Noise Between Stations

  • Frog Design Groks SmartEx

    Ian Curry, design analyst at Frog Design, pens an interesting look at the current state of design education in The Known Unknowns: Exploring the evolution of design education in response to the industry’s expanding role. We’re honored he includes SmartEx alongside the Institute of Design and Stanford’s d.school, two schools for which we have great respect.

    Curry writes…

    Lombardi’s current project is designing a design school. Yes, a design school, but not as we know it. He hopes to close the gap between what schools teach and what the industry requires. As a web guy, Lombardi sees this gap as the result of a classic coordination cost problem. Traditional schools are beholden to administrative tasks, which lessen their agility when it comes to changes in the field. Lombardi’s answer is a new kind of school, coordinated over the web but with meetings in real classrooms around Manhattan. Launched recently, Smart Experience is essentially an experiment in bottom-up design education. Using a wiki-like format, students request topics they want to learn about and instructors pitch classes they want to teach.

  • Props from Lou Rosenfeld

    Lou Rosenfeld, who helped create the field of information architecture with the “Polar Bear Book” blogged his reaction to Smart Experience…

    “…Smart Experience is essentially a broker of dialogues between teachers and learners at different levels, starting with sharing thoughts on rough topics, and ending with an actual course (with students, a teacher, course materials, and a venue).

    Victor, whether he realizes is or not, is now officially an infrastructuralist… Best wishes, Victor; I’m really looking forward to watching Smart Experience grow!”

    Thanks Lou!

  • Anton Chekhov on Powerpoint

    I’m not convinced the MFA is the new MBA, though I like this use of Chekhov’s technique for talking to clients: “One of Chekhov’s more famous quotes was “Any idiot can face a crisis; it is this day-to-day living that wears you out”. His simple philosophies come through in his stories, which were not noted for their intricate plots. Rather, Chekhov found emotion and drama in ordinary, everyday events…. How Does Chekhov’s Model Work? First, Anton tees up a messy situation. Second, he describes the impact the situation is having on his characters – then delights us with an ending. “

  • Talking vs. Doing and My New Project

    If there’s still anyone out there who follows this blog I’m sure you’re wondering why the post frequency has dropped off and why it consists mostly of quoting the New York Times. I’ve been busy slowly creating my latest passion, a school of continuing education called Smart Experience. I could write a lot about it, but hopefully the website explains what’s going on.

    One fun part about building a business again is the opportunity to design a business as a deep dive, rather than on a project basis as a consultant. While I have a lot of new thoughts about how that happens (and doesn’t happen), mostly I’m trying to write less and do more, so I’ll skip that for now.

  • Blow Open the Social Media Doors

    David Pogue with some good ideas from everyday life:

    It seems to me, though, that we haven’t even scratched the surface [of social media potential]… I was thinking about this — a LOT — as I lay in bed last week, sicker than I’d been in years. I hadn’t eaten for two days, and I was nervous about being well enough to travel to a speaking engagement the next day. (Is it just my imagination, or are the bugs getting a lot nastier these days?)

    I kept thinking: Surely I caught this from somebody — somebody who now knows what this virus’s course will be.

    When my kids come down with various horrible flu variations, and it gets bad enough to see a doctor, we often hear from the pediatrician: “Oh, yes, it’s going around. You’ll have vomiting for two days, and then you’ll get better.”

    Well, gosh darn it, why couldn’t someone have told us?

  • Bad News Should Travel Fast

    Another reason I like agile management is because when something bad happens, you should know as soon as you can. If you only check project status every week or longer, that can be way too late. It’s like what Robert Duvall says in The Godfather: “I have to go to the airport. The Godfather is a man who likes to hear bad news immediately.’“

  • Funniest Comment on Today’s Conference Call

    Woman from Marketing: “Well, since we’re all going to hell anyway…”

  • The Tom Sawyer Effect — Old Media Fallacy?

    Just when you think the traditional media is getting over their jealous gripe with new media we hear of the snarky Tom Sawyer Effect, websites that avoid the arduous task of painting the fence (creating content) and instead convincing your friends (customers) to pay for the priviledge of painting it themselves.

    Point taken, some lame sites do ask too much of their customers. But after consulting to several different established media firms in my career I sense a lack of appreciation for the power of the application. Flickr doesn’t just succeed because people contribute photos — Snapfish and others did that long before. Flickr enhances that experience through use of design and enhances the photographic network through its API.

    And the longer the publishing-centric companies ignore this fact, the longer they will fester in old business models that become increasingly irrelevent. A website that allows visitors to contribute content is a far cry from a platform like Daylife that allows customers to manipulate content.

  • Google Earth Convinces Bush to Act on Darfur

    On the bright side, this story of how President Bush acted after seeing a Google Earth depiction of the burned out homes in Darfur is a great story about the power of visualization. But really, was the administration waiting four years to act because the bullet points weren’t powerful enough?

    • At least 400,000 people have been killed
    • More than 2 million innocent civilians have been forced to flee their homes and now live in displaced-persons camps in Sudan or in refugee camps in neighboring Chad
    • More than 3.5 million men, women, and children are completely reliant on international aid for survival

  • Word of the Day: Capitation

    Capitation: The system of payment for each customer served, rather than by service performed. Gym memberships are a common example, as is U.S. medical care. It’s now applied to new businesses like office space for writers.

  • Cumulative Advantage

    Duncan Watts summed up an experience on cumulative advantage this week in the NY Times, based on the article ($) of a year ago in Science. It’s of importance to anyone in the position of publisher, having to try and select which of many candidates to invest in, as well as anyone scratching their head wondering why Justin Timberlake is so popular.

    In our study, published last year in Science, more than 14,000 participants registered at our Web site, Music Lab (www.musiclab.columbia.edu), and were asked to listen to, rate and, if they chose, download songs by bands they had never heard of. Some of the participants saw only the names of the songs and bands, while others also saw how many times the songs had been downloaded by previous participants. This second group — in what we called the “social influence” condition — was further split into eight parallel “worlds” such that participants could see the prior downloads of people only in their own world. We didn’t manipulate any of these rankings — all the artists in all the worlds started out identically, with zero downloads — but because the different worlds were kept separate, they subsequently evolved independently of one another.

    This setup let us test the possibility of prediction in two very direct ways. First, if people know what they like regardless of what they think other people like, the most successful songs should draw about the same amount of the total market share in both the independent and social-influence conditions — that is, hits shouldn’t be any bigger just because the people downloading them know what other people downloaded. And second, the very same songs — the “best” ones — should become hits in all social-influence worlds.

    What we found, however, was exactly the opposite. In all the social-influence worlds, the most popular songs were much more popular (and the least popular songs were less popular) than in the independent condition. At the same time, however, the particular songs that became hits were different in different worlds, just as cumulative-advantage theory would predict. Introducing social influence into human decision making, in other words, didn’t just make the hits bigger; it also made them more unpredictable.

  • Does Strategic Thinking Reduce Stress?

    If you’re a designer, you can become very stressed over a small product detail, something so small most customers may not notice. If you’re a product manager, you may attend to the product details without stressing over them because you see the bigger picture of how the product competes in the market and what the true competitive advantages are.

    And this scenario scales. A business unit manager may fret over a $50 million decision. If you’re Jeffrey Immelt, CEO at GE, that’s not a stressful decision, the big decisions are about billions of dollars. So Immelt spends time coaching managers through the $50 million situations.

    In short, I find the bigger the picture one considers, the less one sweats the small stuff.

  • Having the API Rug Pulled Out From Under You

    John Hagel observes how “the large Internet players are wearying of the high acquisition premiums for attractive Web 2.0 companies and are increasingly deciding to grow their own copy when they see an interesting venture.” So if you’re a start-up, what’s your new exit strategy? Hagel says…

    The only sustainable edge in Web 2.0, as in all businesses today, is to get better faster by working with others…

    There are basically two ways to do this. First, you can accelerate the innovation in the services you offer so that you are constantly one or two (or more) steps ahead of those tempted to copy you. Second, you can find ways to use your service offerings to build trust-based relationships with your users, ideally with some powerful network effects that will make it very difficult for later entrants to pry these people away from your service.

  • John Backus, RIP

    While we associate the older programming languages — and business models — with the old economy, John Soat writing in InformationWeek reminds us everything old is new again…

    John Backus died. Backus, 82, was the originator of the Fortran computer programming language. Generally considered the first high-level language, Fortran was a lot easier to use than the machine code computer programmers had to wrestle with before Fortran came along. “Much of my work has come from being lazy,” Backus was quoted as saying. The logic of that statement is breathtaking, and makes him one of my personal heroes.

    Fortran is still being used today, 53 years after its inception. And why did Fortran become such a widespread standard? Because it was free–as in free beer. IBM gave away the Fortran compiler with every IBM 704 mainframe computer, which was how software was distributed in those days. Free.

  • Rettig on Market vs. Design Research

    I like just about everything Marc Rettig writes a whole lot, so I need to bookmark
    this new mailing list posting where he compares market research to design research…

    Market research typically attempts to answer questions of general trends, differences across a large group, general attitudes and preferences.

    Design research typically attempts to reveal latent, unspoken or masked needs and desires; can reveal emotions and psycho-cultural aspects; attempts to get at the “why” behind attitudes and preferences.

    …