Often our hardest job... is to remove, remove, remove bit by bit, anything that is unnecessary, that gets in the way of maximum unity. It's like music, we make a melody like this - Instead of discord - something like that. I think it's very close to composing music. Creating harmony, something very sensual...
Ronan Bouroullec as quoted in Objectified (Directed by Gary Hustwit), Swiss Dots, 2009, www.objectifiedfilm.com. Quote starts at 26:14.
The great design thinker Horst Rittel once wrote that “a design problem keeps changing while it is treated, because the understanding of what ought to be accomplished, and how it might be accomplished is continually shifting. Learning what the problem is IS the problem.”
Peter Hall, "A Good Argument," MetropolisMag.com, 18 Mar 2009, www.metropolismag.com/story/20090318/a-good-argument via Alan Blood.
8. Be an anthropologist, not an archaeologist.
An archaeologist seeks to understand the past by investigating its relics and digging for the truth of what was. An anthropologist studies people to understand their values, needs, and desires. If you want to design new solutions for the future, you have to understand what people care about and design for that. Don’t dig for the answer—connect.
"IDEO’s Ten Tips For Creating a 21st–Century Classroom Experience," MetropolisMag.com, Feb 2009, www.metropolismag.com/story/20090218/ideos-ten-tips-for-creating-a-21st-century-classroom-experience via Alan Blood.
One of my heroes is the Victorian engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, a man who lived before the profession of design even existed. As the challenges of the industrial age spread to every field of human endeavor, a parade of bold innovators who shaped the world, as they have shaped my own thinking, followed him: William Morris, Frank Lloyd Wright, the visionary educators of the German Bauhaus, the American industrial designers Raymond Loewy and Henry Dreyfuss, the team of Ray and Charles Eames. What they all shared was optimism, an openness to ex-perimentation, a love of storytelling, a need to collaborate, and an instinct to think with their hands—to build, to prototype, and to communicate complex ideas with masterful simplicity. They didn’t just do design; they lived design. These great thinkers were not as they appear in the coffee-table books about the “pioneers,” “masters,” and “icons” of modern design. They were not minimalist, esoteric members of design’s elite priesthood, and they did not wear black turtlenecks. They were creative innovators who bridged the chasm between thinking and doing because they were passionately committed to the goal of a better life and a better world. Today we have the opportunity to take their example and unleash the power of design thinking as a means of exploring new possibilities, creating new choices, and bringing new solutions to the world. In the process, we may find that we have made our societies healthier, our businesses more profitable, and our own lives richer and more meaningful.
Tim Brown, "The Making of a Design Thinker," MetropolisMag.com, Oct 2009, metropolismag.com/story/20091021/the-making-of-a-design-thinker.
“It’s time to take risks,” Mr. Fielding said he told them. “When consumers are ready to spend again, we will be ready.”
The involvement of Mr. Jobs, the Apple chief executive who joined the Disney board with the 2006 acquisition of Pixar, is particularly notable. For the first time, Mr. Jobs’s fingerprints can be seen on Disney strategy, in the same way that he influenced the look and feel of Apple’s own immensely popular retail chain. While Mr. Jobs did not personally toil on the Imagination Park concept, he pushed Disney to move far past a refurbishment.
“Dream bigger — that was Steve’s message,” said Andy Mooney, chairman of Disney Consumer Products."
Brooks Barnes, "Disney’s Retail Plan Is a Theme Park in Its Stores," New York Times, 12 Oct 2009,
www.nytimes.com/2009/10/13/business/media/13disney.html.
A fundamental design and life lesson from the Zen arts is to never use more when less will do....The ancient art of Japanese brush painting called Sumi-e provides a powerful lesson concerning the use of color, communication, and restraints. Sumi-e was brought to Japan from China and is an art deeply rooted in Zen, embodying many of the tenets of the Zen aesthetic including simplicity and the idea of maximum effect with minimum means....
...Either way the lesson is clear: few colors carefully selected and positioned can be more effective than many colors indiscriminately placed.
The objective of Sumi-e is not to recreate the subject to look perfectly like the original, but to capture its essence — that is, to express its essence. This is achieved not with more but with less....
Garr Reynolds, "Sumi-e, color, and the art of less," Presentation Zen, 6 Oct 2009,
www.presentationzen.com/presentationzen/2009/10/a-fundamental-design-and-life-lesson-from-the-zen-arts-is-to-never-use-more-when-less-will-do-this-goes-for-the-use-of-color.html
Lizette Alvarez, "U.S. Veteran Returns Iwo Jima Relic to Daughter of Japanese Soldier," New York Times, 18 Sep 2009,
www.nytimes.com/2009/09/20/nyregion/20iwo.html.
Anyone who has ever been to Target would instantly recognize the Michael Graves section simply by the distinctive blue boxes lined up at the base of a kitchen-products gondola. 'Graves blue' is a Wedgwood-y shade, as iconic as Tiffany's robin's egg blue. Born from the color of architectural blueprints, it's a complex hue not easily matched with a Pantone number. But it's Graves's favorite and, naturally, the one he chose to use in his first collection.
Target, it seems, had other ideas. Graves remembers submitting his first collection -- which featured a toaster, a blender, and an ice bucket, all with blue handles -- to the trend spotters at Target's headquarters. 'They said, 'Well, we love it, but the blue will have to go,' ' he recalls, laughing. ' 'Blue doesn't sell. Half of America doesn't like blue, and the other doesn't like green. It's got to be neutral.' ' The standoff continued until Ron Johnson, then head of the discounter's home products, mediated the dispute. 'I had to step in and say, 'Guys, these are Michael's products,' ' says Johnson, who now oversees Apple's retail stores. 'Design works if it's authentic, inspired, and has a clear point of view. It can't be a collection of input.'"
When the line launched in stores, Graves was instantly vindicated. From day one, the toaster has been a hit at Target, and five years later, it's still available. "That's the fundamental difference about design," Johnson says. "It endures."
"Between the Lines," Fast Company, 1 Aug 2004,
www.fastcompany.com/magazine/85/open_betweenthelines.html.
Brad Bird: In my experience, the thing that has the most significant impact on a movie’s budget—but never shows up in a budget—is morale. If you have low morale, for every $1 you spend, you get about 25 cents of value. If you have high morale, for every $1 you spend, you get about $3 of value. Companies should pay much more attention to morale.
Hayagreeva Rao, Robert Sutton, and Allen P. Webb, "Innovation lessons from Pixar Director Brad Bird," McKinsey Quarterly, April 2008, www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Innovation_lessons_from_Pixar_An_interview_with_Oscar-winning_director_Brad_Bird_2127.
For now, Microsoft continues to fight alone, but with more vigor than in years past, analysts said. Less than a month after Bing’s release, Microsoft beat Google and Yahoo to a hot new area in search: It became the first major search engine to index new postings from popular Twitter users almost immediately. The move helped amplify the buzz around Bing.
“I feel like they are a little more daring,” Mr. Sullivan said. “They popped this thing out in a few weeks. That’s very Googley.”
Miguel Helft, "Bing Delivers Credibility to Microsoft," NYTimes.com, 13 July 2009, www.nytimes.com/2009/07/14/technology/companies/14bing.html.
We tend to conform to the behavior of the people around us. Which is what makes culture change particularly challenging because everyone is conforming to the current culture. Sometimes though, the problem contains the solution.
'Stories.' I said to the head of the firm.
'Excuse me?' he responded.
'You change a culture with stories. Right now your stories are about how hard you work people. Like the woman you forced to work on her wedding day. You may not be proud of it, but it's the story you tell. That story conveys your culture simply and reliably. And I'm certain you're not the only one who tells it. You can be sure the bride tells it. And all her friends. If you want to change the culture, you have to change the stories.'
Peter Bregman, "A Good Way to Change a Corporate Culture," HarvardBusiness.org, 25 June 2009, blogs.harvardbusiness.org/bregman/2009/06/the-best-way-to-change-a-corpo.html via a tweet by David Armano
America? What could I possibly teach this esteemed group about America? Then I remembered what one of my mentors, Bill Lazier, told me about effective teaching: Don't try to come up with the right answers; focus on coming up with good questions.
Jim Collins, "How the Mighty Fall: A Primer on the Warning Signs," BusinessWeek, 14 May 2009, www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_21/b4132026786379.htm.
'With technology, the function is much more abstract to users,' Ive, then 32, told us. 'So the product's meaning is almost entirely defined by the designer.' Even then, it was clear that Apple's head of design knew what he was doing. Ive defined his overarching design principles as 'simplicity, accessibility, honesty, and enjoyment.'
"Most Creative People 2009: Jonathan Ive," Fast Company, June 2009, www.fastcompany.com/100/2009/jonathan-ive
I'm not going to run out of creativity or ideas, so I don't hang on to stuff for dear life. If you're terrified to release control, nothing gets made!
"Most Creative People 2009: Dave Stewart," Fast Company, June 2009, www.fastcompany.com/100/2009/dave-stewart
Marissa Mayer: So if we double and we had 18 engineers, would we want them to do the three things twice as well? Or would we want to do twice as many things? And I said, “Well, obviously we’d want to do twice as many things.” And so you know that’s how we’ve grown. We’ve tried to keep the teams really small which leads to a sense of empowerment, people making decisions around what’s the best feature, what do their users need, how are they going to build the best product, and it allows also for them to be really agile. You know, we try and avoid meetings and like a lot of reasons when you have — one of the great things that happens with a small team is you can put them all in the same office. At Google we usually have three or four people in each office and that works really well because when they wanted to make a decision, people just roll back from their desk and say, “Hey –”
Michael Arrington, "Marissa Mayer On Charlie Rose: The Future Of Google, Future Of Search," TechCrunch, 6 Mar 2009, www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/06/marissa-mayer-on-charlie-rose-the-future-of-google
As the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus put it: “Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; but remember that what you now have was once among the things only hoped for.”
Nikolas Westerhoff, "Set in Our Ways: Why Change Is So Hard," Scientific American, Dec 2008www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=set-in-our-ways via a tweet from Scobble and ZDNet
It gave it a slimmer design and more storage, but there are a lot of things Amazon could have added, but didn't. Things like a color display not only would make the device pricier and give it a shorter battery life, but would also make the gadget uncomfortable to hold.
"One of the great things about Kindle is it doesn't ever get hot," Amazon Vice President Ian Freed said in an interview at Amazon's downtown office here. That's important, Freed said, given that the company has one main goal with the Kindle--making the product as invisible to users as possible when they are reading.
"The most important thing for the Kindle to do is to disappear," Freed said. That was the goal with the first device and was also a key factor in deciding what would go in the sequel, which started shipping on Monday. There are the obvious factors, like the thinner, sleeker design. But there are also things like an improved cellular modem. As a result, Kindle users will find themselves out of range in fewer places to get updates or buy a new book.
Ina Fried, "Designing the Kindle 2," Beyond Binary - CNET News, 24 Feb 2009, news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10170310-56.html.
Stegner certainly had the writerly credentials — Ph.D, a teaching stint at Harvard, short stories published in all the right journals read by all the right people. But he chose to make the cultural elite come to him.
And he grounded himself, spending nearly half his life in the Palo Alto foothills above Stanford.
On his 100th birthday, it’s worth remembering another lesson of his life — to choose authenticity over artifice. “If you don’t know where you are,” he said, paraphrasing the writer Wendell Berry, “you don’t know who you are.”
He knew — the where and the who.
Timothy Egan, "Stegner’s Complaint," Timothy Egan Blog - NYTimes.com, 18 Feb 2009, egan.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/18/.
Creativity needs the support of knowledge to be able to perform at its best.
Massimo Vignelli, The Vignelli Canon, /www.vignelli.com/canon.pdf via northtemple