illuminate the things I don’t know

The value lies in the network of people and how they illuminate the things I don’t know.

....

I want to know more people, and sure, it’s interesting to see what they’re up to, but what I really want to know is what is going on inside their heads with a minimum of fuss. I want to see how they see the world. This is why I follow people on Twitter. This is why they follow me.

Michael Lopp, "We Travel in Tribes," Rands in Repose, 15 May 2008, www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2008/05/15/we_travel_in_tribes.html via NorthTemple.

bottom up vs top down design

JV: Have you seen challenges in being a designer at Google, a very sort of technology-focused and -centered company?

IA: It is challenging. I think in a lot of conventional companies, design is kind of a top-down process. Where you think about who are your target users, what’s the market you’re going after, what are their needs. You do requirements-gathering, and then you design the experience around that, and then you tell the engineers to go build. Here, the way products are conceived a lot of times, it’s an engineer has some kind of idea and then starts building it and then — as it gains momentum — a product manager and a designer might become attached to it. So it’s a very bottoms-up kind of process, which is very different to how designers are trained to think about product development. Yet I still think that there are ways that designers can work within that environment and still have products be use-driven and design-driven, but the ways in which you go about getting yourself inserted might be quite different than [at] other cultures, [which] are maybe more top-down, or product- or marketing- or design-driven.

Jeffrey Veen, "Chatting with Irene Au," veen.com, 7 Feb 2007, www.veen.com/jeff/archives/000961.html.
Also listen to a podcast at itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail1758.html

Savor the Surprises

Q: How do you find the paradigm shifts, the really big changes that even the customer doesn’t know they want yet?

A: Or they may know they want, but they can’t verbalize it yet.

Two things. And we teach our people how to do this. One is to spend time observing customers. I love market research. It’s nice. But even better is to go out and watch with your own eyes customers or prospects in their native environment; in their home or in their office. Watch what they do and ask them about what they do and don’t do.

As you do this, second point, savor surprises. Be open for the unexpected. Look for the unexpected. What didn’t make sense? What didn’t agree with the paradigm that we all have in our mind? Because it is those surprises that typically are the market speaking to you about a problem they have that we haven’t discovered yet.

Transcribed from Nir Eyal, "Scott Cook, Founder of Intuit," iinnovate podcast, 28 Apr 2008, (quote starts at 15:30), iinnovate.blogspot.com/2008/04/cook.html

Happiness

1. satisfying work to do 2. the experience of being good at something 3. time spent with people we like 4. the chance to be a part of something bigger

Jane McGonigal, "Alternate Realities," SXSW 2008 Keynote, March 2008, podcast - 2008.sxsw.com/blogs/podcasts.php/2008/04/02/keynote_mcgonigal slides - www.slideshare.net/avantgame/alternate-realities-jane-mcgonigal-keynote-sxsw-2008/ blog post - avantgame.blogspot.com/2008/03/keynote-speaker-jane-mcgonigal-doing.html