Insightful IDEO interview

The (2006?) IDEO team is Alan South, Head of Service Innovation; Mat Hunter, Head of Consumer Experience Design; Ingelise Nielsen, Head of Marketing Communications and Brand consultant Alice Huang. The 2006 interview highlights a number of useful insights about their approach to working with clients and the role of the agency within client organisations.

One thing that stuck out for me is the idea of “open-source innovation” which seemed to apply to the philosophy in IDEO of teaching clients to work the way they do and trusting that the agency will be needed for truly sticky problems and greater strategic value.

Another was their strong case for ‘generative research’. They argue forcefully for qualitative research as inspirational. They highlight the need for analysis and design interpretation to bring insights to life as ideas. And they argue for partnership, not combat, with quantitative data. Mat Hunter summarises these positions as possibility and risk. He says, “The point is that our intuitive thinking, our qualitative approach is very good for imagining new possibilities, but managing risks you must bring in analysis, statistics and data.”

Ekaterina and her company have a number of other interesting publications available at their website, their organisation operates in Russia and Asia.

A Short (Economist) History of Modern Finance

Tour Bus Ethnography

Image: A snapshot of today in Western European (liberal media!) culture.

In this post he deals primarily with some of his techniques for managing life on the road, through a kind of “mental scaffolding” for comprehending where you are (taking photos of local papers) and managing data through a very specific process and dedicated person.

The post seems to implicitly raise other issues though. He notes that in a 100 interview tour of the States, the first 4/5 days produce the most valuable insights. This is the pragmatic side of the argument. Get in, get out, keep moving. You never know the truth anyway so what counts is having a clear idea of where “truths” came from. The scaffolding is what counts, not the detail.

The other side is that the tour bus is like a moving armchair, carrying our 19th century study with all it’s preconceptions with us. Admittedly it’s a different set of preconceptions that I’m talking about here.

Somewhere in the middle lies a compromise. In the end, it hinges on the framing of ‘the field’. Concerned exclusively with the field inhabited by users of general practitioners in a particular town, your terms of reference hinge on that town and more depth is desirable. The issues are local and therefore specific, and time may be required to uncover them. If your frame of reference swings to the wider issues of medical services infrastructure, then looking at ‘instances’ of GP use can be enlightening, alongside ‘instances’ from other aspects of that eco-system. Within this eco-system perspective, it can feel like an unrealistic luxury to spend too much time in a single instance.

There’s something of Sennett’s critique of potential man in this debate. And something of a nostalgia for when the world was seen simply enough to spend a year mythologising remote cultures.

Here in the thick of it, Chipchase’s scaffolding techniques and images of traffic flows, feel like the reality of the never more global world that we inhabit and it’s perhaps a different, rather than inauthentic anthropology.

Henry Paulson’s Shell Game

He says that the US (and by extension global) financial system is suffering from 4 problems:

• The banks have toxic product no-one wants, and the lack of trust in their value is paralysing lending.
• The banks have holes in their balance sheets from bad debt.
• The economy has been running on housing bubble debt, which must now normalise.
• And finally, there are credibility problems in terms of the governments and banks that created the problems proposing the solutions.

He argues that the plan as it has now passed the US Congress addresses only the first issue ( and at cost to the State, not the banks). This is a simple argument about designing things the right way first time round. It’s also an implicit argument that that’s not even being attempted because this is a bail-out of Wall Street, with little regard for the impact to taxpayers and the incoming administration.

Image by Duncan Hull

Gnva.com Autumn/Winter 2008

I’ve just completed a redesign for the Autumn/Winter 2008 season.

It’s largely inspired by newspaper design. Lot’s of columns and blocky boxes for all the odd content that I collect and heavily dependent on imagery for visual impact.

Whilst I never claim to be a designer, I hope this refresh will pass and keep Gnva.com looking fresh through the winter.

I’d love to hear any comments or feedback!

-- edit—just added the photo, it took a while to find some changing trees.

Newsmap

It attempts to identify patterns in world news by recognizing bands of information and displaying them together, as Weskamp puts it, to “demonstrate visually the relationships between data and the unseen patterns in news media”.

http://www.marumushi.com/apps/newsmap/newsmap.cfm

Super niche geek humour

ncomment posts super niche geek comics, mainly it seems on the state of play amongst link aggregators such as Digg and Reddit.

For the least threatening possible insight into current social mores in geekdom, you could do a lot worse than keeping an eye on his Flickr pages.

User submissions: Content and Commentary

“Bond Art + Science explores the state of the art in inviting users to participate in the conversation online.

In the past, user participation in editorial publications was limited to writing “letters to the editor.” On the web, users take an active role in shaping the message through their comments and debates.

Bond Art + Science looked at how traditional media and online publications invite, manage and benefit from user participation, and we identified some best practices and common pitfalls:

* How are users asked to register to contribute?
* How do site moderators manage comments to ensure quality?
* What are the best ways to treat user comments as content?”

http://bondartsciencefair.com/audits/

30 years of little Lego men

30 years ago, Jens Nygaard Knudsen added little plastic men to the Lego universe.

Iconeye hosts a gallery of some of the more famous of their kind. Whilst I’d like to see more of the working class depicted, it’s a good gallery!

Getting People to Talk: An Ethnography Primer

A video by Gabriel Biller and Kristy Scovel at The IIT Institute of Design, a graduate school of design dedicated to advancing the methods and practice of human-centered innovation.

In the spring of 2008, they talked to professors, experts, and students about the process of interviewing the users of “a truly universal article of clothing” – denim jeans.

The result is this video full of statements and examples about interviewing practice. Agree or disagree with all of it, but not a bad primer for those of us who like talking to people about their lives.

Watch the video here