Xerox, Apple, and Innovation

Malcolm Gladwell on Creation Myth: Xerox PARC, Apple, and the truth about innovation in the New Yorker

Xerox is famous in tech circles for inventing the personal computer but failing to successfully market it. Gladwell explores this story and shows that Xerox did profit from its PC research by inventing the laser printer.

The whole article is definitely worth reading. Here are couple of quotes to get started:

“Jobs went to Xerox PARC on a Wednesday or a Thursday, and I saw him on the Friday afternoon,” Hovey recalled. “I had a series of ideas that I wanted to bounce off him, and I barely got two words out of my mouth when he said, ‘No, no, no, you’ve got to do a mouse.’ I was, like, ‘What’s a mouse?’ I didn’t have a clue. So he explains it, and he says, ‘You know, [the Xerox mouse] is a mouse that cost three hundred dollars to build and it breaks within two weeks. Here’s your design spec: Our mouse needs to be manufacturable for less than fifteen bucks. It needs to not fail for a couple of years, and I want to be able to use it on Formica and my bluejeans.’

The difference between direct and indirect manipulation—between three buttons and one button, three hundred dollars and fifteen dollars, and a roller ball supported by ball bearings and a free-rolling ball—is not trivial. It is the difference between something intended for experts, which is what Xerox PARC had in mind, and something that’s appropriate for a mass audience, which is what Apple had in mind.

Read the whole article at http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/05/16/110516fa_fact_gladwell

Five Common PowerPoint Mistakes

Brad Phipps posted on the The Five Most Common PowerPoint Mistakes

1. Too Many Slides
2. Too Many Words
3. Pointless animations
4. Not Enough Graphics
5. Complicated Visuals

Read the post at http://www.prdaily.com/Main/Articles/11244.aspx

The Curious History of “Tribal” Prints

Slate Magazine writes on The Curious History of “Tribal” Prints: How the Dutch peddle Indonesian-inspired designs to West Africa. It presents an interesting history on the origin of currently fashionable "tribal" prints.

"In the meantime, Europeans were hard at work figuring out how to manufacture their own versions of batik, with the intention of flooding the market in Indonesia with cheaper, machine-made versions of the cloths (the handmade versions were labor-intensive and expensive). Finally, at the end of the 19th century, a Belgian printer developed a method for applying resin to both sides of a cotton cloth, and the machine-made wax-print fabric was born.

But there was a problem: The machine-made version of these cloths developed a crackling effect—a series of small lines, dots, and imperfections where the resin cracked and dye seeped through—that didn’t appeal to Indonesian batik purists. In need of a market for the new textiles, the Dutch turned to West Africa. As it turned out, West Africans were actually partial to these imperfections: They appreciated the fact that no two bolts of cloth were identical. The West African fondness for this effect was so pronounced that Dutch wax manufacturers still program those imperfections into the printing process today, long after the actual mechanical limitation has been resolved."

Why clothing sizes make no sense

Julia Felsenthal writes in Slate Magazine on A Size 2 Is a Size 2 Is a Size 8.

The ASTM recommendations have evolved over time to accommodate a very real trend: vanity sizing. Women don’t want to know their real size, so manufacturers re-label bigger sizes with smaller numbers. In 1958, for example, a size 8 corresponded with a bust of 31 inches, a waist of 23.5 inches and a hip girth of 32.5 inches. In ASTM’s 2008 standards, a size 8 had increased by five to six inches in each of those three measurements, becoming the rough equivalent of a size 14 or 16 in 1958. We can see size inflation happening over shorter time spans as well; a size 2 in the 2011 ASTM standard falls between a 1995 standard size 4 and 6. (This may also explain why smaller sizes are constantly invented. The 1958 standard listed 8 as its smallest size. The 1995 ASTM standard listed a size 2. In 2011, ASTM lists a standard for size 00.)

[...] a private organization called the Textile Clothing Technology Corporation conducted the first widespread study of American women’s bodies since O’Brien and Shelton, called SizeUSA. They installed body scanners at 13 different locations across the country and, over the course of about a month, scanned the bodies of almost 11,000 people between the ages of 18 and 80. The main finding, says Boorady, who was involved with the study, is that people are bigger than ever. The study also distinguished five to seven distinct body shapes for women, as opposed to the single hourglass ideal that has long determined the proportions of clothing (and which only 8 percent of American women have). Boorady says the results mean “it would be extremely difficult to come up with a single sizing system.”

[...] in 1986, the Times reported on manufacturers’ resistance to the development of ASTM standards. “The Laura Ashley woman is different from the Liz Claiborne woman, who is different from the woman whom Calvin Klein envisions,” opined the article’s author, who then quoted a designer saying, “Fit is a type of identity.”
There is something to this. My sense of brand loyalty is as much about the way a designer’s clothes fit as how they look. I [Ms Felsenthal] do pretty well with J.Crew sweaters, Urban Outfitters jeans, and Frye boots—because those have become, after years of trial and error, my brands. If these companies suddenly changed their sizes to adhere to some synthetic average of the American female form, I’d feel annoyed—even indignant.

The article is an interesting introduction to an intriguing topic, one that combines design, statistics, economics, business, and psychology.

Web

The Oatmeal presents "How to make your shopping cart suck less" Vulgarly amusing advice on design.

What not to ask

Sometimes the secret of successful design is to not include a feature. Boing-Boing reports on a company that increased its sales by $300 million by removing its user log-in feature.


http://boingboing.net/2011/08/05/300-million-button-making-customers-create-logins-to-buy-cost-etailer-300myear.html

Iterating good design

Rob Beschizza writing for Boing-Boing contrasts Sony's and Apple's approaches to solving design problems.


Misunderstanding Apple

"At a recent event I attended, someone involved in marketing said that Apple's success is founded on it creating substantially new designs every year to keep everyone keeping up. In his view, Apple ownership is about getting the latest thing to impress people."

"It's weird that a company under such constant scrutiny is misunderstood like this, often by people who have been watching it for years. Isn't it obvious that Apple rarely changes its designs?"

"I imagine that Apple is delighted to see rivals convinced that every year's model is different to the last one; talk about a reality distortion field. Companies like Dell and HP will chance across good design every so often, but companies like Sony make good designs then abandon them intentionally because they're blind to their own good design choices."

"... Sony rarely iterates, even when it's onto something good. Everything is a one-off. It treats a billion-dollar business the way a microbrewery treats ales with silly names."

"Apple isn't the only company that persists with a good design, either. If you want an ultraportable laptop that's Windows or Linux-friendly which works better than the Z and isn't outrageously expensive, look no further than the Lenovo X series."

His essay is illustrated with great comparison photos:
"Check out these two iMacs. The one on the left is from 2007, and the other is the latest model. They're more than four years apart. Here's the first and the latest iPod. While they're not identical, bear in mind that nine years passed in the interval... Here's a Mac from 1984 and one from 1994. Though Apple made all sorts of other desktop towers and pizza boxes in this period, this popular design saw more than a decade of refinement." See them at http://boingboing.net/2011/11/14/what-the-vaio-z-says-about-son.html

Websites that leave a bad taste in your mouth

Slate Magazine on Why are restaurant websites so horrifically bad?

Over the last few weeks I've spent countless hours, now lost forever, plumbing the depths of restaurant Web hell. I also spoke to several industry experts about the reasons behind all these maliciously poorly designed pages. I heard several theories for why restaurant sites are so bad—that they can't afford to pay for good designers, that they don't understand what people want from a site, and that they don't really care what's on their site. But the best answer I found was this: Restaurant sites are the product of restaurant culture. These nightmarish websites were spawned by restaurateurs who mistakenly believe they can control the online world the same way they lord over a restaurant. "In restaurants, the expertise is in the kitchen and in hospitality in general," says Eng San Kho, a partner at the New York design firm Love and War, which has created several unusually great restaurant sites (more on those in a bit). "People in restaurants have a sense that they want to create an entertainment experience online—that's why disco music starts, that's why Flash slideshows open. They think they can still play the host even here online."

The article illustrates its points with great links to expensive websites that may satisfy a chef's ego but don't work for the customer. The whole article is well worth reading.

Watch design

David Pogue writes on How to Build a Usable Watch

Good interface design is darned hard:

"Your inclination is to stuff a lot of features into your product — “hey, that’ll make it sell, right?” And yet every feature has to go somewhere. It has to fit on some screen, in some menu, under some keystroke. So the more you stuff in, the more difficult to use your product becomes, and the less pleasure it will bring your customers.

I had recently bought my daughter a $9 digital watch from Wal-Mart. It had three buttons. You were supposed to be able to perform all of the watch’s functions using only these three buttons: set the time, set an alarm, turn the alarm on and off, start and stop the stopwatch, record lap times, and so on.

It was, as you can guess, a disastrous user interface. Every button wound up performing multiple functions. Double-press. Press-and-hold. Press two at once. There’s no possible way you could master it without the 3-by-3 inch sheet of instructions in 2-point type."

Read his students' suggested design improvements at:
http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/11/how-to-build-a-usable-watch/

What you say isn't what I hear

"We think direct written and verbal communication is clear and accurate and efficient. It is none of those," writes Seth Godin. The implication: "Plan on being misunderstood. Repeat yourself. When in doubt, repeat yourself."

Getting Lost in Buildings

Donald Norman wrote about designers who can't figure out why users can't use the products they've designed. Boing Boing reports on a study by psychologists on why users get lost in award-winning buildings:

"Architects, on the other hand, may be among the class of people with very strong spatial skills, because their craft requires numerous spatial transformations, such as needing to envision 3D space from 2D depictions. One unanticipated consequence of such abilities is that they may not be very good at taking the perspective of a user with poorer spatial skills, and therefore may not be able to fully anticipate where users may have navigational difficulties within their buildings."

PowerPoint and Cognitive Science

Good design is more than making things pretty; good design communicates. IO9 posted on How Cognitive Science Can Improve Your PowerPoint Presentations based on a lecture by Stephen M. Kosslyn, author of Clear and to the Point: 8 Psychological Principles for Compelling PowerPoint Presentations.

Here's an overview:

1. The Goldilocks Rule: present the "just right" amount of data. Never include more information than your audience needs in a visual image.

2. The Rudolph Rule: make information stand out and highlight important details — the way Rudolph the reindeer's red nose stood out from the other reindeers'. If you're presenting a piece of relevant data in a list, why not make the data of interest a different color from the list? Or circle it in red?

3. The Rule of Four is a simple but powerful tool: the brain can generally hold only four pieces of visual information simultaneously. So don't ever present your audience with more than four things at once.

4. The Birds of a Feather Rule is another good rule for how to organize information when you want to show things in groups. "

The examples in the original post are worth reading.

Thanks to Boing Boing.

Egg drop

First day of class

Our characteristics for evaluating a product:

1. comfort
2. durability
3. price
4. appearance
5. needs
6. stability
7. weight
8. efficient to produce
9. size
10. age
11. fit
12. material
13. reputation
14. type of use

If you're interested you can see last year's list

Welcome Kalamazoo College class of 2014

Welcome to K!

And welcome to the Design Intelligence seminar. This course is part of the Shared Passages Seminar program at K College. Like all of the First Year Seminars, much of our time will be devoted to discussion and writing. The topic of this particular seminar is design.

From the class syllabus:

This course will look at the role of design in the world around us. Our emphasis will be on features, feel and function of design. We will consider why some designs work well and others work poorly. We will think about how and why things are designed in particular ways. We will look at design choices from various perspectives.

The broader goal of this class is to develop and refine skills necessary to succeed in college and beyond. We will work on discussion skills, presentation skills, analytic skills, and writing skills.

If you are interested, you can find out more about the course by exploring some of the posts below or following some of the related links on the right.

Material world

New materials allow new designs. The Financial Times reported on the Materials Library at King’s College London

Materials libraries are one of the newest and most intriguing manifestations of materials science, which is itself a relatively new term to describe an age-old discipline – the study of the relationship between the molecular structure of materials and their perceptible physical properties, such as hardness, softness, flexibility or brittleness. In the past, the study of materials fell under metallurgy, chemistry and solid-state physics. But in the last half-century, with more new materials being created than in all previous history, their sheer variety – plastics, semiconductors, biomaterials – could no longer be understood merely within the classical disciplines.

Take Aerogel: the world’s lightest solid consists of 99.8 per cent air and looks like a vague, hazy mass. And yet despite its insubstantial nature, it is remarkably strong; and because of its ability to nullify convection, conduction and radiation, it also happens to be the best insulator in the world. Sitting next to the Aerogel is its thermal opposite, a piece of aluminium nitride, which is such an effective conductor of heat that if you grasp a blunt wafer of it in your hand, the warmth of your body alone allows it to cut through ice.

Read the whole article: "A library of the world’s most unusual compounds" by George Pendle.

Thanks to Boing Boing

Photo from Tanakawho's Flickr stream, used by Creative Commons permission

http://www.flickr.com/photos/28481088@N00/ / CC BY 2.0

Should design be a policy priority?

Allison Arieff for the NY Times wrote"Designs on Policy"

Design touches all sectors of our daily life, and increasing awareness of that reality can result in tremendous benefit for all. Is design about aesthetics? Of course it is, but that’s just one of its many facets. Design can save time, money and one’s sanity. It can simplify use, enhance enjoyment, and keep us safe and well. I believe the National Design Policy can help to tangibly illustrate design’s value and help to keep it from being reduced to an afterthought, that “denim patch on a satin dress” Beirut is talking about.


Some designers I spoke to are less than thrilled with the whole design policy idea. An architect said emphatically, “Good design needs no spokesperson, needs no voice other than itself.” Yet I’m not convinced that’s always the case. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be living in, as I’ve heard one homeowner describe it, “a house with a Spanish Gothic front”, or driving Pontiac Aztecs through poorly designed intersections, and signing on for balloon payments, among countless examples. Design doesn’t need good PR; it needs to be recognized as essential to good practice. Anything that can help facilitate the importance of design as part of larger systems thinking is a positive.

She writes frequently on design for the New York Times Opinionator section

Thanks to Patrik for suggesting this.

Details matter

Dustin Curtis posts on Disney's sound system.

"To get the original audio system at Disney World to work, engineers simply attached large speakers to several hundred light-posts randomly scattered throughout the park. ... [T]here is actually a minor flaw with this system. Because the speakers are placed on arbitrarily-positioned light-posts throughout the park, the volume of the music slightly fluctuates as visitors walk along pathways. As they get closer to a speaker, the music gets louder, and as they walk away, it gets quieter."

Although no one complained about this, Disney re-engineered the park's sound.

"Today, as you walk through Disney World, the volume of the ambient music does not change. Ever. More than 15,000 speakers have been positioned using complex algorithms to ensure that the sound plays within a range of just a couple decibels throughout the entire park. It is quite a technical feat acoustically, electrically, and mathematically."

Read the whole post at http://dustincurtis.com/how-mr-q-manufactured-emotion.html

Photo by Joe Penniston used under Creative Commons

http://www.flickr.com/photos/expressmonorail/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Thanks to Boing Boing

Intersections

From Indexed.

Downtown Kalamazoo

An hour of observations...