Sustainable Design Seminar, Design Management Institute
Design Green Now, Bellingham, WA
Panelist, UT Austin Sustainable Business Summit
The System is the Product / Speaker at Inverge 2007 Conference
The System is the Product / Presentation to Silicon Valley PMA
The Tragedy of the Commons, frog Design Mind
I’m a product strategist, working at the intersection of physical, digital & service products with brand, user experiences, user insights & cultural trends. I come from a background in industrial design and sociology. In my day job, I’m Director of Product Strategy at frog design. I also write for Cnet on the Matter/Anti-Matter blog. This is my personal blog and does not represent the views of frog or Cnet.
What else is left to say about this modern classic of business management? Certainly one of the most influential books of the last ten years. It has something to say on virtually every project I work on. The two later books in the series, The Innovator's Solution and Seeing What's Next each have their strong points also, but they didn't gel as well as this one.
Two of the best articles I've ever read on product design are in here: an interview with Rob Haitani, the architect of the original Palm OS, and an essay by Nick Healey, the designer of the OS used by Psion palmtops. Though these are both talking about PDA design, there are many gems of insights into designing all kinds of products.
Reinertsen is one of my heroes. As someone who had been involved in product development for years, I read this book and lost count of the number of times I found new clarity into complex issues of team dynamics, business drivers, and design trade-offs. Reinertsen has a gift for making the complex clear, and providing practical guidance on solving difficult issues. His analogy of the design factory - where companies have inventories of design ideas that are invisible costs on the books until they can be monetized in the marketplace, is insightful and powerful.
French semiotician Roland Barthes was the type of public intellectual we rarely see today, writing both scholarly books on language and symbols, and weekly columns on the meanings of popular culture for a major newspaper, covering such topics as wrestling and the Citroen 2CV. The essays are short, incisive, and easy to read. This book combines both sides of his writing, with a lengthy essay in the back that talks in more depth about how meaning is communicated with physical objects, and offers far more thoughtful insight than pop-psychology books on the shelves today.
This book is exceptional for two reasons:
A classic of information design, Powers of Ten is a must-see for any designer. It shows what you can do with modest resources and technical capabilities (compared to today), but a surplus of imagination. Finally available on DVD after many years of being virtually unattainable, so pick one up while you can, you won’t regret it. The Eames’s made many brilliant short films, so look for their other ones on Amazon also.
A classic. And now updated. Ralph Caplan is probably the most eloquent writer to ever touch on the subject of design and though many of these thoughts were penned some thirty years ago they translate fantastically well into today. I re-read this book every few years and discover something new in it every time.
Grant McCracken’s latest book is a sprawling, ambitious and, as he acknowledges, incomplete attempt to bring fresh ideas to how marketing can track cultural trends through stages of evolution. I found it a bit lacking in rigor at times, but reading it energized my thinking in a way that few “business” books do. I also appreciated that McCracken doesn’t belabor his point to fill out 250 pages - it comes in at a trim 150 or so pages of main text.
If you are in the business of having to present ideas to others and get them acted on (and if you read this blog you probably are), then you need to read this book. Authors/brothers Chip and Dan Heath have put together one of the most succinct and valuable resources for helping communicate ideas effectively and inspiring others to action. Read my full review.
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