Author Archives: Diego Rodriguez

“Just enough is more”, and other pearls of wisdom

Posted on by

Here’s some deep wisdom from Milton Glaser, who says, "I am going to tell you everything that I know about the practice of design. It is a sort of collage of bits and pieces that I have assembled over 50 years…This is what I’ve learned."  You’ll need at least an hour to soak all of this in.  Here’s an overview:

  1. You can only work for people that you like
  2. If you have a choice never have a job
  3. Some people are toxic; avoid them
  4. The good is the enemy of the great
  5. Less is not necessarily more
  6. Style is not to be trusted
  7. How you live changes your brain
  8. Doubt is better than certainty
  9. Solving the problem is more important than being right
  10. Tell the truth

I particularly like no. 5:  "Just enough is more". 

via Seth Godin

Nike Considered: Simply Remarkable

Posted on by

Nike has just launched its new Considered family of shoes, designed from a Cradle-to-Cradle-ish Point of View.  To create the Considered line, Nike’s designers went back to first prinicples, questioning basic design traditions in order to get to a new and better product outcome which addresses the environmental footprint required to source, manufacture, and recycle shoes.  Here are some highlights:

  • Leather (a renewable resource) pieces are stiched in an overlapping fashion so as to produce smooth internal seams, obviating the need for comfort liners and reducing the shoes’s material mass.
  • All of those leather pieces are tanned using a vegetable-based process
  • Again, to save material mass, metal eyelets aren’t used
  • The two-piece outsole is designed to snap together, eliminating harmful adhesives and simplifying recyclability
  • No use of PVC
  • Where possible, materials are sourced locally to reduce transportation energy use

The result?  Considered shoes generate 63% less waste in manufacturing than a typical Nike design.  The use of solvents has been cut by 80%.  And a stunning 37% less energy is required to create a pair of shoes. 

Is Considered a perfect example of green design?  No, but when was the last time anyone did anything to perfection?  I’m just happy to see a big, public company like Nike — with everything to lose, and not so much to gain — take a leadership role in trying to forge a new market space for environmentally friendly, socially relevant products.  This is a wonderful first step.

The result is a new sub-brand of shoes whose differentiation is rooted not in the multi-million dollar marketing endorsement of a basketball player, but in the physical makeup and design of the offering itself.  That’s real, and I hope it’s for keeps.

It’s Not About the Blog, part 2

Posted on by

Last month Scoble said "You should be fired if you do a marketing site without an RSS feed."

I propose a stronger wording: "You should be fired if you conceive of your marketing site as being anything other than an RSS link to and from your audience." 

Why go through all the bother of creating a slick online "brochure" when everyone else can create the same thing by spending cubic dollars?  Flash tours, splashy graphics — they’re all so commonplace, so boring.  And how many times do I visit a non-transactional marketing site?  Once, maybe twice?

Instead, create a site around what’s unique: you and your offering.  Speak with a real voice.  And listen and learn.  Use RSS, and not a glossy brochure, to strike up a relationship with a potential or current customer. 

Here’s a great example.

Help change the world, visit WorldChanging

Posted on by

I admit it: I’m a bit late to the party on this one.  WorldChanging is one of the most remarkable blogs around, but I didn’t know of its existence until late last week.  No matter, now I’m hooked.

From their unique mission to their strong point of view to the depth and breadth of their content, the crew at WorldChanging will change the way you approach being a global citizen.  So, pay WorldChanging a visit.  If you have a child, talk to her about the things you learn there.  If you have a blog, give ’em a link.

There’s too much important stuff at WorldChanging to ignore.  Like this.  Or this.  And this.  Wow.

Innovation, Empathy, and the Internet

Posted on by

Observing our fellow human beings work their way through life can be a rich — arguably the richest — source of inspiration for innovations.  Sony’s Walkman grew from Akio Morita’s insight that, given a choice, people want to listen to music whenever possible.  Henry Ford’s Model T, and later Pierre Boulanger’s incredible 2CV, both came from the realization that would soon be wealthy enough to want and use basic, affordable transportation devices.  Scott Cook succeeded in a crowded market by building Quicken’s user interface around insights gleaned from watching people — including his wife — balance paper checkbooks.

But getting out of the office to go observe real people can be intimidating, difficult, maybe even impossible.  As organizations grow and work roles become more specialized, talking to real people becomes the job of the research department instead of the people actually doing the development work.  And as things grow even bigger, the research department hires outside research firms to do the work.  Bye bye human empathy!  Real people and their vibrant stories and true needs get reduced to PowerPoint bullets, statistical tables, and cheesy clip art.  Can we really expect inspired, breakthrough innovations to come from that?

If you work in the kind of situation I just outlined above, I think you have three choices:

  1. Accept the status quo, get your "user insights" from your research group’s hired help, and watch your organization slowly ossify and become functionally unable to innovate.
  2. Don’t tell anyone what you’re doing, go observe users, start a blog, listen to support calls — anything.  You might hit a home run.  Or not. This takes guts and runs the risk of derailing your career because you’re undermining the research bureaucracy.

The third choice?  Ask yourself this:  how hard is it to go out and observe real people in an age where, without leaving your desk, you can:

I have a sneaking suspicion that this is yet another case where the Internet really does change everything.  Let’s embrace Internet-enabled observations as yet another source of innovation inspiration.  It’s cheap, it’s there — why not?

Venture Design, part 6: Beating the Commodification Monster

Posted on by

Most business magazines would have you believe that a big, nasty monster called "commodification" really does live under the bed.  Or perhaps in the closet. This view of world believes that dwindling margins, shrinking revenues, outsourcing to China, and the great sucking sound of WalMart are all inevitable parts of doing business circa 2005.  The monster is going to get you…

Hogwash.  Creating cool stuff that matters is the best way to avoid the commodification trap, and cultivating the ability to create that cool stuff in a cool way makes things even sweeter.  To illustrate this point, I’d like to point you to economist Virginia Postrel’s recent NYT article on American Leather, a furniture manufacturer using lean manufacturing, enlightened employment practices, and a modular design philosophy to create (and claim) real value in the marketplace.  In an industry rife with cost and price pressures, American Leather’s sales are growing 17% per year year.  And their products are pretty nifty.

Not that it’s been an easy ride for the firm.  Its co-founder Bob Duncan came from an engineering background, which enabled him to implement the innovative manufacturing culture that defines American Leather, but that training didn’t prepare him for what it really took to get something to market.  Says Duncan:

At the end of the day, you have to sell the stuff.  You can have the coolest products. You can build it in 20 minutes and
deliver anything you want. But if nobody buys it, it’s irrelevant. As
an engineer, the biggest thing I’ve learned in the whole process is how
hard it is to sell things.

I love what American Leather has done and what they stand for.  Designing your venture to create the products people want in the way they want them is the best way to beat the commodification monster.