David Fore, "Whole lotta thwarting going on," Cooper Interaction Design Newsletter, Nov 2001

A system that disregards people will itself be disregarded by people.

Scott Kirsner, "Making Better Toys and Jumbo Jets by Sharing the Rough Draft," The New York Times, 5 Nov 2001

...making changes to three-dimensional objects and beaming them to colleagues around the world has become as easy as altering a sentence in a shared word-processing document.

Charles Fishman, "Design - Freeman Thomas," FastCompany, Dec 1999

"So I'm driving over here today in the Prowler, and I pass a car. There's a man driving, a kid in the front passenger seat, and two more kids in the back. They see the Prowler, and they grin and give me a thumbs-up," says Thomas. "And I give them a thumbs-up back. You only get one life; this life is not a rehearsal. So chances are, you want to have fun. You still want to act like a child. That spirit is a frame of mind, not an age. And the automobile gives you a chance to have an adventure every day. Say you drive 20 minutes to work every day. Your commute could be totally pragmatic, but it doesn't have to be. Having a really nice car is like wearing a really nice suit. It's like a role you play -- a role you get to play. Who doesn't want a thumbs-up experience?"
...
Thomas is always sketching cars. He has a simple, rough, freehand style, using whatever ballpoint pen is around. He uses lots of lines and cross-hatching -- capturing the mood and the shape, rather than the details. Sketching helps him think, helps him experiment, helps him explain.
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In that world, Thomas has evolved a role that serves both his artistic and his bureaucratic needs. "I'm a storyteller," he says. "I think of a designer as a processor of information -- like a scriptwriter or a novelist." Thomas sees himself as a kind of cultural filter and architect: Listen carefully to what's going on out in the world, consider history and context, and create a vehicle that matches the zeitgeist. The Microbus is an artifact of its era; so is the minivan.

Thomas believes absolutely that every vehicle needs a story. "What's the plot?" he asks of the Prowler, before answering his own question. Being able to communicate that story to consumers is one thing. But being able to articulate it to people inside the company is perhaps more important, if your designs are going to survive, and if they are going to transcend "committee-ization."

"It's important to be able to communicate, not just to designers but also to nondesign people," Thomas says. "If people don't have a vision, you have to be able to walk them through what you're talking about. You have to be able to connect equally with an engineer, with someone from marketing, and with someone from the fabrication shop. The question is, How do you get people to work together? Most companies have 'committee design.' That's not what I like. I like 'consensus design.' In a committee, people don't speak up. They don't say what they think. Nothing is allowed to come out. Consensus design means that you all express yourselves, and your ideas, and at the end of the day, you all agree to do something. You might initially be against an idea, but if someone walks you through the thought process, you might then be able to say, 'I see what you're talking about.' "

Andy Raskin, "Are You Geek Enough?," Business 2.0, Dec 2001

Jeff Katz, CEO of Orbitz, the online travel agency, says learning to listen is how he made the leap from engineer to executive. With a BS in mechanical engineering and an MBA, Katz concedes that he needed to improve his listening skills to make it to the top. "It's something I've had to cultivate," he says. "I've worked hard at listening to customers and to people doing the work."

Rachel Konrad and Sandeep Junnarkar, "Rival browsers benefiting from MSN gaffe," CNET.com Tech News, 1 Nov 2001

Berners-Lee sounded a more critical note. "Control over a person's desktop and their browser is control over their whole Net-mediated perception of the world out there," he wrote. "It is very powerful."

Scott Berkun, "Strategies of influence in interaction design," UIWeb.com, Nov 2001

A prototype of your new search page design reflects a set of design choices you think should be made. But what are the business impacts of those choices? How long will it take to build? How will it effect advertising rates, or partnerships? What code changes are needed to make it possible? In the abstract, some designers feel these are not design considerations, and instead are just matters of implementation for someone else to figure out. This is a trap. While it’s great to ignore constraints to inspire creative thinking, if your want your work to reach people’s web browsers or desktops, you have to plan to involve yourself in the practicalities of realizing your ideas. The more skilled you are at assessing those aspects of a design, the more welcome you’ll be to participate in the process.
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The two most powerful forces of influence in the interaction designers toolbox are the video and the prototype. Humans are visceral creatures. We respond to things that call on our senses. Specs, code, and even bitmaps are all static, limited attempts to represent what the experience of interaction will be like. It takes an inventive imagination to read these things and accurately visualize anything. It’s typically only those few individuals with practiced imaginations, regardless of job title, that can do this well. If you need to convince someone that the current design has problems, you must show them... If you want to get people’s attention around your work and the user experience, there is no better way.

The prototype offers you another form of direct influence. It’s almost a secret weapon. While everyone in the room is debating in front of the whiteboard about what the design should be, or how it should behave, you can show the group a real live working example of your ideas . They can even interact with it depending on what you’ve done. It’s a huge advantage.

Walter Mossberg, "Consumer Technologies Make Startling Advances in Decade," The Wall Street Journal, 25 Oct 2001

... it's amazing how much better things are than they were just a decade ago. It seems like 100 years have passed, not just 10. Yet, some things haven't changed. The techie class that designs and sells these products still tends to make them too complicated and still looks down on average consumers, at least privately. The buying experience is still terrible. And in some ways, at least when it comes to the personal computer, consumers actually have less choice than they did in 1991.

Marcia Conner, "Our Shared Playground: An Interview with Michael Schrage," LiNE Zine, Winter 2001

...in researching the histories of disciplines like biotech and software development for the book, what I really found at the core of innovation weren't only creative individuals, per se, but rather creative relationships. Intriguingly, the key medium for managing those creative and innovative relationships was the shared space. I found that all collaboration, without exception, requires shared space.

"Making the World a Happier Place, One Web Site at a Time: Interview with Jakob Nielsen and Marie Tahir," WebReference.com, Oct 2001

At the same time, to get high quality design, you must have usability-directed design where you start out with studying users' needs and let that decide where you're going to go. That more integrated approach, where usability permeates throughout the lifecycle and becomes the way a company designs interfaces, I would say that is exceedingly rare. Basically, it almost never happens that way. I recommend that is the direction things should move because whenever products or websites are designed that way, they become so dramatically superior that they take over and gain some substantial market shares. So it's self-perpetuating.

Dan Bricklin, "Copy Protection Robs The Future, Bricklin.com, Oct 2001

Copy protection will break the chain of formal and informal archivists who are necessary to the long-term preservation of creative works.