So I’m in Buenos Aires right now. Doing a little sight seeing. I’ve notice that when I travel I never visit a country–I alway visit a city.

I rarely leave that city unless my trip is over. So, I’ve visited Barcelona, not Spain. Rome, not Italy. Cuzco, not Peru. In the city I walk. Everywhere. I shop, for mundane things like groceries. Sure I check out a few touristy things, but the big attraction for me has always been the cities themselves. And you can only see a city by walking its streets, yourself, no guide.

Some might think this a waste. Why go all that way and just see one city? But cities are reticent. They don’t open up to the casual acquiantance. You have to spend time with them, to get peronal, to let a city time to soak into you. If you don’t give it enough time you might as well just look at a picture book.

So anyway, I’m here to see if Buenos Aires and I are friends. So far it look promising.

Once upon a time claims like “content is king,” or “cash is king” were heard all over the net and in disposable hype-mongers like RedHerring and Fast Company. Everyone was saying this or that was king.

Well, if all the 2.0 stuff has shown us one thing its that people are king. YouTube isn’t about videos. Del.ici.ous isn’t about links. Flickr isn’t about pictures. SourceForge isn’t about code. They are all about the people behind and between the videos, link, pictures, code, etc…

Now this is more than just glib social software. This is more then just squeezing content production for free from users and letting them add ‘friends’ to some list. This is about engaging people’s minds and spirits; energizing thier subjective expression; and openning vast potentialities for interconnection. Actually people aren’t just king, they are king, content, consumers and (most importantly) consumed.

Calling this “peer-production” misunderstands and misrepresents the engine driving the whole thing. We have to get passed “peer-production” and its ironically supply-side mentality. Its not “peer-production”. Its mass self-expression. This isn’t splitting diction. This is a fundamental shift in perspective. Get it or get used to being a has-been.

Last week Daniel over at Innovation Zen posted about the differences between continental and anglo-saxon capitalism. This brought up an old issue for me about the tension between open and closed systems.

The Financial Times has a great article on this question. If we hadn’t created the internet 15 years ago, would we do it today? “Control and ownership seem intuitively the right way to go,” the article says. “We are likely to undervalue the importance, viability and productive power of open systems, open networks and non-proprietary production.”

So learning to design for giving up control is sort of like learning to fall–it may be easy to do, but it doesn’t feel right and we’re going to resist it like hell. Its like that scene in the Matrix where Neo learns to break free of his constricted perceptions by trying to leap from building-top to building-top. No one gets it the first time. But we have to get it.

There’s always something interesting in the frictions found where culture intersect. Check out Su Fie’s (Sophie’s) chronicle of a single jewish girl in Beijing trying to find just a little love and romance in such a completely foreign culture.

See more videos on NibTV:

Designers and stylists are synonymous in popular conception–and in the minds of many stylists. The reality, however, is that they aren’t the same at all.

In a previous post I took a stab at visualizing a certain perspective on the cognitive capabilities that distinguish designers from stylists.

Then recently I read Developers are from Mars, Programmers are from Venus on Hacknot which describes a nearly identical situation in software engineering. Developers and programmers are also vastly different, in many of the same ways designers and stylists differ.

Taking this article as a model, here are some of the key difference (some tongue-in-cheek, some entirely serious) between designers and stylists:

Stylists	Designers
Fussy pixel-perfectionists who delight in the minute decorative details of the artifact	Appreciate the fine details, but understand that they are only a small, occasionally self-indulgent part of what they do
Desireability is primary concern	Utility is primary concern
Shy away from the business (the goals, the models, the metrics, etc)	The business is like their second job, its success or failure is a key measure of their design work
Tactical	Strategic
Remains firmly entrenched in their own idiosyncratic subjectivities	Work very hard to get out of their own head, and see the world through their clients’ and users’ eyes
Obsessed with what’s cool	Obsessed with what works for clients and users
Doxa	Episteme
The solution to any business problem is slicker style (especially if they can make it look like an iPod)	Many solutions often need to be knitted together from multiple disciplines, and harmonizing them together can be more difficult than identifying them individually
Intuition	Process
The ego, the icon, the personality, the signature, the rockstar	The market need, the multi-disciplinary team, edge competencies
Aesthetics of complexity–what better way to inspire the awe your self-evident superiority deserves	Philosophy of simplicity–what better way to help people achieve their goals, create market value, and turn a tidy profit

By skill, approach, values and temperament, designers are very different from stylists. And just as the developer can program but the programmer can’t develop, so the designer can style but the stylist cannot design.

This is a sort of follow up to something I posted last year how the future of design will be in designers giving up our fussy and precious obsession with control. It seems I’m no longer alone:

Consumers are beginning in a very real sense to own our brands and participate in their creation… We need to learn to begin to let go.

AG Lafley, CEO P&G

I first experienced the limits of design’s control in my graduate thesis project. My project was based around intelligent agents that define a service over time through interaction with its user. In this project user testing always resulted in positives–false positives I soon learned. Why? Because there was nothing to test but imaginary scenarios I invented. Users were reacting to my ability to address their needs and not the product’s. But I would not be the product. There was in fact no way using established methods to test such services because they could not exist prior to use.

(Extreme digression: Of course the faculty couldn’t see the limits I was bumping into. “Are you suggesting that you don’t need to test your designs? That your product is so good it doesn’t need testing?” they sneered (ironic coming from a faculty that have never user tested their product–the curriculum they designed and industry’s experience with students infused with it. No I wasn’t suggesting that at all. I was experiencing the limits of their unquestioned dogma–something they were too blind to see and I was too green to truly appreciate)

As the things we design become more interactive, more self-determining, more deeply integrated with thier users, the less control designers will exercise over the final artifact. This is not only inevitable, its good. And it demands that we work and think in ways earlier generations of designers did not and could not.

Fussy and precious signature design is finished. Sure decoration stylists like Karim Rashid and Phillipe Starck will likely still garner some fame, but they are stylists and not designers. Tomorrow’s designers will be more authors than typographers, more concerned with the story and its telling than with the shape of letters it may be written in.

While Lafley comments specifically on branding and branding’s need to let go of its precious OCD fetishes, his words are equally true for design generally.

I have for a long time believed in the integrated new product development (iNPD) model Jonathan Cagan and Craig Vogel present in “Creating Breakthrough Products.” This model shatters traditional functional silos in favour of a balanced integration between the design, engineering and marketing disciplines. This integration results in products of higher value, and therefore higher likelihood of market success, by consistently improving usability, utility and desirability (Cagan and Vogel say usefulness where I say utility). These improvements are not coincidental but the necessary consequences of integrating these disciplines.

Unfortunately it hasn’t always been possible or practical to follow this model. However, when and where I have been able to follow it I have achieved remarkably better team dynamics and better results. That said I have started to recognize some faults in the iNPD model.

The first fault is that this iNPD model describes the fundamental issues occurring at the intersections between the design, engineering and marketing discipline, but overlooks the issues fundamental to each individual discipline.

The second fault I see is that Cagan and Vogel situate utility at the intersection of engineering and marketing. This certainly creates a pleasant symmetry, but I have the growing suspicion that this symmetry is forced and distorts the case both as it is and as it should be.

In my experience engineering is largely agnostic to a product’s utility, as long as a product development presents interesting engineering problems to solve. And marketing cares about utility only as a means to sell more products with higher gross margins; if a useless product proves attractive to the marketplace so be it.

Design on the other hand, as a problem solving endeavour, is primarily concerned with utility. Indeed many of our more powerful methods (contextual inquiry, task analysis, shadowing, personas, to name just a few) focus on helping to discover what users should find the most useful.

This then begs the two questions: 1) what should we find at the intersection of engineering and marketing? And 2) what are the primary concerns of engineering and marketing? Not having a formal background in either discipline I could be on rather thin ice, but I’m going to try to answer these questions anyway.

I’ll start with the second question first. While design is primarily concerned with questions of product utility, it seems that engineering is primarily concerned with questions of product feasibility and marketing with questions product viability.

To address the first question, while engineering can speak to development costs, and marketing can speak to pricing, together they can address questions of profitability.

I think we can map each of these areas of concern to specific questions that should drive each disciplines’ contributions to product development.

Usability: can our customers use this product?
Utility: does this product alleviate our customers’ pains?
Desirability: do our customers want this product?
Viability: will this product sell sufficiently well?
Profitability: can we make sufficient money selling this product?
Feasibility: can we build this product?

Further questions:

• iNPD was created for product development, and not product innovation; is this model as relevant or valuable to innovation as it is to development?
• Is it going too far to reduce each discipline’s primary concern to single word? Or is it sufficiently clear that each word opens up to a web of related concerns?
• Have I mischaracterized the engineering or marketing disciplines?

Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi will be stepping down this thusday to pursue his hobby in chemistry and put the finishing touches on his new hair tonic, garunteed to grow a helmet of hair on even the baldest of pinheads.

Looking at his picture, is there any doubt this man has the secret to a full head of hair? Well that sounds just Koizumilicious! Good on you Juny!

Call me selfish, but I’ve never been a big fan of charity. I don’t mean things like giving time or money to help find a cure for cancer or to help the EFF to keep fighting for freedom. I’m happy to give a little to the EFF. I don’t like charity that’s just a hand out. I don’t care if its to corporations or individuals. I think its entirely counter productive and cultivates dangerous dependencies.

This is why I love the idea behind Kiva. Kiva connects people in developing nations who need micro investments with people who want to give micro investments. Each investment seeker works with a local NGO, posts a profile of themselves, thier need, thier projected repayment period and the amount of investment (rarely anything over $1000). Kiva shows you a bar of how much of their needed investment has been contributed so far.

I dropped into my new Kiva account $50 that has just been sitting in my PayPal account for months doing nothing. You probably have a few dollars sitting you PayPal as well, also doing nothing. I then looked over a number of business opportunities in areas of the world I’m interested in helping, and loaned $25 each to two latin american women trying to grow their little shops.

Check out Maria Pilco and Melvis Merchan. I know my portfolio isn’t terribly diversified, but these businesses had the shortest repayment periods, and I want to see if this really works before investing more. Remember, this ain’t charity.

I don’t know if they actually get the money (Kiva promises the businesses get 100% of your loan), or if I’ll ever see it returned. But for $50, and the amount of good a model like this could do in the world, I feel that its more than worth the risk.

“The problem is not ignorance, it is preconveived ideas”

This is so worth watching on so many levels. TED had some good stuff, some not so good stuff, and some stuff that seemed good on the surface but in retrospect wasn’t that good.

This one, however, is great. Watch this for the content of Rosling’s insight. Watch this for the powerful presentation of these insights in motion graphics. Indeed this might just be the first use of motion graphics I’ve seen where the motion actually conveys insight.

Watch the video, and if you want to play with Hans’s data yourself, head over to gapminder.org for all of his fully interactive charts. You will be further amazed by both the content and it powerful presentation.

click to watch this video on NibTV: