Products
-
The responses to my question about your favorite books on innovation were so interesting and useful I can’t help but ask another: Let’s say you’re a manager charged with developing a software-driven product or service like a website or a mobile service. You already have staff to handle the interface design, programming, and marketing. But…
-
Agile with a capital/lowercase A
•
2 min read
It looks like agile software development is having the same growing pains, expressed through semantics, as the design field (or the Design field). It’s the perceived misapplication of language that catches my eye… Jason Gorman argued that the meaning of Agile was ambiguous and was being inappropriately applied to a very wide range of approaches…
-
IDEO’s UMPC Vision Video
•
1 min read
A nice example of what I call a tangible future. I like how it starts with more conventional examples and then ends with others that have believable gestures but without clear intentions, which could make it a good conversation starter between IDEO (the design firm) and Intel (the client).
-
Tech Reality Check: eCommerce and Microchips
•
1 min read
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…
-
Awesomeness
•
1 min read
I was hanging out with my peeps last week and a couple times Paul used the word awesome, as when we were talking about building tools for customers and he said, “The tools should make them feel capable of awesomeness.” Making people feel capable of awesomeness. That in itself is awesome. So this is my…
-
Given my feelings on the humanitarian, labor, and political problems in China, I’m not too sorry they’re going to take an economic hit on product safety issues. It was just a matter of time.
-
The ING Logo
•
0 min read
-
Idealized Design
•
1 min read
Idealized design is a way of thinking about change that is deceptively simple to state: In solving problems of virtually any kind, the way to get the best outcome is to imagine what the ideal solution would be and then work backward to where you are today. This ensures that you do not erect imaginary…
-
MSNBC Review of the World Future Society Conference
•
1 min read
Until I get around to recording my own observations, here’s Michael Roger’s review of the recent World Future Society conference in Toronto.
-
Tangible Futures in Denver, Wednesday, August 16th
•
1 min read
I’ll be giving a presentation on Tangible Futures in Denver next Wednesday, August 16th. Since giving the talk in Philadelphia I’ve refined the how-to part of the talk quite a bit with more perspective of the people on the receiving end of this work. If you’re in the neighborhood and interested I’d love to meet…
-
Jamais Cascio on the Role of Artifacts in Futurism
•
1 min read
Jamais Cascio on Artifacts from the Future: “If scenario creation was the poster-boy for futurism in the mid-1990s, artifact creation looks to play that role for mid-2000s futurism…. I can’t imagine doing a major futurist project now without using some kind of tangible element of the future, even if it’s just an article from a…
-
Tangibly understanding your retirement
•
2 min read
Our retirement is one topic where all of us think many years into the future. In my tangible futures presentation I’ve been showing a typical screen from my online retirement account. It shows how much money I have saved, where it’s invested, the rate of return, my asset allocation, and so on. It’s a great…
-
“The Institute for the Future couldn’t get clients to read its trend forecasts. So it started giving away prescient product ideas instead.” These are great examples of the tangible part of what we’ve been calling Tangible Futures. The IFTF objects seem like good ways to, as they say, ‘start conversations’ about alternate futures. The intention…
-
GE dares to dream of the future
•
3 min read
In my tangible futures presentation last week, I repeated a statement I’ve written here, that sometime during the second half of the 20th century, American companies forgot how to dream. I’m happy to contradict that statement with a clear example: GE. In Growth as a Process, Jeffrey Immelt reveals the process that led to their…
-
Tangible Futures in Philly on Wednesday
•
1 min read
I’ll be discussing tangible futures in Philadelphia next Wednesday, courtesy of the nice folks at PHICHI and Colony Interactive. I hope to provoke the audience with a new look at an old practice and hear some feedback. I hope to see you Philadelphians there.