Bruce Nussbaum obviously had a great time at Davos, and this post sums it all up quite nicely.
It’s a good time to be doing design thinking.
Author Archives: Diego Rodriguez
metacool Thought of the Day
"One thing
I’ve learned is that it is important to surround yourself with the kind
of people you aspire to be. If you hang around with deadbeats and
pessimists, you’ll end up with a negative view of the world."
Diego, TED. TED, Diego
I’m doing a little bit of guest blogging over at TED Blog.
Borrowing language from another sphere of my life, my TED stuff represents a market adjacency to my core metacool blogging activites. Related, and pulling from the same core capabilities, but not addressing the same target segment.
In other words, different subject matter viewed through the same lens of design thinking.
All innovation is local?
Tip O’Neill pointed out that "all politics is local." To some extent, innovation is also a local phenomenon.
Living in a place as innovation-friendly as Silicon Valley or the U.S. as a whole, it’s easy to overlook the important role that society, government, and culture play in creating a supportive stage for innovators to do their thing.
In this insightful post titled Public Floggings, Joi Ito uses the Horie/Life Door drama unfolding in Tokyo to show us how easy it is to discourage innovation at the societal level.
Slow Design
In Praise of Slow Design, by Michael Beirut
Really worth a read and some soak time.
How long should it, does it, take to design something really good? To create an innovation of lasting value?
On Doing Both
As I make my way through this world of ours — as Indiana Jones said, it’s not the years, it’s the mileage — I’m less and less convinced that anchoring on any single thing is the best way to make progress. Sure, focus is to be cherished, but it’s energy that needs to be focused, not the target. In other words, don’t mistake a narrow field of vision (or a small target) for a focused point of view.
Simplicity should be cherished, but simplistic approaches must be shunned.
I’m still wrestling with the ideas I just threw out above, but John Maeda’s post Do Both gave me a big push forward. In it he says:
Is it cheaper to improve a product’s reliability and functionality? Or is it cheaper to improve a product’s desirability? Considering the marginal costs of additional research and development, combined with production, testing, assurance, and so forth, the answer is fairly clear. Investing in advertising is a cost-effective way to increase the profit for an existing product. If the campaign is any good of course.
What determines "good"? Is it the copy? Is it the visuals? Is it the celebrity that has been chosen to be the head cheerleader? Seems like there are tons of subjective variables to consider that will ultimately define success or failure… Do both.
Do both. Do everything needed, no more, no less. With focused energy. I think that’s a good recipe for innovation.
On Seth and prototypes and storytelling
Seth Godin wrote an interesting post about prototypes today. I disagree with where he went with this argument, but being of a Voltaire-ish world view, I’m really happy with him saying it.
Here’s how my email response to Seth went:
Hi Seth,
Part of the problem is that there are many, many levels of prototypes. There are sketchy prototypes, rough prototypes, works-like prototypes, looks-like prototypes, works-looks-like prototypes, launched product prototypes (Gmail), you know what I’m talking about.
What I find is that prototype owners aren’t very good about setting context for their audiences. They focus too much on the prototype and don’t tell enough of a story about it. In fact, I’ve found the best way to get people to understand a prototype isn’t to show them the prototype on a table, but to shoot a video of someone using that prototype, or to use the prototype as a prop in a skit. Then you can show how and why it creates value in someone’s life, which is the point of the whole exercise anyway.
So, I guess I disagree that prototypes need to be better than the real thing. It’s the storytelling that needs to be better than reality.
Best,
Diego
So, kind metacool reader, what do YOU think? Let’s have a comment fiesta below.
Loops and venture design
My friend Jim Matheson, who is a superlative pilot in addition to being a great thinker (and doer) when it comes to anything related to the art and science of bringing cool stuff to life, wrote an intriguing blog post about the joy that flying brings to his life. Given a day job doesn’t provide timely feedback for any of his big decisions, flying a plane is anything but; every action has an immediate feedback loop, and he derives great satisfaction from managing those feedback loops in order to stay in on top of the plane.
Of course, it’s about much more than flying. On the subject of designing business ventures, Jim makes the following point:
… how do you create intermediate feedback
loops in activities that are inherently not given to them so that you
can gain better insights into the distant future outcome of an current
activity and make mid-point course corrections which can ensure
ultimate success? And in situations where there
is much more immediate feedback, how do you make better initial input
decisions by gaining critical information a priori or perhaps utilize
simulated training so that the feedback seems less mercurial and
ultimate outcomes less surprising?
Two fantastic questions. It’s something absolutely critical when it comes to creating ventures in situations of uncertainy — designing things so that you get adequate feedback so that you know what’s going on when you need to know what’s going on, but not so much that it all seems like noise.
Unabashed Gearhead Gnarlyness
A variant of the famed 2CV, the plastic-bodied Mehari is a wonderful example of the kind of aesthetic that results from a design point of view which is more concerned with materials, end use scenarios, manufacturing processes, and — above all — cost, rather than with the vagaries of style. It’s the same type of point of view that gave us such classics as the original Jeep, Land Rover, and Mini. When done in a more conscious mode, it’s really hard to do this kind of design.
The new Mini does a good job of it, but modern Jeeps just don’t have it. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to see a modern Mehari? Maybe it will happen.
I’m very emotional about the Mehari. For me, it’s evocative of the summer I spent as a boy staying with family in Spain. My uncle Valentin Sama took me on a whirlwind tour of Southern Spain (in the summer, in a SEAT Panda, with three other people and our luggage and two dogs, and of course, no A/C. We were hot) which included a few days relaxing in Agua Amarga. Your quintessential fishing village with no phones, lots of beach dogs, and more than a few Meharis.
I spent hours in Agua Amarga looking at an orange Mehari and a red 2CV. Those two made for an aesthetic feast from Mars for this suburban Colorado boy. I’m still figuring out how to get back there.
photo credit: Jacques Froissant, Creative Commons license, via Flickr
metacool Thought of the Day
"Confront the difficult when it is still easy; accomplish the great task by a series of small acts."
– Tao Te Ching