October 2005
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Marketing & mental models
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3 min read
I sincerely think human-centered designers’ (I use the term designer in the widest sense) ability to regard problems in a personal way results in drastically different solutions. Lately I’ve been looking at how marketing programs are designed to fit customers’ mental models, or not. For example, here’s JetBlue’s frequent flier program: short flights earn 2…
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New business design blog: bplusd.org
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1 min read
My friend Jess and I have shared hotel rooms at two recent conferences, where he gently challenged and explored my thoughts on design and business. He’s smart, humble, and dedicated, so I’ve taken his skepticism seriously and use this space to address the criticism he offered. I’m happy to see he’s now doing the same…
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GM’s enterprise product development
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1 min read
Bob Lutz explains plans to centralize their design and engineering budget and what that means for building automobiles worldwide… We expect a reduction in our architecture count over time of 50% as we introduce more converged architectures replacing the regional architectures we have today… For example, as we develop our new global mid-size architecture, which…
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It’s alright to cry at work
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2 min read
Stephanie Rosenbloom’s Big Girls Don’t Cry in the NY Times offers many opinions on women crying in the office, all of them against it. When I was a young manager, a woman in my group came to my desk to ask about a resourcing decision I had made. Unhappy with it, she broke into tears.…
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Peter Rowe on design thinking
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1 min read
…design has often occupied an ambivalent position, being characterized as either a form of fine art or a form of technical science. From all perspectives, however, design appears to be a fundamental means of inquiry by which man realizes and gives shape to ideas of dwelling and settlement. Furthermore, design is a practical form of…
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Chuck Owen on design thinking
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1 min read
Design thinking, as a complement to science thinking, embodies a wide range of creative characteristics as well as a number of other special qualities of distinct value to decision makers. In advisory roles, properly prepared design professionals could make substantial contributions to a process now dominated by political and economic views…. I would nominate for…
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Dave Pollard on design thinking
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1 min read
…the rule set above is a mechanism for the intellectual process of intentional creation. It is much more than just imagination, or invention, or creativity, or project planning, though all of these are a part of it.
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Everyware
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1 min read
More from New Challenges… On Saturday night a sub-group — emboldened by a smuggled bottle of wine — sketched out a new manifesto for information architecture. Outward looking, devoid of definitions, accessible to the common person. On Sunday Mr. Greenfield parachutes in to advocate for what could be the impetus to the manifestis’ work: Everyware,…
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Teaching design to enterprise architects
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1 min read
More from New Challenges… James Melzer has made impressive progress on expanding the Zachman model to accommodate design (i.e. user experience) activities, vital to his challenge to educate and work with enterprise architects in U.S. Federal agencies.
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Philosophical underpinnings of system design
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1 min read
More from New Challenges… Dan Brown leverages Lakoff’s ideas on the central and exceptional elements of concepts in categorization to question how we design computer systems. We’ve built a lot of exception handling into systems to the point where we take some actions for granted, where computers are enforcing rules that perhaps people should (or…
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Designers and cultural influence
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1 min read
I’m at the New Challenges retreat in upstate New York this weekend. Whereas the last retreat was unexpectedly diverse by background, this one has attracted a geographically diverse audience, both ex-pats living on the East coast as well as visitors from Europe. Pouring rain is expected all weekend, so I expect folks to hunker down…
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CMU design management reading list
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1 min read
Someone published a list on Amazon covering the reading list from Carnegie Mellon’s graduate Design Management class.
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Gross National Happiness
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1 min read
Perhaps a better framing of the Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare (ISEW) is GNH: Gross National Happiness. Jigme Singye Wangchuck, king of the Himalayan nation of Bhutan, says GNH consists of “economic self-reliance, a pristine environment, the preservation and promotion of Bhutan’s culture, and good governance in the form of a democracy.” On a related…