Noise Between Stations

Month: October 2005

  • Marketing & mental models

    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 points, medium flights earn 4 points, and long flights earn 6 points. Book online and you get double points. 100 points earns you a free flight.

    Compare this to the American Express rewards program, where I just scrolled through pages of Terms and Conditions text. The eligibility section has five paragraphs, here’s the first paragraph (that last sentence kills me):

    The program is available to Basic Personal Card, Gold Card, American Express® Preferred Rewards Green Card, American Express® Preferred Rewards Gold Card, Platinum Card,® Rewards Plus Gold Card, FSA Gold Card, Fidelity American Express® Card, Fidelity American Express® Gold Card, Fidelity American Express Platinum Card® and some Blue from American Express Cards, Basic Optima,® Optima Platinum, Optima Gold Card or Business Management Account members whose American Express® Credit Card or Optima Card account is associated with an eligible AMEX charge Card account enrolled in the program (“Eligible Amex Credit Card”). Basic and Additional CMs holding a Business Card from OPEN: The Small Business Network (“Business CMs”) who have one of the following Cards may also enroll in the program: Business Gold Card, Business Platinum Card,® Business Centurion® Card, Executive Business Card, Business Purchase Account, Business Costco Card or Business Membership Rewards Card. American Express® Rewards Green CMs and American Express® Rewards Gold CMs may also enroll and remain enrolled in the program as long as they have another eligible AMEX charge Card account enrolled in the program. Basic and Additional Corporate CMs may enroll in the program unless their company has chosen not to participate in the program. Accounts or Cards not listed in this paragraph (e.g., Student Optima Card, American Express® Credit Card for Students, American Express Costco Cash Rebate Card, Hilton HHonors Credit Card, Delta SkyMiles® Credit Card, Starwood Preferred Guest ® Credit Card, IN:NYCsm, Incentive Funds Cardtm, Golf Card, American Express® Cash Rebate Card, Blue Cash from American Express, Corporate Purchasing Card, Corporate Meeting Card, Corporate Defined Expense Card, Business Travel Accounts, line of credit accounts, Delta SkyMiles Business Credit Card, Gold Delta SkyMiles Business Credit Card, Platinum Delta SkyMiles Business Credit Card, Community Business Card, Business Cash Rebate Card, Cardless Central Billing Accounts and other non-Card accounts) are not eligible for enrollment in the program. Card eligibility is subject to change.

  • New business design blog: bplusd.org

    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 on the bplusd blog, where I’m looking forward to hearing more from him.

  • GM’s enterprise product development

    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 will replace such vehicles as the Opel Vectra, Chevy Malibu, Pontiac G6 and Saab 9-3, we’ll realize significant savings as a result of this new system. We’ll move from three closely related regional architectures to one global architecture serving nine different models in all four of our regions. We expect a 40% reduction in our prototype builds, a 20% reduction in material costs as a result of the common components, and 25% reductions in both engineering costs and overall investment. That one program alone could save us more than $1 billion over the course of its lifecycle.

    Having just drove an Opel Meriva in Italy, a mini minivan not available here in the U.S., I can see the wisdom in leveraging great architectures worldwide. But we’ll have to see if a Saab is still a Saab when it has a Chevy chassis.

  • It’s alright to cry at work

    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. In the middle of an open landscape office. With everyone looking on. It was uncomfortable, but this is a biological reality…

    Scientists do not know exactly why women tend to cry more easily, but Dr. Frey said several factors may be at work. One is the hormone prolactin, he said, which is present in mammary glands and induces lactation but is also found in the blood and in tear glands. Boys and girls have about equal levels of prolactin levels in their blood during childhood. But from ages of 12 to 18, the levels in girls gradually rise, and that may have something to do with why women cry more than men.

    In my case, we stepped into a conference room, closed the door, and I explained my decision. She agreed, ended the conversation by giving me a hug, and we went back to work. Ever since I’ve thought crying in the office is not only a normal part of work, but to discourage it is to discriminate against women. The 21st Century organization needs to be different from the factory or office of the 20th Century. Especially in companies that strive to push the boundaries of design and innovation we tap into the personal and emotional conduits of our customers and ourselves to create new products and services. That can’t happen when we deny our own emotions.

  • Peter Rowe on design thinking

    design thinking book cover …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 inquiry insofar as it is concerned with making and a certain commonplace usefulness, quite apart from its more esoteric benefits.

    Design Thinking

  • Chuck Owen on design thinking

    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 design thinking the following characteristics and ways of working:

    • Conditioned inventiveness.
    • Human-centered focus.
    • Environment-centered concern.
    • Ability to visualize.
    • Tempered optimism.
    • Bias for adaptivity.
    • Predisposition toward multifunctionality.
    • Systemic Vision.
    • View of the Generalist.
    • Ability to use language as a tool.
    • Affinity for teamwork.
    • Facility for avoiding the necessity of choice.
    • Self-governing practicality.
    • Ability to work systematically with qualitative information.

    Design Thinking: What It Is, Why It Is Different, Where It Has New Value (.pdf)

  • Dave Pollard on design thinking

    …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.

  • Everyware

    Adam GreenfieldMore 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, a vision of ubiquitous computing with a set of principles guiding and urging designers to create responsibly the electronics of every place. Adam’s in-person plea created a sense of urgency for most of us to consider how to connect our skills with devices not yet invented, that we should invent. It was the perfect compliment to Dan Brown’s questioning of human vs. technology control of content.

    More notes are on the wiki, and there’s photos.

  • Teaching design to enterprise architects

    James MelzerMore 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.

  • Philosophical underpinnings of system design

    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 shouldn’t).

    He ends by asking if we should go back to how we understand businesses and design applications that follow that understanding. “…alternate conceptions of business may lead to other foundations for content management. What if business is a factory? A family? An army? A conversation?”

  • Designers and cultural influence

    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 into a long stream of conversations.
    trailmarker
    So far there’s been a lot of explicit mention of organizational culture in the presentations, influenced by everything from translation to business process change. Talking through the MIG “trailmarker” model has resonated with folks who are seeing the bigger ramifications of product and process work. A longer explanation can be found in Design [is not a] Strategy.

  • CMU design management reading list

    Someone published a list on Amazon covering the reading list from Carnegie Mellon’s graduate Design Management class.

  • Gross National Happiness

    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 note, I just returned from Italy where the Slow Food movement has morphed into Slow Cities, an emphasis on local sourcing and less harried lifestyle. Spreading to other parts of Europe, the media reported the conflict between the desire for slower cities and the perceived need to compete with countries like China and India.

    The Economist reassures us that manufacturing jobs shifting to the east is natural, and that those are actually less safe, less desirable jobs. The “rich nations” will provide more services, which are difficult to export. And…

    People always resist change, yet sustained growth relies on a continuous shift in resources to more efficient use. In 1820, for example, 70% of American workers were in agriculture; today 2% are. If all those workers had remained tilling the land, America would now be a lot poorer.