There’s a great online exhibit at the Smithsonian Institute, exploring the history of various innovations - focused on the early sketches and half-assed doodles that eventually became great things.

If you like looking at design sketches and early drafts of ideas, you’ll love this.

Doodles, drafts and designs: The Smithsonian

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For next week’s IDEA 2006 conference (Oct 23/24) here in Seattle I’m compiling a list of places visiting and local design minded people should definitely check out.

Maybe there’s cool architecture, interesting public art, or a space that inspires you, for whatever reason, to be creative? Or how about a coffee shop or cafe that has the best creative vibe, or is just downright impressive for it’s design savvy?

Here’s my short list, but I’m in need of more - please suggest away:

1. Gasworks park. Take an old construction plant, add love and some Seattle funk, and you get one of the most interesting urban parks in the country. Quietly tucked away a few blocks from Fremont, I’ve spent many a good afternoon watching kids fly kites and having a bite down by the water. (Don’t miss the human sundial on the top of the hill).
2. Experience Music Project. Call it a Gehry on acid or Seattle’s 2nd most interesting building, $8 will get you inside for the DoubleTake exhibit (recommended). Also gives you a peek at the neighboring Space needle and the aging science center nearby.
3. Top Pot Doughnuts (5th avenue). The downtown location is right on the monorail, giving views of what might have been for Seattle urban transit (great fodder for prolongued doughnut/coffee fueled discussions). The doughnuts are sublime works of food design, but the crazy floor to ceiling bookshelves, wi-fi and loungy upstairs seating makes this place worthy of some extended lesiure time.
4. Lark. This small, upscale restaurant offers several perks for the designminded. First, across the street is Seattle University, with one of the funkiest churches you’ll ever see. But inside the restaurant, each small plate is a delight of presentation and taste, a great experience for small groups. (Harvest vine, is the local tapas highlight, with wonderfully low key candelit interiors and spectacular food).
5. Purple (downtown). This local wine-bar chain’s downtown location centers on a two story bar sculpture that’s worth staring at for at least one good drink. (Photo above). You can head down two blocks for dinner at Wild Ginger, the obvious high end dinner choice for designers in the core downtown area. (If you’re more budget minded, head over to Dragonfish, for a great atmosphere, many specials and a funky interior design).
6. Peter Miller books. This is the best design/architecture bookstore in the city (Althought Elliot bay books in pioneer square is a better general bookstore and in a more interesting building). Located just up from Pike Place Market on 1st.

What have I missed? If you had a designer visiting Seattle, where would you take them? What are you favorite places for your own design inspiration?

Posted in Design | 14 Comments »

As I’m on the home stretch of finishing the first draft of the book, I’ve read nearly 100 books on innovation, plus various studies, papers, magazines, and more than 100 interviews with innovators of various kinds. One trend I’ve found is the high number of innovation efforts within established companies, and how rarely they have any effect.

Established companies try to retrofit innovation into organizations by things like task forces, committees, portals and suggestion systems.

Have you seen these efforts in action? I’d love to hear why you think they worked, or didn’t. I’m cynical and here’s why:

• Task forces and committees are seperate from the real teams. Unitl the teams doing actual work are rewarded for being progressive, innovation doesn’t reach products no matter what the task forces do. All the true barriers are still in place.
• Suggestion boxes go to the same people who vetoed the last five good ideas (Imagine Darth vader with a suggestion box). The problem with innovation is rarely finding ideas: ideas are easy. Instead its finding someone in power with the convinction to take risks and empower creative teams.
• Innovation and change must be core values, not layers or addendums. You can’t make a company innovative by sprinkling magic innovation dust in the hallways. Instead you have to grow a culture, and hire individuals, that are comfortable with risk, and reward managers willing to support the creatives who report to them.
• Who has the power to stop innovation? Eliminating the real blocks can be more effective than trying to add some magic new mojo to the organization.

Can you name the innovation leader in any field that got there by committees and task forces? Most innovative companies don’t need any special innovation effort - they built a culture of exploration and risk taking, perhaps out of competitive necessity, as their way of getting good work done.

Innovation efforts that work:

There are a few things I’ve seen in my research that established organizations have done that work.

• Pilot project. Organizations that form a new project team, give them big goals, and get out of their way. Once they succeed, they come back into the fold as a seed of innovative teamwork that other projects can copy, emulate, or build on. (See skunkworks)
• Risks and Rewards. Innovation comes with the price of risk. In organizations led by risk takers, innovative cultures are natural as they feed off the leader’s willingness to try new ideas. If a leader is open to change and supportive of his most creative thinkers, innovation will come naturally.
• Avoidance of innovation for innovation sake. Not everyone needs to innovate. Only certain projects at certain times need to reinvent, retry, or radically change. If everyone is asked to innovate all the time, no one is really innovating: it’s nonsense. It has to have a purpose and a reason, aligned with a strategy.
• Culture and environment. Innovative organizations, even large ones like 3M, have a long history of supporting individuals in the pursuit of their ideas. 3M invented the “10% work on your own project idea” that Google has made famous. Big companies can be innovative just as small ones, provided the culture and environment support it. Big organizations need long cycles for any culture change, but it can be done by starting small and growing.

So what have you seen work, or fail? I’d love to hear some opinions.

Posted in Innovation | 8 Comments »

The worldchanging folks, who run a great blog and non-proft org, are now releasing their first book: Worldchanging: a users guide for the 21st century.

From the press release:

Worldchanging is poised to be the Whole Earth Catalog for this millennium. Packed with the information, resources, reviews, and ideas that give readers the tools they need to make a difference. An intoduction by Al Gore, and a team of top-notch writers includes Cameron Sinclair, founder of Architecture for Humanity. Renowned designer Stefan Sagmeister brings his extraordinary talents to Worldchanging, resulting in a book that will challenge readers to personally redefine the conversation about the future.

Disclaimer: I wrote a short chapter for the book.

World tour starts now:

Seattle: Alex Steffin, Worldchanging editor and chief, and Bruce Sterling, will be speaking in Seattle Oct 28th at Town Hall: 7:30pm, $5 at the door.

Also in Portland, NYC, Mineapolis, Chicago, Toronto, Wasington D.C., and more. Tour details here.

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This week in the ux-clinic discussion group:

I’m a single usability engineer serving over 100 programmers across a dozen ongoing projects.  I focus on a couple projects at once, but have large amount of miscellaneous work that comes to me from the other projects.

My major challenge is that the project teams I work with generally have haphazard schedules themselves.  So, its hard to plan my own time given that uncertainty. And to make this even more fun I have a new team member joining and will need to manage both our time.

Planning and organization are not my strengths, so I need techniques that are easy to use!

Yours,
-  Coming Up For Air

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This week in the pm-clinic discussion forum:

I’m a pm for a web development company - I have what we call a zombie: a project that lives on forever for no good reason. The client continually makes rounds of tiny changes, often to things where they can’t provide specific or actionable feedback so we can’t get it right the first time. The project scope (contract) of work, sadly, doesn’t have language that caps these things as they were unexpected. So, through either politics, influence, bands of garlic, or changing the process, how do you put a zombie
project to rest?

- Hunting project zombies

Posted in Management, PM-Clinic | 1 Comment »

This fall I’m teaching a course for the University of Washington in the Masters of Communication in Digitial Media Program - the topic? How to create and manage ideas.

If you’re curious, here’s the syllabus (PDF).

We’re heading into week 3, all about the history of ideas. And you can follow the course along if you like at the course blog.

Thanks to Kathy Gill and the MCDM program for making this happen.

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An old PM trick I learned years ago is that whenever you start something, it’s just as important to list the non-goals for the project, as it is to list the goals themselves. The reason is that non-goals, things that people might confuse with real goals, are where all the lost effort and wasted time that sinks projects grows from. Nip that in the bud, and things get easier.

The problem is it’s hard to know where people are confused with big ideas like visions - and its all too easy for people that write visions, sitting on their highest of horses as the assumed visionary, to assume that people are taking the vision as gospel, when instead they’re using it as toilet paper (or perhaps worse, not using it for anything at all).

So the product vision test is all about keeping your ego in check if you’re the dude who wrote the vision. Do people on the team understand the project goals? Do they even remember them? Are they jazzed at all about what’s going on? Someone has to bring the vision to them and see what’s really going on.

The product vision test

After you’ve written, reviewed, and published the project vision do as follows:

1. Break the key ideas of the vision down into 10 or less high level statements. Think ten commandments: short, tight messages that help people make decisions. (If this is hard, the vision was incomplete).
2. Make this list visible - in the hallway, on the wiki, linked to from specs.
3. Perioidically go to random people on the team and ask them how many of the ten they know.

If people don’t know the ten, you’ve got problems. Either they haven’t read it, don’t care, or worse, don’t agree with the vision but haven’t said anything about it.

For this reason its important to vett out a draft vision at first with a small group of people, but then with increasingly larger groups, continually asking for feedback, revising, and pushing people to reflect back to you what they think the essence is, or should be.

If you’ve built a good vision, and distilled it properly, most people, most of the time, should be able to recite from memory the key goals for the project.

Famous visions

The book Blockbusters, by Gary S. Linn documents several major products that used distilled versions of their visions to drive and communicate goals across the team. The book claims that these kind of rock solid, crystal clear, ultra-simple goals are what makes blockbuster products possible.

• Palm

• Fits in pocket
• Sych seamlessly with PC
• Fast and easy to use
• No more than $299

• Simplify manufacturing
• Modernize
• Reduce cost
• Look like the Apple II

• Beat Apple.
• Do it in one year.

Bonus testAnother great way to test visions is to require the distilled list to be the first slide at every group or all-hands meeting. The rule is that you put it up, read them, and ask anyone in the room if they have any way to improve the list.

This keeps the vision alive throughout the project - if someone has a way to refine a goal, or question it given recent events, they should have a mechanism to raise it for discussion. But if they don’t, they have to conceed they should be working passionately to satisfy the existing list.

History note:

My first exposure to this kind of practice was David Cole, the development manager on Windows 95, where he broke the complicated vision down in ten commandments that he would quiz and prod the team to remember. He could be an intimidating guy, which he used to his advantage at keeping the ten commandments on everyones mind.

More on visions:

My book the art of project management has a whole sweet chapter on visions and how to do ‘em right.

Posted in Innovation, Management, Software/Web development | No Comments »

This week in the pm-clinic discussion forum:

After two years as a general manager, building a team of 25 from scratch, my VP is showing me the door. More precisely, I’m being asked to find a role elsewhere in the company. Yes I’m devistated, but that’s not the point.

My challenge: how do I message my leaving why I’m leaving? Most of them came to the org because of me: I recruited them on the basis of my commitment to them and the project. I don’t want to be ugly and badmouth the VP, but I don’t want to lie either. How do I message this honestly, but create the least damage for the team and whoever has to replace me?

- Signed, trying to close the door (TCTD)

Posted in Management, PM-Clinic | 2 Comments »

This week in the ux-clinic discussion group:

I’ve been asked by the boss to do a usability review of all of websites, and to report the results directly to him. Happy as I was that he’s interested, as I’m working I get that “you’re going to bust us” look from all of the programmers and designers I’ve been working with, as I’m now a kind of UI enforcer.  How do I do the job of reviewing the work for head honcho, without being someone people are afraid or resentful of?

- Signed, the rookie on the force

Posted in Design, UX-Clinic | No Comments »

I restrain myself from writing often about writing - I’m too junior at the task to contend with the great writers who have writen great books about how to do it well.

But as it’s 2:33am I will share a tale of this evening’s authorial madness: I’ve been sick all week, haven’t slept well since I don’t know when, and somehow find myself writing this now about what happened a few moments ago.

As I lie in bed, praying for rest, I sense a stir in a distant, forgotten corner of my disturbed little mind. There I find a dim, cloud like thought floating towards nowhere, tempting me with the faint shadow, a grey line against infinte grey, of something hiding inside. And as the puffy, soft marshmellow of a thought hovers mindlessly in my Tylenol infused semi-conscious brain, I see, wrapped in its shadows, the faint golden spiral of a truth, a tight phrase, a magic sentence that connects everything in the chapter that has tortured me all week.

And then the horror begins.

Do I get up to write this down? Or pray to the muse that the idea is strong and will stay until morning? I’ve killed more brain cells in the tail chasing circles of this debate than modesty allows me to reveal. (If you write it down, will it still work in morning? Will it make any sense at all? Can I get part of it down while still in bed? Where is the damn pen? Will she forgive me if I wake her up yet again?)

So there I lie, stars crossing the sky, mice and men snug in their little beds, hearing only the rhythm of my wife’s ever calm breathing, a secret chant from the gods of sleep, reminding me of my longing for the softness of unconsciousness… and no. Slowly I realize that what’s rising behind the thought is a dark circle of wolves, fangs at the ready, chasing their crafty literary pray. I want to deny the wolves, holding fast against the absurd, undisciplined notion of hunting anything of the brain this late, on a night like this, knowing as they charge that all I have to do is turn over to the pillow, slow my mind and it will all fade away.

And this my friends, is what it is to write.

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