IDEO: deans of design

When you're the chief executive officer of one of the planet's most influential design firms, you can't help but notice compelling design-such as the object in which IDEO's Tim Brown and a visitor are sitting this summer morning. Right inside the front door of the two-story lobby at IDEO's Palo Alto, Calif., headquarters is a 5-foot-high, open-roofed, Corian-shelled, cylindrical micro-conference room. It's sort of a 21st-century version of a yurt, the sturdy, all-weather tent of the Mongolian nomads.

The yurt is not an IDEO design, though. Brown spotted the Steelcase-created prototype at a design show last year and just had to have it. Yet the technoyurt represents a core IDEO design principle: creating something tangible as a launching pad for further exploration and innovation. "It's not talking about what may be; it's actually creating and building it," Brown says. "Something you can walk into. It's that ability to make new ideas tangible that makes design useful."

Read the US News article.

The hunt for innovation

Desperate to innovate, companies are turning to design schools for nimble, creative thinkers. Instead of asking a business school for help, Mozilla turned to Stanford's "D-school," as the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design is termed on campus.

A B-school class would have started with a focus on market size and used financial analysis to understand it. This D-school class began with consumers and used ethnography, the latest management tool, to learn about them.

Business school students would have developed a single new product to sell. The D-schoolers aimed at creating a prototype with possible features that might appeal to consumers.

B-school students would have stopped when they completed the first good product idea. The D-schoolers went back again and again to come up with a panoply of possible winners.

Read the Business Week article.

Georgia

“Right now Georgia is the most fashionable type on the Internet,” writes Alice Rawsthorn in style and design pages of International Herald Tribune. Georgia, along with the sans-serif Verdana, were designed to be screen-friendly by British-born, Boston-based Matthew Carter.

"A few designers have mentioned that there seems to be a 'Georgia revival' going on," says Carter, who developed Georgia for Microsoft in 1996. "It seems a bit young to have died and been revived already."

Whatever its age, Georgia is an elegant, quietly idiosyncratic typeface, which is a pleasure to read on screen, even though it is not designed in the minimalist style of lettering that we associate with the Internet. Instead it is one of the serif fonts with decorative squiggles at the ends of the characters that we are accustomed to seeing in print. Georgia's growing popularity is partly the product of typographic fashion, but also reflects deeper changes in our relationship with the screen as our primary source of information.

Read Rawsthorn's article.

Seth Godin: Marketing creativity

Seth Godin writes about the two things that kill creativity — fear and lack of inspiration.

I believe that every single person I've met in this profession is capable of astounding creativity. That you, and everyone else for that matter, is able to dream up something radical and viral and yes, remarkable. So why doesn't it happen more often? Sure, fear is a big part, but it's also a lack of imagination.

Read more on Seth's blog.

#10 envelope window guidelines

The US Postal Service is encouraging manufacturers of #10 window envelopes to move the window up to a position 5/8 inch from the bottom. Apparently, some automation systems are having trouble with the windows at their current position, which is 1/2 inch from the bottom.

Color code

Color Code is a full-color portrait of the English language developed by Martin Wattenberg. Technology Review recently named him "one of the world's 100 top young innovators."

The artwork is an interactive map of more than 33,000 words. Each word has been assigned a color based on the average color of images found by a search engine. The words are then grouped by meaning. The resulting patterns form an atlas of our lexicon.

View Color Code.

Authenticity in the experience economy

"Authenticity is the thing consumers respond to the most," says Diego Scotti, VP of Global Advertising for American Express.

Joe Pine and Jim Gilmore are working on their next book, focused on authenticity as a new consumer sensibility. Gilmore writes:

In the Agrarian Economy, the dominant purchase criteria was Availability (price being set by supply-and-demand, and only influencing the quantity of materials purchased in the marketplace). In the Industrial Economy, Cost became the dominant driver of purchases as Mass Production made more and more goods affordable to the masses. In the Service Economy, Quality came to dominate, when the performance of offerings became most important as consumers increasingly rely upon others to perform certain activities on their behalf.

And now, in the Experience Economy, in an increasingly unreal world of staged places and mediated events, consumers want Authenticity. Thus AMEX desires to "be associated with people of substance, whose success is based on real achievement" and entices celebrities with the opportunity to craft their life-stories (as a commercial) and not just monetary compensation. (Indeed, selling out for the big bucks is not "being real".)

"My Life, My Card..." Diego Scotti on making the directors' series commercials for American Express.

Fast Company features guest blogging by Experience Economy's Jim Gilmore.

Designing a business, not just a product

In Armchair M.B.A, William J. Holstein showcases companies that build innovative technology and products and design the business model for the product.

If you look at the natural history of great new product failures, it's often because they went with the standard business model, or the first feasible business model, instead of doing what good companies do, which is challenge themselves and ask, "What are three very different business designs that we can use to take this product to market?”

Holstein notes Toyota and Honda business  strategy for hybrids, Apple's iPod, and General Motors' OnStar.

Read the NY Times column, Sun Jul 30.

Thinking wrong

Step magazine engaged the "Think wrong" method used by San Francisco firm C2 to design the cover of the May/June issue and collaborate on the editorial content inside. At C2, John Bielenberg, Erik Cos and Greg Galle have built their company upon the concept of removing the heuristic bias from their thinking in order to generate exceptional ideas.

As Alissa Walker describes in the issue,

When you're given a problem — say, tying your shoe — your brain immediately goes into problem-solving mode. Fortunately, your brain is exceptionally well-trained: Previously learned behavior proves that a certain thought process can produce a certain result, so your brain simply skips the heavy thinking and follows those prescribed paths. You tie your shoe just as you've done a thousand times before. This is called heuristic.

If you're trying to create something new or break out of the norm, heuristics are bad. To take your thoughts out of the status-quo, you think wrong.

Greg Galle and Thom Grizzard explore "From Right to Wrong to Right Again," in Step's May/June issue.

John Bielenberg talks about heuristic bias on this video at Aquent.

The beauty of simplicity

Marissa Mayer, who keeps Google's home page pure, understands that less is more. Here's why making things simple is the new competitive advantage.

Fast Company, Nov 2005