Noise Between Stations

  • Business Model Diagrams

    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 visit from the client.

    A tool I’d like to use to capture the essence of the client’s business in a snapshot is a business model diagram. I’ve found two good examples:

    1. Peter Rip’s
    2. Alex Osterwalder’s and below…

  • What Makes a Good Job? Trust

    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 benefits that go into a good job, but one key characteristic:

    A good workplace is one where management trusts the employees and where employees trust the management.

    Which is illustrated in comments like…

    “I feel I get a fair share of the profits of this organization,”
    “I am proud to tell others I work here,” and
    “There is a minimum of politicking and backstabbing here.”

  • Videos from Overlap 2007

    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 the site.

    A highlight for me was the presence and conversation with Jeanne Liedtke, as I think her research, teaching, and writing has done the most to define and disseminate the core ideas of business design. She focuses on practical outcomes, yet is comfortable spinning beautiful metaphors and embracing big ideas, so I recommend you start with her video.

  • Design Thinkers Convening in Dallas

    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.

  • Protoscript: AJAX for the Rest of Us

    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 step in this evolution:

    Protoscript is a simplified scripting language for creating Ajax style prototypes for the Web… I am a huge proponent of breaking down the barriers for the non-techies among us to be able to do what us techie geeks can do.

    There are many AJAX frameworks out there, but Protoscript is designed to address a different and widespread need — those of us non-programmers who would like to make rich websites — without over-generalizing the code too much. It still involves looking at code, which I think will scare off many people, but it seems he’s thinking about how a graphical interface can control this.

    For designers, it means you will soon be able to do more without relying on a developer, and developers can focus more on the backend systems. For everyone else, it means the web will be getting more interesting more quickly.

  • An Open Letter to Internet Job Recruiters

    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 outstripped the supply. For the most part, you are pretty nice people who are willing to go the extra mile to consider a good match of person and job and maybe even career, unlike the IT headhunters I knew in the early 90’s that were mostly middle men for resumes.

    But, I have two giant gripes with the way you’re working these days:

    1. Don’t ask me to do your job for you.     Yes, I know a lot of people, and yes I like helping them find new opportunities. But simply telling me about an open request you have tells me that you haven’t taken the time to build your network or don’t know how. Further, you’re being paid to do that, so if you want expert help you need to share a significant portion of your fee.

    2. Great people are not found, they’re grown. There are simply not enough skilled workers to fill your jobs these days. This may be great news for you, but ultimately the companies you work for (and the clients they work for) will continue to suffer until you learn to cultivate good people. It’s easy to measure if a company knows how to do this, just look at the rate of employee turnover. If it’s under 5%, they do it well. If it’s over 10%, there are serious problems.

    To illustrate the potential, I’ll tell you a story from the first dot com boom. I was working at a company that hired a certain smart guy as a receptionist. In between phone calls and signing for packages he taught himself javascript. Excellent, make him a developer. After a while doing that he wanted to be an information architect, so I trained him. At that point the company failed to keep engaging him, and he left to pursue a masters degree, where he formed a company with a classmate. Soon after his company was bought by Google.

    That’s an extreme example, but I can tell plenty more about people hired that were not qualified, but had the right qualities, were smart, and got things done. A little training and encouragement made them qualified. But until your clients realize this and stop turning away good people, I’m done helping you.

  • What Music Videos Want to Be When They Grow Up: Once

    OnceOnce 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

  • Discount on the IDEA conference and SmartEx Classes in NYC

    I’m psyched that IDEA — a conference on designing complex information spaces of all kinds — is happening in New York this year, with a great lineup of presenters like Jake Barton, Alex Wright, and Chenda Fruchter.

    And from now until September 15th October 3rd you can get 10% off the price of the IDEA 2007 conference when you sign up for a class at Smart Experience.

    And, if you register for IDEA by September 15th, you receive 20% off any Smart Experience class. Here’s the details.

  • Where’s the Hip Hop Culture Online?

    chrysler300.jpeg Hip hop culture (at least here in America) has influenced not only our musical preferences but also our language, clothing, movies, and car styling. But you won’t see much of it online. The websites for hip hop artists resemble those for other artists, and the more innovative things are mostly done by us geeky white kids.

    Why is this, and will it change? I asked my friend Elizabeth who’s familiar with both the online scene and hip hop. She says,

    i’m not sure if the problem is available tools or simply culture and education. there are many tools available on the web. it may also be a difference in priorities. most of the people I know associated with “hip-hop” culture are more active/interested in making relationships in person and going to events vs. spending time online. online is just somewhere to sell things and post pictures and event invitations… maybe there is some web-evolution that cultures have to go to to adapt themselves to the web…?

    I’m fascinated by the possibilities of hip hop infecting the web. And frankly I think the technology is a barrier to many low-income students. Rather than merely educate low-income students on tech issues, framing the offer as hip hop online — starting with what’s being done now like amplifying the functionality of event invites — could be more attractive and generative.

  • Jibbajabba Website Porn

    If you ever need a little online design inspiration, check out the screens that Michael Angeles captures so lovingly…

  • Worthwhile is Now Motto

    motto magazine cover I just noticed that Worthwhile magazine dodged a trademark suit bullet and re-emerged as Motto magazine. They had good spirit before, I’m looking forward to checking out this new incarnation.

  • I’d Like to See More Discussion of Emotion Among Business Designers

    I was very frustrated at work yesterday thinking through a key business issue with a lot of variables in play, and the emotion was clouding my ability to think about the problem. Approaching the problem creatively was even harder, even though I was aware of this obstacle at the time. And of course this is not a novel problem, it happens to most of us in business.

    I’ve written before about not denying our emotions, channeling anger at work, and seen evidence that managers need high emotional intelligence.

    But I haven’t seen much discussion on the topic from people who are interested in business design. It’s a taboo in corporate life that won’t be discarded easily, because we associate calm, collected behavior with professionalism, and anything else can be scary. All the more reason to address the use of emotions at work head on and figure out how to summon and channel productive emotions that fuel creativity and motivation without making individuals upset with themselves or others.

    The start of a list of ideas for doing this:

    • Identify what kind of work arouses each person on a team and try to focus them on it
    • Teach everyone on the team the concept of flow and when to recognize their own signs of anxiety or boredom, and to communicate these to others on the team so the work can be adjusted accordingly
    • Develop a trademark style or practice of the firm that has a positive emotional effect. Broadcast this so that others who respond to it naturally come to the firm (as employees, clients, etc).

  • Tech Reality Check: eCommerce and Microchips

    A colleague recently complained that furniture company Room & Board has a great website but the buying process stops halfway and must be completed by phone. By coincidence we recently bought a bed from them and I have to admit the order was completed much quicker using the phone compared to a typical online shopping cart process. Even better, the bed was just delivered and I assembled it in 3 minutes. Literally. With no tools. And since the pieces were delivered by their own service and wrapped in the truck, it required almost no wasteful packaging. Overall a great customer experience, sans eCommerce.

    Meanwhile, my new (deep breath) Gillette Fusion Phantom Power Razor cost $11, has 6 blades, and runs on a battery and a microchip, bringing us closer to Kevin Kelly’s prediction that chips will be in everything everywhere. Shaves nicely too.

    Update: the next day Room & Board sent me an email (from a person, not just botmail) making sure the delivery went alright. Very nice.

  • Five New SmartEx Classes in NYC + A Discount

    After successfully launching Smart Experience this Summer with a prototype course, I’m very happy to have a stellar line up of teachers sharing their expertise this September and October. Here’s the class listing, and if you follow these links you’ll get a 10% Noise Between Stations reader discount…

    Information Architecture 3.0
    Oct 16 with Peter Morville

    Interaction Design for Web Applications
    Six sessions starting Sept 5 with David Malouf

    Managing the Online-Offline Partnership
    Oct 9 with David Wertheimer

    Moving User Experience into a Position of Greater Corporate Influence
    Sept 8 with Richard Anderson

    Foundations of Interaction Design
    Sept 12 with Karen McGrane

  • Are We Arguing When We Should be Designing?

    shirt slogan: I'm not going to waste my time debating with you. Does this look like the Internet?

    Scanning the Internet-centered design mailing lists these days, I have to wonder if the inward-looking conversations aren’t doing more harm than good.

    Earlier in my career, mailing lists and blogs were incredibly useful tools for learning my craft. The mass media hasn’t really covered the story of blogs as more than journals and citizen journalism. For those of us designing complex Internet systems there were (and are) tons of interesting problems to solve, and we wrote about them and shared invaluable information with each other, desperately trying to push the discipline fast enough to turn new ideas into functioning reality. It wasn’t just writing and reading, it was joint, remote problem solving among an entire community.

    As I became more accomplished, I didn’t need quite as much of that communication to practice my discipline, the work become more about how to manage teams and help them ascend the learning curve. So these days I blog less frequently and mostly scan the mailing lists. And what I see concerns me. Some of our brightest minds are still having the defining the damn thing discussion, which we realized years ago was proving fruitless.

    Perhaps just saying no to something seemingly pleasurable isn’t enough; we need compelling alternatives. So lately I’ve been thinking a lot about tools we use to do our work and tools we make to empower others. The difficulty of programming is a threshold that reduces designers to asking others for help, but we need to funnel our energy into creating tools to solve our problems and then move on to more interesting problems.

    More on this in the coming months…