the good of the overall concept. I find that’s one thing people learn along the way: it’s good to critique and trash ideas, just as long as it doesn’t get personal. His dig on “businessmen” is…

  • Democratized Design at BMW

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    1 min read

    At the end of the concept design phase you’ll need to select among the concepts you’ve developed, and there are various methods for doing so: customer feedback (e.g. desirability testing), a decision market, an executive decision, a vote, and so on. The last option, voting, becomes more interesting when you keep the designers anonymous to…

  • Concept Art Book is Now Online

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    1 min read

    Concept Art is distinct from the design concepts I talk about here, but they do converge at the point of expressing a powerful image of the artifact. The Concept Design book, by Scott Robertson with a forward by Francis Ford Coppola, collects the work of seven concept artists, but the book has been sold out.…

  • OMA’s Proposal for the Seattle Public Library

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    1 min read

    Now here’s a little nugget of gold for concept hunters like myself: The Office for Metropolitan Architecture’s original 1999 proposal for the Seattle Public Library. I love flipping through it and reading the story of how they let their idea unfold.

  • Images That Sum Up Our Desires

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    1 min read

    We are, by turn — and a writer says it with sadness — essentially a society of images: a viral YouTube video, an advertising image, proliferates and sums up our desires; anyone who can’t play the image game has a hard time playing any game at all. — Adam Gopnik, Angels and Ages: A Short…

  • Reverse-Engineered Concept: Waterfree Toilets

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    2 min read

    Here’s a reality we deal with all the time: toilets that use a great deal of clean, potable water in order to flush. This urinal for instance, requires one gallon, or 3.8 litres, just to flush some pee, which seems excessive: The sustainability problem here has multiple facets: the availability of water, the financial cost…

  • Play Literacy

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    2 min read

    …yes, that term sounds a little dumb, but it’s an idea I think will be important in the future. A deliberate spin on computer literacy, I think play will not only be important to designers to support creativity and innovation, it will be important simply to get along in an electronic world. In the past…