Many designers define their practice as professional problem solving. I’d like to take that a step further and say that it is decontextualized, generalized, or abstract problem solving. This is because design is not tied to any domain or subject matter.

Ironically though, there is no such thing as a decontextualize, generalized or abstract problem. Problems by defintion must emerge from a particular domain or subject matter. So design is a generalized problem solving endeavor yet there is not such thing as a generalized problem–there are only specific problems.

As a result many design methods intend to gather domain knowledge in order to bridge this gap between the general and the specific. This then begs the question: is it better to have a subject matter expert with some design knowledge or a design expert with some domain knowledge?

This question maps directly to proejct resourcing. With limited resoruces what is the best balance bewteen domain and desgin expertise? And on what does this balancing act depend?

I think many mature designers have an innate (and usually non-selfish) sense of how to manage this balance. However I have not yet seen anything more concrete on the matter outside of my own experience. This becomes a problem when dealing with entreched disciplines like marketing and engineering who tend to have many narrow preconceived notions (well, don’t we all?) about problem solving and are more easily persuaded by more objective information than the designer’s experience.

Oh and merry Christmas. Now I need toget back to playing The Movies (its a video game simulation for those who haven’t heard of it).

Ok so I was getting a little bored with the default wordpress theme and thought I should spend some time to customize a theme of my own. Hope you like it.

Hopefully I’ll have something a little more interesting to read shortly.

I had a list of quotes here but it started taking up too much room so I’ve put the quotes in its own page to clean things up a bit. You will find the permanent link in the side panel under Pages > Quotes.

Not sure this is even worth 2 cents, but… In no particular order, and not written in stone:

• Less is usually more
• Do not make people feel stupid
• Design for probable, no possible
• People just want to accomplish their goals, and being educated is often not their goal
• Design is to help people better accomplish their goals
• The more expert, the less aware a person is of their activities
• Design is about problem finding and problem solving
• Design problems are the problems people experience
• People are generally more motivated by avoiding pain than by increasing pleasure
• Ask all the truth, but ask it slant
• Personas and scenarios are ultimately means to an end.
• Upstream costs and effort saves greater downstream costs and pain
• Functionality should announce its presence

There is so much talk of “design” and its strategic importance floating around these days. However no one, least of all designers, can agree on what exactly design as a professional practice means in any consistent and practical way (just read any DMI report for a taste of the fluff that passes for design scholarship). Unfortunately, the word “design” seems to be about as meaningful as the phrase “family values”.

Perhaps as individual designers some of us can lucidly specify what it is exactly that we do and how it is valuable. Unfortunately we cannot manage to do this as a collective, and certainly not with the consistency and clarity the business world needs in order to understand how design benefits them and how to integrate it into thier activities.

While undoubtedly fertile ground “design” as is it commonly used is far too fluid, too situational, and too mercurial to provide much of a professional foundation. To build a credible profession that offers consistent value and clearly communicates both this value and the methods for collaboration, we need not only fertile ground but stable ground.

This means that we designers will have to give up some fertility to gain some stability. To do this we will have to find the strength to appropriately position design and commit to it. But the design world is terrified of committment. And rather than face this fear, this weakness, the design world through some rather nice double think (Buchanan, page 6) prefers to convince itself that this weakness is actually strength.

However, Michael Porter says the strength to make the committment to do somethings and not other things is the essence of strategy. His logic is as follows. Strategy is all about taking a clear position. Position is all about making tradeoffs. And tradeoffs are deciding what you do do and what you don’t do, and sticking to it. So if you cannot be clear about what you don’t do, you cannot be clear about what you do do, and the whole stratgic house of cards falls apart.

This problem frustrates me because it holds all of us back and has some of its roots in design education. Take Herb Simon’s academically popular definition of design “Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.” It is expansive to the point of meaninglessness. Our inability to define design or its position hinders the credibility of design as a strategic competency. At some point soon we will have to get over our timidity. If we can’t I’m afraid designers will become irrelevant as other disciplines claim the professional territory we wouldn’t. We are standing on a burning platform folks.

PS
Here’s a recent exmple of the confusion over what design really is….

– Michael Bierut says design is innovation
– Larry Kelly says nonsense, don’t conflate the two
– Mark Hurst suggests simplicity is the new innovation

So design is, or is not, innovation or simplicity depending on who you ask. Well that clears it all up.

Part 1: Definitions (10/23)
Part 2: iNPD model (11/06)
Part 3: Innovation Matrix – Categories of Innovation
Part 4: Innovation Matrix – Areas of Innovation (01/05)
Part 5: Innovation Matrix – Overall
Part 6: Process

Not all innovations are created equal. And likewise not all innovations should be treated equally. So in order to succeed different kinds of innovations must be handled differently. That is neither novel nor controversial. The sticky part comes when we try to define how innovations differ and map these differences to specific handling strategies.

I have recognized roughly 4 kinds of innovation: sustaining, incremental, breakthrough and disruptive. Some of these categories probably sound familiar, and you likely have some established notions of what they mean. Just for a moment though, suspend your own notions and just try to see innovation according to the following.

	Evolutionary		Revolutionary
	Sustaining	Incremental	Breakthrough	Disruptive
Desc	Performance improvements on features current customers already value	New functionality to satisfy unserved or underserved needs	Redefine product category with new value proposition	Create radical new products markets and biz models, undermining established players
Purpose	Refresh Product	Advance Product	Redefine Product	Define New Value Networks
Variables	Known	Partially Known	Unknown	Unknowable
Goal	Keep share of the pie	Grow share of the pie	Grow the whole pie	A chocolate sundae
Risk	Low	Moderate	High	Extreme
Fuel	Data	Information	Knowledge	Wisdom
Drivers	Sales	Market	Design	Visionaries and Accidents
Activity	Tactical Execution	Strategic Execution	Strategic Planning	Strategic Revolution
Examples	Mustang 95-04 Color iPod Xbox 360	CD-Burner Camera Phone Windows 95	Starbucks Music Videos Walkman	P2P Steel Mini Mills VOIP

* This model is definitely a work in progress, and some of my definitions are the result of playing with free associative analogy.

It is important to note that there is a lot of grey area and overlap between these categories. So try not to think of them as distinct and separate buckets. Rather try to think of them more like different areas of a landscape all blending into one another at the edges.

It is also important to note that this model is not on a scale from dull to sexy, from good to better or from less value to more. No one category is necessarily any better or worse than any other. They are simply different and deserve to be handled as such. This is often ignored for the rhetorically dramatic effect of using the language of disruption to make things sound more important. I’m working on formalizing some objective criteria to help guide categorization to help avoid such hyperbole.

But categorizing innovations correctly isn’t the point. Categorizing innovations appropriately is. Why? Because the categories themselves don’t really matter. What matters is what they mean in terms of guiding development activity. Indeed these categories aren’t just for academic exercise—they are actionable. Each one maps to different evaluative criteria, rules of engagement, and as a whole provides the foundation for a kind of innovation risk portfolio management.

By evaluative criteria I mean the criteria by which teams can rank, prioritize and judge different innovations within the same categories in order to determine which to pursue and which to shelf. By rules of engagement, I mean the rules that guide the expectations and contributions of each discipline in the multidisciplinary iNPD team. And together these categories support innovation risk portfolio management by making explicit how much attention and how many resources the company is devoting to what levels of risk in terms of innovation.

There are serious risks related to inappropriately categorizing innovations. For instance, using inappropriate evaluative criteria would poison go-no-go decisions. And following inappropriate rules of engagement between the iNPD disciplines would put team members’ expectations and contributions at odds with what the innovation naturally demands. The results would be frustration, interpersonal conflict, loss of morale and inadequate diligence.

To complicate things the same innovation could arguably belong to multiple categories depending on perspective. For instance, from the perspective of Apple’s management and investors the iPod was a breakthrough, because it represents the company’s first step away from computing and into the very different consumer electronics world. However, from a consumer’s perspective it’s a purely sustaining device—the same functionality as dozens of other players, but in a much more distinctive and attractive package and hipper brand. So talk of categories should be mindful of whose perspective is driving.

Further Questions:

• If perspective is important to appropriately categorizing innovations, is there a way to standardize a list of common perspectives?
• Other associations for each category?

Recent reports indicate that claiming something is dead is now quite dead. The phrase died of exhaustion, having been overworked by the armies of second-rate intellectual hacks seeking to make names for themselves with the lazy hyperbole and vacuous dramatics of issuing counterfeit death certificates, and the swarms of bubbledheaded zombies always too eager to parrot such trite melodramatic self-promotional blathering.

A certain Mr. Mark Twain had long ago warned that reports of death are often exaggerated–a claim confirmed by Mr. Paul McCartney. This warning has been lavishly ignored in technological and academic circles, and the once vibrant attention-grabbing phrase has finally given up its ghost. Rest in peace.

(I suppose this post makes me a second-rate intellectual hack too. oh well.)

• meme-peddler: someone who is constantly trying to coin new nonsensical terms and is alway up on the lastest buzz
• brandmeme: a corporate brand message masquerading as meme; intellectual product placement so to speak
• buzzhound: buys all of the meme-peddler’s latest wares, and is always anxious to uncritically show-off his newest purchases
• hype-o-condriac: someone with a strong over-sensitively to all forms of hype due to over-exposure
• hype-o-allergenic: an antidote to brandmemes and other forms of unwarranted hype

So I just ate my very first Krispy Kreme today. I’ve never had one before, and I thought I should do it soon before the company goes completely under.

Results: it was completely, absolutely, truly awful. It had the sort of unpleasant high-pitched faux sweetness you usually get from an excess of saccharin. It was so sweet it was almost bitter. It left my ears ringing. And the dough was a triumph of blandness. It was the flavor equivelent of Garfield or Dave Matthews. It was decidedly soft and squishy, but i wouldn’t call it fresh. It was fresh in the same way WonderBread is fresh.

I’m glad I had the experience of (partially) eating a Krispy Kreme donut, but I will never, ever intentionally do it again.

This is the first part of what I think will be a 5 part series to build a crude theory of innovation. Ironically, there is nothing terribly novel about any of the individual ideas in I’m presenting here—and perhaps I’m even misusing the word innovation. I do hope however that my integration of these ideas will be at least insightful. Regardless of true novelty there is always value in just putting thoughts into word.

So here is the overall flow I’m planning:

Part 1: Definitions
Part 2: iNPD model
Innovation Matrix – Categories of Innovation
Part 4: Innovation Matrix – Areas of Innovation (01/05)
Part 5: Innovation Matrix – Overall
Part 6: Process

My working definition of innovation refers to a capitalization on new business opportunities through new products, services, processes or experiences (collectively referred to simply as product hereafter). New ideas that cannot be tied to business opportunities may be wonderfully creative, but ultimately inert in terms of capitalization, and so fail my working definition.

Opportunities are situations that afford both a chance to create value for someone or something at a profit in some new or unique way, and a chance to achieve and maintain a position of competitive advantage.

Now here is where things get a little controversial. I believe that people and organizations are more strongly averse to pain than they are attracted to pleasure. This negative motivation means that one will most consistently provide higher value by helping to alleviate pain. This is of course a philosophical position I cannot (yet) prove with empirical evidence.

I’m defining pain to refer to a problem that 1) costs a subject time, money and/or attention, 2) the subject experiencing the problem accurately recognizes it, and 3) the problem is sufficiently acute to warrant spending time, money, and/or attention to alleviate it.

Pain then boils down to cost, in terms of time, money and attention (and in the case of consumers, perhaps personal ego as well). If the cost to alleviate the pain is less than the cost of living with it, we have ourselves a business opportunity ripe for a great new innovation to capitalize on. Please forgive the Fischer-Price economics—I’m just trying to lay some very basic definitions.

Costs drive Pain > Pain drives Opportunity > Opportunity drives Innovation
Under this interpretation, necessity really is the mother of invention.

With consumers it appears most (if not all) pains are costs related to at least one of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (or another needs hierarchy like Clayton Alderfer’s ERG). Henry spends a lot of money on diet books because he feels that his weight is costing him more in terms of belongingness than the books cost financially. Buying these books is his way to solve the pain of not belonging to his perception of a certain group.

These definitions raise further questions, such as:

• Other than pain what else can give rise to business opportunities?
• Should focusing on pain differ between consumers and businesses (what pain does the iPod solve? and is that why people are snapping them up?)
• Are there pains other than time/money/attention/ego costs that give rise to business opportunities?
• Does something like Maslow seem appropriate for classifying pains?
• Could it provide some insight into pains in order to drive innovative solutions, or is it just too academic?
• Is there a similar needs hierarchy for business customers, or does Maslow apply to businesses too?