Noise Between Stations

  • The Ten Distinguishing Properties of Wicked Problems

    You may have heard of Rittel and Webber’s wicked problems (problems that are messy, circular, and aggressive). I was interested to see their original paper (pdf) includes ten distinguishing properties “that planners had better be alert to” because “policy problems cannot be definitively described.”

    1. There is no definitive formulation of a wicked problem
    2. Wicked problems have no stopping rule
    3. Solutions to wicked problems are not true-or-false, but good-or-bad
    4. There is no immediate and no ultimate test of a solution to a wicked problem
    5. Every solution to a wicked problem is a “one-shot operation”; because there is no opportunity to learn by trial-and-error, every attempt counts significantly
    6. Wicked problems do not have an enumerable (or an exhaustively describable) set of potential solutions, nor is there a well-described set of permissible operations that may be incorporated into the plan
    7. Every wicked problem is essentially unique
    8. Every wicked problem can be considered to be a symptom of another problem
    9. The existence of a discrepancy representing a wicked problem can be explained in numerous ways. The choice of explanation determines the nature of the problem’s resolution
    10. The planner has no right to be wrong

    It makes me wonder if any politicians have tried to campaign on a process for solving wicked problems instead of prescriptive solutions.

  • The Wii’s Blue Ocean Has to Float Partners Too

    It seems Wii games aren’t selling as well as competitors’ games. The New York Times article cites two culprits:

    1. Audience: “They don’t buy new games with the fervor of a traditional gamer who is constantly seeking new stimulation.“
    2. Marketing: “Part of the problem, analysts say, is that other game makers have yet to embrace unconventional advertising methods that can reach this broader audience.“

    Those are probably contributors, but I would cite one overriding factor: strategy. The Wii is a famous example of Blue Ocean strategy, achieving low-cost through asymmetrical and differentiating product characteristics. In a recent experience, I realized this strategy has to extend through the product extensions created by partners, or the whole system loses momentum.

    In 2006-7 I worked with a media company partnering with a fitness company that had gone from a small franchise to an international leader in its category using a Blue Ocean strategy. They wanted to extend the business online, but somehow forgot why their customers loved them: an innovative, different experience that could be had at a lower price. The online product we were asked to create was not different, not better, and not cheaper. Although it’s designed well and effective, it’s not selling well. I’m not sure if the client saw the strategic mismatch, but they certainly didn’t enforce it with their partner.

    If I were in Nintendo’s shoes, I would be hammering away at a broad effort to help my partners follow the strategy that has been 20-million-consoles-effective. Example: Guitar Hero shouldn’t be the same price for the Wii as for Playstation and Xbox, it should be a lower price (and it can’t be a whopping $90, who do they think this segment is anyway?). And the games need to work hard to find new, fun things to do with that motion controller. Fun and cheap, the Wii is as simple as that, and partners need to get on board with that strategy.

  • Pages and Direct Manipulation

    Now that we have rich web interfaces and sufficient bandwidth there’s talk of the death of the web page. While that may happen someday, for now we’re on a gradual journey of using pages differently than we used to.

    One difference is simply introducing more direct manipulation, such as clicking and/or dragging the pages themselves rather than a link representing the page. About four years ago I created a way to navigate web pages by moving them side-to-side…

    backslider

    …one gesture the iPhone uses today.

    iphone-slide.JPG

    Some recent designs are using thumbnails to increase non-linear navigation performance, such as Issuu

    issuu.GIF

    …and AT&T’s Pogo browser.

    No doubt these are some slick interfaces. But of course we’re relying on a visual thumbnail of a page to signal the meaning of what content is on that page. For relatively graphical web pages, that may be fine. For text pages, probably not. As they used to say at Apple, “a word is worth a thousand pictures.” Displaying a thumbnail and a word together could go a long way, at least until we kill the page.

  • In Tillie’s, Fort Greene, Brooklyn

    “Hey Man”
    “Hey, how’s it going?”
    “Good good. You know, I’m sorry to bother you, but I’ve been watching what you’re doing and it looks wild. What is that?”
    “Oh, I’m sort of drawing a piece of software.”
    “Drawing it? Is that how you do it?”
    “Well ya, I draw what it’ll look like, and someone else makes it work.”
    “How much of it do you have to draw?”
    “Well, it depends. In this case, I’m drawing every screen.”
    “Every screen?! Man, that is crazy, that is so far out. I didn’t know people did that. Draw every screen. Man, that’s something. Why do you do it that way?”
    “You know, I’m not sure.”
    “It’s kinda like an architect. Like you’re drawing a building. But I thought, you know, people just programmed and whatnot and that’s all you had to do.”
    “Yeah. Yeah, that would be cool.”

  • Concept: The Food Guide

    restaurant.jpg

    At the most expensive and sophisticated restaurants, the service tends to be the same as in a diner, just more refined and thorough. But it could be quantitatively different. Elite restaurants feature exotic ingredients and preparation that require an experienced fork and palette to appreciate, expertise many of us don’t possess and for which the menu and momentary description by the server doesn’t suffice.

    Enter the Food Guide. In addition to the conventional service, a food guide would join you at the table and guide you through the meal. She would describe the chef’s philosophy, where the ingredients originated, how the meal was prepared, how to eat it, what tastes to tune in, etc. At this level of restaurant, the patrons have no presumption of conducting business or chit-chat; the food is the focus and the restaurant provides a food-centric experience.

  • If Da Vinci Blogged the Mona Lisa

    Comments

    Cool! But the background looks all messed up. Is it done yet?

    —

    The model looks a little schizo — happy and menacing at the same time. Can you fix the smile?

    —

    yo leo, what’s with the green thing jutting out of her head?!?!

    —

    Cheap baby furniture. Cheap meepit furniture for neopets. Cheap wicker furniture. Cheap micro-suede furniture. Cheap furniture. Cheap sex furniture. Cheap garden furniture

  • Why I’d Like to See the 37Signals Urinal

    37Signals and Don Norman had a tiff recently, with the lads from Chicago saying they design for themselves first and the Don saying, essentially, That’s not design, Martelli. That’s masturbation. (Whitney has the links).

    This strikes me as an argument for gentlemen farmers. What most of us experience most of the time, I was thinking recently in the men’s room here at my client’s office, is poor design. ‘Do I want to stand next to another man as he is urinating?‘ I thought, ‘Does the architect of the bathroom want that?‘ Of course not. Ideally I’d like the architect to design for me. But if I have to accept the design he creates for himself, that would probably still be a better experience than what some administrator has specified.


    Update: Just heard Phillip Hunter from SpeechCycle last night who told a familiar tale. As a purveyor of interactive voice response systems, he made it clear the speech recognition technology isn’t the obstacle to improving these systems. And they have lots of great ideas for improving customer service like personalization based on your geographical location or your past calls. The obstacle is the clients. ‘Everyone knows how to talk, so everyone thinks they know the best way to design these interactions.‘

    Perhaps what we need is not arguments over what design process to employ but rather better ways of dealing with clients. Everyone I know, despite differences in their process and philosophy, goes through pretty much the same client review cycle. Why not try something else? For example, grab a couple key people from the client and embed them in the design team in the design team’s environment.

  • Concept: Ambient Light-Powered Smoke Alarm

    Smoke alarms have saved thousands of lives in the United States since their introduction and widespread use during the past 2 decades. The good news is that more than 90% of homes in the United States now have at least 1 smoke alarm.1 The bad news is that a substantial proportion of those smoke alarms do not work. In on-sitesurveys of homes with smoke alarms, about 25% to 30% of the alarms did not function when tested.2 Some failures are due to malfunction of the alarm itself, some are due to a dead battery, and some do not function because the battery has been removed.

    — Smoke alarms and prevention of house-fire—related deaths and injuries

    If dead batteries are a problem, we could power them using solar panels and ambient light. The current panels probably aren’t efficient enough yet, but that’s improving.

    Ambient Light-Powered Smoke Detector

  • Most Designers Really Think They’re Dentists

    Most designers really think they’re dentists. If the designers are sitting there and they’ve got the stakeholders in the room – the CFO, the CIO and the CTO and the CEO – and one of the clients says: “Boy, my jaw is killing me”, the designers will immediately say: “I can have a look at that!” “Really?” “Yes, I’ll invent something! We’ll get that molar out of your jaw in no time!”

    That’s what I, as a science fiction writer, find most attractive about designers. They don’t primly say “I only do plastic consoles” — because that’s not what they do.

    from Bruce Sterling — A Conversation About Turin

  • Looking for Examples of Digital Design Concept Processes

    I’m storyboarding away and working on a section about design concepts: examples and processes for making them. This write-up of the Chamr concept process is a good overview, and I’m looking for more in case you know of any.

    In a nutshell, the Adaptive Path team started with research, then expressed important principles and major user activities to design for. Then they brainstormed hundreds of ideas and filtered them. Then one team member offers a new idea that nails it. I’m guessing the team so thoroughly internalized the research and constraints by this point in the project that they could evaluate a new idea quickly, in addition to recognizing the sexiness of it.

    Charmr

    Later… There isn’t much online, perhaps because the most mature examples are from non-digital design fields such as industrial design, architecture, and digital art. I have some hypotheses about why there’s little conceptual design in the software world, but they’re still half-baked.

  • Tyler Brûlé on Starting Up

    Tyler Brule at CEBit

    Some facts about his new start up:

    • No research
    • No focus groups
    • No creative conflict
    • No eating at your desk
    • No PowerPoint presentations to clients
    • No walls
    • No freebies
    • No user generated content

    Photo, link courtesy John Maeda

  • Happy Birthday Noise Between Stations

    This here blog turns 9 years old tomorrow. Quantitatively speaking, she’s got 2,041 posts, 590 comments, and 130 categories. Checking the PageRank, it’s a 6, the same as generalmills.com, whatever that means.

  • People — Rather than Things — at the Centre of Work

    The Harvard Business Review continues to support Gary Hamel’s ideas on management innovation, most recently with a summary inviting readers to contribute their thoughts on the subject. I’m eager to see the response. I think Hamel has a strong argument, yet the topic doesn’t have a handle that’s easy to grasp. “Alright, it’s clear we need to make management more innovative. Now what do we do?” My guess is management innovation will be the outcome of the causes Gary cites, tangible things like collaboration via wikis or recruiting talent on social networks.

    Theodore ZeldinI do like the quote from Theodore Zeldin, a British historian of work, who says “the world of work must be revolutionized to put people–rather than things–at the centre of all endeavors.” This isn’t a new message, humanists have been talking about it since the 1920’s or 30’s, but perhaps now information technology will overcome the thing-centered work of the industrial age.

  • Exploratory Ideas for Newsware User Interfaces

    Way back when, I was a journalism major in college. So I was pleased to meet the folks from Daylife last year and bat around some ideas about how they’re aggregating, understanding, and syndicating news applications. I just found part of the conversation lying around my hard drive and thought you might be interested in browsing some exploratory ideas for newsware user interfaces.

    headlines sorted by source and source's length

  • Entrepreneurs: Beware of Big Liabilities

    The Zollverein School in Essen, Germany was a great hope for the business design field, starting the first MBA of its kind in Europe. But this newspaper story lays out a tale of caution for anyone starting a venture like this. In short, it seems the gorgeous new building they constructed to house the school has become a real estate liability. Even with taxpayer funding, the operating costs are a burden.

    The dot com downturn of 2001 sank some firms like Scient but not others like Razorfish. The difference wasn’t client base or capabilities (or even the fact that I was working at Razorfish :), it was real estate liabilities. Scient invested in a lot of expensive offices whereas Razorfish put their spare cash in the bank for a rainy day.

    Let’s hope the Berlin C-School — through partnership with Steinbeis University — avoids this issue.

    “Don’t own nothin’ if you can help it. If you can, rent your shoes.” — Tom Peters Forrest Gump