Teaching critique
Not only do we need to offer criticism, but we need to provide tools to help people critique their own work.
A critique session is often a moment to teach. But what does it mean to teach?
I found this quote recently, which resonated.
“It means that your students can look at the work and make similar decisions without you being there.” - Dr Samuel Holtzman
Not only do we need to offer criticism, but we need to provide tools to help people critique their own work.
To that end, I wrote this article, “Design proofreading.” It offers a tool to help you understand how I critique UX design work. I hope it proves helpful to you as you work through your next project. There are no magic solutions to making great designs, no secret methods other than spending time understanding the problem, trying out a variety of ideas to see what fits, and then critiquing those ideas.
Every critique teaches you something, and the trick is to be open, to listen, to let go of your preconceived ideas, and to be ready to move on to the next idea.
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Leadership
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.
“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.
Innovation
What is innovation?
It seems that every day 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.
“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.
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
Source : Polis