Archives for May 2008
Monocle, as a business, a magazine, and a website, is an interesting story. I’m not sure how well the business fares, but it’s been around long enough and the content is growing in quantity and richness that it seems the affairs are in order. Dan Hill recently posted about his work on the design of [...]
Those of us following the dissemination of the design thinking meme were wondering if and when the Harvard Business Review would jump on board, and the waiting is over. In the June 2008 issue there’s an overview article courtesy of IDEO’s Tim Brown, a logical choice. He makes some key points while sidestepping unnecessary hype. [...]
I think it’s fair to say the $100 Flip video camera is a disruptive play. I’m not too surprised it didn’t come from Canon or Sony, but instead from a company who established their capabilities by building even cheaper cameras… Pure Digital started out, in 2002, making a digital version of the single-use “disposable” camera, [...]
Lately Twitter’s database crashed. They occasionally have to turn off features for technical reasons. Sometimes they’re down and they don’t even know why (having been a sys admin I feel their pain). It seems they’ve picked a service with a a hard technical problem: scaling a web messaging system. And it’s reached the point of [...]
Design London looks like a very cool, London version of a D School — mixing students from design, engineering, and business students — with an incubator thrown in for good measure.
The world is getting to be a whole lot more complex, and we seem to be reacting with increasing punditry, from cable news hosts to conference speakers (there are currently 14810 slideshows on Slideshare explaining the future of something or other). And of course I’m guilty of this as the next guy, so I thinking [...]
Malcolm Gladwell is working on a book that argues there is a mismatch problem in the way we usually hire people, that we set up qualifications to try and judge how people might perform where what we should be doing is watching them actually perform. Here’s a recent video of him explaining the problem. The [...]
Toyota gets Surowiecki’d (a straightforward, insightful summary)… …if Toyota doesn’t look like an innovative company it’s only because our definition of innovation—cool new products and technological breakthroughs, by Steve Jobs-like visionaries—is far too narrow. Toyota’s innovations, by contrast, have focussed on process rather than on product, on the factory floor rather than on the showroom. [...]
Posts have been, and will probably continue to be, rather slow around here as I happily bond with the new member of my family, TVL. Cute, ain’t he?
Each semester I tweak my Business & Design class as I learn more about how to teach undergrad design students about business, and help them to blend business and design ideas rather than see them as two separate spheres (while relating cautionary tales, as with Ford bean counters who show up at the end and [...]