Band & Olufsen have release a new phone called “Serene”. Too bad it looks an aweful lot like those cheap travel clocks and PIM devices you find places like the Sharper Image and airline product catalogs. Of course Serene is about $1200 more than those landfill items.

B&O’s stylistic goals are pretty clear. They wanted something new, different, novel, stylish. They wanted something people would buy that says “I’m not like you luuzers.”

What they’ve got is definitely stylish and novel. But with its cheesey flared ends, awkwardly placed keys regardless of orientation, and thumb-cramp inspiring scroll wheel, this is a phone that is stylish and novel for their own sakes. What B&O have here is the results of the stylist’s aesthetic of gratuitous complexity and disregard for design.

Check the flash video to see some of the obvious usability problems this phone offers. Notice the unnatural circular thumb movement necessary to scroll through lists. Thumb joints don’t move comfortably in the direction and orientation the phone demands. The circular motion would work with two hands (one holding and one scrolling). However people tend to operate their cellphones with only one hand. Serene forces users to either adopt a new less convenient behaviour, or get used to a cramped thumb. Thanks B&O, that’s truly innovative!

Furthermore, regardless of which way you hold it (screen on top or screen on bottom), the numbers on the dialpad are either mostly upside down or sideways. I tried to image answering an email with this keypad. It was painful, so i stopped.

When style rather than substance has been the driving force behind a product, you often don’t have much to say about it after “it looks really cool.” And so your advertising firm has to write nonsense like this: “Coherence and continuity, innovation and craftsmanship.” Coherence and continuity?? Sure these words make a pleasing staccato alliteration, but what do they mean in the context of a cell phone? Nothing, absolutely nothing, that’s what.

And this one really cracks me up: “Serene will astound with its good ideas and common sense solutions.” I would definitely be astounded if my cell phone started spouting off good ideas and common sense solution. “Pssst, John, we should go have some Pistachio gelato.” “Good idea Serene! Let’s go!”

It looks like if you want simple, its going to cost you. KitchenAid has a new blender out that’s super simple. On this unit you will only find only one retro style switch that offers three choices: up for on, down for pulse and center for off. And that’s it.

What will this kind of simplicity cost you? Well about $400 regularly. That about 6 times more that your average blender with lots of buttons.

Apparently its very expensive to strip out functionality.

Hype bothers me. Bullshit bothers me. Self promotion bothers me, especially when its made of equal parts hype and bullshit. As an example I’m going to pick on 37 Signals’ Basecamp product. Afterall, they’re certainly big enough not to care about what I say, and since every action has an equal and opposite reaction, it about time for some opposite reactions–otherwise known as reality.

Here’s the reality: Basecamp and 37 Signals’ other poroducts are not nearly a great a they lead everyone to belive. For all the hot air they spout about usability, design and general philosophy of being (more Deepak Chopra then actual ontological enlightenment), i have to ask where’s the beef?

Here are just a few choice examples of many:

How does one edit Company profiles? Its far from clear. I know I did it once, but I can’t seem to figure it how to do it again because the UI is so often completely opaque.

Conceptually Wrtieboards are integral to a project, functionally they are jarringly separate. So much for user-centered design.

From an individual writeboard you can’t get back to the project by clicking the project name–that only bring you back to the main list of writeboards, not your project. Elsewhere in the app project names link to the project’s overview page. Why a unique behaviour here?

Where can I keep a list of links relevant to the project and team? in a message? but the gets burried under chronology. A writeboard? That’s neither obvious, nor easily accessed. Sure you can store your extra bedsheets in the oven, but that’s not really thier proper place. Information simiarly needs a proper place.

Campfire is also poorly integrated with Basecamp despite users’ conceptual model of the chat session belonging to a project.

Staying with Campfire, the window size is enormous. Chatting is often a periphal activity, but the Campfire window size demands huge realestate. Its easier to just use Google Talk (equally simply visual design but with a flexble size).

Filename links in project messages bring you to a list of files, not the file you actually clicked on. This subverts natural expectation

Basecamp/Campfire chewed up 2gigs of RAM after being left open for a day and a half. This problem only seemed to occur with IE, but that’s irrelevant. Who ever heard of a memory leak from a webpage??

And here’s the real kicker–a year of Basecamp (never mind Campfire) with a secure erver (if you’re working for a clinet, they’re going to want at least that much security for sensitive PM info) is over $600. That’s right folks, the cost of Baecamp is like buying a new version of Microsoft Office Professional every year.

Here are a couple alternatives:

1. Use ActiveCollab, it a free, open source project management tool like Basecamp you can install on your server in like 3 minutes.

OR

2. Create a WordPress blog for each project. This gives you almost as much power, much more flexibility, and all for no cost.

Don’t belive the hype folks, my experience with Basecamp has shown me that its frustrations outweigh its benefits, that it cost is utterly unreasonable, and that there are other better alternatives available.

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?