33 posts
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.
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.
Ideas are a critical to the invention, evolution and optimisation of systems of any kind, whether we're talking about organisational change, inventing new products or startups or helping fix problems with older products and systems. In western culture, an abundance of ideas opitomises the creative spirit. But new ideas also come with insidious taxes. Aside from being the building blocks of any thoughtful endeavour, ideas can also be incredibly damaging to productivity and progress.
For a while I've been thinking about the process of design in two very different ways.
I’ve been thinking of what agencies do for their clients and how they are paid to think about problems on behalf of the client. Agencies design for people outside of their building and they tinker around at the edges of a problem space unhindered by the day-to-day firefighting that's endemic among large corporations - They can see the wood for the trees.
For a while I’ve been troubled by the effect that language can have on the group design process. When we began to come up with ideas and solutions for ITV’s online news proposition, we used terminology to share our individual understanding and to communicate different solutions between us - we would use the words “feed” and “stream” interchangeably, as were phrases like “topic landing page” and “dynamically generated index page”. You could say that this is a natural symptom of having multiple humans from different backgrounds with different mindsets working together on the same shared problem. We want very different people working together, this is good. But what we want less of is the misunderstandings, confusion and antagonistic recollections. We want more group flow, enthusiasm, cohesion and personal investment so that we can use less energy for more benefit.
One of my favourite talks of SXSW this year was ‘Rebuilding LEGO’ by Prof. David Robertson of The Wharton School, Pennsylvania where he teaches innovation and product development. The talk was a cautionary tale of how dangerous innovation can be if it isn’t managed.
FLICKR CREDIT - kalexanderson
There's a popular technique in interaction design known as Progressive Disclosure. You can see this in wizard-style interfaces that show you a single question at a time. The theory is that it's better to show one single thing at a time than to show a big wall of stuff that makes you run away.
Did you see Black Mirror on Channel 4 recently? It's a bleak and paranoid set of 3 parables of a future with unintended consquences. Created by Charlie Brooker, all three are available to watch now on 4OD.
In December 2009 I wrote this thing about TV Apps and how great it would be to have an app ecosystem for Connected TVs. Now there are habsolutely loads of them - Samsung, Boxee, the ill-fated GoogleTV (RIP), the embryonic YouView and even Apple (somewhat vicariously through iOS) are all trying to pull off the App Store model. Unfortunately, it's all a bit shit at the moment.
Unfortunately, right now we're still not seeing a single platform successful enough to make this really exciting for designers and developers. In advance of such a happening, I'd like to provoke some debate about things that might be important when designing apps for the TV.
I'd love to know your thoughts on these and welcome any additions.
