r+d

Matt at 37Signals dug this quote up out of a post on Cult of Mac. It recounts John Sculley's meeting with Steve Jobs in which Steve described his meeting with Edwin Land, the inventor/ founder of the Polaroid camera:

Dr Land was saying: “I could see what the Polaroid camera should be. It was just as real to me as if it was sitting in front of me before I had ever built one.”

And Steve said: “Yeah, that’s exactly the way I saw the Macintosh.” He said if I asked someone who had only used a personal calculator what a Macintosh should be like they couldn’t have told me. There was no way to do consumer research on it so I had to go and create it and then show it to people and say now what do you think?”

Both of them had this ability to not invent products, but discover products. Both of them said these products have always existed — it’s just that no one has ever seen them before. We were the ones who discovered them. The Polaroid camera always existed and the Macintosh always existed — it’s a matter of discovery. 

I think the exchange is outstanding on so many levels, not the least of which in the way it quietly denigrates customer research, particularly customer research, for the purposes of breakthrough products or services. For incremental change, it's great. You're polling the audience for feature enhancements. That's right in the market research wheelhouse. But when it comes to breakthrough change . . . as Henry Ford famously said, "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse."

For revolutionary change, you need someone, or a team of people, who not only understand the specific value denials that need to be addressed but who also have the creative prowess and technical expertise to engineer the right solution. But for people who can do this, people who have been tinkerers and inventors their whole lives, it's not as hard as it might sound. They've been working on turning ideas into real things for years. It's just a part of who they are.

They just know how to make the right thing because they've done it before. Even if it's new to the world, they can see it plain as day right in front of them. Those products have always been there, waiting on their moment to be discovered. And once discovered, all that's left is the small matter of breathing life into them and polishing them for inspection by the world.

image via

Data-driven design is "hill-climbing," a well-known algorithm for optimization. Imagine standing in the dark in an unknown, hilly terrain. How do you get to the top of the hill when you can't see? Test the immediate surroundings to determine which direction goes up the most steeply and take a step that way. Repeat until every direction leads to a lower level.

But what if the terrain has many hills? How would you know whether you are on the highest? Answer: you can't know. This is called the "local maximum" problem: you can't tell if you are on highest hill (a global maximum) or just at the top of a small one.

When a computer does hill climbing on a mathematical space, it tries to avoid the problem of local maxima by initiating climbs from numerous, different parts of the space being explored, selecting the highest of the separate attempts. This doesn't guarantee the very highest peak, but it can avoid being stuck on a low-ranking one. This strategy is seldom available to a designer: it is difficult enough to come up with a single starting point, let alone multiple, different ones. So, refinement through testing in the world of design is usually only capable of reaching the local maximum. Is there a far better solution (that is, is there a different hill which yields far superior results)? Testing will never tell us.

Here is where creative people come in. Breakthroughs occur when a person restructures the problem, thereby recognizing that one is exploring the wrong space. This is the creative side of design and invention. Incremental enhancements will not get us there.

I've been interested in the cultural shift in Hyundai for the past few months. They're really turning on the marketing to accompany their new models and design thinking. I think this shift is most interesting for me because this is the first time I've actually been attuned to a large automotive company proactively attempting to remake their entire DNA and market perception. Of course this happened (successfully) with Toyota and Honda in the 80s and 90s, but at that time I was more interested in my SNES and listening to Pearl Jam. These days, watching the market moves of a multi-national car company makes for good entertainment. Such are the curiosities of getting older.

Hyundai is promising to mimic the luxury car dealer experience.Every Equus will come with a small tablet PC that will replace the standard paper owner's manual. In addition to providing information about the car and its features, the computer will also track scheduled maintenance and will even connect to the dealership to schedule appointments.

I came across two articles today that both deal with the same subject, the mass of people in the center of the distribution curve. This, of course, is where you find your "average" customer. Only that's the problem. There aren't any average people or average customers. If you're conceiving of an "average customer" for your business and designing your product for that average person, you're probably not doing as well as your competitor who has a better understanding of your real customers and their real goals.

Interesting video of Steve Jobs from a *few* years back, discussing the importance of core values for a company. He accentuates the very clear distinction between selling products as a goal and selling products as a byproduct of a core value. In Apple's case, here's what that meant then:

"What [Apple] is about isn't making boxes for people to get their jobs done . . . although we do that well. We do that better than almost anybody in some cases. But Apple is about something more than that. Apple at the core, its core value is that we believe that people with passion can change the world for the better."

Throughout history design as a verb, also known these days as design Thinking, has created things of enormous value to humanity. The Bill of Rights, the Aravind Eye Care System, Medecins Sans Frontières, and the Marshall Plan will never show up in a Design Within Reach catalog. And yet each of these amazing achievements of humanity was designed. Apple, a company justifiably known for its design, must be applauded for the way it lets its designers and engineers design things to the hilt. But how Apple has created and captured shocking amounts of market value in the music (iTunes + iPod) and telecommunication (iPhone) industries is due as much to skillful systems engineering and infrastructure development as it is to compelling aesthetics.

Success has many parents, and good design is only one of them. For every success like the iPod, there are scores of beautiful market offerings that failed because no one bothered to think about how to manufacture, deliver, sell, support, and retire them in ways that met people's needs.

I love when people take the time to redesign bad products and services. Not necessarily people who are hired to do that redesign, but rather people who have been so offput by a design or experience that they take up a small portion of their life to actually come up with a possible better approach. Gratis. Barton Smith got a lot of press for his re-envisioning of the Facebook UI after the last Facebook redesign was rather poorly received. I'm not sure I'm sold on all the elements of Barton's redesign, but it certainly has plenty of merits. Kudos to him for even taking the time to point the way to a better place. Sadly, if the screen caps of the new FB design being rolled out this week are anything to go by, not much attention was paid to Barton's considerations. Such is life.

(download)

Click here to download:

Boarding_Pass_Redesign_One_Ste.zip (146 KB)

"..In a survey on innovation from Accenture that polled vice presidents, directors, and managers at 640 large U.S. and U.K. companies, responses from executives at banks and capital-market firms stood out. More than two-thirds of those execs said their organizations prioritize short-term financial results over investing for the long term. Very few saw innovation playing an important role in efforts to increase operational efficiencies and reduce costs. And more so than executives in any other industry, they characterized their quest for innovation as searching for the next "silver bullet" rather than "a diverse pursuit of new opportunities."

Great companies do not necessarily have innovation as a central part of their vision or strategy. They are just as likely to be followers as they are to be leaders with pioneering products and leading-edge services. IBM, for example, grew from a one-building small business into one of the largest corporations in the world because of its professional sales force, not its product innovation. In fact, when IBM fully launched into computers, in the early 1960s, it already lagged far behind rival companies, such as Burroughs, in innovative computer technology. And it was Diner’s Club, not American Express, that invented the modern credit card. American Express didn’t introduce its card until eight years after the debut of Diner’s Club—hardly leading-edge behavior. Nordstrom, Wal-Mart, McKinsey, Marriott—none of those companies attained success primarily through innovation.

Certainly, some great companies—notably Sony, Johnson & Johnson, W.L. Gore, and 3M—have innovation as a core value or an integral part of their strategy. So, you can be innovative and great. But the fact remains: you do not need to have innovative products, services or technologies, or visionary market ideas, to create a great company.