Blog

On Wednesday night I was talking to someone that works in innovation for local government. I wont go into too much detail about her position or the organisation she works for. She was asking about the way we work at Made by Many and we talked about the cross-over between lean practices in manufacturing, product design, Lean startups, innovation and UX. I was fairly  surprised and dissappointed by what I heard.

I've been learning about trade-off curves recently and they seem pretty useful for learning and making decisions when designing products.

Do you make ‘things’? You probably do. So do we — things are brilliant. 

Okay, you and I are a bit more sophisticated than that; we don’t call them things - not us - we know them as services, products, systems! We get the complexities of integrating platforms and prototyping user flows. The word ‘things’ doesn’t really cut it — these products can’t be dropped into an organisation as neat, self-contained packages. They have to be wired into the existing business or service. They are not islands, they are an extension of the organisation itself...

I touched on the concept of considered laziness here and here. It's a term which I'm sure I stole from @higgis, and which has subsequently been very nicely articulated in this post.

I can't be bothered to write more about what this means to me as a technologist, so here are some graphs which may help explain why I come across as such a laggard when talking about technology.

As you can see, I’ve been given the keys to the Made by Many blog. Like every other employee, I can now write a post here without any censorship. I think that’s pretty amazing. The blog is one of the most important assets that Made by Many have; it’s where the company’s public voice has been forged over five years of hard work, and to give *everyone* access is really interesting to me. It also reminds me why blogging is important...

Strategydog has been at Made by Many for two years. In her first blog post she gives us exclusive behind-the-office-door access to her life.

Here I am on my first day in the office. Don't know who that guy holding me is. Think he might be my butler as he feeds me and walks behind me all the time.

Gaps (formerly known as 'hackable spaces', a term coined by @conordelahunty) have been cropping up all over the place this week. It started with Ian's excellent post on designing connected products and then suddenly, I was seeing gaps everywhere.

Creative Commons photo credit: 16 Miles of String on Flickr

Recently I started as a designer at Made by Many and it feels like a good time to take a moment to quickly reflect on my initial 6 weeks and give you my first impression of working here.

If you really want to understand the application of Japanese management philosophy beyond its interpretation as Lean Manufacturing, forget about tech startups and take a look at the street food industry in the UK.

Last week I gave a talk about designing connected products, lean hardware, and the future of a discipline that bridges the physical/digital divide. This is that talk, in a blog post. Enjoy.

As a term, ‘connected products’ is pretty loose, so let’s narrow the definition a little; I’ll be talking about purpose-specific physical products that exist as part of a digital service ecosystem. Fully featured devices such as phones, tablets, and to some extent, Google Glass sit slightly outside of this, but many of the principles discussed will be relevant.