Noise Between Stations

Month: June 2004

  • Beers and Carbs

    The beer wars are cracking me up, as product design meets marketing, awkwardly. Bud light, feeling out-marketed in a category they already designed for, runs ads that remind us ‘All light beers are low in carbs.’ Miller Light responds, ‘That’s right, so choose on taste.’ Here’s the beer carb chart if you’re curious. Interesting that the beer designed to be low in carbs — Michelob Ultra — is described as watery. I guess Michelob discovered water is low in carbs.

    Like the author, if I’m in the mood for a beer I’ll drink a beer, even a Guinness that has twice the carbs of anything else. If I want something lighter, my Summer choice is gin and tonic (0 carbs) and in the Winter it’s red wine (lower in carbs than light beer).

  • Example of weird info shape

    A few months ago I presented Incorporating Navigation Research into a Design Method (.pdf) at the IA Summit, which included an overview of using familiar information shapes. Afterwords Thom Haller approached me with this wonderful Chinese menu, a deviation from some Chinese menus I presented. He just said, ‘Look at this one. Try to figure out how much is a bowl of noodle soup costs.‘ You can see the logic in their modular approach, but when it takes 60 seconds to determine the price of noodle soup then something ain’t right.

    Confusing Chinese menu

  • Massive Change

    What is Massive Change? It’s Bruce Mau Design and the Institute without Boundaries trying to wrap their arms around the whole thing.

    Engineered as an international discursive project, Massive Change: The Future of Design Culture, will map the new capacity, power and promise of design. We will explore paradigm-shifting events, ideas, and people, investigating the capacities and ethical dilemmas of design in manufacturing, transportation, urbanism, warfare, health, living, energy, markets, materials, the image, information, and software.

  • Stimulating mental models

    Yesterday my wife received a call from John Kerry, the American presidential candidate. She was pretty excited, but realized fairly quickly that it was a recording. When she was done listening, she tried to delete the message.

    ‘No honey,‘ I said, ‘it’s a phone call.‘

    ‘Which number do I use to delete again?‘

    ‘Honey, it’s not a message, it’s a phone call.‘

    ‘What do you mean? I’m listening to a recording.‘

    Fascinating. To her, listening to a recording (plus the reaction to the notoriety of the caller) was equal to listening to voice mail, a natural response. She was thrust into the mental model of listening to a voice mail by the characteristics, the stimuli, of the call.

    Examining the stimuli that activate certain mental models would be a nice complement to Indi Young’s mental model thingy. So we not only react to what people already understand but also stimulate them into using information in a certain way.

  • MIT Sloan discovers design

    The Evolution of the Design-Inspired Enterprise (abstract free, article not free) in MIT Sloan’s Management Review is another article in the avalanche of recent business publications discovering design…

    …companies such as Master Lock, Procter & Gamble, BMW and Cambridge SoundWorks have employed design research — including the use of multidisciplinary teams and a variety of ethnographic and psychophysiological techniques — to build organizationwide identification with the customers’ needs and aspirations, keeping everyone’s eyes on the same prize.

  • Narrow vs. board perspectives on business

    Steve Diller, who is collaborating with Nathan Shedroff on a book about Designing Meaningful Experiences, raises the issue of how writing for business differs from writing for academia (and, IMO, designers)…

    Most people I know who manage businesses complain about the simplistic nature of much of what’s available. At the heart of the “typical” business book appears to be an assumption that ideas are, essentially, opportunistically-applied tools, rather than frameworks for broadening one’s perspective on the world. Academia, in contrast, focuses on the broadening of perspective, but frequently at the expense of usefulness.

    He’ll be writing more on the Cheskin blog, which incidentally has a cool photoblog.

  • The cure for the common cold

    I’m home today suffering the apex of a head cold and thinking, ‘This would be a great design challenge, curing the common cold.‘ I’m way out of my area here, but it’ll make me feel better to look at the problem.

    In What causes the common cold? HowStuffWorks tells us, ‘There are many different viruses that can cause cold symptoms, but about half of the time a cold is caused by a class of viruses called rhinoviruses.‘ In their article on the immune system they say, ‘Many diseases cannot be cured by vaccines…. The common cold and Influenza are two good examples. These diseases either mutate so quickly or have so many different strains in the wild that it is impossible to inject all of them into your body.‘

    The trick in battling the cold virus seems to be quickly detecting and vaccinating it. The mutating virus problem is a tricky one, and the plethora of strains makes having the right vaccination on hand difficult. But what if we went for an 80/20 solution, something that allowed us to detect and vaccinate just the more common strains, say just the rhinoviruses.

    Let’s look at the patient’s experience. Here’s how my cold progressed:

    • Sunday I felt an annoying discomfort in my throat.
    • Monday I had a full-on sore throat
    • Tuesday brought a runny nose and sneezing, to the dismay of my co-workers.
    • Today, Wednesday, my head feels like it’s in a vise.

    Now I’ll go into pure exploration mode. What if, on Sunday, I swab my nose with a special strip that performed a litmus test just for the rhinoviruses. If the test is positive, I go to the pharmacy and the pharmacist slips the strip into a machine that reads the strip, telling the pharmacist which vaccine to dispense.

    Or, let’s say the vaccinations were still too varied for a pharmacist to have on hand. A positive test might enable medical associations to dictate specific recommendations to help your immune system fight the virus (zinc, rest, fluids, etc.). This litmus test plus the official recommendation could be recognized by employers, so one proactive day of rest would cure a cold instead of decreased productivity as the cold approaches plus a day off.

  • Putting email in it’s place

    Michael Cage, who earns most of his income through writing, takes drastic measures to organize his time:

    I just want better strategies for focus. So, I bought an iBook. It does not have E-mail set up and never will. When it’s time to work on important projects, I carry it into another office…. As for my main, office computer, I’ve made a life-changing shift there, as well. I only check E-mail once per day, at the end of the day….

    I’ve noticed many people are happier with the illusion of progress than they are with progress itself. You can spend an entire day “appearing” productive by banging out E-mail after E-mail, writing memos, and barely taking a break. But at the end of the day you are where you started. Low-value, low-return busy work took up your day, and you are confronted with the fact that high-impact projects aren’t done. Or much/any closer to being done.

    I used to do this more in my previous job, unplugging the laptop and moving to a lounge-like spot in the office. Sadly my current job lacks loungeness, and a laptop.

  • Stanley Cup

    Hockey player holding a giant silver cup over his head in victory

    I’m not a hockey fan, but I must say this sport has far and away the best trophy of any major sport, a giant silver cup that can be proudly hoisted over the head. Look at that thing gleam.

  • Ending with a preposition is O.K.

    Chatting with some IAs recently, we wondered into grammatical territory where to my relief everyone felt passionately that it’s alright to end sentences with a preposition. One or two people said that was a rule carried over from Latin that shouldn’t apply to English. Winston Churchill illustrated the preference of comfortable convention over artificial rule:

    When an editor dared to change a sentence of Churchill’s that appeared to end inappropriately with a preposition, Churchill responded by writing to the editor, “This is the kind of impertinence up with which I shall not put.”

  • Widgetopia

    I knew Christina was moving Widgetopia to Drupal, but I didn’t realize the community had already jumped onboard and was contributing widgets. This is turning into the definitive gallery space.

  • Motivation

    More notes from Managing the Professional Service Firm…

    Issues in motivating each other…

    • There is a spiral effect among
      • Motivation
      • Productivity and quality
      • Economic success
      • Marketplace success
    • Honesty is very important in recruiting. It creates the right match between position and employee so the person’s motivation emerges naturally
    • Firms should have slightly more work than staff to maintain an atmosphere of challenge
    • Professionals are smart and want a variety of challenges. They usually have Impostor Syndrome
    • Professionals need a meaningful understanding of their work
    • And to be reminded that all of the work is important
    • Outplacement is not just humanitarian, but a compliment to up-or-out and a way to build the network

  • Broadcatching

    I recently thought it’d be nice for digital video recorders like TiVo to access parts of programs, so if I wanted to see that one joke from a movie, not the whole movie, I could find it. Just tag and syndicate the video, right? Webjay Brett Singer has the seeds of an implementation, publishing clips of news video. Webjay creator Lucas Gonze calls it broadcatching.

  • Your job will be offshored

    In the next decade, many design jobs will move offshore. If you think I’m wrong, if you think this is preposterous, then talk to out-of-work programmers who thought the same thing only five years ago. But Victor, you protest, someone can’t do user research from 4000 miles away. To this I’d say, most companies aren’t doing user research anyway. Good-enough design is good-enough to most companies, and good-enough design can be done offshore.

    Paul Ford, in Outsourcing, Etc., says, ‘I’m struck by the irony that the tools, networks, and protocols built over the last 40 years by programmers are the exact mechanism that allows these jobs to move overseas.‘ The same is true for design, as we write about design, critique each other’s work, and release our tools for those overseas to learn from. Furthermore, when we offshore our programming work, we send them our designs, we explain our designs, and in doing so we educate offshore workers in design. They’re probably getting a better case study-based education than many of us have had.

    India, for example, has a new, growing middle class that will absorb the jobs that we won’t be able to fill in the coming years. Already firms right here in New York City have difficulty finding entry-level web design workers. You’d think recent college graduates would love a job in this industry, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.

    Mind you, I don’t think this is a bad thing, it is simply the ways things are. If we recognize this now and prepare our skills accordingly (i.e. move up in the problem-solving food chain) we’ll protect our ability to earn a living. Brett Lider has some good ideas along these lines.

  • Coaching

    More notes from Managing the Professional Service Firm…

    On coaching…

    • Coaching is even more important when the market for employees is constrained.
    • The best management is not the most intelligent or the highest skilled, but the best at coaching. They can make people feel special and focus their talents.
    • Use the Socratic method to stimulate thought.
    • Senior people coaching junior people is another form of leverage.
    • Maister does the math and shows it’s more profitable for managers to spend their time coaching than to do their own work.

    Manager’s performance should be measured by

    • the aggregate performance of the group they manage
    • 360 degree feedback

    He goes on to say more about managing, that he finds there’s a big difference between the duties of a professional and a manager of professionals. The entire chapter is good, but in summary managers should be…

    • patient
    • willing to give credit to others
    • good leaders in tough times