Zakary Tormala, writing about our surprising preference for potential - even over achievement. Emphasis mine.
We designed several ads in Facebook promoting a comedian who was growing in popularity at the time of our study. One ad said, “Critics say he has become the next big thing,” and another said, “Critics say he could become the next big thing.” The “potential” ads produced more than three times the click-through rate and five times the fan rate.
I had never heard this term, but I like it. From an interview in Solid State Technology with Margaret Blohm, Chief Scientist and Leader of Nanotechnology at GE Global Research, emphasis mine:
Q: What challenges do you face in managing nanotechnology research programs and scientists?
The challenge of dealing with a lot of enthusiasm and making sure we stay on track with business impact and not just really cool technology. It can be hard on folks who have a good idea that’s not ready for a specific business use. An even bigger challenge is doing matrix managing. I’ve never been a fan, but I love it now. Matrix managing is the process of influencing organizations or departments or other structures where you don’t have individuals directly reporting to you, to help them recognize the mutual benefit of what they are working on.
I matrix manage the people on the various research teams. I reach in to their team and work with them. For example, a chemist is on one team and can join my team as well. It’s usually a management nightmare, but it has worked here. It’s communication both ways. They aren’t isolated from business challenges and opportunities. Matrixing helps do that.
I can't tell whether to be flattered by this or what.
FWIW I am proud of most of these, especially "coined countersinks," for which I am *bafflingly* the top result. I also have reason to believe that a good number of the unprovided search results are for DMLS pricing, which is more exciting to me than the fact that someone wants to see me (or some lesser Spencer Wright) in the nude.
PCBA, recently @ The Public Radio:
We've got about a dozen beta radios out in the wild right now, and are working on an additional 10 or so. There are a few small hardware revisions that are yet to be made, but the overall design is about right, and we'll be rolling out a larger launch in the coming months. Stay tuned.
From a good article on Susan Kare, who (among other things) designed the great early GUI icons for Apple.
In exchange for a pre-IPO purchase of Apple stock, Xerox allowed Jobs and his engineering team three days’ access to PARC to scope out the Alto and its development tools.
*So* good to deal in equity.
I relate to this very strongly.
Whether in the context of building products or changing cultures, my own core interest is in seeing what drives human behavior and how people react to change. I am drawn back to the technology industry over and over not because I care about bits and bytes, but because it is the most fertile ground for behavior change that exists in our world today.
cf. something I wrote like a year ago - whether or not it holds up :)
My mailing list is live. Again. Why is it taking you so long to realize this?
The (arbitrarily) best things to read about tech, culture, behavioral economics & hamburgers.
George Packer, writing in the New Yorker:
Journalists and historians have to distort war: in order to find the plot—causation, sequence, meaning—they make war more intelligible than it really is.
There's a nontrivial value to this kind of deception, but it's a tricky balance to strike. One presumes that there are lessons to learn from war, and it follows that someone should be empowered to tease those meanings from the (literal and figurative) rubble. At the same time, I have a strong aversion to making even subtle modifications to underlying truths, and it worries me to consider that what I read is distinctly different from facts.
This same dilemma extends to other realms, including my own (as it were). Business analysis (even that which I find most insightful) and the opinions of experts are subject to all manner of distortions, and I struggle to keep those out of my own work.
If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.
I can't find a good citation for this, but I like it. I do, however, think it's worth adding that good communication skills are also very, very important - and that "well enough" is relative.
From a post titled "How Cognitive Fluency Affects Decision Making" on UXMatters. Emphasis mine.
In one study, researchers presented participants with the names of hypothetical food additives and asked them to judge how harmful they might be. People perceived additives with names that were hard to pronounce as being more harmful than those with names that were easier to pronounce. On a subconscious level, people were equating ease or difficulty of pronunciation with an assumption about familiarity. When the pronunciation seemed easy, people assumed it was because they’d previously encountered the additive and had already done the mental work of processing information about it. Since it seemed familiar, they assumed it was safe...
Researchers have found that, when a stimulus feels fluent, people are more likely to make judgments and decisions based on their first, Gut reaction. However, when a stimulus feels disfluent, people are more likely to reconsider their initial Gut reaction. Disfluency functions as a cognitive alarm that gets people to slow down and reassess a situation. From a UX-design standpoint, sometimes it’s good to get people to slow down and pay attention—and one way to do this is to deliberately make the information harder to process mentally by making its font harder to read or by using wording that is uncommon or unfamiliar.
Product photography is fun, and weird.
Today I spent the majority of my day on-location shooting The Public Radio with Zach and Colin (and with help from Hannah, Lianna and Chris). It was good, and exhausting, and fun.
When I was building bikes, I self-consciously photographed a huge portion of my life. My aim was presumably to build a personal brand that would improve the appeal of my company, but looking back I wonder how much of it was pure narcissism.
Now it's (ostensibly) different; I'm part of a larger team, and in many ways the aesthetic that we're selling is distinct from my own. Sure, I use Mason jars, and I truly enjoy FM from time to time - and when I do, I only listen to one station. But the challenges that interest me about The Public Radio are largely distinct from the reasons that (I believe) our customers would buy it, and that has a huge effect on the way I present it to the world. It frees me up, and removes self-consciousness from the equation. It makes it much easier.
Anyway. Consider The Public Radio's crowdfunding campaign begun. Stay in touch for updates.
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You should subscribe to it - it'll be better that way :)
I became aware of Undercurrent a little over a year ago. I found them via Radiolab, where they were an underwriter; their ad caught me off-guard (in particular because it mentioned both additive manufacturing and human-refrigerator interaction), and I've spent a lot of time since then tracking the organization. Undercurrent's philosophy, talent, and focus were highly attractive to me, and I enjoyed reading about their work.
And so it's with great pleasure that I can announce that I'm joining Undercurrent in a full-time strategy role.
Mike Arauz describes Undercurrent's philosophy well here:
This is why we’ve built a team that doesn’t look like traditional consulting firms. We value someone’s ability to see how organizations need to be in the future more than someone’s knowledge of how organizations operated in the past. Our core competency is not our ability to apply rigor and proven methodologies to make safer bets and mitigate risk, it’s our insight about how the future is going to be different than the present, gained through intuition, intelligence, and creativity.
I will be continuing my work on the variety of other projects I've got going - with increased vigor, in some cases. Undercurrent has the highest density of curiosity, creativity, and excitement that I've ever seen in a workplace. I'm looking forward to being a part of it.
My coffee grinder hack works really well! I made a few cups this morning with it - and you can get your own on Shapeways!
Ben Bajarin, on twitter yesterday:
I always, *always* want to be looking down the road in fields upstream of mine. If you want to be ahead of the curve, it's critical to be tracking the curves of all the fields that inform yours.
David Cole, writing about the role of designers in a very good presentation from last year.
If the project you were working on failed — it hit the market and nobody wanted it, nobody used it — would you blame yourself? If the answer is no, then I think you don't have enough authority. If you're blaming others for the outcomes in your work, it's time to demand more.
I would generalize this statement to all professions, all roles. I would also add that responsibility is key to this equation as well, and that responsibility isn't given - it's taken.
"In today's high speed environment, stop motion footage of a city at night with cars turning quickly makes you think about doing things efficiently."
Ben Thompson, in a post titled "Newspapers are Dead; Long Live Journalism."
“But [Insert Newspaper Name Here] has great journalists! They’ve won Pulitzer Prizes! And our democracy needs newspapers!” Unfortunately, advertisers don’t, and newspapers are paying the price for having long ago divorced the cost of their content from the value readers place upon it. To put it another way, it’s not that “the Internet has unbundled advertising from content creation,” it’s that advertisers (rightly) don’t give a damn about journalistic ideals. It is incredibly tiring to hear newspaper defenders talk as if advertising dollars are their god-given right, and that Google and Facebook are somehow stealing from them, when in reality Google and Facebook are winning in the fairest way possible: providing better value for the advertiser’s dollar.
I think this is very pretty.
With any luck, I'll have an update on my coffee grinder driver in the next few days. The bottom line is that it's live and working, and you should holler at me if you're interested in testing one!
