What’s the Price of Everything?
Great trailer for the upcoming book, “The Price of Everything?”.
Yes, all 999 ideas are listed.
Ideas are a dime a dozen. The money is in the execution.
Need proof? For Seth Godin’s Alternative MBA program, this week the nine of us came up with 111 business ideas each. But ideas are only valuable when someone (like you) makes something happen.
Moral?
- Quantity over quality, for the first stage of ideation.
- Don’t get too attached to a single idea. Instead, come up with 3 more that relate to it.
- Push your ideas hard: choose your most promising thoughts, and evolve them.
- Breed your ideas. Combine the most unlikely candidates to spawn novel solutions.
- Go deep. Consider the problem at the most abstract level first, then brainstorm concrete solutions for it.
- Go big. You can always simplify a solution, but it’s much more difficult to add depth or complexity later. Start with the biggest, most grandiose vision, then worry about how you can actually do it.
- Don’t worry about answers for now… Just ask compelling questions.
- A good question is a dramatic question. Thunder should rumble when you speak it.
- If you find something interesting, then it is interesting. Don’t worry if anyone else agrees or thinks so; follow your own passions.
- Trust yourself first. You can verify your hunches later.
- Find your personal “truth” – choose a problem that is relevant to you. (Remember Hemingway’s advice: “If you get stuck, write just one sentence; the truest sentence you know.”)
The 40-30-30 Rule: Why Risk Is Worth It
Many of the strategies employed in competitive and recreational sports are applicable in business and our personal lives. One lesson I learned from alpine ski racing was the “40-30-30 Rule.” During training, early on, I tried to go fast, and I also focused on not falling. On a ride up the ski lift, my coach told me I was missing the point. He explained that success in ski racing, or most sports for that matter, was only 40% physical training. The other 60% was mental. And of that, the first 30% was technical skill and experience. The second 30% was the willingness to take risks.
Generate Ideas In Moderation
An interesting counterpoint to idea generation… How do you manage your balance between generation and execution?
Our intern was clearly disappointed when she realized that we spend less than 1% of our time generating ideas. As our founder explained to her mid-way through her time in the office, “if anything, we have a surplus of ideas. Excess ideas are our greatest cost. What we need is fewer ideas.” In addition, our intern observed that the team essentially lives in “execution mode.” Not much fun.
Perhaps the greatest challenge for a creative group is to consume its creative juice sparingly. Creative people, regardless of their commitment to a cause, are more likely to exchange ideas than take steps to push any one idea forward. Why? Idea generation is an addiction. It is an engaging, brain-spinning indulgence that must be practiced in moderation.
Of course, you should take pride in the creative capabilities of your team. When you do engage in creative flow, enjoy it. Just be sure to compartmentalize it. Recognize that such occasions have the tendency to be intoxicating. New ideas have the potential to transform your life in wonderful ways, but they are also the most notorious source of distraction. Frustrated entrepreneurs and struggling creatives often trace back their problems to a moment when they decided to pursue too many things at once.
The steps for making ideas happen are interrupted by impaired judgment. And, as we all know, our judgment is impaired when we get intoxicated. When rampant, new ideas will get you off track. So, drink in moderation. Hire “designated drivers” that are more cynical and have the power to keep you focused. And strive to make ideas happen, rather than just generate more ideas.
The Visual Grammar of Ideas
Big ideas as simple diagrams drawn on index cards, every day.
Ze Frank on Imaginary Audiences
What I was finding was that there was an opportunity for me to explore this creative process that normally all happens internally, in a different way where you release work, and then you allow the frameworks that emerge from the way people respond to the work as some kind of feedback cycle. It’s incredible, and it gets talked about a lot now, as people try to open up the work that way, allowing people to react, respond.
The second thing is making the work fast. I usually try to say ‘make it as quickly and faithfully as possible.’ ‘Quickly’ and ‘faithfully’ kind of pull in opposite directions. I find that that’s a nice tension to work in – try and get it out as fast as possible, but don’t take shortcuts just for time. Try to stay true to the original concept. I find that that is important because you end up making more stuff. And for me, the most difficult part of the process is the first 50%.
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I say make it as quickly and faithfully as possible. ‘Quickly’ and ‘faithfully’ kind of pull in opposite directions. I find that that’s a nice tension to work in.
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Read the full Harvard Business Review article for complete examples.
1. Quality is more important than design in business.
There’s a persistent belief in a trade-off between style and substance. In reality, design is a way of conveying quality.
What’s true in the lives of individuals applies to companies as well—when you’re exhausted, overwhelmed or confused about what to do next, you never look your best. Good design is like putting on a suit for an interview—it shows the other person that you care about the relationship.
2. It is more important for to offer a great price than a great design.
Some great designs and brands do cost more, but there is no absolute correlation between price and design. Great design exists at all price points. Some of the best-known examples are companies such as Target, IKEA and LEGO that offer goods in a budget-conscious segment.
More importantly, some of the most innovative designs today were created with affordability and scarcity in mind. The push for sustainability across industries is likely to amplify this trend.
3. I would like to have a great design, but I have to launch on time.
Design by definition must include execution. Focusing on design forces an organization to test ideas, synthesize feedback, and generate new concepts at a rapid pace. Historically, designers were brought in at the end of the launch process—and creating concepts under intense pressure is still the norm.
Design efforts don’t slow down product launches. Indecision does. A widely shared set of decision criteria around design can make the process more efficient.
4. Design and aesthetics are too subjective—I need data to make decisions.
Although great design speaks to a consumer’s needs and emotions, there is no single aesthetic that companies must drive toward. Consistency between the brand values and the physical design is what creates a superior consumer experience. Moreover, design priorities are based in actual data. Consumer testing and feedback can be achieved at low cost today with the internet and social media.
5. I will create the product or service; I trust the advertising experts to tell the story.
The worlds of brand, advertising and design are rapidly converging. Well-crafted marketing and branding can boost the impact of a great design, but unless the message is reinforced by real-world experience, the effect is usually temporary.
Business leaders don’t need to go to design school to bring great design into their companies. (Ed: Do designers need to go to business school?)
They need to remember bring their own core skills—listening to consumers, asking questions, and openness to new ideas—into the design process. Design doesn’t work in a vacuum—it’s the alignment with the right business model and service that creates a compelling consumer experience. Getting to great design requires looking at consumers, not competing products, more thoughtfully.
How To Make Innovative Ideas Happen
In one of his recent presentations, Frans Johansson explained why groundbreaking innovators generate and execute far more ideas than their counterparts. After watching his presentation The Secret Truth About Executing Great Ideas, my thoughts began to surface about how meaningful the presentation was regardless of a persons industry, culture, field or discipline. Anyone can come up with an amazing idea but how you execute the idea will determine your success.
Brilliant little article from Clearleft’s Cennydd Bowles:
And then, of course, you ask us how we work. We respond with confidence, bold Helvetica outlining our design process: research, ideas, prototyping, testing, iteration. We hope you approve of our rigor, and perhaps even believe it ourselves.
But the project is always more fluid. We splash between the phases, unable to separate ideas from output, problem from solution. We explore promising avenues that, days later, become dead ends. Sometimes, we solve a month’s problem in an hour. It seems unfair to charge you the same regardless, but it avoids those difficult conversations.
Try as we may, we can’t justify every decision. The birth of an idea is ineffable. Although we hope it came from our research and analysis, we can never know for sure. Intuition and experience influence our every thought.
We try to predict the effect of our work, but the truth is that design is always a gamble. We can tip the odds in your favor, but never guarantee a jackpot.
Sometimes we proclaim design to be art, sometimes science. This upsets both the artists and the scientists. Fortunately, it’s neither. We claim to understand human behavior, but are surprised by it daily. Despite what we say, there are wrong answers. The fold is a myth only when it suits us. And yes, criticism still stings.
Don’t misunderstand—we aren’t bullshitting you. People who’ve taken our advice have profited from it. But design resists minute analysis—break it into its constituent parts and it crumbles into dust.
So, reluctantly, we lie. We lie because otherwise nothing would happen. We lie because we don’t have the words. We lie because we’re human. And being human is what it’s all about.
(Source: 52weeksofux.com)
So many design articles today seem content to throw the intuitive core of design under the train of its more rational self. They imply, by varying degrees that design fits neatly into two camps: aesthetic pursuit and intellectual analysis. Just as prevalent are the pieces that chastise design for purporting to own creativity. From where this perception arose—I have no clue. Perhaps it’s the unintended consequence of selling design process (aka creativity) detached from the pedestrian world of results. Design and designers may have a lot to apologize for, but their advocacy of creativity is surely not one of them. If design is guilty of annexing creativity more effectively than other professions, so be it. There are worse accusations I can imagine.
Where did all this noise begin? Why is it that design, all these years on, consistently finds itself on the defensive? Compulsively seeking to legitimize itself? The reasons are numerous. In part, this state of affairs stems from the fact that, unlike engineering or architecture, there is no process for professional qualification in design. While the pros and cons of this have been debated to the point of boredom, it’s clear that the lack of standardization informs design as much as it limits it. Having gone back and forth on this issue any number of times, I cast my vote squarely for the loose structure that has come to define the profession. Why? Because design thrives on ambiguity, and this less than perfect pedigree endows design with the flexibility it needs to steer clear of institutional thinking—a competency increasingly as in demand as creativity itself.
But ambiguity is hard to sell, and this brings us to the second culprit behind design’s perennial posturing: entrepreneurialism. Anyone who has spent time in design consulting knows that the mechanics of the business require you to identify some readily understood value proposition; the elevator pitch. Something you can present to your clients (potential or otherwise) as the thing that distinguishes your organization from the other guy. This is natural enough, and if you’re successful at this, and your results align reasonably well with what you’re selling—you can indeed run a nice business (2008 - 2009 notwithstanding). But what happens when your value proposition becomes the same or similar to that of your competition? Well, then you need to reposition that offering. So it is that the ‘black-box’ of design is disassembled and demystified obsessively into narrower and narrower spaces. Likewise this constant revisionism can just as easily lead in the opposite direction, toward abstraction; blithely driving design into territory where it is invariably exposed as naive and unwelcomed (see Kevin McCullagh’s recent post). To me, both paths are corrosive because they deform the practice of design into a coalition of sorts; one that ultimately weakens the profession by distorting it beyond recognition.
To be fair, design thinking and the rest of the vocabulary we’ve created for design hasn’t been without purpose. It’s helped. Design today has entrée to a range of audiences it might otherwise never have had access to. But enough’s enough. Let’s claim our messy bits. Design IS thinking. Pure and simple. It may not be as ready for the boardroom as design thinking, but it’s the truth. Design derives its power and ultimate relevance by the way in which it artfully blends logic and intuition. The enduring truth of this fact is brought home to me every day when I enter our offices at TEAGUE. Here is a design organization founded 84 years ago by a man who paved his own course from commercial illustration to product design before arriving at the nascent field of aviation design. Was he selling design thinking, user-centric design, or universal design? I doubt it. What he was doing was employing his curiosity, talent, and intelligence to explore an ever-expanding range of problems. And Walter Dorwin Teague wasn’t unique. Dreyfuss, the Eames’, Buckminster Fuller, Achille Castiglioni and a host of other giants achieved their impressive results by employing the same dogged pursuit of opportunity through design—the intuitive as well as the rational; not by making excuses for it.
Design IS thinking. If we as a profession can’t muster up the confidence to sell that with conviction - who can?
(Source: core77.com)
What is the real game, then?
‘Gamification’, the internet will tell you, is the future. It’s coming soon to your bank, your gym, your job, your government and your gynaecologist. All human activity will be gamified, we are promised, because gamifying guarantees a whole bunch of other buzz-words like Immersion! and Emotional Engagement! and Socialised Monestisation! You’ll be able to tell when something’s been gamified because it will have points and badges. And this is the nub of the problem.
That problem being that gamification isn’t gamification at all. What we’re currently terming gamification is in fact the process of taking the thing that is least essential to games and representing it as the core of the experience. Points and badges have no closer a relationship to games than they do to websites and fitness apps and loyalty cards. They’re great tools for communicating progress and acknowledging effort, but neither points nor badges in any way constitute a game. Games just use them – as primary school teachers, military hierarchies and coffee shops have for centuries – to help people visualise things they might otherwise lose track of. They are the least important bit of a game, the bit that has the least to do with all of the rich cognitive, emotional and social drivers which gamifiers are intending to connect with.
F* Yeah Mobile Web
A nice roundup of mobile web stats from Dave Rupert, developer of Lettering.js.
I usually don’t usually sit around and ponder “The Mobile Web”, but about two weeks ago I accidentally inundated myself with multiple talks about it from two separate podcasts. Because of that, the Mobile Web has a growing market share in my brain space.
The mobile web is a big freaking deal. Here are some current Mobile Web trends as of June 2010.
“The Desk”
A short film about designers’ desks.
“With a designer’s desk…the tools, sketches, reference images, Japanese packaging, type samples and printouts provide a more logical cognitive path from initial brief to the final design,” writes Twemlow, who goes on to illuminate how Vignelli’s desk philosophy tracks with both his work style and design style.
Calabi–Yau manifold
A visualization of higher dimensional space, as discussed in class.
Data Mining for Feelings, Not Facts
An emerging field known as sentiment analysis is taking shape around one of the computer world’s unexplored frontiers: translating the vagaries of human emotion into hard data.
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