“The sound quality of the music is a bit tinny, and somewhat annoying with various boingy and chirping sounds jumping in unexpectedly, and the selection of songs you can listen to is quite limited.”

Picky picky…

Read more at Calling Tokens

I’m excited to say that we have published a new issue of the frog Design Mind, frog’s bi-monthly newsletter. This is a special issue dedicated to the topic of green design, and I had the pleasure and privilege of coordinating it. I think we’ve got some pretty interesting articles that look at the challenge of more eco-friendly design from wide range of perspectives. This is part of a broader effort within frog of becoming a more green-focused company, both working with clients and with our own operations, of which more will be rolled out in the coming months. This is just a first public step.

There are ten articles, some essays, others photo explorations which are a mix of design, technology, brand, marketing, and economics approaches to green design.

My particular article, The Tragedy of the Commons argues that we need to add an “E-Factor” to the typical triad of Business, People and Technology that is used to evaluate the appropriateness of new products and innovations. Sometimes this means taking the blasphemous step of ignoring what we find in customer-centered research.

We’ll have a few podcasts coming in the next week or so, too. 

Read it here. 

Today would be the 100th birthday of Charles Eames.

As I get older I find myself ever more appreciative of what Charles and his wife and design partner, Ray, were able to accomplish:

• A blending of timely and timeless style
• Innovative use of materials and manufacturing methods
• An empathy for the changing culture and individual attitudes and behaviors
• Embracing of constraints as a route to optimization not compromise
• A blending of a studious approach with persistent joy
  
• Above all, a belief in appropriateness discovered through experimentation

The Eameses carried everything off with a sense of effortlessness, but in fact their process was anything but effortless. In fact it was ridiculously hard work.

NPR story this morning featuring an interview with the Eames’es grandson, Demetrios Eames

I was in Chicago a couple of weeks ago for my 10-year grad school reunion and spent an afternoon at the Millenium Park near the edge of Lake Michigan. There is an orchestra shell designed by Frank Gehry which punches a striking profile in the sky as one approaches from downtown, silhoutted against the lake is immediately behind it. It’s clearly a Gehry and designed to impress, but what I enjoyed much more were the relatively modest sculptures arrayed around it. In particular these sculptures managed to be public in the true sense of the world and it was wonderful to see how people, and children especially, engaged with them.

The most fun one is known as The Cloud Gate, and was designed by British artist Anish Kapoor. It is 110 tons of stainless steel polished to a mirror finish. Its location allows it to reflect the fantastic Chicago skyline, and at a more intimate scale it reflects the immediate environment and the people around it. The most trippy effect is standing directly underneath it and staring up, it’s like being inside a mirrored sphere. Children have a great time seeing their fun-house reflections in it, but adults too can’t help but express joy.

The other sculpture is The Crown Fountain by Spanish artist Jaume Plensa and it is of a much larger scale. Two huge rectangular slabs face each other, water falling from the top of each on all sides. The facing sides of each are filled with a single moving image courtesy of LCDs arrayed over the surface. On one a caucasian face, the other a black one, at least when I was there. Apparently there are over 1000 images of Chicagoans used on the fountain. I can say from having lived in the city that it is still wracked by racial divisions and the fountain clearly plays on that. But it is playful at another level, as the kids romp in the huge waterfalls and in the shallow pond that forms in between. (The Millenium Park website shows water spouting from the mouths of the faces like old fountain cherubs, but that wasn’t happening while I was there.)

While the Gehry pavillion was bombastic, the sculptures were more concerned with effacing themselves and letting the people come to the fore. Chicago has one of the best architectural and public sculpture heritages in the US, and these are two worthy additions. 

An interesting article in the June 11 Wall Street Journal talks about one company’s real-life realization that to maximize efficiency you have to not keep people working at full capacity - and this is especially true if you are looking for innovation. Furthermore, you need to carefully filter which innovations you invest in rather than trying to jam too much into the pipeline.

Avery Dennison Corp. loves to innovate. In recent years, the adhesive-label maker has expanded into areas such as stick-on automotive trim and heat-transfer inks to label clothing. But Avery executives grew vexed a few years ago at how long it took to turn ideas into products. Schedules were slipping. Customers were chafing.

Hoping to find the culprit, Avery hired George Group Consulting LP of Dallas to examine its practices. The surprising conclusion: Avery was jamming too many new ideas into its product pipeline, without enough slack time to ensure that critical tasks stayed on schedule. The remedy: Shrink the number of rollouts.

This fundamentally comes down to queuing theory, and how many things you can stack up without having dependencies which throw off schedules unpredictably. As the article notes, this type of thinking has been standard practice in manufacturing for decades, but “the same notion can seem like heresy when applied to scientists, designers or other creative types who launch new products.” In fact, this is exactly the approach that Donald Reinertsen advocated in his outstanding book Managing the Design Factory, which I have in my recommended books section.

Briefly his notion is this: innovative product ideas are like inventory sitting on a company’s books - until you get them out in the market they should show up as a debit in the accounting sheet (though company’s rarely track these things well, so the costs are often invisible). So you want to have as many inventory turns as possible to get ideas out quickly. But you don’t want to put out bad ideas, you need to balance time to market with “time to right”. This requires focusing your efforts and managing the innovation pipeline carefully. (I’ve written before about Google also dealing with this “innovation surplus” problem.)

The consultants mentioned in the WSJ article apply a mathematical theory on queuing, called the Pollaczek-Khintchine theory, to also show how  you need to have slack in the system to be most efficient overall. In other words, don’t keep people loaded up to 100% all the time if there are possible variances in how long tasks will take, as inevitably bottlenecks will occur during peaks. Since most real innovation efforts have multiple variables like this, to be most effective with a new innovation program you need to “under-utilize” people.