The good people of 37signals published a wonderful Director's Commentary a couple of weeks ago in the form of a post called "Basecamp help". What's a Director's Commentary? It's the voice over track on a DVD where the director explains everything that was going on when he shot a scene. They exist in the world of design thinking, too, as I wrote a while back:
Wouldn't it be great if, in a similar fashion, we could hear and see great designers talking about their craft? When I was a practicing engineer designing tangible things, there were tens, even hundreds of details embedded in my designs which I knew about, maybe the rest of my team knew about, but which were essentially invisible to the world at large. Which is fine; it isn't the job of end users to be thinking about the kinds of details and decisions that interest a professional design thinker. But for students in training, and for other professionals, what better way to truly appreciate the enormity of the task of design than to take a walkthrough around a real design with another real, living designer?
In his post, I admire the way Jason walks us through all the details that go into even a minor rework of a software interface item. In general, stuff from 37signals works really well, and it's not due to luck or the alignment of the planets. They're talented designers who sweat the small stuff.
I recently bought a pair of Jack Purcell shoes from Converse. A classic design, wouldn't you agree?:
They're good shoes. But what I really dug was the clever detailing on the box they came in:
My first reaction was something along the lines of "how clever!". What a nice way to echo the gestalt of the shoe in the shoe box. And then I thought, "how did the marketing manager for this line of shoes win the argument in favor of adding little metals shoe grommets to each and every box?" While grommets are cheap, they're not free -- a few cents here and there and it all adds up.
On the other hand, who says a brand logo needs can't be a three-dimensional object, even on a lowly shoe box? Why not treat a logo more like a badge, as many automakers do? These Converse grommets are badges, and not so different than the nine (9!) brand badges which adorn my car (ten if you count the one on my key fob). Why print a swoosh or a set of mouse ears when you can a have a tangible brand expression?
Bravo, Jack Purcell!
What happens when people love your brand and what it could be so much that they're willing to, err, mess with reality in order to make it so?
As detailed here (and in the diagram and Home Depot shopping list above) my pal Reilly Brennan of Winding Road went through a lot of trouble to create a "fake" version of the mysterious -- and as of today, not on the market -- Corvette Blue Devil. If you're not a gnarly gearhead, a little background for you: people who love the Corvette are extremely interested in what's next. What will Chevy do to make the next version that much better? Or will they screw it up? How might it allow them to go out and stomp on witless 911 and Viper owners? Or to win Le Mans yet again? It's a community which is not only ripe for the spreading idea viruses, it's one which welcomes them. And as Reilly has shown, Corvette aficionados want stories and myths that feed the story of why they bought their own car so much that they'll believe anything. Because they want to. Describing this worldview, Reilly writes:
We have visions of high American optimism coupled with the fear of a regulated, sedan-like tomorrow. We dream of a world full of nightmarish Corvettes, those that rumble and break pavement and write "Zora" on blacktop when they leave stoplights.
In brief, Reilly and team took a stock Z06 Vette and mocked up their ersatz Blue Devil with a few hundred bucks of foam and vinyl and tape. They paraded it around Detroit, and some competing automotive journals even took the bait and published "spy" photos of their fake in action. Which is a fun outcome, but more significantly, rank-and-file citizens like and you and me were shouting "build it" when they saw the fake Blue Devil rumble by. Now, if you were Chevy, once you get beyond the act of outsiders pretending to be you, you've got to be happy with that outcome. Why? Because Winding Road's Blue Devil is simultaneously an example of and a catalyst of the kind of user-generated brand content which Chevy tried to get with its much-discussed user-generated launch campaign for its Tahoe brand. Except, I'd argue, it represents an undeniably positive outcome from a brand point of view.
Philosophically, when it comes to creating infectious action, I see the fake Blue Devil as the same kind of expression as the user-generated Firefox cropcircle. They share some common elements and operate on similar principles:
Well, somehow I've managed to start with Corvettes and end with genocide. I didn't expect to get there, but this is a long post, so I'll stop here.
I'd love to hear what you think.
I love this photo detail from Bobby Greene's "Aircraft latches and you" post from his wonderful blog Automotive Addictions and General Tomfoolery. It's a blog about his very gnarly belly tanker speed racer. It's an ode to gearhead gnarlyness, authenticity, and just plain doing stuff. I love it.
I also dig the photo because it's a great example of beausage, the beauty which comes with use. All those scratches, dents, and subtle surface deformations couldn't be designed. They come from being out in the world, and they're beautiful in a very organic way.
Congratulations to Bobby for getting the tanker up and running -- and running WFO, no less! -- again.
Cool.
We've just launched a news blog for the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford (also known as the d.school).
This will be a space for us to talk about news and happenings in and around the d.school and the world of design thinking.
That's me and my friend Ross hanging out in IronForge. It's a great place to have a meeting and get some work done. Perhaps even do something innovative. In case you're wondering, that's me on the right -- I'm the taller one sporting the diving helmet (which I engineered and fabricated myself, natch) and the longish gun, which was a gift. My trusted pet attack bear, Yogi, isn't in the photo because just a few seconds earlier he wandered off in search of some cheese to eat and fell into a pit of lava.
But I digress.
Come December 1, Ross and his company Socialtext will be holding a press conference. What makes this one special is that it will be held in World of Warcraft in the charming village of Goldshire at the blood-soaked Gurubashi Arena. The whole event should be interesting, and if you're a journalist or a blogger or someone interested in wikis and social software, you outta be there.
If none of this makes any sense to you, I'd encourage you to try out World of Warcraft and attend. I'll even volunteer to walk you over from the city of Stormwind to the press conference location (or have Ross summon you there). I think all of these "games" such as World of Warcraft and Second Life are but the tip of the tip of the tip of the iceberg when it comes to understanding what our lives will be like in 10, 20, 30 years. And the best way to begin to understand is to jump in and wallow around. Learn by doing.
Find press conference details and signup instructions here on Joi Ito's Socialtext Workspace
Words of design thinking wisdom from Russell Davies
A wise person helped me see today that the Golden Gate Bridge is an excellent example of HAAS (Hardware As A Service) which has been living right under our noses for decades. It's a pay per use business model, and is certainly a lot more affordable than building your own bridge.
Sounds a lot like B2B plays in Web 2.0 and Office 2.0 to me.
It's all about perceptions, isn't it? I believe there are very few, if any, new business models under the sun. The challenge for us is to see clearly, to think creatively, and to apply what we already know to make things new things happen in interesting and effective ways.
So, I'm starting the planning process for another Business + Design class at the Stanford d.school for Spring 2007.
My big question is: what kind of class would you want to be a part of?
One choice would be to teach Creating Infectious Action again. We learned a lot teaching it last year, both in terms of how to structure the class as well the content which was developed in the class by staff and students alike. It certainly caught people's attention, as in here, and here, and here. So that's one choice.
The other is to teach something new. I have some ideas about content and form but I'd like to hear what you have to say. What kind of a class would you want to take if you were a graduate student at Stanford interested in learning more about design thinking? Drop me an email, post a comment below, or (best of all), write something on your own blog and send a trackback back over here.
I'll be part of a panel discussion at the Roads to Innovation conference at Stanford this coming weekend. All the panels are stocked with really interesting people. Given my penchant for unabashed gearhead gnarlyness, I'm a little disappointed that Mario Almondo from Ferrari won't be joining my panel as was previously scheduled. But he just got one helluva promotion at work, so I can see why he's not schlepping out to California for the conference.
Please shoot me an email if you're going to be attending and would like to say hi.
The next Design 2.0 discussion will be held in Boston on November 15. The speakers include "Dr. Simplicity" John Maeda, Natalie Jeremijenko, Bill Cockayne, Jason Pearson, and the always interesting Allan Chochinov of Core 77.
Plus, there's robots shooting lasers and stuff. Boston is one of my favorite cities, a veritable foaming cauldron of intellectual ferment. Wish I could go.
“The Scottish are a nation of engineers. But they are
very creative engineers. They seem dour, but underneath they are quite
romantic. It gets back to a sense of
creating order out of chaos. Producing something very controlled is
very Scottish.”
- Ian Callum
(in honor of all the great design thinkers who have come from Scotland, including my good friend David, who remains one of the most uniquely creative persons I've ever met)
The d.school's Clicks-n-Bricks class (part of the Design + Business movement at the d.school) is holding a mini conference on sustainability this coming Thursday. Here are the speakers:
Here are the details:
What is Designing for Sustainability?
d.school Mini-Conference Fall 2006
3:30 PM – 7:00 PM
Hewlett 200
And though my marketing professors would shoot me for saying this, it's really hard to beat the value of something which costs nothing. How can something this good be free? And it's anything near as good as the mini conference we held last Spring for CIA, it'll be really good.
When people send me emails or text messages containing the word "ISO" (which I believe stands for "in search of", as in that wierd Leonard Nimoy show which used to air on TV), I get confused, because I'm a believer in the idea of Italo-American hybrids by the name of Iso. No, no that kind of hybrid. This kind of hybrid:
The Iso Rivolta. Corvette horsies meet Italian tailoring. Accept no substitutes.
Props to my man Zeh for the guerilla street photography
Here's some spectacularly neato design thinking stuff to take a look at. Definitely worth spending more than a few hours on, with the added bonus that it's all in video and podcast form. If you're anything like me, and your eyes hurt from reading so much, it's a pleasure to be able to sit back, relax, and imbibe words of wisdom from great design thinkers the world round.
Enjoy!
Do you have a "to do" list? Odds are you do. Spoken or unspoken, written or not, we all carry around some sense of the stuff we should be doing (or not). Companies and organizations do, too. But they're mostly secret. Let the world know what you're thinking of working on, and you're screwed, right? Competitors will copy your amazing strategic plan in a snap, customers won't buy your existing offering as they wait for the next thing to come out, and whenever you have a key project schedule slip, shareholders will sue you for issuing misleading future-looking statements. Clearly, it would be a bad idea to share one's to-do list with the world. Or maybe not, if you're a business-by-design kind of organization interested in being innovative in a customer-centric way.
If brands are about what you do in the world, and not just about what you say you do in the world, and if relationships are built around some notion of trust, then why not do something concrete which shows that you're investing in your relationship with customers for the long term? And for me, that could mean putting your organization's "to-do" list out in public for all the world to see. Here's something I saw a few weeks ago while on a sneak preview of Daniel Libeskind's new Hamilton addition to the Denver Art Museum:
This poster to-do list wasn't hidden away in some bureaucratic space administrator's back room. No sir, the good people of the Denver Art Museum had the guts to print this thing in poster format and place it right smack-dab in the lobby. Everyone could see it, everyone had to see it. And I appreciate how open they are with the list: we haven't put in seating, the store ain't done, and we know there are no signs. We're working on it. And as we improve the space, we'll check it off and let you know that we know that these are the things that make or break your museum experience.
Just think what could happen if more organizations put their to-do lists out in public. I think we'd all feel a lot better about doing business with each other. Say -- just for the sake of discussion -- that you run the FAA's website and you've found some embarrassing typos on your site. But you can't fix them right away because your web admin is out hiking in Bora Bora (by the way, they've now been fixed). What if you could add the "Fix Typos on Travelers page" on your public FAA To Do List blog, right after the entry "Make our site almost as good as that best website ever from Tenacious D"? Knowing that someone intends to do something, that they are aware of their shortcomings and are trying to improve things, can go a long way toward making you believe.
Even better would be to open up that to-do list to anyone. So when I find the typos on the FAA website, rather than writing a snarky post on my blog, I help 'em out by entering an item on their to-do list wiki. Now I'm part of the solution, and probably part of the brand. It's about leveraging the power of the many to create the best pile of real evidence possible about what works and what doesn't. At some point along the line this starts to feel a lot like open source. Might Mozilla really be one be one big public to-do list in disguise?
Back to the Denver Museum of Art. I wish they had a publicly addressable to-do list. I would add an entry right now. Something like "fix those crazy interior angled walls that everyone kept tripping over."
Ouch!
Today marks the start of the first-ever National Design Week
And remember, 2006 is the Year of Total Design. There's still plenty of time left get some important work done this year.
Say what you want, think what you want, feel what you want about the rock band Tenacious D.
But when it comes to the design of B2C websites, I don't know that I've seen anything lately quite as fresh and innovative as The D's promotional website for their new movie. It just could be the greatest website ever created.
Instead of the usual cluster of clickable static pages, we get a story, some humor, a lot of fun, and above all, an experience. An almost cinematic experience. It's the Tenacious D brand writ large, dude. It's like inward singing but for websites.
( update 11 October 2006: in the grand tradition of The D, parts of this post were written tongue-in-cheek. Humorous. As in, it's probably not the best website ever. Because of this, I'm not going to be able to respond to every email and blog link I receive assailing my marketing and aesthetic tastes. But you have to admit, it is pretty cool. )
A Firefox crop circle. Created by a band of loyal (and unpaid) Firefox customers.
How might your brand stoke this kind of infectious action?
link via neural park
Yesterday I went to the FAA website to see the latest carry-on guidelines. Here's what I saw:
What does "Frequestly" mean? And how about the use of "our" instead of "out"?
Here's the obvious observation of the day: typos like these aren't really helping the FAA brand. I actually like the word "frequestly", and would find it to be brand enhancing if I heard it from Cranium or Virgin or Mini, but when the FAA speaks, we need it to sound like James Earl Jones. We want the FAA to show us at every opportunity that they have their act together. Brands are fractal entities, and the meaning of the whole is to found in the execution of even the lowliest detail. Especially if your brand is all about rigor, safety, and juggling lots of big, heavy balls without dropping even one in a million.
I've received a few emails challenging my assertion that the In-N-Out menu is simple. Yes, I agree that the top bank of pre-designed meals on the In-N-Out drive thru menu makes the it a less than perfect example of simplicity at work. On the other hand, I find conversations about absolutes to be philosophical minefields... I'd rather make a relative comparison and proceed with thinking about how to do more things that are more good and less bad.
When it comes to menus, more bad (and less simplicity) would certainly look something like this:
photo credit: foomtsuruhashi
A great benefit of reading a book on simplicity is the secret thrill one receives by finding examples of simplicity at work in the course of daily living. Including the drive-thru at In-N-Out Burger.
Here's a simple drive-thru menu snapped from the window of my car. Lots of Maeda's Laws at work here. What makes it simple? Some random thoughts:
This coming Thursday, September 14, IDEO will be hosting the good people of Tesla Motors as part of the ongoing IDEO Know How lecture series. The lecture is open to the public. This should be a good chance to drink from the cup of (electric) gearhead gnarlyness.
The lecture will take place at 715 Alma St in Palo Alto at 5pm PST. Enter via the alley off of Forest Avenue between Alma and High streets There won't be a public videotape available afterward.
Here are some selected quotes from Tesla's website:
Tesla Motors designs and sells high-performance, highly efficient electric sports cars — with no compromises. Tesla Motors cars combine style, acceleration, and handling with advanced technologies that make them among the quickest and the most energy-efficient cars on the road.
“Our goal in designing the Tesla Roadster was to build a car with zero emissions that people would love to drive,” said Tesla Motors co-founder and CEO Martin Eberhard.
The real difference lies in the intent of the designers. For the most part, electric cars have been designed by people who believed we should not drive, and, if we must, then we should drive a bare-bones electric car. In sharp contrast, the Tesla Roadster is a driver‘s car: optimized for performance and handling, beautiful in every detail. Tesla Motors celebrates driving.
It‘s a no-compromise driver‘s car that can accelerate faster than a Porsche 911 and hit a top speed of nearly twice what the law permits. With a range of 250 miles on a single charge, you can use it all day long and not worry you‘ll run out of juice.
Response to the Tesla Roadster has been even greater than we anticipated, and we’ve “sold out” of our special edition Signature One Hundred Roadsters. We’re now taking reservations for our next 100 Tesla Roadsters to be built.
I, for one, am looking forward to the day when I get to lay a big, fat patch of electric torque-tortured tire rubber.
Update 14sept06: Tesla has a nifty blog worth checking out
The Stanford Product Design program continues the David H. Liu Memorial Lecture Series in Design with this stunning lineup of speakers:
Be sure to check the series website for time and location info.
I normally shy away from pointing to stuff on other blogs on a routine basis, as I figure you'll find the good stuff anyway, and I have a bias toward creating original (or as original as anything can be in this connected world) material.
But I've had some big milestones with my special project lately. This week we shipped two new material intake devices. And we had a successful alpha launch of our upright ambulation initiative. As with any innovation activities, these required lots of late night effort and were the source of some high drama and tears. Par for the course when it comes to innovation!
So I'm mostly pointing. There's so much cool stuff out there!
Today Seth uses egg whites and wheat and peppers to write an ode to the gods of authenticity, quality, and doing stuff to the hilt. It's a reminder to me that delivering great human experiences (even a humble breakfast) is much more a matter of judgment than of rules.
Bruno Giussani, my fellow TED blogger and BusinessWeekOnline contributor, wrote a cool post about how innovation can come from "... an unexpected juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated ideas or concepts...", in this case the Scuderia Ferrari helping a hospital in England with process dynamics:
Pit-stop for doctors
"People are not born craftsmen; they just have the courage to screw
things up. Embrace your inner amateur and try everything.
There will always be an expert to take your money and fix the mistakes."
- Mr. Jalopy
And, as we're fond of saying around the offices of metacool, "Why not do something NOW?" If half of life is about just showing up, then the other half (and more than half when you're in the business of getting something good done) is about getting past the excuses, grabbing a wrench, and hacking away. Fail early, fail often. Build a prototype. Think global, drink local. Catch something on fire. Why not screw something up today instead of strategizing for the next month? You might learn something. No -- you WILL learn something. What's the worst that could happen?
(note that I use the word "wrench" as a metaphor for whatever it is that you need to do the thing you do)
I love that: "Embrace your inner amateur and try everything." Sounds like design thinking to me.
Ferguson was a great role model as an innovator, always open to new ideas, new technologies, new ways of seeing himself and being in the world. And he wasn't afraid to be way out there with some hair-raising, totally crazy, high-altitude trumpet lick.
If you're interested in hearing a cool discussion about creating contagious behavior, pouring gas on fires, releasing control and the future of marketing, check out this video of the panel discussion I moderated earlier this year with Bob Sutton at the 2006 AlwaysOn conference. Joining us on the panel were:
What an awesome group! The video image is kind of small, the open Internet comment box can be a bit distracting, but the sound quality is good, and that's what matters. This insights and thoughts brought up by Mitchell, Perry, and Gil knocked my hat into the creek. I love marketing innovation.
For a nice written summary of the panel discussion, see this post on Bob's blog.
I've added two cool blogs to my COOL STUFF section. They're a yin yang combo for innovators. They're both of a legal bent, but from totally different points of view. Yes, I know, legal stuff. Bear with me here:
Patent Pending Blog: about patents. Obviously. This blog is a great reminder of how there's really very little new under the sun. It's good, clean fun, too -- who wouldn't want to read about Harry Houdini's Diving Suit? And look at those gents in the illustration above. They're cruising around in a rolling iron yurt, discussing the state of their stock portfolios. Think of it as a collection of Unabashed Gearhead Gnarlyness, Antique Edition.
Business Bankruptcy Blog: no, I don't enjoy looking at traffic accidents. But this is important stuff for innovators know about, because business viability and sustainability are key to getting stuff done in the world.
I think if you make the Bankruptcy blog, VentureBlog, Feld Thoughts, and The Economist a part of your regular reading schedule, you'll be way ahead of the new venture business curve.
It used to be that having a blog was a remarkable thing for a Fortune 500 company. I know because I had to "hurdle" to get one started when I was part of the team at Intuit, and it was a big deal when General Motors came out with their Fastlane blog. As marketing organizations have become more comfortable with easing their span of control over outbound messaging and content, blogs are now more or less part of the marketing mix. RSS feeds are de rigueur. Corporate blogging is about trusting the judgment and intuition of individual contributors instead of relying upon a rule-based central authority. It's about releasing control and rules, but embracing judgment and character. In general I think that's a better way to market, because it comes across as more real and authentic because it is more real and authentic, and a more open, trusting stance is a wonderful way to engage the outside world in creating contagious action around your offerings -- which is the fundamental (if often forgotten) goal of marketers in the first place.
So that's the state of world for relatively unscripted marketing words coming out of organizations, but what about the visual expression of their brands? Photos and the like. Now we're talking about thousands of words. But, as most bloggers can tell you, companies are loath to share their visual content. If you want access to a photo from a website, you'd better be ready to contact their press department and kiss the ring.
But not General Motors. Their marketing team is pushing lots of great photos to a public Flickr gallery. And pulling in photos from the gearhead community. This is good marketing. Yes, it would be better if everything were published under a Creative Commons license to really free up usage, but this is a great start.
Why not share some of your corporate visual content with the outside world? The reality is that people are going to take your online content anyway. Why not do it in a way which engages your fan base, encourages participation, and rewards good judgment and creativity? What's the worst that could happen?
