Noise Between Stations

May 2006

  • Curing the pattern disease

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    1 min read

    Do you walk down the street and notice patterns all around you? If so, you might suffer from apophenia — a serious malady that goes undiagnosed for years in most people. Talk to your doctor to see if Metavor is right for you. Satire courtesy of Chris Baum.

  • Overlapped

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    1 min read

    We overlapped and now my mind is too busy sorting things out to write. More later.

  • Why Your Employees Are Losing Motivation

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    1 min read

    Sirota, Mischkind, and Meltzer suggest some ways individual managers can motivate employees… 1. Instill an inspiring purpose. 2. Provide recognition. 3. Be an expediter for your employees. 4. Coach your employees for improvement. 5. Communicate fully. 6. Face up to poor performance. 7. Promote teamwork. 8. Listen and involve.

  • Exporting management techniques

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    1 min read

    The chief executive of Cognizant Technology Solutions, an outsourcing company that is based in Teaneck, N.J., but has most of its employees in India, says it can compete against giants like I.B.M. and Accenture partly by borrowing American-style management techniques.

  • Analyzing the past, designing the future

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    1 min read

    If you follow Edward de Bono’s writings, you already know about his drive to improve the quality of thinking. It’s an important message he continues in Why so stupid? “There is always some risk with design…. Judgment and routine behaviour is low risk so it is the preferred method of thought… You can analyse the…

  • Process Explained

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    1 min read

    Here’s a wonderful little diagram from Central Office of Design…

  • oDesk for design & field research

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    1 min read

    I know a lot of designers in the New York area, so frequently people ask me for references. But lately it’s very hard to find freelancers or anyone between jobs. The industry is booming, but the traditional place-an-ad, receive-a-million-resumes (or not), and interview-a-dozen-people way of finding someone is fairly inefficient. The globalization of the programming…

  • Business models for designers

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    2 min read

    About every third or fourth design student I meet has a concept for helping the elderly call for help from their homes. I just saw another one last night at the Parsons show. One might wonder why such devices aren’t widespread by now. I ran into my friend Bill recently who works as a CTO…

  • Big companies as collections of small companies

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    2 min read

    A completely nascent idea: are big companies more successful when they are organized as collections of small units, as opposed to bigger, less personal, hard-to-manage large units? I asked this question while commiserating with a friend whose medium company was swallowed up by their giant competitor last year after a prolonged and contentious aquisition period.…

  • The Creative Age from Rotman

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    1 min read

    The Spring/Summer 2006 Rotman Magazine (.pdf, 5.3MB) is out with design-happy articles by Richard Florida, Jeanne Liedtka, Roger Martin, and more.

  • Design thinking at the Alberta College of Art & Design

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    1 min read

    Lance Carlson, president and CEO of the Alberta College of Art and Design, is — somewhat ironically — one of the only art and design colleges incorporating design thinking into the curriculum in a comprehensive way… “Our new Institute will explore and foster work in these areas, and provoke internal dialogue at the college as…

  • The Scoot-n-Swiff

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    1 min read

    + = The Scoot-n-Swiff (patent pending) This idea came to me while visiting my sister this weekend. A lot of kids were over for a party, and I saw how the toddlers loved these ride-on toys. I also noticed my sister needing to swiff a few times per day to de-crumb after the kids. Clearly…

  • Design envy

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    1 min read

    You know, I think the phrase design thinking is an oxymoron. The design mindset is synonomous with making and doing; it’s more action-oriented than merely talking and thinking. This is yet another reason to reframe design thinking. A friend of mine studying psychology says many in that field have physics envy: they want the capability…

  • WorldChanging images of the future

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    1 min read

    My colleague Zap pointed me to some of WorldChanging’s links to images of the future… Pantopicon’s FFWD>> competition presents a series of themes, and asks for images set in 2005 and 2025 as illustration. (reference) The Onion’s 2056 issue. Alex Steffen — in a post wonderfully similar to MIG’s ideas on tangible futures — itemizes…

  • Did you know there’s a vaccine for chickenpox?

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    2 min read

    I had no idea until a friend of mine, an adult, just caught chickenpox (she actually knew about the vaccine but her doctor told her she’d been ‘exposed’ and didn’t need it). Apparently the vaccine was approved in the U.S. in 1995. If you have never had chickenpox and haven’t been vaccinated, you can no…