Experience First

The world of innovation is awash with acronyms and tech terms: AI, AR, VR, CV, Bots, Mix Reality. It seems that every few months a new piece of pure technology is being born.   

Yet, two people who have created significant innovation in the last fifteen years explicitly say that you address a person’s or group’s problem first, and then find the tech to support the solution. You don’t start with AI, AR, VR, or Bots and look for a problem they can solve.

“You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backward to the technology” - Steve Jobs

“There are many ways to center a business. You can be competitor focused, you can be product-focused, you can be technology focused, you can be a business model focused... But in my view, obsessive customer focus is by far the most protective of Day 1 vitality.” - Jeff Bezos 

What this means is that we have to look beyond the newest technology born in a lab as well as beyond what people themselves are currently asking for. To quote Wayne Gretzky, we need to move to where the hockey puck will be. 

How do you do that? You have to look for fundamental needs: communication, transportation, living spaces, health. What are the unmet needs in these areas and what will they be in the next 10 years?

Airbnb and Uber each met a fundamental need. It was not the technology that led their innovation, rather it was the need and the experience. You can, of course, make things faster with better technology, but neither of these culture-changing companies created any new fundamental technologies; they used sometimes decades-old technologies in new ways.

When you start with a new technology you are limited by its context and its lack of history. It is something looking for a home; there are many cases of technologies that should never find one. 

If you want to innovate, stop reading tech blogs and start looking around at people's most basic needs and make those better. Those needs represent big markets that can change the culture of our society. By creating real people-centered innovation, you have the possibility of creating products and services that people will eventually be unable to imagine the world without.  

The best team in the world

It’s 1998. I am 4 years into my career as an interaction designer and find myself working at the BBC on a new service called BBC Interactive. It allows people access to all sorts of information directly from their TV using an interactive interface.

I am working on a project called BBC Wimbledon, which lets people watch multiple live video streams from different courts and stay up to date on news and scores through their TV. The first step of such a service is to build a pilot and show it at the tournament so the public can get a sense of what it would be like. The difficult bit is that very few people had ever made an interactive pilot demo that used outside broadcast video.

So, one morning I get to go to Wimbledon a few months before the tournament and talk to the outside broadcast team with a colleague of mine who is a senior computer engineer at the BBC. The idea is that he will talk to the outside broadcast team and then give me the live video in a format I can use for the prototype I’m designing on a computer hooked up to a TV, simulating the experience of using the service with remote control on your home TV. All sounds great.

We turn up to the outside broadcast area and are shown to a room with the source of the live video: a jumble of wires and cables plugged into a video board that routed the video signal for the live broadcast. At that point, the BBC live broadcast engineer told us that was it. That was the extent of the help he could give us and we should be able to figure it out from there.

My first thought was “Holy s#*t we are F##**Ked”

At that moment I had to rethink what I thought 'hard' meant. The computer engineer with me started to think. He had a Ph.D. in computer science and years of experience. Within 3 days he had written a separate program that would plug into the software I was using so that I could access the live video feeds I needed to make the prototype work.

What did I take away from this experience? That hard is a relative term and that having the right team is far more important than having the perfect process.

Try this the next time you face a hard problem: 
Think of all the people you know who have the expertise or who might know someone with expertise in the problem you are trying to solve. Reach out to some of them via phone or email and ask for their advice. You may be surprised at how open and willing experts are will to share their knowledge.

You make your own best team, and this may or may not be your work team. While this feels odd at first, this is, in fact, the team that will make your career far more successful than anyone team at any one job.

P.S. The prototype worked, and the next year the service was made into a real application that was available for millions of people across the UK.

Intent driven design

People don’t want a drill. They want a hole.

People are often only given solutions that solve a portion of their original intent.

So what is the intent?
The intent is being resolved or determined to do something. Doing this thing on which one is intent can be broken down into a series of smaller interconnected tasks constrained by a number of requirements (time, location, money, for example) which are only important in that they get you to your desired something. 

By listening carefully you can hear people's intentions, rather than just the tasks they mention. 
To design for an intention, you must be able to sequence the tasks in the right order and make sure each task is possible within a particular set of requirements. 

If you can understand intent you can map tasks over time and predict your users’ future!

Let's take an example: cooking an omelet. This seems simple but it is actually deceptively complex to create a solution that fulfills the whole intent. The answer could be to look online or in a cookbook and to follow the instructions, which can often be a hit or miss approach. Instead, let's break this down from an intent-driven design approach. 

By listening and observing experienced cooks (or users) you can see three major things you need to do in sequence to make the perfect omelet. 

Have the right cooking equipment. 
Have the right ingredients.
Know the right cooking techniques. 

Hence, an intent-driven solution would first make sure that you had the right equipment, and if you didn't would offer you alternatives you might already have, or would help you find a place nearby to get the right equipment. 

It would then check if you had the right ingredients to make the omelet. Once again, if you did not, it would suggest the places in your local area that have the ingredients you need. 

The final step would be to provide you with videos or clear instructions on the correct cooking technique to help you make the best omelet possible with the equipment and ingredients you have. 

Putting intent into practice
Very few, if any, services today offer this kind of complete intent-based solution. Making eggs is simple, but still, there's a gap between the tasks and the intent. Imagine something more complex -- like buying a house!

The actual tasks when buying a house include :
Get financial advice, mortgage advice, mortgage loan, credit checks, real estate lawyer services, real estate broker, house finding services, building surveyor reports, school district data, house closing services, tax document action, notary services, and on and on and on……

You can see what I mean; you want a home but to fulfill that intent you “need’ all these services, people, and kinds of information-- in the right sequence--to be successful. 

Focusing on a user’s intent allows you as a designer to look into the future and predict what the user will need and when.

This is what Airbnb and Uber have done to some success and Apple does extremely well in its retail stores. They understand the intent of their users (e.g. for Uber, to get to a specific location in a set amount of time) and make services and products that cater to each of the tasks that the user requires in sequence to fulfill their actual intent. 

To use this method you should start by identifying the basic parameters for breaking down all the elements that will lead a person to be able to fulfill their intention. You can do this by asking the following questions:
1. How much time does the user have to complete their intent?
2. Do they have to be in a specific location?
3. How much money will they need/do they have to complete their intent?

Next, you should try to define three main categories of tasks that need to be accomplished for the person to fulfill their intent.

The final thing to do is to sequence the tasks and apply the time, location, and money parameters to create a design brief which, if met, will fully satisfy the person’s intent.

It sounds like magic but in fact, it is just learning to listen in a very different way, and thinking more expansively about a design problem. 

Selected Reading 2017

This year has been a year of change, to put it mildly. And so, the books that have captured my attention in 2017 have focused on an America that could have been in “American Dreamer: A Life of Henry A. Wallace," about FDR's Vice President and the architect of the New Deal; the reasons for the America that exists, in “Bind Us Apart: How Enlightened Americans Invented Racial Segregation;” and the forces that have shaped our current culture in “Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology.” Having understood this context I also read “In Praise of Idleness,” by Bertrand Russell which provides clear solutions to many of our core issues. Finally, I read several of George Simenon's “Maigret” novels, which show what can happen when (an admittedly fictional) someone applies intelligence and context to solve a problem, rather than resorting--as happens in our present information-obsessed culture--to raw data alone.

Happy New Year.
K. 

American Dreamer: A Life of Henry A. Wallace 
By John C. Culver and John Hyde

"The Wallaces have prospered and been successful, he said, because “we have never thought of wealth or social position as ends in themselves, but merely as means of enlarging our possible usefulness to the community at large."
 

"The question I would raise is whether a new unity can be built which is based on the principles of economic balance and an advancing culture. Is it possible to hope for an educated democracy, capable of making the necessary key economic decisions in a spirit which does not have its origins in hatred or greed or prejudice?"
 

"Probably the most damaging indictment that can be made of the capitalistic system is the way in which its emphasis on unfettered individualism results in exploitation of natural resources in a manner to destroy the physical foundations of national longevity."

Bind Us Apart: How Enlightened Americans Invented Racial Segregation
By Nicholas Guyatt"Abraham Lincoln, in the first years of his presidency, did more to secure government support for black emigration than any politician since James Monroe."
 "Wayne was confronted by extraordinary sights. The “banditti” had cleared five hundred acres for the cultivation of crops. Most of them lived in log houses, neatly arranged in a fashion that would put to shame many white frontier settlements, and used the same utensils and manufactured goods as the soldiers who had defeated them."

 Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology
By Neil Postman
"What extent has computer technology been an advantage to the masses of people? To steelworkers, vegetable-store owners, teachers, garage mechanics, musicians, bricklayers, dentists, and most of the rest into whose lives the computer now intrudes? Their private matters have been made more accessible to powerful institutions. They are more easily tracked and controlled; are subjected to more examinations; are increasingly mystified by the decisions made about them; are often reduced to mere numerical objects. They are inundated by junk mail. They are easy targets for advertising agencies and political organizations.new technologies compete with old ones—for time, for attention, for money, for prestige, but mostly for dominance of their world-view."
 "New technologies alter the structure of our interests: the things we think about. They alter the character of our symbols: the things we think with. And they alter the nature of community: the arena in which thoughts develop."

 In Praise of Idleness
By Bertrand Russell"People have become mainly passive: seeing cinemas, watching football matches, listening to the radio, and so on. This results from the fact that their active energies are fully taken up with work; if they had more leisure, they would again enjoy pleasures in which they took an active part."
 "Good nature is, of all moral qualities, the one that the world needs most, and good nature is the result of ease and security, not of a life of arduous struggle."

 Maigret 
George SimenonAs a diversion from history and philosophy I read George Simenon's Maigret detective novels. This year I have read around 10 of them. Each one of them captures a time and place and allows you to imagine yourself in a particular place in Maigret's Paris. The novels capture the small details of both a place and time but also of human nature. I find a detective's process to be very similar to a designer's; you piece together the clues to the problem, try out different hypotheses, and then find the solution. The only difference being that in a murder case there is only one right answer, only one murderer; design allows for many right answers.

Design Proofreading

In books, proofreading for grammar and punctuation is a tool for creating clarity and simplicity in a text, so that big ideas are not clouded by small confusion. In the past 15-20 years we have begun to publish many more things: websites, apps, videos and even print 3D objects. What creates clarity in these?

While the possibility for error is as common as ever, in networked media a tool to help you improve the clarity and simplicity of a design does not really exist. The need for a proofreading tool for designing these new forms of media and objects seems necessary. 

With this in mind I have created a framework I call “design proofreading,” to allow people to navigate this new world of mass media and object production.

There are four core elements to the design proofreading framework: Assumptions, Simplification, Scaling, and Consistency.

Each core element gets you to ask key questions about the product or service you are designing and helps unlock potential ways to improve it. This framework is for use at critical junctures when you have made a major step forward with a design: developed a new concept, changed out the content, added a new piece of functionality.

Design proofreading framework:

Assumptions
Assumptions can be deadly. It’s important to understand the assumptions you are making and see if they are realistic or not.

How to proofread for assumptions:
List out the major assumptions you are making about the project.
1. Who is the project for?
2. What information are you basing your assumptions?
3. Are those assumptions still valid today ?
4. How many assumptions are based on known facts compared to untested facts?

Do you your assumptions still ring true? Is there new information that requires you to update or refine your initial assumptions?


Simplification
Less is more. By simplifying (but not making simple) a design you can  make the product more refined and improve the user experience with fewer elements. 

How to proofread for simplification:
1. What is absolutely essential for the project to work properly?
2. Can the same results be achieved with less?
3. Is there redundancy in the design?
4. Is the language used age-appropriate? Does is use the right vernacular?

Simplifying the design this way does not mean dumbing it down, but doing more with less.


Scaling
How can you make things work for one person and 10,000,000 people? This is important in all forms of design, from the web to manufacturing. How will a product / service respond over time with an increased number of people using it?

How to proofread for scaling:
1. What are the variable elements of the design?
2. If any part of the design is variable, what happens to this part of the design at the lowest and highest ends of the variance? Does the design adapt, or break down and stop functioning? (e.g. if your design is created for multiple languages what happens when everything is translated from english to a more verbose language like german)
3. What must be variable and what can be fixed in the design solution?

You cannot know all of the answers when you start designing something. This exercise lets you consider what might happen and plan for some of the bigger changes.


Consistency
Consistency in how something looks and works is an important part of  building a relationship with the person/ people using the design. While there always needs to be variability to allow for more intuitive ideas, the majority of the design should be consistent to create trust between the design and the user.

How to proofread for consistency:
1.How many variables do you have within a design?
2.What are the main activities that someone will use your design for? When you use the components that make up those important parts of the experience do they behave and look consistent?
3.Placement, size, behavior, typography, color, interaction, and meaning. Look at each element of the object, book, poster or website’s design: does it behave consistently when you apply the above parameters?

Do the basics, headers, calls to action add up? If not, go back and look at the system to see how to adjust or, better, simplify to create a more consistent set of rules for the people using your design. The simpler the rules, the quicker the adoption of a product.

***
By asking some relatively simple questions this process allows you to make rational choices about a project.The entire design process is about providing a vision for a project, understanding the content or functionality intimately, and delivering a solution. All of these things necessitate being close to the project, making it hard to take a step back and see an obvious flaw which could stop an otherwise great idea from taking off. Design proofreading is a way to take that step back while in the flow of making an idea real. 

Tools That Shape Us

On the weekend I drove a car which had a feature I had never seen before. It had a small LED indicator in the wing mirror which appeared when a car drove by me in the blind spot of the wing mirror. This saved me from having to crane my neck back over my shoulder to check that blind spot. Great! I thought, That’s handy, that makes my life easier.

Later on in the drive I had become used to this new tech and basked in its glory. No need to look any more, the little LED will just show up and I will be safe. Safe in this knowledge, I checked my mirrors and started to pull into the curb at which point I swerved quickly to avoid hitting two cyclists who were in my blind spot! Woah! It doesn’t work in that situation?

What had been a convenience a moment earlier now became a liability, making me think about all the trade-offs people make everyday for convenience. Google maps on your phone, no need to know where you’re going, right? Apart from all the people that ask me for directions while holding a smartphone in their hand, in New York, a city built on a grid for easy wayfinding.

This post is not about features, but about systemic problems of learning and how we apply our learning to the world. There seem to be many tools to make your life easier, but very few to help you get smarter and learn more.

Why? Perhaps it is that getting smarter and better at things requires hard work and patience, things that are not convenient. I am not advocating going back to the dark ages (or even the 90’s) and using maps and compasses again, but what I am advocating for is that we use technology to start building our own personal cultures, our own ways to think about the world, creating tools for ourselves to be more successful, happy and fulfilled.

What does that mean practically? Simple example. If you love sushi, instead of using yelp, spend the time looking up the best sushi restaurants in your area, make a list, map the locations, list out the specials and what you might eat there. Now make something, a blog post, email, instagram, anchor, snapchat about it and let other people know.
 
Do this every time, soon you are the expert instead of yelp, you have taken something you love and learned more and helped others learn more. This doesn’t have to be a job or make you money, but it is a way to share your personal culture — what you think and how you think — with others. That is how great ideas start.

Design first

A new day and a new project. The first thing to do in a human-centered approach to designing a new product or service is to understand the user and business goals. You start setting up interviews with your client, reading about competitors, and begin to observe and interview the types of people who might end up using this new project. 

But wait. What do you actually know at this point? What questions do you have? Are they well informed, distinct, and pointed? Or are they wide-ranging and fuzzy? I want to challenge the order in which we structure our approach to research in design, and to suggest how design can be used not only to create solutions but also to define the problem.

The current human-centered design process is essential: research, ideate, solution, test, and repeat. This is the wrong order. How can you research if you don't have a well-defined question? 

How many times have you seen projects begin by observing users, talking to business and end-users, competitive analysis ... only to end up with a list of pretty general bullet points about what could be done a little better and some pros and cons. This is not a well-considered research process; this is a research process that started without a well-defined question.

So how can you change this? I would say start designing a solution to the problem from day one. Only by making something will you as a designer start to understand the problem both from a macro and micro perspective. Next, instead of testing your design, take a step back and ask yourself what questions do you have and what assumptions have you made? Now use the answers to these questions to formulate your research questions, and begin your research activities with them in mind. The next step would be to iterate on the design this time focusing on a solution. Finally, you would test this idea with end-users. 

A bonus to this approach is that you will actually have things to show end-users, not just hypothetical ideas, and you can get a real reaction. The point of this initial design process is to understand the problem by actually doing the thing that designers are good at--designing! 

While many designers have a skill for research, this is often more intuitive than formal. Based on many conversations with sociologists, anthropologists, and other social scientists over the years, I've seen how many designers’ research skills are at best naive, without a grounding in real research techniques. The research that designers do is often incomplete or misleading, especially when it is done on questions such as ‘how can we improve shopping experiences?’ or ‘how do we help improve health outcomes?’ This is not a knock on designers; why should they be good at this work? Most were never trained to conduct formal research methods or research design.

You may say I have described the lean UX approach of “design and test.” Rather, I would argue that that process is focused on finding a solution, rather than defining a question. Testing by its nature is about narrowing to a solution. The initial round of design in the approach I have outlined is not to define a solution, it is to define the problem. 

By designing first, designers play to their strengths, creating a preliminary solution. By then doing substantive research into the questions raised by this initial design, they can look at more specific questions and find better outcomes. It allows the research process to be much more focused and useful, getting at core design questions more quickly. 

Smart Cities

This collection looks at the idea of using technology to build "smart" cities. Smart cities can seem an odd concept, as it sounds as if the city by itself will improve; the reality is that cities are not just made from concrete, steel, and sensors but are mostly made of people. I'm interested in exploring how technology can help connect people and data to build towards the “'triple bottom line' of economy, environment, and social equity," as one of the articles suggests. 

New York's Bryant Park is tracking visitor behavior
"As AdAge reports, PlaceIQ and several other similar companies gather their information from mobile app location data (which most users allow access to when they download free mobile apps) or from geo-targeted mobile ads. Although the data is anonymized and not tied a specific user's phone, it still creates a surprisingly complete picture of the visitors to the park." 

Same Strategy, Bigger Problem
"better neighborhood seems to matter and moving to areas of opportunity can increase income by 31% annually."

How Smart Cities Save Money (and the Planet)
"Cities around the world are getting bigger, fast. By 2015, there will be 22 metropolitan areas with populations of more than 10 million people. Around the world, some 180,000 people move into cities every day."

An Exclusive Look At Airbnb's First Foray Into Urban Planning
"Is it naive to think that you can simply drop a building onto a community and expect them to reorient their lives around it? Gebbia answers that community centers have always been a strong part of Japanese culture; this effort, in fact, is simply piggybacking on government efforts to build new ones." 

Tools for Sustainable Cities
The effort builds on IBM’s Smarter Cities initiative, which is focused on how the strategic use of data and technology can drive sustainable growth and prosperity.

Grow vs Manage

Grow :  undergo natural development by increasing in size and changing physically; progress to maturity.
vs
Manage:  be in charge of (a company, establishment, or undertaking); administer; run // succeed in surviving or in attaining one's aims, especially against heavy odds; cope.

A patient is diagnosed with with Type 2 diabetes. The patient is scared and worried, unsure of what to do and what their options are. The doctor in this case provides clear medical and self care instructions and schedules a follow up appointment in a month's time.

The patient tries their best to keep up with the tracking and daily medication required, but because of their work schedule and diet they don't follow all of the doctor's instructions properly and start to feel worse. At their next visit the doctor has to "manage" the medical crisis situation, providing additional education and instruction, as well as medical attention.

With the best of intentions on both sides, the situation keeps getting worse, more and more emergency visits are needed, and more "managing" of the situation ensues. In the end, both patient and doctor feel this is not being resolved or getting better.

This story is not hypothetical; it was told to me by a medical professional.

Too often we "manage" by controlling and fixing a crisis that arises, then exhaling and waiting for the next one. This is unsustainable and this management style is a core reason why people leave jobs they would otherwise enjoy.

“People leave managers, not companies.”

“Workers reported that companies generally satisfy their needs for on-the-job development …[such as] significant increases in responsibility. But they’re not getting much in the way of formal development, such as training, mentoring, and coaching—things they also value highly.” - HBR

So what can you do?

“The more that people are rewarded for doing something, the more likely they are to lose interest in whatever they had to do to get the reward.” - Alfie Kohn

The approach I'll describe here isn't hard, but it does require you as a manager to be consistent, focused, and honest with the people you manage.

The first step is to understand where the person you are managing is right now. What is their skill level, how do they approach their work, what makes them happy and sad? This understanding can only begin from careful observation.

Once you understand where they are, you can help them figure out how they want to grow. Your careful observation should have given you some clues but asking directly and exploring future growth paths is necessary to get a full picture. 

Thus far this may sound familiar and straightforward. The next stage in a conventional growth path would be to set goals that need to be achieved to attain new skills. 

This is exactly what should not happen! 

Following the goals path leads to the “crisis management” approach. Once goals are set, the tenor of the conversation becomes about testing: did you achieve the goal, when are you going to achieve it, how long will it take, how well did you achieve your goal? The learning becomes not about new knowledge gained but rather about the ability to pass the test. This approach narrows thinking and makes the whole process of growing your career more stressful and less open. 

The alternative approach is to think about growth as progression.

Let's say a person's goal is to get better at communicating ideas. A traditional goals structure would say: set a goal to give a presentation at a conference of your peers.
 
The growth-based approach would say: spend time each week writing a blog post about the work you have done, make a series of diagrams to show your working process, make a series of short presentations about an idea or activity you really enjoy, make a series of short videos about the current project you're working on.

The growth approach is about exploring a wide range of ways to communicate ideas and to do lots of them in quick bursts so the person starts to build a skill, without worrying about failing, and makes it part of how they work.

The role of the manager changes from someone enforcing and setting the rules to someone checking in on, marking, and supporting progression.

The approach focuses on growing skills rather than on the ability to cram to pass one big test. You shift from the crisis management of “”will this person give a good presentation or not?” (and their coming to you two days before without a real plan) to instead, their practice of a series of activities that allow them to explore and learn from each activity and to build on skills learned and from mistakes made. 

To create innovative products and services, companies need to first invest in building a sustainable creative culture where people feel they are growing, rather than being tested. 

Don’t let things get to a crisis point; decisions made in this mode are almost always worse. Help people grow and you and your company will thrive. 

Creative Frameworks

If you ask me why I am willing to give away the valuable formula of this discovery I will confide to you that experience has taught me two things about it: First, the formula is so simple to state that few who hear it really believe in it. Second, while simple to state, it actually requires the hardest kind of intellectual work to follow, so that not all who accept it use it.
–  A Technique for Producing Ideas by James Young

What is a creative framework?

At its simplest, it is a conceptual tool that allows you to test a concept.

It has a set of rules (parameters) that must be abided by and a set of success criteria by which any concept created with the framework can be judged. 

A simple example of a creative framework is a map. A map has a defined set of rules e.g. geographic boundaries, roads, and paths, towns, etc… it also has a set of success criteria by which any journey routes created using the map can be judged e.g. distance traveled and time is taken for any given journey. 

Now at this point, you can also add more criteria to your map framework to create different journeys. For example, a new criteria might be scenic beauty. This may dramatically change how you judge what is the best journey. 

Creative frameworks also share another major idea with maps: there is not one single map or framework for all journeys or concepts. 

So when using creative frameworks to test an idea, you may have to refine a framework you have used in the past, or you might have to come up with a completely new one depending on the nature of the problem you are trying to solve. 

The following articles look at very different frameworks and how people use them to understand problems and create innovative ideas.  


Alessi Framework for products
This theory implies that all objects communicate a message to people through five possible codes: paternal, maternal, childish, erotic, and birth/death.3 We can recognize many of these codes in the Alessi product family. Indeed, according to Alberto Alessi, Thanks to this epistemological
Design Driven Innovation by Roberto Verganti
Source : Design Driven Innovation


Wordless Collaboration
The story of the project’s origins is shrouded in mystery, but what is known is that, because the residents couldn’t decide on what they wanted to build, they made three rules. The first was that, not only would they build without any plan or blueprint, they would not discuss the direction of the project at all. Second, when they were on the building site, no one was allowed to speak — at all. Third, the building would never be completed, because anyone at any point could decide to take it in a new direction.
Source : Polis 


Bauhaus: a blueprint for the future:
For years the Bauhaus building was known to the wider world mostly through a few black-and-white photographs that stress its more easily copied details, but miss the point that it was a framework for the creative energy of the school.
Read more
Source : The Guardian


Letters of Note: C. S. Lewis on Writing
2. Always prefer the plain direct word to the long, vague one. Don’t implement promises, but keep them.
Read more
Source : Letter of Note


Top artists reveal how to find creative inspiration
Routine is really important. However late you went to bed the night before, or however much you had to drink, get up at the same time each day and get on with it. When I was composing [the opera] Anna Nicole, I was up at 5 or 6am, and worked through until lunch. The afternoon is the worst time for creativity.
Read more
Source : The Guardian

The Problem-First Design Process

"The greatest challenge to any thinker is stating the problem in a way that will allow a solution.” Bertrand Russell

I want to be rich. I want to be more mindful. I want to start my own company. These all seem like reasonable goals but when stated in this way they are almost impossible to achieve. Why? Because they are not stated in a way that allows for a solution. They are, in fact, a statement of desire and not a set of requirements that would allow anyone to achieve the stated goal.

In this article, I propose a design process that focuses on understanding the problem and, in so doing, it's requirements--a process I call "problem first." If you understand the problem, making the solution will be simple. 

The following exchange between founder of Patagonia Yvon Chouinard and his head of design, as retold in his book “Let my People go Surfing”, shows a useful example. As they discuss how to make the best product, one person states a goal as a desire that is impossible to achieve, while another begins to state requirements that will allow for the development of solution to meet their goal. 

“Early in our history our chief designer for many years, Kate Larramendy, issued me a challenge. She said that we didn’t make the best clothing in the world, and moreover if we did, we’d go out of business."

“Why?” I asked her.

“Because the best shirt in the world is Italian,” she said. “It’s made from hand-woven fabric, with hand-sewn buttons and buttonholes, and impeccably finished. And it costs three hundred dollars. Our customers wouldn’t pay for that. “

I asked “What would happen if you threw that three-hundred-dollar shirt into your washer and dryer?”

“Oh, you’d never do that. It would shrink. It has be dry-cleaned.”

To me a shirt that has to be treated so delicately has diminished value.  Because I think ease of care is an important attribute, I would never own a shirt like that, much less make and sell one.”
—Yvon Chouinard (2006), Let My People Go Surfing

This example shows that instead of stating a goal for his perfect shirt Chouinard states the problem as different requirements which allow for the best outcome for his particular set of consumers.

Today the approach to problem solving in design is both linear and iterative. Yet, these methods allow very little room for clearly stating the problem and reframing the requirements / strategies required to create something great.

This diagram shows a popular method of production called “waterfall”, a small amount of time spent up front stating the problem while the rest of the process is spent trying to create a solution to this problem statement. Unfortunately if the problem isn’t stated correctly at the beginning, many issues occur during the production process, leading to pretty mediocre results. This style also manages the process with hard deadlines and sets of milestones that have to be met.

In reaction to this, the “agile” process was created,
which works this way: 

This process is the opposite of waterfall; it looks to iterate quickly through all parts of the project in quick 2-3 week sprints. This is meant to allow for more feedback in the design process and creates a more reactive process as new information is learned. But, as with the waterfall model, agile is also a managerial process; in each structured 2-3 week sprint, a number of targets must be met. Even though things can change due to new information, the mentality is still focused on production. We are making something, just quicker.

All processes have their strengths and weaknesses. The biggest weakness of either “waterfall” or “agile” is their focus on creating a solution immediately. By its nature, this causes a narrowing of thinking and exploration which can lead to unforeseen issues in the production process. 

Even more problematic, in both processes the work of framing the problem is only a small part of the overall process and is attached to the idea of production which means that the thinking will be narrow and be influenced by subsequent stages. This leads to a process which is only 20% stating the problem and 80% creating a solution.

What’s an alternative? 
The “problem first” method I suggest follows a different path, spending the majority of the time on stating the problem, rather than on creating a solution. I have found from long experience that, even with the best of intentions, predetermined milestones and assumptions, and a focus on solution, can only create a climate of narrow thinking where milestones are all-important and the problem at hand is too often neglected.

This is what the problem-first process looks like:

I assume that to many people this will not look like a process at all; to some degree that is the point. Without all the artificial milestones and deliverables, this process allows for free exploration of the problem space. Many of the usual activities will be done--brainstorming, sketching, research, interviews etc.--but all with the goal of each week stating the problem, requirements and assumptions in a clearer way.

What do I mean by stating the problem? Well, this will also look familiar to anyone who has designed anything before: making artifacts of possible solutions, doing and recording research with consumers and businesspeople, stating assumptions about the market, creating metrics for success. Yet, these are all done with the aim of stating the problem and not making a solution.

Once the team is happy with the problem statement, making the solution is a natural process because they understand the problem. They have not had the burden of artificial deadlines; the problem statement itself is a clear guide to show them whether the design solution they are creating meets the needs at hand. While this sounds like magic I can assure you it’s not. It's hard work, but it is work with a focus and a clear idea of :

What are we building?
Why are we building it?
Who are we building it for?

When you can answer these questions with confidence you will be on the right track to making something valuable and innovative. 

Work Culture

"Good nature is, of all moral qualities, the one that the world needs most, and good nature is the result of ease and security, not of a life of arduous struggle." - Bertrand Russell

Everyone is busy! Working constantly -- often much more than their 40 hours a week -- yet, people still do not feel satisfied. The more they work the less satisfied they feel because they are missing out on other parts of their lives. Part of the issue lies in our work culture. Here I'd like to suggest three key ideas I've identified in my reading on this subject; attention to focus, culture, and space can allow for a more sustainable work life, and hence, one's whole life. 

Focus: How do you find the time to do your most important work, or spend the time with the people that matter to you?

Culture: How is our work culture affecting our lives?

Space: How does the environment in which we do our work affect us as people?


Focus 
According to one article from the BBC, “an average working professional experiences 87 interruptions per day” which seems to be an impossibly unsustainable environment in which to work. Cited in that article, professor Dan Gilbert’s study finds that “we spend 46.9% of our time not thinking about what is happening in front of us”. With this little focus, it is not surprising that people put in more and more hours to recover from all the distractions. And - it turns out that even putting in more hours is not the right answer, as the BBC goes on to note that “employees with the highest productivity didn’t put in longer hours than anyone else – often they didn't even work eight-hour day. Instead, the key to their productivity was that for every 52 minutes of focused work, they took a 17-minute break.”

So what can you do if working more is not the answer? These short breaks are a good option, as well as the idea put forth by Thrive Global, a life hacking website, which suggests that you should “build a working system for yourself...[which] makes your goal real...[and] concrete.” One way to do this is to take the 168 approach and look at how you spend your time, track the activities you do for a given week, and categorize those activities into the following groups:

Creative : Activities that make you happier or move you closer to your long term goals. 
Health: Activities that improve your mental and physical well being. 
Tasks : Activities you have to do to maintain your life e.g. washing up, laundry, food shopping. 

Now look at how you have spent your time, and the activities you did. Think about next week and how you want to spend your time and the right balance for you. This is a first step in creating your culture of work, stopping the feeling, and the reality, of being bombarded by trivial activities that stop you from doing what is most important for you to succeed and be happy. 


Culture 
Perhaps one of the clearest and frightening examples of our work culture gone awry is in Japan; the BBC writes that while “the country may have some of the longest working hours it is the least productive of the G7 group of developed economies” and that while workers are “entitled to 20 days leave a year...currently about 35% don't take any of it.” This article highlights how working more hours is not only bad for individual workers but is also bad for companies that use this culture of work and for a country's economy as a whole. Signal vs noise, a blog written by the company basecamp, addresses this issue and sums up much of what is wrong with the current culture of work this way: “Workaholism is a disease. We need treatment and coping advice for those afflicted, not cheerleaders for their misery.” Whatever short term gains companies get from workers doing 80 hour weeks is massively offset when you have burned-out employees and resignations, meaning that companies are losing their most valuable asset, their people. 

Place 
Where we work can have as much effect on our work and happiness as how we work. A 2014 article from the New Yorker shows how the ill-conceived idea of open-plan offices has taken over workplace design “The open office was originally conceived by a team from Hamburg, Germany, in the nineteen-fifties, to facilitate communication and idea flow. But a growing body of evidence suggests that the open office undermines the very things that it was designed to achieve.” The article goes on to explain that compelling evidence in this way:

"In a study by the Cornell University psychologists Gary Evans and Dana Johnson, clerical workers who were exposed to open-office noise for three hours had increased levels of epinephrine—a hormone that we often call adrenaline, associated with the so-called fight-or-flight response. What’s more, Evans and Johnson discovered that people in noisy environments made fewer ergonomic adjustments than they would in private, causing increased physical strain. The subjects subsequently attempted to solve fewer puzzles than they had after working in a quiet environment; in other words, they became less motivated and less creative."

Companies gain the short term benefits of being able to cram more people into smaller spaces and to reduce office space cost overheads. Yet, by doing this they lose out in the long term by creating spaces in which it is almost impossible to focus and concentrate, leading to less innovative and lower quality work. 

Another article from Fast Company shows how allowing people control over where they work leads to much better productivity and more innovative outcomes for both the individual employees and the businesses. While they cite that “the most innovative companies have between 25% to 57% of their employees working remotely,” this still does not change the minds of many businesses that continue to look for short term gain and end up providing an overall culture of low innovation and stagnation. 

Focus, Culture, and Space help us think about how to build more sustainable creative workspaces which lead to more innovation, better products, healthier and more profitable businesses, and happier people. 

***
As an additional note to this article, it’s important to say that there is a whole field of study called environmental psychology dedicated to looking at the effect of space on culture and vice versa. Below are a few more articles that might help you understand the profound effect the built environments of our workspaces have on our well being. 
Additional reading :
HBR : Rules for designing an engaging work space
HOK : Workplace Strategies that Enhance Performance, Health and Wellness

Leadership

“My friend Danny recently summarized what he’s learned from years of fatherhood: “Being right isn’t necessarily what matters.” - from Unconditional Parenting by Alfie Kohn

I am going to describe a situation, let me know if this sounds familiar.

A person is trying to teach a child the concept of multiplication in mathematics. They tell the child that 5x5 =25, then they ask them to memorize this, and rhetorically ask them if they understood what just happened. Now they ask the child a question, what is 5x6? the child thinks for a while and then says 81? The person who asked the question gets frustrated at the child for not having thought about the answer and not seeing the logical connection between 5x5 and 5x6 which seems obvious to them. The person then tells the child that the answer is 30! and tells them to remember that for next time.

A few days later the person asks the child what is 5x6, the child thinks hard and remembers the answer, 30! Great, says the person, this must be working, now we are getting somewhere. Okay what is 5x7, the child thinks for a while and says 92! confidently. NO!, frustrated again the person tells the child that 5x7 =35, and follows it up with “Remember that for next time!”

A few days later…..

I hope you can see where this is going, and its parallels with the top-down management style widely used across industries and company types. Throughout my career, I have seen this pattern repeated in large and small companies, Fortune 500s, startups, and nonprofits.

Having a single person with all of the context and knowledge does not empower a team to learn and make good decisions. The assumption of management and managers is that they have been clear, but in reality, they often provide very little information and even if they have, no tools to empower their people to solve the problems at hand.

Being a good leader is not just about providing a clear goal, it is also about providing the support and the tools, both tactical and conceptual, to help teams learn for themselves. Only then can you disrupt this broken cycle and create real solutions and sustainable creative environments that people want to be in and learn from.

Thinking

"The systems that fail are those that rely on the permanency of human nature, and not on its growth and development." – Oscar Wilde

Today we are awash with self-help and guidance books which will tell us what to think, eat, create and anything else you care to imagine. So, for this week's design + culture entry I have made a selection of books which, instead of telling you what to think, help you understand how to think. 
 

Book 1 : Pragmatism - by William James

"Our minds thus grow in spots; and like grease-spots, the spots spread. But we let them spread as little as possible: we keep unaltered as much of our old knowledge, as many of our old prejudices and beliefs, as we can. We patch and tinker more than we renew. The novelty soaks in; it stains the ancient mass; but it is also tinged by what absorbs it. Our past apperceives and co- operates; and in the new equilibrium in which each step forward in the process of learning terminates, it happens relatively seldom that the new fact is added RAW. More usually it is embedded cooked, as one might say, or stewed down in the sauce of the old."
 

Book 2 : The Soul of Man under Socialism - by Oscar Wilde

"Anybody can sympathise with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature—it requires, in fact, the nature of a true Individualist—to sympathise with a friend’s success."
 

Book 3: The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin - by Benjamin Franklin

"I never arrived at the perfection I had been so ambitious of obtaining, but fell far short of it, yet I was, by the endeavor, a better and a happier man than I otherwise should have been if I had not attempted it"
 

Book 4: A Technique for Producing Ideas - by James Young

"If you ask me why I am willing to give away the valuable formula of this discovery I will confide to you that experience has taught me two things about it: First, the formula is so simple to state that few who hear it really believe in it."
 

Book 5 : Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind - by Shunryu Suzuki

"It is difficult to have good communication between parents and children because parents always have their own intentions."

Creative Culture

" The designer has a prescriptive rather than descriptive job.
Unlike scientists who describe how the world is, designers suggest how it might be." - Bryan Lawson

If you're running any kind of creative company, what questions and processes should you come back to regularly to make sure you're on the right track and focusing your energy on what matters? What follows is a set of guiding principles to shape the creation of more sustainable design culture. It focuses on defining the problem, shaping product culture and creating a transparent process.

Defining the Problem
Defining the problem is an important part of figuring out a solution, and having clarity of vision. The following questions need to be posed and answered again and again throughout the product development process to make sure your product or services are on target.

1. What's the problem we think people have?
2. Do they in fact have this problem?
3. How do they solve this problem today?
4. How much do they spend to solve this problem?
5. How much does this problem impact their business/life?

Product Culture
Products and services are made by people. Those people need to feel valued, motivated and happy. It's important to have a clear vision and ensure that your people are supported in its execution. Using this product culture framework and regularly asking the following questions of yourself and your team allows you to gauge the health of your organization.

• Future
  What do we stand for? What are our values?
   

• Framework
  What are the strategies which form the core of our company or service?
   

• Form
  How do we communicate our story?
   

• Feel
  How do people feel after using our product/service?
   

• Function
  Is it clear how to use our product or service?

Transparent Process
Once you have clearly defined the problem and have an engaged workforce, using a transparent process will help you create great products and services in a sustainable manner.

Framework
My framework is a way of logically laying out ideas, organizing them by Vision, Goals, Strategy, Tactics, and Tasks. The framework is a flexible tool which allows you to evaluate ideas at any level and helps you make decisions in real-time about your organization and product. It is also a tool to create consensus in your team about which ideas are truly connected to your vision and which ones are not.

Audience
It's important to understand the whole customer story. It's not about what you want them to do; it's about carefully understanding their current activities and then creating the best possible outcome for those activities. This will create real innovation instead of incremental change.

Market
Find the open spaces in culture; these are where the big opportunities are. This can be a hard path, since no one else is initially working in that space, but by addressing a gap it is also the one most aligned with your customers' needs. If by following your own path you create an innovation, you will have no competition. No competition allows you time and space to build your advantage.

Product Development
It's all about execution. We've all heard this phrase, but what does it mean? In this case it means that people want to see fully-formed products they can use, not half baked beta products. Creating complete products at each stage of your company's journey satisfies customer expectations and allows your ideas to evolve and change, learning through the challenge of creating real products.

Resources
No matter how many resources you have for a project, here's a simple breakdown: 50% will need to be spent on design production and development. The other 50% will be spent on understanding your audience, telling your story, and making sure your vision is big enough and aligned with the market of users.

Time

"Life is long enough, and it's been given to us in generous measure for accomplishing the greatest things, if the whole of it is well invested."
- Seneca

It’s hard to make goals for yourself and even harder to track your time to see if you are achieving them. Sometimes you might not even know what your goals are.

Next time you try to figure out your goals, try this:

For a week, write down every task or activity you have accomplished — big or small, at work or at home — and note how long it took you to complete.

From this list pick the things that you think fit your long term goals for yourself. If you don’t know what your long term goals are, just pick the things that make you feel like you have accomplished something you enjoy doing. Let’s call this “Creative time”.

Now add up all the time you spent on the activities you marked as
“Creative time”

Now take that number and do this calculation:
(Hours of creative time x 0.89* = Creative time %)

For example if I spent 15 hours that week on “creative time” activities then my calculation would look like this (15 x 0.89*)= 13.3%.

So that is 13.3% of your waking time (let’s assume you sleep 8 hours a night!) spent on the things you would call you long term goals.

This idea not only lets you calculate how much time you spent on your “creative time” or your long term goals but it also helps you identify the kinds of activities you think of as supporting your long term goals.

By going through this exercise you will have created a tool for yourself to understand and identify your long term goals. What you come up with might surprise you — or not — but what’s important is that now you have a starting point. Something to build on for the future.

The process of tracking and reflecting provides an answer to one of our most difficult questions, without the overwhelming feeling of needing to know everything often associated with setting goals. Now that you have your own tool, your own yardstick, it’s worth using it every couple of months to see if your long terms goals have changed. What are they now and how much time do you want to spend making them real?

Visual Thinking

Making a sketch is often the first step towards thinking about a design problem. But I’ve found that oftentimes making that mark feels daunting – it is the first sign of my imagination committing to a solution. A mark feels risky – the idea is now out in the world for more than just me to see.

I often think of sketching an idea as making a visual list. Making lists helps move ideas forward, another kind of decisive first mark. I also think about list-making as a process :

1. Make the list (Thinking out loud, possibly in collaboration)
2. Looking through the list again and re-ordering it. (Fitting it to the needs of the idea)
3. Reviewing your new list (Critique and time for contemplation)
4. Fixing the list and deciding to follow its order (Deciding on a course of action)

With sketching or visual thinking, these steps happen simultaneously, still holding a lot in common with a simple list.

Here’s an example from one of our projects with MIT’s Wolk Gallery for an exhibition promotion piece.

One of several sketches which emerged from this visual thinking process.

The Final Design

Although this process seems based in a visual product, I apply this kind of visual thinking (or visual list-making) to many kinds of problems. Because of the quick nature of the process, I'm able to address many questions and answers early on, helping to shape a project’s outcome in the process.

Innovation

“Designers shouldn’t accept false suggestions from the market. The market never suggests anything good.” — Michele De Lucchi

What is innovation?
It seems that everyday new products and services are being touted as innovative, but are they really?
I would like to propose a framework to understand and recognize innovation.

Innovation should be: 

Useful
It solves a real problem.

Cultural
It needs to change the prevailing culture, allowing people to adopt a new set of behaviors.

One way
Once you have used the innovation you cannot imagine going back to the way things were. 

The Washing machine.
The first washing machine was invented around 1800, and 1858 saw the introduction of the rotary-powered washing machine. It has changed the lives of millions maybe even billions of people by taking something that was incredibly laborious and making it relatively easy. Yet the innovation of this product did not stop there. It had a tremendous cultural impact; by reducing the extraordinary time and labor of keeping clothing clean (time and labor almost always belonging to women) the washing machine enabled​ more women to enter the paid labor force, and by doing so was part of constructing the culture we live in today. (See Ha-Joon Chang’s book for more.) The humble washing machine had effects way beyond its function and has in some ways completely changed the world. 

This collection of articles critically looks at our current culture of innovation. 
 

The Army of Technological Slaves

That is Benedikt’s call, cited above: take advantage of the machines, they are made for this! And that means: also creative professionals, mind workers, editors, journalists, should think like hackers. Hacker for me is a neutral to positive term. Hacker make use of technology as completely as possible. Like the famous investigative journalists, they don’t let themselves hold up by arbitrary rules which are supposed to tell us, how we should use information.

Read more

Source : Slow media

iOS app success is a lottery: 60% (or more) of developers don’t break even

“The App Store is very much like the lottery, and very few companies are topping the charts,” Kafasis told Ars. “It’s a hit-based business. Much like music or book sales, there are a few huge winners, a bigger handful of minor successes, and a whole lot of failures.”

Read more

Source : Ars Technica

The One Thing CEOs Need to Learn from Apple

Jobs said in an interview with Betsy Morris in 2008, “People think focus means saying ‘yes’ to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying ‘no’ to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things we have done.”

Read more

Source : HBR

When Will this Low-Innovation Internet Era End?

Then there’s another view, which I heard from author Neal Stephenson in an MIT lecture hall last week. A hundred years from now, he said, we might look back on the late 20th and early 21st century and say, “It was an actively creative society. Then the Internet happened and everything got put on hold for a generation.”

Read more

Source : HBR

Redefining Development through Innovative Governance

by referendum — of a new Constitution that approaches development not as an end, but as a means of achieving a collective state of “Buen Vivir” (Good Living), or “Sumak Kausay” in Kichwa. The concept is rooted in aboriginal philosophy, emphasizing environmental conservation and social organization based on mutual solidarity. It is evident in Ecuador’s constitutional support for human rights and nature’s “right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate.”

Read more

Source : Polis

Function, Feel, Form

“Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People think it’s this veneer – that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” 
– Steve Jobs

Making high quality interactive experiences has always involved a sequencing of function, feel and form. Designers and technologists have often built prototypes of small portions of products to see what works and what doesn't.

In recent years, the improved usability of prototyping tools has allowed more people to create more fully-realistic experiences which can be built in a relatively short period of time. Both designers and users are able to see a high fidelity interpretation of what might eventually get made.

With these new tools, prototypes have become a blend of the three core elements of function, feel and form. While this might seem optimal, in reality this melding often produces results that do not fully explore any one of those core areas. This lack of focus can lead to ideas being executed too quickly, with less than desirable results. As designers we need to understand what it means to prototype for these three areas so we can refine each to make more coherent designs.

Function (Flow + features)
Function helps us see the inner working of an idea; it reveals an idea’s basic nature and allows us to satisfy the primary product use. For example, a skeleton of a car can still serve to move you from place to place.

Feel (Interaction)
What is the tactile quality and emotion you feel when you pick something up for the first time? Feel helps us understand much of what is unsaid: does feeling soft, hard, hollow or solid make a product feel satisfying, familiar, approachable? In both the physical world and the digital, much experimentation is needed before an idea “feels” right.
 
Form (Language + Interface)
What strikes you when you look at a fully executed idea? How does the visual form or language change your relationship to using the product or service? Form often guides how a particular idea connects with how we see ourselves and our taste. For example, in a sea of black headphones Beats headphones come in multiple colors and connect with popular culture and the desire for individuality even though they are mass-produced. 

It's useful to look at industrial design, which has extensively used prototyping that splits apart the three ideas, treating them as distinct parts of the overall concept. 

An industrial designer would never initially try to address all three facets in the same prototype because too many concessions would have to be made in the manufacturing of the prototype. Take, for example, a cell phone: To make the electronics necessary without mass manufacture the electronics would be too large to create the right form and feel for the prototype. Making three separate prototypes makes it easier to explore each of these core areas in more detail.

• A simple but functional prototype which can test the core feature set and make sure they work at a basic level. 

• A number of prototypes made from different materials to explore the possibilities of feel.

• A simple and elegant solid model of the phone to see its form to understand its aesthetic value. 

Splitting the process into core elements allows it to move more quickly while allowing for a deeper exploration of each core element of the design. As the design process moves through the initial phase, the function, feel and form are fused together into more and more elaborate prototypes. Yet still, at any stage in the journey it might be necessary to decouple a single core element (Function, Feel or Form)  to try out a new idea without having to stop the progress of the overall design and production process. 

In the digital world some physical realities do not apply, but can be reinterpreted in conceptual and workflow ways. If from the outset of a project you are constantly trying to make something look pixel perfect while testing its function you will compromise both function and form, and take twice as long doing it. 

So what does this all mean? Do you need to build three different prototypes every time you want to make a digital product? I think the answer is NO; yet, you do need to be ready to quickly create additional prototypes during any phase of the design process. You do this to see how the core elements of Function, Feel and Form effect your overall design, so that you can integrate the results into your main prototype process. Today we have better tools than ever to quickly make and test ideas in any one of the three core areas, so why not do just that? Branch off when it makes sense and then bring it all back together quickly and efficiently.

As new platforms and forms of interaction become mainstream, like voice & chat interfaces or augmented / virtual reality, the principles of function, feel and form actually become even more important. When the interface for a product or service is not readily apparent, as in the case of voice interfaces, it is important to understand the functional elements, the feel cues for a conversation, and the form of the language used to help the user understand the nature of the interaction and activity.

Working more quickly and focusing your efforts on each of the core elements allows you to make the best thing instead of just the next thing.

Think like a designer

Design can be seen as a method: a method to join together separate ideas, information, emotions and organize them to develop a thought. None of the books listed below have any real examples of what is traditionally thought of as design. There are no glossy visuals or “concepts”. Instead these are books which develop a way of thinking, a method which realizes that what is made is only as good as the way an idea is framed. They provide different ways to help you see the world you live in and how to rearrange the complexity of that world in a way that makes sense of things.
 

Book 1 : What Customers Want - by Anthony Ulwick

"Why does traditional brainstorming often fail to produce breakthrough ideas?Most brainstorming and idea generation efforts yield poor and unactionable results for three key reasons. The first is because managers rarely know how or where to direct employee’s creative energy. The result is much wasted energy, hundreds of useless ideas, and unfortunately, few ideas that are truly worthy of of pursuit. Consider the typical pattern. In most firms, when employees are asked to come up with new ideas they are not directed to focus on specific outcomes; rather, they are asked for ideas to improve the company’s product in general (functions, ergonomics, fit and finish, distribution and packaging), leaving the direction for improvement open to interpretation. In the absence of a specific target, employees in turn focus on what they themselves want to improve rather than on what customers want to see improved."
 

Book 2 : Design Driven Innovation - by Roberto Verganti

"Alessi knows that if all his new products are successful, the company has been too conservative and has stayed away from the borderline. This is not good, because it opens the field to competitors. So the company periodically pursues more-radical projects. And even when these efforts apparently fail (proposing products that are too extreme-beyond the borderline), that failure is the revealing moment in which the firm finally sees where the borderline was and is in the best position to make a breakthrough with the next project, before and better than its competitors."
 

Book 3: A Technique for Producing Ideas  - by James Young

"What is most valuable to know is not where to look for a particular idea, but how to train the mind in the method by which all ideas are produced and how to grasp the principles which are at the source of all ideas."
 

Book 4: How Designers Think - by Bryan Lawson

"Classifying design by its end product seems to be rather putting the cart before the horse, for the solution is something which is formed by the design process and has not existed in advance of it. The real reason for classifying design in this way has less to do with the design process but instead a reflection on our increasingly specialized technologies. Engineers are different from architects not just because they may use a different design process but more importantly because they understand about different materials and requirements. Unfortunately this sort of specialization can easily become a strait jacket for designers, directing their mental process toward a predefined goal. It is thus too easy for architects to assume that the solution to a client's problem is a new building. Often it is not!"
 

Book 5 : Designing Programmes - by Karl Gerstner

"To describe a problem is part of the solution. This implies: not to make creative decisions as promoted by feeling but by intellectual criteria. The more exact and complete these criteria are, the more creative the work becomes. The creative process is to be reduced to an act of selection. Designing means : to pick out determining elements and combining them."