Today Scott McNealy stepped down after 22 years as CEO of Sun Microsystems, with Jonathan Schwartz taking over. Though expected, it was sad to hear, as my first job out of college was in the industrial design group at Sun (the product shown here is one I worked on). It was a terrific place to work, and I continue to apply the lessons I learned there on a daily basis.

He embodies Sun in the way that Bill Gates does Microsoft and Steve Jobs does Apple. And you have to love a CEO who enters into an annual company all-hands at the Shoreline Pavilion by rappelling from the roof dressed in a Batman costume. That and his irrepressible urge to take hilarious jabs at the competition.

But Sun has always been a hot and cold company. It's at its best when it has a clear vision, as it did in the early to mid-nineties, which then propelled it on to dot-com driven success. Though as the bust came on, it became clear that, as with many companies, the open spigot of customer cash had been hiding poor management and a lack of vision. Sun had got sloppy.

Clearly some drastic things needed to be done, and McNealy wasn't quite able to pull them off. My guess is that Schwartz will trim a lot of the hardware development, where Sun is struggling, and focus on Java, software and services such as utility computing.

A question that has long plagued me is: why isn't Sun the Apple of the enterprise?

Consider:

• It controls the OS
• It controls the hardware (even more than Apple does)
  
• It controls a lot of application development
• It has a knack for creating infrastructure and platforms such as Java

So why hasn't Sun been able to parlay this enormous level of integration into an unprecedented level of design and experience quality at all points?

Certainly the enterprise market is very different than the consumer market, and ostensibly has less concern over aesthetics. However, enterprises are at least as concerned about costs, and the integration of experience provided by design can eke out savings in downtime, speed, and overall work efficiency. When I was at Sun I headed industrial design for their larger server systems, and believe me, every second counts when diagnosing a downed server. We spent a lot of time trying to make them as efficient to work on as possible.

Beyond that, the lack of real attention to design at Sun meant that their hardware and software were not differentiated enough from lower cost, more commodity offerings. This isn't to say that there aren't people at Sun who don't care about design and who don't work hard to push for it - they certainly are there. But upper management, and McNealy in particular, have always paid it lip service, if that. They see it as a frivolous, surface activity, not something that needs to be deeply ingrained in the culture and the process and the products if it is to succeed well.

Now this is true of a lot of engineering/technology companies. It's just particularly sad in Sun's case because the extent of the opportunity was so large. They could have been the prestigious brand that set the benchmark for everyone else to follow, and which inspired fanatical customer loyalty because of their reputation for quality and attention to detail. Just like Apple.

Visa debuted its “Life Takes Visa” ad campaign a couple of months back during the olympics, highlighting a major trend in advertising of late: living life. Or perhaps it’s living life again - a getting back to the earthy basics - friends and family, wholesomeness, judicious amounts of play and self-indulgence in between the grindstones.

When I read about the campaign in the newspaper right before it actually debuted, it fell flat. But then seeing the ads changed my mind and I’ve come to quite like it. My favorite is probably the one entitled “Life Takes Risk” with a guy sniffing a carton of milk with a hopefully raised eyebrow and skeptically wrinkled nostril.

Visa is not alone in this, I’ve spotted quite a few companies taking the Life angle. Grocery chain Safeway started a campaign a few months back positioning them as supplying “Ingredients For Life,” full of pictures of fresh sweetcorn and strawberries and people running through meadows.

On a slightly different tack, Kaiser Permanente has been pushing a “Thrive” message, similarly accompanied by billboards with gigantic blueberries.

My most recent sighting came while pumping gas the other day at a 76 station where I noticed an ad on top of the pump stating that “Life Happens Between Empty and Full”. Something about this one really rubs me the wrong way, perhaps the implication that life only exists inside the car, when really mostly time in the car is spent getting ready for the actual life living. (They are also using Rotis, what has become a highly over-exposed font, which is unfortunate as it’s really a terrific font…)

One could argue that Citibank kicked the whole thing off a few years back with their “Live Richly” campaign which has consistently put out “make you think for a moment” bon mots. It was a harbinger of things to come, as cynically as it might have seemed at the time, but obviously has struck a chord that I think goes beyond echo-chamber me-too advertising. There’s something broader going on here.

Is this another stage of reaction to 9/11, a pop culture expression of a broad social gestalt? We’ve gone through anger, grief, recovery, and now onto, perhaps, living life once more.

On a recent visit to New York City I spent some time at the Museum of Modern Art (good building, not great) and was delighted to see a small exhibit about the building of a project by Emilio Ambasz, the Argentinian designer and architect. Seeing the large structure actually built (pictured above), and doing so accompanied by a colleague from frog who is very design savvy but not familiar with Ambasz, brought back memories about my earlier foundations in design, which it turns out still drive what I do and how I work today, though in quite subtle ways (perhaps disappointingly so). What I’ve always found intriguing about Ambasz’s work is that they are unfinished, or rather, they require you (user, customer, owner, inhabitant, whatever capitalist technical word you wish) to complete them.

This is reflected in the statement of philosphy on Ambasz's product website:

We are beginning to understand that, like the ancient people of non-Greek cultures, we should see humanity not in contrast to, but as an integral part of both, the natural and the man-made milieus. Man should not see himself as a separate entity, detached from nature, but should accept his existence as part of it. Similarly, the artifacts we create should not be proud aliens, but rather should be designed as carefully and intricately woven extensions of the larger natural and man-made domains surrounding us. 

The building in question is called Casa de Retiro Espirtual (House of Spiritual Retreat), and was originally designed by Ambasz for an imaginary site near Cordoba, Spain. It remained in imaginary form until 2004, when it was build on a hilly landscape 40 km north of Seville. The exhibit at MoMA had some beautiful photos of it taken by Michele Alassio that do as much as can be done in 2D to bring you to the location.

I first became aware of this structure when I was in design school when I bought a book about Ambasz’s architecture after having become fascinated by a particular product he'd designed. The book in question showcased a variety of his buildings, and the models of Casa were one of them. It’s a stark white right-angle structure, reminiscent in some ways of “follies” in England - buildings constructed for no purpose except for presence - but which immediately communicates a poetry that draws you in. What didn’t get communicated adequately in the drawings is the sheer size of the structure. It really is huge, and the fact that you have to climb up the stairs with nothing to prevent you falling off (only a sinewy handrail cut out of the interior wall surface can keep you steady) comes across clearly in Alassio’s images.

Once at the top of the stairs you come to a window overlooking the landscape from quite a vertiginous height. The window is actually a structure that juts out from the plain white walls, almost like a nook that you could sit down in and contemplate life, with glass panels of somewhat Moor-ish design.

The product that prompted me to become interested in Ambasz in the first place was far smaller: a plastic watercolor paint set made by Herlitz, AG. I first saw it when I was covering a local showing of the winners of the Industrial Designers Society of America annual awards for the college newspaper. I was probably in my second year in design school at that point and was heavily into semiotics (in particular Roland Barthes) which would then lead me on to Michele de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life, and to write my first published essay, for Design Issues, called “Death of the Designer” which appeared, thrillingly, a couple of months after I graduated.

I still have a hard time articulating what it is about the paint set the speaks to me so much, but it has to do with its simplicity and humility, and also the ingenuity with which it imposes itself again. It’s both there and not there. It’s also clever about using one part to do multiple things (the outer case converts to a container for water and wet brushes), and the elegant proportions that are miles away from the cheap tins that might childhood paint sets came in. It’s a product that is adult and child-like at the same time: for an adult painter a remembrance of things past, for a child an aspirational product that doesn’t talk down to them. One gets the sense that Ambasz himself is both adult and child - sophisticated and innocent.

In any case, what I found intriguing about Ambasz’s work (and still do) were two things: First, the effortlessness of it. There are no big histrionics, no over-thinking (or at least there’s no appearance of such). Second, they require the input of a human mind, heart and body to complete them and bring them to life. In some cases this is explicit (such as his office task chair that was the first to move automatically with the body of the sitter), in other cases implicit, as with the paint set. Many of his designs (and that of his staff) have movement and animation as central elements, or soft materials which give when pressed or which conform to the size and shape required of the user, and which have a conceptual malleability which gives a truer sense of ownership (compare, for example, to the “otherness” of the iPod).

This was what my essay for Design Issues was about, which was entitled “Death of the Designer”. It took Barthes ideas about “death of the author” and applied them to product design, to bring about the “birth of the user” in the hope that this leads to a greater sense of public ownership over the material world. This puts the user in charge, rather than the demagogic designer, giving back some sense of control to built environment. The focus on the human, and the adaptation of the human-made to the human, is what Emilio Ambasz does so easily.

NYTimes.com has undergone its first redesign in five years, and it's a huge step forward over the old site, which was long past its prime. I do wonder if they have gone far enough, however.

The big news is it feels like a newspaper. (It also feels more like a blog, but more on that in a moment.) The columns look much more print-like, and the page almost literally has “folds”. On my 15” Powerbook screen, which has a fairly average 854 pixel height, you can scroll down the front page and there are clear breaks at 1/3 intervals that are sized for that height of screen. Smart.

The visual weighting of the elements is much, much cleaner than the old design, which was cramped and cluttered, with a color scheme that was old-hat looking the day it appeared 5 years ago. The new colors are much more sophisticated and subdued. The layout now stays centered on the screen, unlike the old one which stayed flush left (check out a random sample from archive.org). However, this is not a truly gooey layout as the columns do not resize. Given the complexity of the page layout, this is understandable. Pictures overall are larger, and don’t look like postage stamps any more.

The flow of scanning the major articles on the front page is now better, and they are more logically placed and distinct from the second tier articles. Search is now more prominently displayed at the top in a stand-alone bar, though visually it looks a little funny underneath the “The New York Times” title centered on the page. (the nice white space around the header on the picture above is courtesy of Camino’s automatic ad blocking - at left you can see it as it appears on Safari - pooh!). In the bottom third, however, my eyes just glaze over at the number of links - this makes even Yahoo’s old layouts look simple! The small type is a necessity to get that much information on their, I suppose, but some stronger visual structure needs to be applied to help guide one’s eyes.

Ironically, the new design looks more like a blog, right down to the use of Georgia for the headlines, which is rapidly becoming a cliche (guilty as charged - what can I say, it's about the nicest standard font there is for this type of thing...). The overall colors, line spacing and so on all have a blog-like feel, which also makes me wonder about the new design's longevity - do they really intend this to last another five years? Hopefully they've made its inner workings nimble enough that a CSS refresh will be "all" it takes.

It is also more like the International Herald Tribune’s site (the NY Times has a relationship with IHT, I don’t know if it fully owns it or not but it certainly has some hand in its production and feeds it articles, usually on a 1-day delay basis. Perhaps someone can elucidate.) Still, for pure readability of articles I give the IHT a nod, it has one of the slickest ways of dynamically resizing and reflowing columns, and allowing you to easily click through articles. Compare how roughly the same article appears on IHT.com to NYTimes.com. (The IHT.com version does lack pictures though, a significant downside of its scheme.)  IHT.com also pioneered a clever drag/drop bookmarking scheme that the NY Times itself is perhaps adopting in some manner for MyTimes.com. We’ll have to see how that plays out once MyTimes comes online (you can become a "charter member" now, which maybe indicates it will be a fee-based service).

The newspaper describes MyTimes as a place to “organize your favorite Web sources of information — from NYTimes.com and elsewhere — and view them at a glance.” This puts them into competition with del.icio.us and things such as My Yahoo.

The Times still feels like it’s playing catch-up on reader participation, however, despite the tabs for Most Popular, Most Emailed and Most Blogged. Even IHT.com has a "Save to Del.icio.us" link on all its article pages. Maybe I’m just being cranky, but it has a walled-garden atmosphere to it, which is not where the web is going. With the new features they have just about achieved parity, but if they are not going to redesign again for another five years then there will need to be some serious re-architecting in the mean time.

Multimedia content is more prominent (and thankfully based on Flash, so doesn't cause platform incompatibilities as can come up at CNN.com, for example). However, these look and act very 2003. Compare them to Flickr's slideshows or YouTube's visual polish, and they come off as primitive and lacking in interactivity. 

I love the “Today’s Paper” tab at the top of the page, what a simple and great idea. I’ve lapsed on my physical Times subscription, so this is a great first step to get a list of what I’m missing...

The Times Topics are also a logical step (I don't recall if they were in the previous design, if so they were buried, now they have a tab to themselves at the top of the main page). Presumably these are getting aggregated through a tagging mechanism, so why not open this up for readers to use themselves? Similar to Google's News Alerts, but it builds the page for you instead of drip-dripping you with articles on a daily basis. You can see the whole list of topics here, which I have to admit is pretty impressive, everything from Outdoor Advertising to Affirmitive Action.

A couple of interface issues I noticed: The Guided Tour pop-up window offers links to see more about the section you've just been guided through, however, the links load directly in the pop-up. Unfortunately this window is not equipped with browser controls (they can be manually turned on, but how many people know they can do that?). It should load the section in the window behind, instead.

Second, to my eyes they need to tweak the colors of links in line with body text - the blue links are a bit to hard too distinguish against the dark gray text. Look at the Editor's Note for example.

Overall though, at first blush this looks like a terrific update and I look forward to seeing what they roll out over the next few months. 

As an interesting comparison, for a  great discussion about another major newspaper redesign (of the print edition of the English Guardian), check out Dan Hill’s excellent City of Sound blog.

In 1966 a Russian scientist named Pyotr Ufimtsev wrote a paper called "Method of Edge Waves in the Physical Theory of Diffraction," which described the mathematics required to develop aircraft that could evade radar. The paper was extremely technically dense, and employed a set of formulas originally developed a hundred years earlier by Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell to reach its conclusions. Even if you understood the impact of what Ufimtsev was saying, you had to read almost the entire 40 pages before getting to the zinger.

Nine years later the US Airforce Foreign Technology Division finally translated it from its original Russian, and it was picked up by a bright engineer in Lockheed's Skunkworks (the same group that went on to develop the SR-71 Blackbird, and which earlier had created the U2 spy plane). He happened to have just started working on the Skunkworks' first real stealthy aircraft, and so was primed for unorthodox thinking on how to reduce the radar "signature" of a plane.

So the theories of a Russian scientist were ignored by the Russians themselves, and later picked up by an American to build aircraft created to avoid Russian radar. The end result was that the Stealth F-117 fighter (66 feet long, 43 foot wingspan, and weighing over 50,000 lbs) appeared to be the size of a 1/8" ball bearing to radar.

As I've noted before, it's often a fine line between stupid and clever, and the Skunkworks group was consistently successful at separating the two. Not always at first, but they learned quickly with small teams and rapidly iterated prototypes. They had short deadlines, small budgets and large goals, which tended to force open-ness to unorthodox thinking. There was no sense of "not invented here" at the Skunkworks; they would take ideas from wherever and whomever in order to get done what they needed.

(For more on the history of the Skunkworks, Ben Rich's book tells it engagingly from the perspective of being Kelly Johnson's right hand man and successor as director of the Skunkworks.)