August 2007

In Business Week: CEOs Must Be Designers, Not Just Hire Them. [via plasticbag]. His main point:

I now believe that CEOs and managers must know Design Thinking to do their jobs. CEOs must be designers and use their methodologies to actually run companies.

But he goes on to elaborate. Here’s some more:

What are the biggest social trends that will have an impact on design in the future? I’ll give you the obvious first—sustainability. Sustainability will be a prime driver of economic growth in the years ahead.

… By sustainability, I mean something more fundamental than just saving energy. I mean the reinvention of the chemistry of industry. I mean Bill McDonough will finally be proved right—that cradle-to-cradle capitalism is the next stage in the evolution of our economic system.

We’re fans of this approach for sure, so it’s cool to read it in Business Week. And I had to chuckle at this jibe at Al Gore:

If you’re out there Thackara, go talk to Al Gore about this and help him put some substance on the frame of his vague global warming message. Bulk it up as much as he has….well, you know what I mean.

He also singles out social media as another trend. Definitely worth a read if you have a spare 15 minutes or so…

P.S. in the same plasticbag linkset – Clay Shirky: User-generated neologism: “Indigenous content”. I have long disliked “user-generated content” (preferring “participant media” which was still clunky. I dig the concept of “indigenous content”, still not sure if it hits the mark…

This little infographic is a great example of the power of visual communication. It was designed by Josh On (of Futurefarmers renown and designer of They Rule) and Shazna Nessa.

This remarkable work of information design was produced from code created by Barrett Lyon for The Opte Project. The image is based on code that can map every C class network on the internet from a single computer in around twelve hours. The resulting image is a snapshot of the internet drawn from that half-day period. Active North American IP addresses are blue; European, Middle Eastern, Central Asian and African IP addresses are green, Latin American and Caribbean IP addresses are yellow, the remainder are unused or unknown IP addresses.

The ability to create representations of the evolving internet so quickly allows us to see the effect of war or natural disasters on regional networks, or the changing rate of internet use in developing areas of the world. The Opte Project is continuing to map the internet in increasingly sophisticated ways and shares its intellectual property via a Creative Commons license.

Leisa has put together a short series of posts entitled Embracing the Un-Science of Qualitative Research – parts 1 – Small sample sizes are super, 2 – Ever-evolving prototypes are ace and 3 – Improvising is excellent.

It’s an interesting take on how qualitative research differs from quantitative research – and how some of the “un-science”, that is the lack of “hard numbers”, provides research benefits.

We do a significant amount of qualitative research for our clients, so it’s interesting to see another perspective on qualitative methods.

So I went to hear Sarah Bloomer (co-founder of Hiser Group) speak at the inaugural UPA Sydney meeting last night. The topic was Expanding User-Centered Design in the 21st Century OR Why Design Thinking is The Next Big Thing.

It was interesting to see usability professionals excited about what designers have been doing for a long time. Though the division between doing user experience or usability and design doesn’t exist too much at Digital Eskimo anyway (perhaps when it is differentiated, it’s specifically based on methodology).

There weren’t any big surprises in the talk (which is a relief really since my background is in design and we are a design company), and it was reassuring to see how much of what is considered the ‘design thinking’ approach (new, inspirational, nimble, exciting, participatory, innovative and strategic) we already do at DE.

It does trigger me to comment on something that has been in the back of my mind recently though – that for usability professionals, HCI peoples and interaction designers, their/our/my history has come from the computer, from computing technology. Where as design more generally has never been constrained to this. Design has been coming to computing rather than the other way around.

Lots of the more recently introduced “design thinking” and “designerly approaches” to HCI (which are indeed exciting but not new to designers of course), are becoming popular due to HCI/UPA peoples being “released from the desktop” as computing becomes ubiquitous, mobile, pervasive, and everyday. Whereas designers have always been in the everyday. Our products have always lived in the world (although, that doesn’t directly translate to design practice always being human-centred in the way that we mean that in HCI).

I’m not sure how significant this is if all, but I think it is a pretty interesting aspect of the HCI/Design convergence thing that is happening.

My good mate Pip Jones put me onto this other example of how we are returning to old tech as we head towards the end of the oil age. This time its sail technologies propelling the global fleet of cargo tankers. So simple you really have to ask why we haven’t done it yet. The answer of course, oil was too cheap, the costs externalised for past generations (of all species) to pay. Well that’s changing as the pay by date races rapidly forward towards the current generation’s lifetimes.

So sails are back, now to stop those cargo ships carrying tons of consumer junk and coal on them!

This and the post before it reminds me that I often get asked why the agency is called Digital Eskimo. Well in part it is derived from the meeting of modern thinking and technology with the elegant, beautiful and sustainable ideas of the older cultures. I love that this is happening all around us now. We strive to implement this ideal through the agency (most recently we’ve begun to prototype our desk blankets based on the old tradition of placing a blanket around the family dinner table and heating it from underneath (most famously employed in Japan but widely implemented elsewhere i believe). More about that later!

I love this type of thing, architects are starting to use a technique based on a principle that has been around for a long while now (originally employed by architect Le Corbusier 75 years ago utilising shading systems) but not mainstreamed, yet it’s a great example of one of those beautifully elegant ideas that works seamlessly with nature.

The basic idea is that if you angle glass on a building 71 degrees you will, due to the properties of glass,
reflect the summer sun while the winter sun coming in at a lower angle will enter the building warming it. Brilliant!

Read the Treehugger article.