Blog

Recorded in February of 2002, David Kelley, founder of IDEO, presented a session at TED concerning some of the products his company had been designing from Prada's high-tech dressing rooms to a remote controlled submarine called Spyfish. Though becoming a more widely practiced approach, in large part due to the influences of a handful of companies such as IDEO, Kelley emphasized the increasingly important pattern of applying a human-centered approach to design and how designers were beginning to incorporate personalities and behaviors into the design process.

"Something has happened in the last 18 years since Richard started TED... for us, we've kind of like climbed Maslow's Hierarchy a little bit. We're now focused more and more on human-centered design as an approach to design. That really involves designing personality and behaviors into products and I think you're beginning to see that -- it's making our job more enjoyable."

Posted by Rob at 11:47 AM | Permalink

While skimming through recent stories tonight on Digg, I stumbled upon an interesting application called Fidg't Visualizer. This Java-based desktop application visualizes a user's social network using Flickr and LastFM tags. More than just a simple data visualization tool, it allows you to interact with the visual elements well and create dynamic relationships.

The Windows version of the application is not working on my machine, but I suspect that it has something to do with the wrong version of the Java virtual machine running on my computer. The authors of the application have clearly indicated that it's in alpha as well. Fortunately, they have made available a movie that demonstrates the application's capabilities. According to the movie, a Flash version will be available at some point.

Visually, the application is quite captivating and the design team is to be commended on coming up with the concept. More significantly, perhaps, the application teases at what will likely be an emerging trend in future rich internet applications: visual systems that communicate and allow for the interaction of complex data sets and meta data.

What makes Flickr so interesting for this type of application is the staggering amount of meta data it's already collecting. Some of this meta data is automatically generated such as the camera type and image settings for a photo as well as user submitted data including tags and GPS coordinates.

As a registered Flickr user, I often find myself frustrated by certain user interfaces such as the album generator. I often think "surely there must be an easier way to not only to create, but to share these photos with friends." With multi-touch technology still in its infancy and just barely around the corner, my first reaction to Fidg't Visualizer was that this would make an excellent example of a multi-touch screen application. In fact, it seems directly or indirectly inspired by Jeff Han's most recent multi-touch demonstration at TED.

If you have any thoughts on this topic, feel free to leave a comment. I finally re-enabled comments this weekend.

Posted by Rob at 11:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Scott Berkun, best-selling author of the Art of Project Management and former program manager on Internet Explorer at Microsoft, posted a great observation on the underuse of imagination.

In it, he criticizes how the term vision has managed to become accepted -- even embraced -- in the business world whereas imagination isn't used often enough.

Scott writes:

That tragedy is how we forget that a vision is the product of someone’s imagination. Someone makes it up, writes it down, and only then does it become something that other people can follow. Even people who earn the label “visionary” or “genius” use their imagination, doodles, crazy ideas and all, to create their visions. Yet somehow despite people’s interest in visions, they’re unlikely to encourage the create force, in the form of people’s imagination, required to create them.

It's a smart catch and one that I completely agree with. The one exception might have been Walt Disney who cleverly branded his design teams Imagineering.

Since April of 2005, during his original book tour for the Art of Project Management, I've had the chance to meet Scott several times now. When I first met him, I hadn't yet read his book and I remember thinking after his talk "wow, this guy is a really impressive speaker." It wasn't until I read his book that I realized he was quite brilliant. Last year he was invited to participate in a program manager's summit at Adobe. He hinted to me that his next book would be about innovation. Needless to say, I felt like an insider as my right eyebrow inched up. Again I would run into Scott at the MX Conference I attended earlier this year.

A very rare trait to have, Scott, as anyone that has seen him speak can attest, is imminently quotable. A few memorable quotes that resonated with me that I took down:

"Sales is such a crucial part of design... in-house, we don't do a good enough job to make sure people are trained and empowered to do this. [Designers think that] the work speaks for itself... 'I shouldn't have to sell.' It's a failure on how designers are taught. There's a portfolio and that's it... some schools are getting better at this."

One other classic Scott quote:

"What I love about design is that it's not repeatable. There are too many variables."

His next book, The Myths of Innovation from O'Reilly, is due out next week on May 15th and I'm looking forward to picking it up. I've offered to help sponsor Scott on his San Francisco Bay Area book tour where he'll speak at a private event at Adobe's San Francisco and San Jose offices. Though most of his speaking engagements are at private offices, he will be speaking at a public event at Adaptive Path on May 16th.

Posted by Rob at 12:52 AM | Permalink

Bill Moggridge, cofounder of IDEO and father of the "interaction design" movement, was recently interviewed by MIT's Technology Review. It's a short interview, but Moggridge covers everything from how he feels American design was lost until 15 years ago to how tech companies can better understand the needs of customers.

Moggridge and the team he has built at IDEO are a constant inspiration to me. Something I learned recently at the Adaptive Path MX Conference is that IDEO is no longer just doing traditional design work but moving into new areas such as designing new business models and marketing campaigns. These approaches are still founded on the application of design thinking. For example, they helped introduce the "Keep the Change" service for Bank of America.

From the interview:

TR: How can tech companies better understand the needs of customers?

Bill Moggridge: What we're looking for is the latent user needs in a ­situation where, at least at the beginning, you don't know what you're going to be making. So you have to have insights about people driven from their psychology, their desires, their interests, and then apply that to the context where you might be inventing or coming up with a solution for a new product or service or space, or whatever the context may be. Once you've got to a first prototype, build it quick and try it out. As soon as possible--even a small attribute of it--try it out, because you're likely to be wrong.

I particularly liked his final comment -- it's something I've come to learn, appreciate and apply in my current role.

TR: Parting advice?

BM: Put together a team with a great engineer, a crazy designer, a good businessperson, and a good human-factors scientist or psychologist of some kind, and put them in a room and get them to try to work together. It's a big challenge, but they come to a point, surprisingly quickly, where they realize that what they can achieve together is much more than they could do individually.

Great minds may think alike, but minds that think differently, originating from different, unique backgrounds and skillsets, create the disruptive ideas that change the world.

Posted by Rob at 10:03 AM | Permalink

Mashable has posted The 10 Coolest Apollo Apps showing off some of the more interesting and imaginative experiments the Apollo developer community has already started to create. Given that the version of Apollo that's currently for download is still very early and not yet feature complete, the diversity of applications people are dreaming up is quite exciting. [From John Dowdell]

Posted by Rob at 4:42 PM | Permalink

Guy Kawasaki, a judge for Slideshare.net's recent World's Best Presentation contest, posted a blog entry about the winners. I was quite impressed by the winner, Jeff Brenman, who created a presentation titled Shift Happens. In the spirit of The World is Flat, it highlights some of the economic, social and technological changes impacting the world. My only complaint is that the presentation does not provide any reference material for the facts covered in the presentation. Other than that, it's a visually interesting presentation. Oh, and one other request for SlideShare.net -- if you switch to Flash Player 9, you can allow users to truly go into a full-screen mode.

Posted by Rob at 4:28 PM | Permalink

BusinessWeek and the Boston Consulting Group have compiled their list of the fifty most innovative companies in the world. Though the list is certainly interesting from the perspective of conversation, the methodology, described at the bottom of the page, seems intrinsically flawed. For example, I'm not sure that I can take a list that seriously contends ExxonMobil is an innovative company. How many billions in R&D have they wasted? A more interesting list would include smaller start-up companies challenging the status quo and introducing disruptive technologies and services like Tesla Motors and GlobeFunder.

Posted by Rob at 2:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)