Noise Between Stations

It’s great to see design pattern libraries like Yahoo!’s getting a lot of attention these days. I’ve been working on planning one for a client recently and thinking a lot about what makes them successful. In short, I think the newer, popular ones are immediately useful, meaning you can directly insert the pattern into your [...]

That simple idea (hopefully obvious to anyone who has tried it) that great commercial products aren’t simply the result of great product ideas is one I’ve mentioned before in the context of company culture and improving capabilities over time. But compared to the concrete sexiness of topics like the iPod and Swiffer this argument isn’t [...]

Inspired by Samuel Mockbee’s work helping architecture students make actual homes during their studies, I’m having my Business & Design class at the Pratt Institute do business design work on an actual business. We’ve studied business operation and finance, secondary and primary research, and business idea sketching. Monday we’re kicking off our project with a [...]

Milton Moskowitz, who has co-authored “The 100 Best Companies to Work for in America” since 1984, disovered (not surprisingly) that to really learn what makes a good job you need more than surveys and secondary research, you need to talk to employees. In this article, We Love Our Jobs. Just Ask Us, he identifies several [...]

The magical Overlap 2007 event happened this past summer in the woods north of Toronto, a weekend devoted to exploring the intersection of business and design. To keep it conversational and intimate the size is limited to about 40, but for the first time thanks to this year’s organizers there’s video from the event on [...]

If you’re in the Dallas-Fort Worth area you may want to check out Design Thinking 2007, a full day of sessions exploring the topic.

In the evolution of programming languages, we’ve been moving to higher and higher levels of abstraction, for example from binary to assembly to C to scripting. Writing code gets easier, but the more generalized functions are balanced with less flexibility, which limits how much abstraction is practical. Bill Scott’s Protoscript is a small but significant [...]

The nice thing about having a blog is that you can pour your unfiltered frustration into it and walk away self-satisfied. Warning, this is one of those posts. Dear New York City Internet Job Recruiters, I’ve met several of you over the years, and many more lately now that the demand for talented people has [...]

Once is the best movie I’ve seen in a long time, and accomplishes this very simply, without trying very hard. A tale short enough to be a short story. A musical setting so natural you almost don’t realize you’re watching a musical. Characters that are beautiful people you’d want to be friends with. Website Soundtrack