Only 40 Seats Left for MX San Francisco, February 12-13, 2007
The last seats for MX San Francisco are going fast, so grab a spot while the discounted registration still applies (available through January 15). Bring the whole team (five or more) and get an even bigger discount: contact carrie@adaptivepath.com for group rates.
Watch the AP blog over the next couple weeks for podcast interviews with some of the luminaries who are scheduled to speak at MX San Francisco. We’ll be talking to Lou Carbone, CEO of Experience Engineering, and Scott Berkun, author of How Companies Innovate, along with Caterina Fake from Yahoo! and Irene Au from Google.
And speaking of podcasts, the presentations from our UX Week in DC are getting plenty of play over at IT Conversations. Tune in for yourself!
Staff Resolutions for 2007: Wiki Wishes and Integration Dreams
We polled the staff about the resolutions they’ve made for 2007, and we’re proud to announce that not one person bothered with routine promises to “eat better” or “exercise more.” Check ‘em out.
Rachel Hinman: One of Us!
We are so pleased to welcome our new Design Strategist Rachel Hinman to the Adaptive Path team. Rachel has over ten year’s experience working with user-centered design and mobile design and strategy. Her list of former clients/employers is varied and deep: IDEO, Microsoft, Yahoo!, General Motors, Clorox and Kaiser Permanente. And she has a master’s degree in Design Planning. (Yeah, we think we’re pretty lucky, too.) For more whats, whens and wheres about Rachel, take a look at her full bio.
Transcript of Brandon’s Interview of Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO
If you missed the podcast of our own Brandon Schauer interviewing Tim Brown, which posted just before the holidays, it’s still available for your listening pleasure. Or if you’re in more of a reading mood, here’s the full transcript, jam-packed with Tim’s insights into the new challenges of being a designer, the role of user-generated content in the creative process, prototyping strategies and more:
Brandon Schauer: Why is experience, as an element of competitive strategy, so tough to sell within organizations?
Tim Brown: Because it’s complex; it cuts across a lot of domains and silos that organizations have [grown] used to keeping separate from each other — marketing, product development, service. [It’s all so complex] because the business models of innovative experience design are not well developed.
Organizations have a hard time figuring out how to monetize a lot of the work. A lot of it has to be done on a leap of faith. And there aren’t too many people that are really expert about talking about it in a way that’s compelling.
BS: Experiences are inherently cross channel, yet organizations typically aren’t cross channel. So how does an individual within an organization try to bring about some conscious approach to thinking across these channels?
TB: I think it’s one of the great opportunities that design has within organizations. Design is normally cross channel. In most organizations, design has an opportunity to touch many things, so I think designers and design managers have an opportunity to create a great deal of influence around the design of experiences — by connecting opportunities through experience, by connecting design through design language, and just by looking at the various opportunities there are to connect the various channels. So I think design can play a really valuable role.
The other place where a valuable role can be played is in, I think, marketing. More and more we’re finding that marketing execs are realizing that the offer, how you communicate the offer, and how you deliver the offer are all versions of the same thing. [Marketing execs] are looking to stitch that together in various ways. We’re certainly finding in our business that it’s the marketing execs that are often most interested in talking about this stuff.
BS: IDEO’s recognized as a strong prototyping culture. But we mostly see that or think about that in terms of product design and product prototypes. How is prototyping at IDEO conducted towards experiences?
TB: As we extend out into these different forms of design — whether it be software, whether it be service, whether it continues to be hardware (smarter hardware obviously) — we’re having to explore new types of prototyping. We’re having to explore narrative prototyping, the prototyping through storytelling using various techniques — whether it be film or whether it be online techniques. We’re having to create virtual prototypes as well as hardware prototypes where we’re using all kinds of narrative techniques for exploring ideas really early on. In fact, a lot of those prototyping approaches were inherent in interaction design when it was first developed. And a lot of those techniques came straight out of the movie industry.
BS: We talked about the interface of marketing and design within an organization. So what does the toolbox of a good design manager within an organization look like?
TB: Well, I think a good design manager needs to have a team working with them who are more interdisciplinary than they used to be. [Teams who] are not siloed, deep crafts people, but instead are able to think broadly and able to tackle an experienced problem from every direction — not only from the design direction, not only from the direction of the consumer experience… but also from the direction of technology and how to exploit technology to deliver different kinds of experiences; even from the direction of business.
[The team should be able to tackle] how what we do affects business models and how we can design business models into what we do. I think designers are having to become much more literate around the relationship between business and what they do. I think a good design manager really does need to be quite adept at that, and not wait for somebody else to figure out whether their ideas and initiatives make sense from a business perspective.
BS: This week Time Magazine named “You” the person of the year, which of course caused me to roll my eyes a little bit. But the Time story highlights the importance of user-generated content. How can organizations plan for and design emergent systems with this user-generated content as a part of the value they offer?
TB: From my opinion, we’re in the incredibly early stages of what ultimately I think will be an ecosystem for design. The walls will have broken down between what goes on inside design departments within corporations and what goes on with the customers and consumers of that organization. This will just continue to develop.
I think right now we have relatively few great tools. I mean market research is still crude. The online tools we can use to collaborate are only just emerging. But I think forward in every field, maybe five or ten years, our design departments will be of an infinite scale. I’m expecting the first thing to happen is we’ll start to build some useful tools for that. We’ll start to build some tools for collaborative content generation, which can actually then lead to something that’s more than just transient and trivial. I think part of the problem at the moment is that for every really great video that happens on YouTube, there [are] thousands of thousands of them which are basically trivial. We’ll need to develop tools and approaches that up the productivity rate in terms of interesting and quality content.
I’m sure it’s gonna happen. I think as designers we have to start to engage in it. We have to kind of give up on the idea that we can control every aspect of the things that we design. That modernist idea of design… that we’re the architects of the future and we have the vision that we can control completely… I think has slipped away. We have to approach design from a new stance.
BS: So one of the things we’ve been excited about watching is your work with the Acumen Fund. Can you tell us a little bit about your role in it, and how it’s different than other nonprofits?
TB: Well… in a funny kind of way that relates to the pervious question about open source. Because in a way that’s what we do. We’re kind of doing open source design. The Acumen Fund is a social entrepreneurialship fund working in Africa and India and Pakistan. And what we’re not doing is designing solutions in the classic way and dropping them into the field as the result of aid, which is what used to happen.
Instead what we’re doing is we’re helping guide some of the entrepreneurs themselves, some of these people that are working on new healthcare solutions, new technology solutions, new housing solutions in these countries. We’re helping them to use design thinking and use approaches to innovation to improve their own business. So at some level, it’s kind of an open source approach to innovation.
Occasionally we can help with the ideas themselves: the offerings. But mostly we’re helping them become better business people really by including approaches to design and innovation in the way that they think. And we’re doing the same thing with Acumen themselves — helping them use some of our approaches to innovation in the way that they run their fund.
BS: That sounds really compelling. We look forward to hearing more from you at the MX Conference on February 12 and 13 in San Francisco.
TB: I look forward to seeing everybody there.
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