teach them to see things

"I loved art school. I couldn't wait for Monday to come, couldn't wait for the weekend to be over. The PSDW (Pennsylvania School of Design for Women) was ahead of its times, I think. The instructors were'nt professional teachers; they were working artists. Children don't need instruction on how to put things down on paper. All they need to do is learn how to look and see. The important thing is just teaching them to see things. The more you do it, the more you see. I feel strongly about that."

Discription next to the Ella Peacock's painting "Girl with Read Scarf" at Museum of Utah Art & History, Aug 2005. Ella Peacock, "Girl with Red Scarf," BYU - Museum of Art, c. 1920's

The most typical perspective is that experts know more; they have more facts and rules at their disposal.... I have taken a different perspective: expertise is learning how to perceive. The knowledge and rules are incidental.

Gary Klein, Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions, MIT Press, 1999, p 168. (link to amazon) www.decisionmaking.com

"Seeing consists of the grasping of structural features rather than the ndiscriminate recording of detail."

Rudolf Arnheim

"All there is to thinking is seeing something noticeable which makes you see something you weren't noticing which makes you see something that isn't even visible."

Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It, p. 92 (amazon link)

The interface is the product

The interface is the product. It’s the touchpoint between you and your customers. It’s the translator between two parties that often speak different languages. If you’re unable to control that touchpoint to a significant degree on your own then you’re putting your business in someone else’s hands.

Jason Fried, "The importance of having a designer on staff," Signal vs Noise, 37signals.com, 10 Aug 2005

Super computers for potato chips

Once the exclusive territory of nuclear weapons designers and code breakers, ultrafast computers are increasingly being used in everyday product design. Procter & Gamble used a supercomputer to study the airflow over its Pringles potato chips to help stop them from fluttering off the company's assembly lines.

John Markoff, "A New Arms Race to Build the World's Mightiest Computer," New York Times, 19 Aug 2005 via Tomalak's

personas are really conceptual models

The best personas are really conceptual models, which help you to digest the user research in a coherent way. They put a name and face to an observed pattern of behavior.

It’s easy to see the surface elements that we’ve used throughout history to separate and shallowly categorize one another — race, age, where we live, what we like to eat, and so forth. It’s much harder to uncover what binds us together: our shared goals, motivations, and behaviors. But to make sound personas, this is exactly what we must observe and record.

The differences between personas must be based on these deeper issues — what people do (actions or projected actions), and why they do them (goals and motivations) — and not as much on who people are. It’s not that knowing who people are isn’t important, it just isn’t as important for personas.

Dan Saffer, "Persona Non Grata," Adaptive Path, 17 Aug 2005 via Tomalak's

conflicting requirements

It is but one illustration of the complexity of space shuttles, and the dilemmas that complexity creates.

....

The reason, say experts and analysts, emerged from the first concepts of the shuttle, which were not practical but fantastic. It should be reusable. It should fly like a plane on reentry. It should carry huge payloads - such as satellites and pieces of space stations.

"It was given so many conflicting requirements that it wasn't going to be able to reach any of them," says Howard McCurdy, a NASA historian.

The technology to do it did not exist. So the shuttle emerged as a compromise, an inordinately complex machine that fulfilled all the functions adequately, but none perfectly.

Mark Sappenfield, "Shuttle launches into its final era," The Christian Science Monitor, 27 July 2005.

Steps to transform customer experience

Stated as simply as possible, but not simpler, there are four steps in transforming the customer experience within a business:

1. Listen to the business. 2. Listen to the customers. 3. Synthesize the two inputs. 4. Suggest improvements.

Mark Hurst, "Customer Experience in Four Steps, and a Whitepaper," goodexperience.com, 27 July 2005

Within our personas and scenarios, the people and their stories are not arbitrary. They are stories of the lives of our clientÂ?s current and potential customers, and they serve as comprehensive guides to how our clients should interact with those customers, in the moment or over a lifetime, to profit their business. Three years ago, personas and scenarios were Â?a process stepÂ? in our iterative, user-centered development process, whereas today they are the platform upon which many of our insights are communicated, and our solutions are modeled. Over the past few years, they have risen in importance and become a primary tool for communicating data analysis, strategic business frameworks, new product and service concepts, and cross-channel brand experiences....

....Customer-centric discussions, strategy and results continue to increase their prevalence in the boardrooms. Personas are a clear, comprehensive, human way to tell those stories.

Experience Planning Group, edited by Parrish Hanna, "Customer Storytelling at the Heart of Business Success," Boxes and Arrows, 17 Jul 2005.

patterns are a designer's rules of thumb

In a general sense, patterns are a designer's rules of thumb, the intuitive principles, often unspoken, that guide design work. And just as our innate knowledge of grammatical rules allows us to speak fluently and create well-formed sentences, an architect's innate sense of patterns allows him or her to design fluently, to create well-formed buildings.

Max Jacobson, Murray Silverstein, Barbara Winslow, Patterns of Home, Taunton Press, 1992, p. 4.

“Life is too short for a man to hold bitterness in his heart.”

The recent UCI Track Cycling World Championships held near Los Angeles included a display honoring [Marshall "Major"] Taylor. It featured one of his lightweight racing bikes and his defining statement: "Life is too short for a man to hold bitterness in his heart."

Brion O'Connor, "Major Injustice," Delta Sky, July 2005, p. 70.

slightly disruptive

Make the slightly disruptive mindset sustainable. Artists keep what they call a “morgue”-- it is a journal of images, ideas, and sketches they gathered from all sorts of sources. They are able to refer to the journal in the studio for inspiration and ideas. Record your thoughts and ideas in a journal. Add stimulation from other observations--magazine articles, images, and ideas. The goal is to break your pattern of thinking and look at the same things you do everyday through a different lens.

Geof Hammond, Slightly Disruptive, a Play Red Paper, 2005. (PDF)