The d.Fund will focus on Designer-Centric Startups

Always refreshing to hear designers get recognized! The d.Fund aims to increase the number of start-ups co-founded by people who have design experience. Read more at TechCrunch.

I want the Eames Lounge Chair!

Ever since studying industrial and furniture design in school, I’ve been in love with the Eames Lounge Chair. Until I actually acquire one, I can at least enjoy the care shown in this assembly video!
I agree with Casey Chan over at Gizmodo: I would also like to see the entire process including the wood preparation!

Almost kicked out of Design School over Dieter Rams

Well, not exactly, but I thought it was a catchy headline – more on that later.

Dieter Rams is considered on of the greats in the realm of Industrial Design. He’s most often associated with the global consumer products company Braun and the Functionalist school of design. There is no doubt that he has influenced a great number of today’s product designers.

In fact, according to a Gizmodo article, there is an amazing resemblance between products designed by Dieter Rams to the now iconic design by Jonathan Ive, Senior Vice President of Industrial Design for Apple. In the image below, you can see products by Rams along the top with seemingly influenced Apple product counterparts, below.

Image Credit: Gizmodo

It’s fair to say that, in the least, Ive’s dedication to “honesty” and “simplicity” in his Apple product designs follow Ram’s ten principles to “good design” (sometimes referred to as the Design Ten Commandments):

Good design:

1. is innovative
2. makes a product useful
3. is aesthetic
4. makes a product understandable
5. is unobtrusive
6. is honest
7. is long-lasting
8. is thorough down to the last detail
9. is environmentally friendly
10. is as little design as possible

I encourage you to head over to Uzi Shmilovici’s post What Every Entrepreneur and Product Manager Should Learn from Dieter Rams at Future Simple, where he shares his thoughts on Rams and how PipeJump applies the 10 principles in their web product design.

As a designer or product manager, it’s easy to lose track of these core principles when fielding the overload of “feature requests”. It’s good to be reminded that one should step back and remember to meet basic objectives, first.

This is also the foundation of the Minimal Viable Product theory popularized by Eric Ries. Ries has been blogging about this concept on his Lesson Learned blog for years and has been spreading the word via the Lean Startup movement which is catching on with many technology-based product companies.

Now for that story: As an Industrial Design undergrad, I certainly spent some time studying Dieter Rams.  Our 3rd year class was even assigned a project in which we were to “redesign” a shaver and pair of shears for Braun.  I’d like to think that I asked for an alternate product because I had already developed a respect for Braun’s design (established by Rams), but I think I just didn’t want to design a shaver or pair of shears…  I ended up designing an airbrush concept.

In our 4th year, as a follow-up to the Braun project, we were given another small appliance product design assignment – such as a hairdryer.  Although I had (and still have) a tremendous appreciation for physical product design, by this time I was frustrated that our program was too focused on physical products. So again, I humbly asked for an alternate assignment (at least I recall the request being humble).

Our new professor, who had just joined our school that year, took my asking as rebellious and denied the request.  After some “heated” discussion, I was “asked” to leave his class.  Well, there was only one 4th year Industrial Design session.  After taking up the issue with the ID School Director, the professor and I reached a compromise.  While my classmates were designing another small appliance, I worked on a project of my own choice – an exhibit display system (mostly developed, and presented itself, in 3D graphics and animation).

That’s the story about how I was almost kicked out of Design School over Dieter Rams… (sort of).

Image at the top of this blog is a poster of Ram’s ten principles created by design firm Bibliotheque that is available for purchase here.

Data is Beautiful: David McCandless is a Data Detective

According to his TED Speaker bio, David McCandless is a Data Journalist. In his new book, Information Is Beautiful (UK; in the US, it’s being called The Visual Miscellaneum), David and his team of information designers explore a wide range of visualized data points in over 250 infographics.

In this TedTalk video, he explains his enjoyment as a “data detective” – discovering patterns in information data. Good design, he suggests, is the best way to navigate information glut — and it may just change the way we see the world.  In particular, McCandless is interested in living data visualization and data mashups.

You can see the TedTalk video on ted.com or below.

Information is Beautiful Website: http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/

David McCandless on Twitter: http://twitter.com/mccandelish

2010 Social Networking Map by Flowtown

I’m always a sucker for a great infographic!  This one was shared with me by my friend, Sue.  It is a geographic view of the social networking landscape (no pun intended) today.

Some of my favorite points are the “Strait of Rick Roll” near the YouTube land mass, “Land of Defunct Social Networks”, not-to-be-missed small island of “LOL CATS”, and of course the multiple “Google Information Gathering Outposts”.

See  the full-size map over at Flowtown.com.

Iteration Improves Innovation – Simple Advice from 3 Technology Thought Leaders

Iteration was the central point at a talk on Innovation at the last “Entrepreneurs Uncensored!” MIT/Stanford VLAB session.

Respecting the request of moderator Ravi Belani to keep some of what was discussed as “something special for the audience to take home”, I won’t go into great detail on the anecdotal gems shared by the speakers, but will hit some of their major points.

Three excellent speakers were assembled for the panel, each offering a unique perspective on the specific topic “How I Pivoted to Success Through Effective Iteration and Innovation“:

• Marissa Mayer, VP, Search Products & User Experience at Google, spoke frankly from her experience as one of the  first Engineers at Google leading several of Google’s flagship applications.
• Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO, cited that their clients come to them when they need help with innovation, but their internal team also challenges themselves with design experiments.
• Randy Komisar, Partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Author of Getting to Plan B, provided the perspective of venture financiers – how to turn early company growth failures into successes.

Marissa Mayer was the first to share her perspective through very generous insights into Google’s early product decisions. She offered up 4 recommendations:

• Focus on Users, Users, Users: instead of deliberating on what users might do, use A/B testing to find out what users really want.  That’s what Google did when deciding between which of 2 early features for Google News search to work on first.  And they never stopped using this approach when deciding on new features and products.
• Innovation is more important than perfection: Again citing an example, this time in the area of acquiring Deja News, Mayer preaches that launching early and iterating has been a successful approach for Google.
• Separate Technology and Application: Unlikely successes may be born out of a product or service.  Widening vision allowed Google AdSense to flourish within Gmail by providing targeted ads despite some early opposition from the idea.
• And running out time, Mayer added her last point: “Speed!”

Tim Brown was next up. Although IDEO began as a physical product industrial design company, they have grown to be an extremely successful all-encompassing global design consultancy.

Brown offered that one cannot innovate without experimentation.  Experimentation means prototyping – both of which equate to iteration.  And, iteration includes giving yourself the time to experiment.  Brown added that one should still anticipate the outcome of prototyping and that the key is to learn from each iteration.

His second point was that, in IDEO’s experience, some of the best innovations result from the non-obvious and, in fact, that some of the best ideas come from the edges of the organization.

Similar to Mayer’s position that Google learns by “eating their own dog food”, Brown also shared that IDEO learns by developing experiments around its own internal processes.  This probably isn’t obvious to most companies, but worthy of consideration.

In conclusion, Brown says a company (or individual) should have great stories about successes and failures.  This is how lessons are learned and shared from experiments.

Last up was Randy Komisar to offer some amazing advice despite opening with “I have nothing to add.” Komisar shared several Silicon Valley tech war stories. Each one clearly supported his key points, especially for a startup:

• Plan for iteration: don’t blow your whole budget on the single “idea and plan”.
• Komisar also stated that a prototype is an absolute necessity for a startup seeking funding.  He gave a specific mobile software example where, by user testing and (relatively) inexpensive prototyping, they were able to quickly rule out features that users simply wouldn’t use and focus on the (obvious) one that they would.
• Retain the flexibility to pivot from a failure: Avoid a win / lose outcome; you may even find yourself continuously pivoting.  ”When you decide to pivot, you’ll wish you had done it earlier.“
• Learn from failure: Komisar said he is known as the “failure guru”, a moniker he doesn’t really like, but concluded that “If you can’t afford to fail, you can’t afford to innovate.”

Notably, several times throughout the talk when iteration and user testing was discussed, the cult of Apple came up. I believe that each speaker gave credit to Apple and Steve Jobs for being the “last of a breed”.  Apple has to work hard to work on its product in “world wide wow secrecy” and, somehow, Jobs is still uncannily right in product decisions.  Although Komisar did offer up a perfectly timed crack about “holding one’s phone the right way”, which did elicit great laughs from the packed audience.

Another topic that popped up a few times was Google’s practice of allowing their teams to spend 20% of their time on “passion projects”. Both Brown and Komisar were supportive of the general approach.  Miller confidently stated that 50% of Google launches come from the 20% time.  That sounds like a pretty incredible return for generously fostering creativity.

While iteration was the central line of the whole discussion, quickly discovering what doesn’t work and pivoting towards what does work was the clear take-away from the session.  Companies can do this by turning any failure into a success by applying what is learned.

The session was expertly moderated by Ravi Belani of Draper Fisher Jurvetson who kicked off open discussion for the panel and asked them to sum up their recommendations in 6 words.  I couldn’t be more succinct, so here it is:

• Marissa Mayer: Focus on the user. Prototype. Test.
• Tim Brown: Prototype. Learn. Prototype. Learn.
• Randy Komisar: Investing in iteration immensely improves innovation.

Simply expert advice for any company.

iBrainstorm iPad App – “A Creative Collaboration Tool”

iBrainstorm is a neat iPad app created by Universal Mind.

I’ve only played with it for a few minutes, but plan to spend more time checking it out. The creators say that they developed the tool for their own use and decided to share it with the user experience (UX) community.

This is a 1.0 version of the app just released last week with some basic features, but they work pretty well:

• Draw on the canvas
• Add sticky notes (that you type on with keyboard)
• Colorize the sticky notes for hierarchy, grouping, etc.
• Save or share your work via email

Universal Mind says to send them feedback and they’ll keep working on the app.  I look forward to seeing how it evolves.

Get the iBrainstorm iPad app for free in the App Store; they also indicate that an iPhone version is coming.