metacool

A Welcome Voice in the World of Design Thinking

Bruce Nussbaum is blogging:  NussbaumOnDesign

On Zanardi and Innovation

Earlier this month, Alex Zanardi won the Italian Touring Car Championship at the wheel of a BMW.

Even if you don't "get" auto racing, give me a chance to tell you why Zanardi is one of my personal heroes, and why he's an important role model for innovators.  Simply put, Zanardi, has the kind of singular genius that makes something very difficult look oh so easy.  He is an incredible driver, very talented.  During the 1990's, from his come from behind win at Long Beach, to his audacious Corkscrew maneuver at Laguna Seca (in racing circles simple referred to as The Pass), Zanardi was the guy you knew would always go for it, would never ever - ever! - give up.  In other word, Zanardi is a racer, a person intrinsically motivated to win.

He almost died in 2001.  Zanardi's recent Touring car crown is all the more remarkable because it was achieved by a man whose legs were amputated above the knee, by a man whose died several times in a helicopter on the way to the ER room after his horrible accident.  Made all the more remarkable by the fact that, after regaining his health, his intrinsic motivation led him to figure out a control system for his racing BMW which uses his hands and his hip so effectively that he could not just be competitive, but be the most competitive in what is a very competitive racing series.

At the risk of trivializing Zanardi's accomplishments, let me say this:  innovation is a difficult pastime.  Most of the time it's not glamorous, fun videos about shopping carts not withstanding.  You're going to lose a lot of the time.  Ideas get beat up mercilessly.  Hard work gets flushed down the toilet.  People don't believe you can do it.  And the real world has a way of providing harsh feedback on things that work very well in theory but not in practice.  If you're serious about changing the world, innovation is ultimately about doing, and ultimately, winning.  Winning, as it turns out, is tough.

I think great innovators - winners - share a lot in common with great racers.  I just want to be a great racer.  That's why Zanardi is my hero. 

Venture Design, part 9

Now that's a creative business model: Eternal Reefs

Making Things Make Things Beautiful

I had a casual, brief water-cooler-type conversation yesterday, which went something like this:

Me:  I noticed you're using Keynote instead of PowerPoint.  How do you like it?

Them:  It's great.

Me:  Did it take a lot of time to make your presentation look so designerly?

Them:  No.  I think Apple designed it so that you can't produce anything that's not beautiful.

That really blew my mind.  What a simple yet utterly audacious vision for any offering: help your customers make their lives more beautiful. 

What if your car made you drive with the smoothness of Fangio?  If your food processor helped you cook with the elegance of Batali?  As Virgina Postrel has been saying for a while, the desire for beauty in our lives is more basic than we think.  Perhaps those of us who create things for other people to use should be going beyond functionality, usability and visceral aesthetic concerns to deliver the realm of the poetic existence. 

metacool Thought of the Day

"I like to launch [products] early and often. That has become my mantra.  Nobody remembers [Madonna's] Sex Book or the Newton. Consumers remember your average over time. That philosophy frees you from fear."

- Marissa Mayer, Google

Unabashed Gearhead Gnarlyness

The 2006 Honda Civic Sedan

After seeing one pass me on the street, I have to admit I'm head-over-heels for the new Civic.  The shape and proportions represent a huge improvement over somewhat dowdy 2005 model, and there's more than a little Alfa Romeo Giulia Berlina in the trunk section, which is no bad thing.  This is the first Honda sedan since the famed pop-up headlight Accord of the late 80's to make you wonder why people bother with two-door coupes.  Sweet.

photo copyright Honda

More "How Far?"

I'm writing an extended essay on the subject of "How far?  How?".  I'm building off the Saturn story from my earlier blog post, but would love to hear about other remarkable ways that companies express their brands.

Please send me an email if you've got a good story.

Mahalo!

Thought Contagion

When I first began this blog my day job was marketing web software, and I was obsessed with figuring out how to make ideas more likely to spread across the web.  Though part of the reason for blogging was long tail self-expression, much of it was about building my professional chops.  I'm a big fan of knowing by doing.

I'm no longer making my dough as a web marketer, but I'm still fascinated by the mechanisms of thought contagion on the web and elsewhere.  I love sifting through web logs to see who is visiting and linking to metacool.

Imagine my delight earlier this week when PubSub indicated that metacool was the 14th strongest website out there (out of 16 million sites tracked!!) in terms of link strength and buzz.  Sure, I'm happy to be up in the quantitative ranking, but really turns me on is the prospect of figuring out what makes PubSub tick as a measure of contagion.  To that end, I need your help:

1. If you have any sense of how PubSub derives its rankings, leave a comment or drop me a line.
2. If you know of any other online measures of contagion (besides Google page rank), please tell me about them.

Thought contagion is so cool, eh?

The Return of Jolie-Laide

The new BMW Z4 Coupe. 

This is fantastic.  It's the return of Jolie-Laide, and it's about design that takes guts.  Love it or leave it, you have to admire BMW's willingness to take a point of view and run with it.  In that sense, it's beautiful.

(via Jalopnik)

Nano is the new Turbo

The whole "nano-as-the-ultimate-modifier" marketing thing tipped last week with the release of the iPod nano.  While I don't (yet) own one of these iPods, I do own several shirts which supposedly feature a nanotechnology fabric treatment.  I believe we're now going to see "nano" applied to everything from cigars to Civics.  Which is fine, except that in few cases will the product actually contain, or be about, nanotechnology. 

Such is the case with the iPod nano, and that is why I believe that nano is the new turbo, another technical term appropriated by marketing people and applied in so many ways as to make it meaningless.

Nothing wrong with this, of course, for the truth is all marketers are liars.  But it really rankles the engineer in me.  And delights the marketer in me.

Design Manifestos: Eva Zeisel

"The designer must understand that form does not follow function, nor does form follow a production process. For every use and for every production process there are innumerable equally attractive possibilities."
- Eva Zeisel

Read more about Eva Zeisel's point of view on the design process in this wonderful profile written by Virginia Postrel.

Me and My Murse

A few weeks ago I lamented the fact that I couldn't order a Freitag Murse online.  Of course, many of you are lamenting the fact that I want a murse, but for me the lamentation stems only from my continuing state of murselessness.  Each morning as I try and squeeze my gadget-stuffed pockets into the seat of my car, I remind myself to find a way to get out to the Freitag store in Davos.

Salvation came in the form of an email from a nice person at Freitag called Manuela, who told me that, while the object of my murse lust won't be available online until late September, it is possible to purchase one today without jetting off to Davos.  How?  Well, if you consider the designed-as-a-one-of-a-kind-object premise which forms the essence of the Freitag brand, then the solution is obvious:  log into a web cam in the Davos store and have a living Freitag salesperson show you each bag until you find one you like.

Seriously.  You must see it to believe it. 

It's kind of cool and brand-enhancing, eh?  But I still don't have my murse.  The tyranny of the wallet has yet to cease.

metacool Thought of the Day

"NetGens think of the computer as a door, not a box.  When they are on, they have 5-7 IM windows open and multiple tabs into different communities. Each community provides a way of being, to express facets of their identity while engaging in an activity. Most activities are centered around objects to spin stories and hold conversations. They don't go to places, it's more likely they augment plazes in the real world. With increasing mobility they tap groups for what they need to get done no matter where they are and make where they are matter... In other words, the web is increasingly less about places and other nouns, but verbs."

- Ross Mayfield

Knock Knock

The other day I was asked to name the person I'd most like to have evaluate the design of a website.  A few designer names swept through my head, but then I thought, "No, I'd want a marketer who thinks like a designer who thinks like a marketer.  Seth Godin." 

Over the past five years I've had a hand in architecting and building five major websites, and Seth's thoughts on permission marketing, sneezing, and remarkability played no small part in shaping their design.  This one was done on less than a shoestring budget but got nominated for a Webby.  This one is built around getting people to a permission asset, and as a bonus gives sneezers a handy little manifesto for cocktail parties, too. 

Seth just wrote a new guide to creating websites that work.  It's free, it's here, it's Knock Knock