When I was at R/GA, the Nike team talked a lot about making the Nike ID design process as quick and error free as possible. There are a lot of steps and small elements that make up the custom designed shoes; a customer might overlook a step.
Pre-filling the design based on an Instagram photo is, well, genius.
“Three Valleys”, by Alec Soth and Brad Zellar
Only chance can bring together new combinations in a way that is revolutionary. No one ever discovered anything really important intentionally.
John Herrman of BuzzFeed:
According to data from the BuzzFeed Network, a set of tracked partner sites that collectively have over 300 million users, Google Reader is still a significant source of traffic for news — and a much larger one than Google+. The above chart, created by BuzzFeed’s data team, represents data collected from August 2012 to today.
Yikes. Did Google just shut down the wrong product?
Artefact: To Work or Not to Work... From Home
One of the smarter, level-headed responses to the recent Yahoo! “no more working from home” edict comes from Artefact. A few principles they perceive on working remotely:
- WFH Fails When Collaboration Is Key
- WFH Fails When Trust Is Scarce
- WFH Fails When Workers Don’t Really Know Each Other (related to lack of trust)
- WFH Works When Tools Support It (we’re lucky in this at Logitech)
- WFH Works When the Physical Environment Sucks
Smarties hailing from different backgrounds (and/or with different ways of thinking) working together is much more effective than separated, homogenous groups of smarties in almost every way. After all, there are many different kinds of smart and mixing them up results in amazing things. You’ve probably read how small, cross-functional teams are much more effective than your typical silo-ed team approach. I believe that to be true. But there is more to it than that. Cross-function is one part, but it’s also important to create diversity within a particular function. Not all designers are alike, not all engineers think the same way, etc. When you find a group of smart people that share a vision, but offer up different ideas on how to get there, that’s when the magic really happens. I’m calling this “Collaborative Diversity” and I think it’s a great way to work.
It’s complex, it’s subtle, it defies explanation but it’s not magic. It’s a process that requires a degree of faith and fortitude. It’s collecting but ignoring data and trusting judgement when data tells you to move in a different direction. It’s a lot of willful rejection of conventional wisdom. It’s asymmetric approaches to competition. It’s art as much as science. And most of all, it’s a lot of mind-numbing polishing while trusting that only by doing great work is survival even possible.
idea connector. ephemera collector.
