People

  • It was recently the birthday of former American president [[Woodrow Wilson]], someone who knew about trying to be innovative and bringing about change. He pushed major legislation through Congress, entered World War I, and sought to establish the League of Nations. He said, “If you want to make enemies, try to change something.“

  • The NY Times covers the new census figures… Among adults, 97 million Internet users sought news online last year, 92 million bought a product, 91 million made a travel reservation, 16 million used a social or professional networking site and 13 million created a blog.

  • I just learned Leslie Harpold past away. She and I didn’t know each other well; we shared some mailing lists and traded some emails. But we didn’t know each other well for a while — I can vividly remember reading her circa 1999. In my mind she is one of that small group of passionate…

  • My friend and former co-worker Alex Kirtland is reviewing public prediction markets on his blog. Given how important a clear understanding of the market is to the accuracy of participants’ voting, I appreciate the POV of someone like Alex who groks good digital design.

  • Marc Rettig, one of the most thoughtful practioners in the user experience world, will be in New York next month discussing Interaction Design is Language Design… …The notion of a “design language” has been with us for years, but if we take the idea seriously, perhaps ideas and frameworks from linguistics can help us design…

  • I added thoughts from Peter Senge, Ray Stata and Ed Simon to the Design Thinking and Business quotes page. Ed Simon’s is the earliest reference I’ve found of the term business design used in this context.

  • Christopher Rhoads lobs some harmless questions at Motorola’s CEO Ed Zander ($) in today’s WSJ. Luckily Zander steps up and honestly assesses the company’s challenges, shortcomings and approach. Excerpts: On learning the importance of cool… When I came here on January 1, 2004, I didn’t think much about cool. I thought about making a quarter,…

  • Martin Fisher Martin is co-founder of Kickstart (formerly Approtec), an organization designing products for the bottom of the pyramid. As opposed to C.K. Prahalad who tends to describe the poor as consumers (see sachet marketing), Martin views the poor as investors. I met him at the ID Design Strategy conference this past week where he…

  • Niti Bhan

    I finally met the lovely and vivacious Niti Bhan at the ID Design Strategy conference. She gave me one of her hilarious business cards and I discovered she has a blog, check it out.

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

  • 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…

  • I stumbled across Richard Farson’s site looking for an old HBR article he wrote, and discovered a wealth of excellent thinking, synthesizing ideas on business design, organizational design and designers. The article from HBR, The Fault-Tolerant Leader (free here), hits on all the important reasons management needs to accept risk in order to innovate. His…

  • Mike Lee just told me about John Maeda’s new Simplicity blog (where John is coincidentally blogging about Mike.) While simplicity is a noble pursuit, we live in a complicated world and I was curious to know how Maeda could suddenly pounce on us with such a manifesto while surrounded by the complexity of work at…

  • 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.

  • 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…