Noise Between Stations

Design

  • Communicating Concepts

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    3 min read

    Image: Configuration A2 Mach 5 Civil Transport, Reaction Engines When I see concepts that are received well, the concept itself can usually only take a portion of the credit. Just as important is how the concept is communicated. Some of this is common knowledge: make it look good, choose the right level of fidelity, show…

  • IDEO’s Open Dev of the BugBase Hardware/Software UI

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    1 min read

    Concept 1 – Electronic Ink over Tactile Switches. Source: IDEO It’s not often we get to peek inside anyone’s concept design process, so this blog from IDEO has me starting up my reverse-engineering machine…. An open project between BugLabs and IDEO, this deep-dive exploration of the BUGbase UI is focused on re-envisioning the BUGbase interface…

  • Concepts as Inspiration

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    1 min read

    New headquarters and cultural center for China Central Television. Design by OMA. Concepts strive to sway opinion by eliciting emotions. Fundamental to this purpose is the new, the aspect that is beyond question different than what has been done in the past. The new is what causes the audience to pause and react. This reaction…

  • Webinar with Bill Scott of Netflix, Yahoo + 20% Off

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    1 min read

    Bill Scott of Netflix, formerly of Yahoo, will be hosting the Future Practice webinar tomorrow, helping web designers learn how to create designs that are easier to implement by illustrating the UI engineer’s point of view. And you, my dear readers, get 20% if you enter the code VTWBNR when signing up. I recorded a…

  • A Quantified Value of the iPod Design

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    2 min read

    This study — Who Captures Value in a Global Innovation System? The case of Apple’s iPod — is one of the best I’ve heard of in a long time. The researchers traced the parts and assembly of the iPod and attributed the value generated by each step by part and by country. A few key…

  • When Engineering Defines the Limits of Design

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    2 min read

    I’ll get the plug part of this post out of the way right here: I worked on a preview of Bill Scott’s upcoming webinar on What Every Designer Should Know about Interface Engineering and I think it’s both very good and very important, and what’s more it’s a topic that I’ve never seen addressed outside…

  • Dream Cars Meet Harsh Reality

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    3 min read

    That’s what Phil Patton at the New York Times thought about the concept cars at the Detroit Auto Show. In the article I found some insight as well as some assumptions we can toss out… But this year, dark economic clouds seem to have cast a shadow even over the designers displaying their ideas at…

  • Obama’s Design Thinking

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    2 min read

    (Editor’s Note: a meme like “design thinking” hasn’t really been beaten to death until it’s been associated with and used to explain popular culture :-) There were two lines in President Obama’s inaugural speech that caught my attention, signaling him as someone who can think beyond the prevailing frames and design new situations. In both…

  • How To Get More Responsibility

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    1 min read

    Advice from Scott Berkun on the PM Clinic list: …as a general rule: 1. Do good work 2. Show good work to people who have power to give you more responsibility 3. Ask for more responsibility 4. If told NO, ask what you need to do to get more responsibility 5. Repeat

  • Web 2.0 Strategy: Customers Create Value

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    3 min read

    Note: Over the next few weeks I’m blogging my notes on Amy Shuen’s book Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide: Business thinking and strategies behind successful Web 2.0 implementations. (O’Reilly Media). The book is both a good introduction and a synthesis of diverse theories that should offer something to even experienced strategists. Background: What is Web…

  • Come Do RFP Jedi Mind Tricks, Jan 13

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    1 min read

    If you’re a member of the AIGA and in New York, you might enjoy a fun little breakfast gathering planned for Tuesday, January 13, 2009… Redesigning the RFP response Maybe you’ve gotten one: the RFP that asks for mountains of miraculous work, for no money, delivered in 20 minutes. Or the one for a project…

  • Designing Better Proposal Price Tags

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    2 min read

    Not long I was talking to a project manager who was writing her first request for proposal, explaining the common wisdom on budget disclosure: “You’ll want to give them a ballpark idea of what your budget is without telling them your actual budget; agencies will sometimes configure the work to take all the money on…

  • Designing Lower Legal Fees

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    2 min read

    So we all know that at the heart of creativity lie constraints. And one constraint I love is money. I thought of this today as I read about a friend’s company who spent “tens of thousands of dollars” on legal fees just for their domain name. Maybe that was money well spent, but from personal…

  • Social Media as a Product Testing Audience (e.g. for Motrin)

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    2 min read

    To catch you up, Motrin posted the below ad and people, particularly baby-carrying mothers, were so offended that the makers of Motrin pulled the ad. Many of the offended people (“Motrin Moms” there were dubbed) were on Twitter, as well as blogs and YouTube. As a result, marketers are starting to get scared of social…

  • Interview With Me Discussing Tangible Futures

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    1 min read

    Stuart Candy, researcher at the Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies and research fellow of The Long Now Foundation, asked me a few questions about tangible futures and published the interview on his blog. While I’m more focused on near-term concept design these days, it was helpful for me to reflect on why and how…