Stephan Goetschius's List: Design Stuff

• BILTON: One of the things that I write about in the book is that I don't think we sell content. If I said to you, I'm going to sell you this book on Post-it notes, would you buy it? No, because the experience would be awful, but the content is there, right? So I'm not just selling the content, I'm selling the entire experience. There's the hard cover, there's the design, there's the layout. There's this entire experience that we pay for when we think we're paying for content. This is something that applies not just in media, but to every single thing we do. We're not just buying the car, you're buying the thing that goes around that. And it especially takes place with content online when it comes to newspapers and books and magazines and things like that, and radio shows.

         

• "If a sustainable world is to be less about stuff, and more about people, what should designers design? Nathan Shedroff challenges designers to focus on what the experience of a sustainable world can be like. I hope every designer will read this book: they ll be inspired to learn that even as they stop creating stuff, there s still a lot of work for them to do." 
   —John Thackara, creator of the Door of Perception conference, author of In The Bubble

• People with a high level of personal mastery are acutely  aware of their ignorance, their incompetence, their growth areas. And they are  deeply self-confident. Paradoxical? Only for those who do not see the ‘journey  is the reward’. (Senge 1990: 142)
• Building shared vision. Peter Senge starts from the position that if  any one idea about leadership has inspired organizations for thousands of years,  ‘it’s the capacity to hold a share picture of the future we seek to create’  (1990: 9).

• From this we can see that it is not our position that is necessarily   important, but our behaviour. The question is whether or not our actions   help groups and relationships to work and achieve. Actions that do this   could be called leadership – and can come from any group member. Many   writers - especially those looking at management - tend to talk about   leadership as a person having a clear vision and the ability to make it   real. However, as we have begun to discover, leadership lies not so much in   one person having a clear vision as in our capacity to work with others in   creating one.

• lt, in the words of Maggie Smith, a wise and experienced development professional, is that "millions of people are expelled to the margins of fruitful existence in the name of someone else's progress."
• Polak has concluded, after years of work, that the design and technology of a device, such as a pump, is not much more than ten percent of the complete solution. The other ninety percent involves distribution, training, maintenance, service arrangements and the development of partnership and business models. These, too, must also be co-designed.
• es — some of them very old ones — already learned by other societies and in other times. From this insight flows the idea of designers as global hunter-gatherers of models; processes and ways of living that already exist. Or used to.

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• because they are not flashy: they often don’t grab you at all at first glance, being conceived from the inside out, usually over many painstaking years. Moreover, because Zumthor runs a small office and doesn’t often delegate even the choice of a door handle, he hasn’t taken on many projects, and most of the ones he has completed aren’t very big.
• might lead people to mistake Zumthor at first for “an ascetic.” But “he is the opposite,” Rüedi rightly noted. He is “an essentialist of the sensual.”
• eyes, and a hawkish gaze he exploits to intimidate or seduce, depending on his audience. “Normally architects render a service,” he began, skipping the usual pleasantries. “They implement what other people want. This is not what I do. I like to develop the use of the building together with the client, in a process, so that as we go along we become more intelligent.”
• aesthetic faith in engineering.

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• If formal design is not a differentiator, what is?
• responsibility for service design and the entire customer experience, and that strive to solve the right problems

• Society's organizational, disciplinary, and cultural silos are ill-equipped to address the growing needs that fall outside of traditional, neatly defined areas of responsibility. As an integrative approach, design can help provide a new model for leadership."
• The role of design is expanding well beyond artifacts, communications, and experiences to broader problem solving -- an interesting definition of "strategic design" may be "design that solves the right problems."

• of Japan, the faint speckling of dust beneath it, and the subtle ink-patterns in the red field all seem to reference (perhaps unintentionally -- Signalnoise's blog post doesn't say) a key philosophy of Japanese beauty called wabi sabi -- an untranslatable idea sometimes described as beauty that is "imperfect, impermanent and incomplete"... nurtur[ing] all that is authentic by acknowledging three simple realities: Nothing lasts, nothing is finished, and nothing is perfect."

• One answer comes from the Chinese fighting arts, which has created a practice specifically designed to put the nervous system under pressure. It's called zhan zhuang, or standing practice. Beginning practitioners of this practice stand with their arms outstretched as if holding a barrel, knees bent 6-8 inches or so, and their feet a bit past shoulder width for 15 to 20 minutes per day. (As practitioners advance the techniques get more involved but remain deceptively simple.)

   

  As we stand, our big muscles begin to fail, and we're forced to recruit smaller, suppler muscles and connective tissue in order to stay in position. This recruitment awakens parts of the nervous system (many of our bigger nerves are in fact mostly composed of connective tissue) that were previously offline. It literally builds new neural pathways in the body while strengthening those that already exist. As standing puts our muscles under pressure it forces us to recruit new ones, and as we do, the nerves embedded in those muscles get recruited too. In turn, new neural pathways improve the brain's ability to integrate complexity.

   
• In the past 15 years we've trained thousands of people how to integrate greater complexity in their nervous systems, from inner-city gang members to entrepreneurs, designers, executives, bankers, IT managers, professors, and nuns. Nearly all of them learned to make new choices, even while under stress. They expanded the capacity of their nervous system to tolerate the discomfort and anxiety that come with uncertainty and loss of control.

• s the demand for architectural service so limited that we follow the money no matter whom it comes from? What role do architects have in changing this quid pro quo? In laying off a quarter of her staff after losing the Libyan project, Hadid seems to be saying, “Not much.” As an image-maker, she is also signaling, “Who cares?” A recent ruling by the Royal Institute of British Architects requiring all firms to pay their interns starting July 1 underscores a long history of heedlessness and apathy in the U.K. where Hadid’s office is. If architects must rely on dictators and free interns to stay afloat, they are practicing a failed business model.
• What we as designers have been hoodwinked to believe is that the artistry of architecture is a universal humanist asset. What Hadid in Libya reveals is that it can just as simply be a tool.

• but what seems like chaotic flailing — a series of “little bets” with uncertain odds — ultimately leads to a wildly successful invention or direction.
• 
  “At the core of this experimental approach,” Sims writes, “little bets are concrete actions taken to discover, test, and develop ideas that are achievable and affordable. They begin as creative possibilities that get iterated and refined over time, and they are particularly valuable when [one is] trying to navigate amid uncertainty, create something new, or attend to open-ended problems. When we can’t know what’s going to happen, little bets help us learn about the factors that can’t be understood beforehand.”
  

• • we are all ordinary people, even those that make it big and make it greedy, those folks were born naked and ignorant
• build a society that puts ordinary people first

• 
  In the past few years, there have been interesting attempts from within both business and design schools to elevate the potential of design and creative thinking as drivers of differentiated value. There’s the d.school at Stanford, which offers design-driven classes to students of any department at the university. Then there’s the MBA in Design Strategy at the California College of Arts, or the M.Des/MBA joint program offered by the Institute of Design and the Stuart School of Business at IIT. Alternatively, the likes of the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management and Yale School of Management have implemented design-related courses as part of their traditional MBA education. Similar initiatives are being implemented in various universities around the world.
• nd yet, this practical problem neatly mimics a tension present in the larger corporate world. Business isn’t designed for design, either. How many corporate meeting rooms are free for teams to cover in scrawled thoughts and half-baked ideas? And how many of them are part of a wider system in which rooms are booked in half hour increments, and please take your coffee cups with you when you’re done? There’s a reason that design-based innovation firms (like my firm, Doblin) have dedicated case team spaces in which team members can simmer in specific problems for weeks at a time, and it’s not because design is an undisciplined mess. There's method to the apparent madness: It’s from this rich stew of scrawled half-ideas and whiteboard daubings that unexpected insights emerge. And there’s a reason this happens less often in a corporate context: logistics managers have got better things to do than indulge what they have no reason to see as anything but unstructured lunacy.
  
• ut they were indeed beginning to think differently about solving problems.
  
• naware of how the world (or the balance sheet) works seems enormously irresponsible. Another design school chief I spoke to was acid-tongued in his disdain for both the corporate world at large and the recent rise of “design thinking” as a practice within business and business schools. Instead, he dreamily outlined a world in which designers reject the faceless corporate machine, and instead act as lone entrepreneurs in pursuit of their own destiny.
  
  Running a solo design shop is a noble pursuit. But entrepreneurs have to exist in the world as it stands, too, and that involves learning about its current means and structures. After all, you can only reject what you understand. If designers want to make a genuine impact on the world, they’d do well to learn how to navigate big companies and figure out how to articulate their value to the people who run them.

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• esearchers Craig Vogel, Jonathan Cagan, and Peter Boatwright use an action-oriented context for their definition: Innovation “extends beyond invention of new technology and includes a thoughtful and insightful application, delivery, extension, or recombination of existing technologies … the key is that an innovation is a valued leap from the viewpoint of consumers whether or not it is incremental from the producer’s standpoint”
• Second, and more important, design research presents only an opportunity, but it does not lead directly to the new idea or innovative concept. Most businesses understand how to conduct research (either quantitative or qualitative, and often marketing driven but occasionally user centered).
• emphasized

• The link between initial investigative efforts and subsequent creative efforts is rarely, if ever, emphasized.

   
• Design synthesis is the link between the type of behavioral research described earlier—the potential for the future state—and the creation of something new.
• But consider the previous stage, in which the high-level design problems are defined or identified.
• Where do these discussions happen, and who has them? Typically, these types of considerations are made by directors of marketing and technology
• But with the recent popularity of the phrases “design thinking” and “innovation,” designers have been asked to participate in these strategic conversations. Designers are increasingly expected to discuss not just how to solve a problem but also which problems to consider solving.
• Yet even at these more fundamental levels of a design problem,
• Essentially, if a designer is to enter the boardroom, she is expected to bring something unique to the boardroom discussions.
• Design synthesis generally describes this aspect of design, where the designer is not yet solving a problem but is still doing, and making, in an attempt to understand complexity.
• design research acts as problem finding.
• Design is that act of problem solving
• Design synthesis, then, will translate the opportunity into specific design criteria, or a set of elements that must be present to afford a cohesive and concrete design.
• design synthesis is the process of problem understanding.

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• The neologism “irreductions” appeared as the title of the final chapter of Bruno Latour’s book on Louis Pasteur, where he asks the question of what would happen if “nothing can be reduced to anything else, nothing can be deduced from anything else, everything may be allied to everything else”. This is the philosophy behind “actor-network theory”, that the world is not a manifestation of essential substances, or eternal ideas and laws, but is made up of actors or actants, human and non-human, which form alliances, or networks.
• The goal of every invention, design or PhD dissertation is to become a black box, since once it is taken for granted it will not be challenged at every turn; it becomes orthodoxy.
• Failure is an inevitable part of design. As much as designers like to talk about success and solving problems, the interesting design problems are rarely really solved; they’re responded to, alleviated, deferred. The closer you look at design, the more you see failure. I certainly don’t think design museums and critics should avoid it. Because of design criticism’s relative infancy, it has been cast as a fresh cheekier version of art criticism; instead of writing about paintings, palaces and sculptures, we wrote about ice cream trucks, coffee cup lids and surfboards.
• Ludwig Wittgenstein advised, “don’t look for the meaning, look for the use”.

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