Stefano Mazzocchi’s email overfloweth with quotable wisdom:
‘It’s exactly like thermodynamics, where a infinite number of small reversible steps is more efficient than a small number of big but not-reversible steps.‘
‘…good ideas and bad code build communities, the other three combinations do not. This is extremely hard to understand, it’s probably the most counter-intuitive thing about open source dynamics.‘
Form, function, and affordability. This is the key to IKEA’s philosophy. The egalitarian mindset seduces me. ‘For us, price is the magic ingredient. It divides the indispensable from the unattainable. And so we embrace a third dimension of furniture design – an affordable price.‘
Of course price point is always part of a proper business plan, but the philosophy here is not what will the market bear but what will fill the market with lust. Overall the manifesto manages to inspire, educate, and explain (and advertise) all at the same time.
Though a friend recently commented that modern furniture now looks cheap because it all looks like IKEA.
And I must ask, is it too cheap, environmentally speaking? Furniture can be the sort of thing that lasts generations and yet the Billy might only last a few moves.
Update: they post quite a bit of info about them and the environment on their site.
Revisiting one of Jesse’s elements diagrams I’m thinking about how the addition of a ‘length’ column (how long the layer requires) would generate some interesting outcomes. For example, significant business decisions can be made and ripple through an organization faster than upper layers, particularly Scope (Requirements, Specs) and Structure (IA, ID). A problem arises where a product can take longer to design and create than the span of the business environment the product was meant to serve. When business moves this fast, design must as well, limiting what can be built, or at least how.
Incidentally, I disagree a bit with that use of the term ‘strategy,’ preferring Michael Porter’s clarification of strategy and business effectiveness.
More incidentally, the summary on MSN Search for PeterMe.com says, ‘Web designer Peter Merholz offers some brain droppings for hungry designing surfers.’ Droppings? Hungry? Talk about your mixed metaphors. And what is a ‘designing surfer’ anyway?
Press release. For me it means new service offerings (process design, supply chain management, integrated marketing) and a return to having a presence in Europe. As opposed to the July 2002 acquisition of Scient‘s ‘certain assets and operations,’ SBI acquired all of Razorfish.
Of SBI, Gartner says
Of the media reports in general, I was surprised at how often the press release was simply regurgitated or the writers took the opportunity to dig up titilating-yet-ancient corporate history. Forrester – whose business, ironically, is not breaking news, – gets credit for original thought (‘SBI has only acquired five of the dozens of firms up for sale. After hundreds of conversations with different potential targets, it believes it has picked up the best assets available.‘) as does Inside Consulting (‘So while the IBMs, Accentures and EDSs battle for big-buck contracts near the surface, SBI and its counterparts will pick at the pieces that drift downward.‘)
Anyway, it seems Andrew Ross, an American Studies professor at New York University, has excellent timing in the release of his book No-Collar: The Humane Workplace and Its Hidden Costs. I read an except a while ago and was surprised to find it accurate and insightful. One description of the book says,
Though urban knowledge workers enjoyed unprecedented autonomy and bargaining power, and their bohemian artisan style evoked a pre-industrial craft ethos, the volatile economy exposed even the rank-and-file to 24/7 schedules, emotional churning, and the kinds of pressure typically borne only by senior managers. With his characteristic mix of laser-sharp analysis and deft storytelling, Ross asks: How humane can, or should, a workplace be? In documenting the quixotic life of these neo-bohemian workplaces, No-Collar records a unique moment in American history and reveals what the landscape of work will look like for decades to come.
Assuming a typical company website, when estimating the word count for a given piece of text when you only know the character count divide by six.
Andy Hertzfeld, of the original Macintosh team, writes about the prototype of Vista: a prototype for OSAF’s Networked Personal Information Manager. As a view into a development process that must integrate many different modules into one flexible interface it’s a must read.
I’m also glad to see he landed somewhere that has a good chance of releasing a useful product.
Pleasing writing on the MetaDesign site…
Information needs design.
You cannot not communicate.
It looks good and it makes sense.
MetaDesign…an international network of visual engineers, bringing a broad perspective to the complex challenges of everyday communications.
A user experience idea, part of the LazyWeb
Positioning
BlogReader is a useful, everyday tool for many people. While other content tracking, reading, or ranking applications came and went, BlogReader has consistently provided the content readers wanted in an easy and flexible way, and in doing so has become an ingrained part of many people’s everyday lives.
BlogReader is essentially the Google of news readers: fast, smart, hip, leading edge, Net-savvy, in touch with the grass roots, and profitable.
Personas
Designing to user personas is a time-tested user-centered design process. Personas should be based on research that verifies our assumptions, but for now here’s a best guess of BlogReader users.
There are two main personas: The Occasional News Consumer and the Extreme Blog Aficionado:
Nancy the News Consumer
Nancy is an analyst with J.P. Morgan. She focuses on the manufacturing sector and needs to provide insightful information to her clients. She juggles numbers all day and wants to spend her time finding answers to her problems, not searching for information.
Nancy knows the big media companies suffer from groupthink – always regurgitating the same ideas. She’s hoping there’s blogs written by industry insiders who she can look to for honest, unique ideas.
She has previously set up BlogReader and visits the site in the morning during the first sips of coffee to see what’s new.
Barry the Blog Reader
Barry is a programmer at Accelerate, a small IT consultancy in Seattle. After work he enjoys developing Linux modules and conversing with other developers about open source issues. His blog community includes specific individuals whose point of view he respects, and looks to them for links to other people with innovative and trustworthy opinions.
Barry starts, like Nancy, by going to BlogReader and reading his favorite sites. Unlike Nancy, links help him find new sites that he actively adds to his list, specifying how he wants BlogReader to analyze them. Because sites can differ so widely in editorial approach, he likes to create categories to keep them organized.
Alternate career idea #51: Form a small team of crack Internet peeps to provide quick and simple services in the developing world. For example, imagine a SWAT team dropping into Afghanistan to set up a simple website to disseminate information within the new government, complete with no-nonsense hardware and training. Then we’re off to somewhere else. Of course, the usual we’re-here-to-build-a-website-but-first-we’ll-help-prepare-the-organization activities would happen. It’s all funded by grants, donations, etc.
I was going to call it Designers Without Borders, riffing off Médecins Sans Frontières, but they already exist, albeit in more of an educational capacity. I want a SWAT team.
You’ve probably seen the Mindset List, published each year by Beloit College. It goes like this…
Most students entering college this fall were born in 1984.
It’s always struck me as a nice little design document, grounding the instructors in the mindset of their students. What’s more, the items chosen appeal to people of different generations. For example, ‘Women have always been members of the Jaycees‘ didn’t resonate with me, but probably does for older Americans.
I’m thinking about how to use this with my clients.
Link courtesy Chris Pepper.
We’re publishing! This makes me happy. Perhaps post-bust we’re entering a phase of reflection and recording. We young geeks are still thriving, but now it’s in publishing, both on paper and in more ways than ever on the Web.
The emphasis now seems to be taking a breather and recording what we know, what we’ve been doing. I hope the next phase is pushing the envelope, exploring new methods that are at once practical and visionary. I think we needed to catch our breath first.
I just taught a class to some designers visiting from Samsung Korea. As my first experience with an interpreter, I couldn’t help but laugh at the process a few times. Usually my sentence would result in a Korean sentence that was a little longer. But once in a while it was five times as long, and I had to wonder what the interpreter was really telling them. ‘This guy is saying such-and-such, but of course we know that’s wrong. Let’s just humor him.‘
I also realized that when someone is asking a question, even though he is speaking at the interpreter, he’s still talking to me and eye contact is still an important sign of respect (‘you listen with your eyes‘), even though we both acknowledge I don’t understand a word and instead I’m focusing on the interpreter.
But the more complicated social interaction didn’t distract me; the interpretation time actually allowed me additional moments in which to form my thoughts and pick clear, concise words.
Anyway, outside the classroom at Parsons were some student product design posters, including this great one about a desk that converts into a cot called Napple [pic1 | pic2 ]. It privides for both a hammack-like suspended fabric under the desk to lie on and a cover that folds down to give you privacy (inspired by Seinfeld?). The point is to allow for siestas at work instead of relying on less healthy caffiene uppers. It caught my eye because not too long ago I was having dinner with some folks discussing the secret little places we find at work to take naps.
Scient was acquired by SBI/filed for bankruptcy. I’m not sure how to read that financial transaction, how it should feel to clients, or what it means strategically for the company. I just hope folks don’t lose their jobs.
Word around town is that real estate liabilities hurt the bottom line (which means they had too many leases or buildings they couldn’t unload). We had to fix that right quick last year. I’ve always admired the mostly office-less approach of companies like Adaptive Path and Behavior for this reason, but I don’t know if that works for bigger firms that require more socialization.
If a digital design team designed a tire swing. Excellent.
Link courtesy of xblog.
In the latest issue of New Architect Alan Cooper espouses his usual philosophy: ‘Simply put, there is no downside to designing before coding.’
In the same issue, a member of the Mozilla QA team advises, ‘Release early, release often, and let your customers bang on it.’
Certainly two different approaches, but both valid I think. They could be seen as compatible in a couple ways:
Although this last approach implies the dev team needs rapid feedback because sufficient cycles weren’t built into the design process. However, I could imagine a product that, even after a Cooper-style design stage, still needed to draw out tricky technology implementation issues.
