Daily question: When designers run out of ideas
Fri, Oct 31, 08
ASUS is blessed with one of the world’s top R&D teams. With unyielding commitment to innovation and quality, ASUS won 2,568 awards in 2007, meaning on average, the company received seven awards every day last year.
What happens when “one of the world’s top R&D teams” runs out of ideas? Why, you ask the customers! It’s the longest-running sucker’s bet: let end-users design the software/hardware/service they’ll be using. How complicated can that be? They already know what they want. You take everybody’s “dream,” run’em through the filters of “one of the world’s top R&D teams” and sprinkle some “Intel Inside” magic on it, presto:
You Dream It. ASUS Builds It. Intel Inside It.
Imagine your perfect PC. Now imagine top engineers and innovators working around the clock to make that Dream PC a reality. That’s the dream WePC.com is all about.
ASUS and Intel have created WePC.com, a place where users like you come together to share ideas, images and inspiration about your ideal PC. But what if it’s not just talk. Your designs, feature ideas and community feedback will be evaluated by ASUS and could influence the blueprint for an actual notebook PC built by ASUS with Intel inside.
Ever wondered who would own your “dream” idea?
Ownership: You acknowledge and agree that the Site Operators [ASUS] own all legal rights, title and interest in and to the Materials and Site, including any trade names, trademarks, service marks, logos, domain names, and other distinctive brand features therein (whether those rights happen to be registered or not, and wherever in the world those rights may exist), and that they are protected by worldwide copyright laws and treaty provisions. They may not be copied, reproduced, modified, published, uploaded, posted, transmitted, or distributed in any way without prior written permission. Except as expressly provided herein, the Site Operators do not grant any express or implied right to you under any patents, copyrights, trademarks, or trade secret information.
The Site Operators may freely use the User Content you submit in the design of a personal computer or netbook with no obligation to provide compensation or reimbursement to you;To the extent that you claim any proprietary interest in User Content submitted for the Create Your Dream PC and Share Your Ideas activities, you assign to the Site Operators all rights, interests and titles you now possess or will possess in the future (especially the right to register patent rights).
Would you like ASUS to patent and exploit your dreams?
Daily question: How open can open be?
Thu, Oct 30, 08
When you see an application listed as FREE you expect it to be FREE, right? So did we. Little did we know that when you download applications like “Fast Food Calorie Calculator” its sole purpose in life is to direct you to the MobiHand website so you can PURCHASE the application for $9.99!
I’m not sure how many different ways I can explain how obnoxious this is. It destroys the user experience. I loaded the application description and chose to “flag content” for “other reasons” and simply put “not free” in the text box. I hope they get kicked off the market. Although if they do… it opens up a HUGEEEEEEE can of worms as far as Google regulating the market, which it is NOT supposed to do.
One of the principal arguments against the Apple App Store offered by open source advocates was its “closed” nature. Apple’s subsequent de-listings of fewer than 5 apps among 5,500 was Evidence A that the company’s control was unreasonable.
As the emphasized passage above from the Phandroid site shows, Android phone fans are conflicted when confronted with reality. Mind you, G1 is still very much a geek’s phone, for those who care about the plumbing. What happens when Android-powered phones reach the broader consumer market and tricksters start getting more and more cunning with re-direction, add-on pricing, fake apps, proxy markets, etc?
Can we expect non-geek consumers to successfully self-regulate the Android App Market, without Google’s verboten intervention?
Daily question: Smartphones bad for you?
Wed, Oct 29, 08
Martin Cooper, one of the creators of the cellphone 35 years ago at Motorola, recently gave a keynote at the Embedded Systems Conference where he offered “a list of complaints against the wireless industry that ranged from closed carrier networks to inefficient cellular antenna systems to the design of smart phones like the iPhone, which he argues are overly complex,” says Forbes.com.
Forbes had an interview with Cooper following his talk:
Cooper said that he had used an iPhone for a few weeks before handing it off to his grandson, saying that he couldn’t navigate its contacts and that its shape and cell service made it a sub-standard phone. “A phone that’s an Internet appliance, an MP3 player, a camera and a whole bunch of other functions doesn’t make a lot of sense,” he said. “You try to build a universal device that does all things for all people, and guess what? It doesn’t do anything very well.”
Some conflicts of interest/issues to consider:
- Cooper’s old company Motorola doesn’t make usable smartphones
- Cooper’s new company ArrayComm is “the world leader in multi-antenna signal processing,” just the thing needed by broadband-relays called femtocells Cooper’s promoting these days for indoors reception
- Cooper is 80 years old
- Cooper’s wife is the creator of the Jitterbug, limited-function voice phones targeting the elderly
Are you ready to dump your iPhone smartphone for a Jitterbug simple-phone tomorrow?
Daily question: How much is that stick-figure drawing worth?
Tue, Oct 28, 08
Dan Roam’s recent book, The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures, has a great website with stick figure animations to explain how visual thinking can be employed to understand problems and communicate solutions:
In an interview at Metropolis magazine, Roam mentions:
A lot of your work involves basic information design. Are you a fan of Edward Tufte or Richard Saul Wurman?
Absolutely. Tufte and Wurman are certainly the grandfathers of information visualization, no doubt about it, and we must bow to our elders who have been there before and cut through the swamp. That said, I’m not always a huge fan of Tufte. His books have been given awards for being the most beautiful books of the 20th century. But every time I walk into an office and see them on someone’s desk, I ask, “Have you read the books?” And I have yet to meet anyone who’s actually read them. From my take in the hard and fast world of business, his approach is dry and academic. In his own work I find that he drains the blood out of the visual.
Maybe it’s not “designed” enough for you?
I had an interesting conversation with Missy Cummings, director of the Humans and Automation Lab at MIT. She’s an ex-Navy fighter pilot, who’s taken her understanding of how people in high-pressure situations understand complex data, and thought about how that data can be presented in intuitive ways. The topic of Tufte came up. Missy said she appreciates his ideas, but where she disagrees with him is: if you’re in a high-pressure situation and have multiple sources of data coming at you and one of them is off, you want chart junk yelling, “Pay attention to this piece of data over here!” You want flashing red lights, drop shadows, three-dimensional effects—all the stuff Tufte tells you to avoid. You’re supposed to take time to really look at and understand his charts. That is a lovely luxury that you almost never have in business, and certainly don’t have when you’re flying a plane.
Is your copy of Tufte’s work serving as coffee-table adornment or dog-eared work aid?
Daily question: License MBAs?
Sat, Oct 25, 08
“..there’s no universally accepted set of professional values backed up by a governing body with the power to censure managers who deviate from the code.”
So say the authors of a recent Harvard Business Review article (via the Economist.com) on why MBAs should be licensed. They argue:
“Codes create and sustain a feeling of community and mutual obligation that members have toward each other and toward the profession.”
Hopefully, such nutty ideas won’t dominate the re-regulatory landscape brewing up in reaction to the financial meltdown and we’ll be smarter than that.
After all, more than half of the licensed American internists and rheumatologists, for example, routinely prescribe placebo treatments to their patients and consider them to be ethically permissible.
I point this out only in relation to the persistent call of a very small but vocal minority of designers and designer-wannabes to license designers, like doctors. People who love rules, regulations, shortcuts, best practices, six sigmas, templates, processes and anything else that’s the progeny of bureaucracy love licenses. Especially if they are the ones to set up the licensing rules and, of course, monetarily benefit from the license umbrella.
If licensing is the answer to design what’s the question?
