No fear of flying Southwest
According to Wikipedia, the 35-year old Southwest Airlines is the third larger airline in the world for passenger carried. Fortune magazine defined Southwest "the most successful airline in history." Yet, I didn’t understand what a big deal Southwest was until I flew with them for the first time.
Museum art is dead
Yesterday Husband and I went to the Whitney Museum in NYC. In this period the Whitney is having the 2006 Biennial, which is titled Day for Night in homage to François Truffaut’s movie La Nuit américaine. Some of the pieces were outrageous (a large virginal white canvas with piece of dirty chewing gum splattered on it, huge holes in the museum’s walls), some were moving and unsettling (Brauntuch’s shirts, Hannah Greely’s baby), ironic and/or provocative in a sexual (Vezzoli’s trailer for the never made remake of Caligula, Iannone’s "I was thinking of you") or political way (Serra’s Stop Bush, Anderson’s take on Black History, Nari Ward’s Glory).
But what was truly odd and out of place was to see modern art in a modern art museum.
User Research: Don’t neglect the goldmine in your own backyard
A product development process built around the user and the experience is an expensive proposition for many companies. On the surface, companies may reject user- and experience-centric approaches because they appear more expensive (more steps, more people involved, more time); deep inside, taking a user-centric approach is frightening because it requires relinquishing control and embracing a 180° cultural shift.
Putting a lot of thought in the early phases of product design clashes against the "faster, cheaper," "let’s see if it sticks" IT culture. Reaching out to people outside the company to discover solutions, ideas, and opportunities is unsettling for companies in which "the boss" makes all decisions and sets all strategic directions. True user-centered design requires a flatter, more democratic, and distributed corporate structure to work.
Because adopting a user-centered framework requires a cultural paradigm shift we often need to start small and proceed slowly to avoid a massive immune rejection response from the corporate culture. The good news is that in each company there are pockets of user knowledge that designers can easily leverage to get important user information. Read more »
Public Service Announcement: Please contribute to my list of friendly, locally owned cybercafes.
I am starting a list of friendly, small, locally owned cybercafes. I have looked around on the net for annotated lists and I could not find anything useful.
So far I have a tiny list of places I have personally visited, but I hope to expand the list with your help. If you know of a cybercafe you like and visit often or any friendly place that offers free or cheap wireless access, please send me a note with the name, address, website (if available), and a brief description of the place. Thank you!
Tags: cybercafe, list, wireless, hotspots
Scott Cook, founder of Intuit, talks about innovation at CHI 2006
Scott Cook opened CHI 2006 with a plenary on fostering innovation. Live-blogging notes have been posted on the CHI Blog. Here are my notes, which are not a word-by-word report on the talk but more of an annotated reconstruction (quote at your own risk).
Creating Game-changing Invention
The brief - Innovation happens at the junction between business and customer needs, not from executive ideas or lonely geniuses within the company. Indeed, innovation bottlenecks are often at the top. Creating a culture of innovation is about nurturing customer observation, incubating new ideas, celebrating failure, and staying out of the way. Read Thomas Kuhn (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions) and Peter Drucker (Innovation and Entrepreneurship).
Intuit: Changes lives so profoundly people can’t imagine going back to the old way.
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