MightyFunk

Archive for August, 2009

2009-08-19 19:18:38

I’m happy to announce that I just joined the board of the Boul­der Dig­i­tal Works (BDW).? At this time back in 2004, I was busy help­ing the Stan­ford d.school achieve lift off, so it’s really cool now to be part of another design edu­ca­tion startup.? And now the idea of a design cur­ricu­lum com­bin­ing busi­ness, tech­nol­ogy, and human issues is much more accepted in the main­stream, which to me makes the focused mis­sion of the BDW even more excit­ing. As John Maeda recently noted, the miss­ing part­ner to STEM (Sci­ence, Tech­nol­ogy, Engi­neer­ing, Math) is IDEA (Intu­ition, Design, Emo­tion, Art).? As a per­son who was trained on both sides and now works and plays across STEM and IDEA, I feel strongly that our edu­ca­tion pro­grams need to com­bine both in order to cre­ate the T-shaped peo­ple that can go out and make a dif­fer­ence in the world ( Prin­ci­ple 6 ). Finally, as a native of Boul­der, BDW gives me another excuse to get back to the place where I came to love and admire the fine art of dri­ving in the snow .? Can’t wait.? Hope the board meet­ings are in February!

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Design­ing at the Boul­der Dig­i­tal Works

2009-08-14 15:25:03

What do us three hunks have in com­mon?? The answer is easy and nat­ural:? we’re all (for­mer) proud own­ers of a Ford Tau­rus SHO.? Mine was an 89 with a chalky black fin­ish.? A good car with a fab­u­lous, fab­u­lous motor. The best device ever con­ceived by mankind for lay­ing some patch.? On a cold Ore­gon win­ter high­way, in the dark and in the wet, I could shoot huge rooster tails of sparks out from the slip­ping studs of my win­ter Miche­lins on steel wheels.? Oh, the romance

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Brad, Conan, and me

2009-08-12 18:28:37

If you’re going to reach inno­v­a­tive out­comes on a rou­tine basis, you need to match the right team to the oppor­tu­nity.? Part of that means under­stand­ing Prin­ci­ple 7 so that you know what type of prob­lem you’re tack­ling, the other part involves under­stand­ing what kind of expe­ri­ence you need on your team.? When it comes to answer­ing that last ques­tion, the right kind of expe­ri­ence pro­file depends on whether you’re look­ing at a high or low vari­ance sit­u­a­tion.? Exam­ples of low vari­ance sit­u­a­tions are fly­ing a 747 from San Fran­cisco to Sin­ga­pore, oper­at­ing on a heart, or serv­ing up burg­ers at In-N-Out.? In each of those sit­u­a­tions, we desire a pre­dictable out­come deliv­ered with a low degree of vari­ance from a pre­de­ter­mined stan­dard, and in this con­text, the right expe­ri­ence is expressed in terms of hav­ing done the same thing many times before.? We want a pilot who can fly the 747 on, well, autopi­lot.? We want a sur­geon who has done hun­dreds of the same oper­a­tion, and learned some­thing from each one, not a sur­geon who has done one hun­dred dif­fer­ent sur­gi­cal pro­ce­dures once.? As such, expe­ri­ence is really about tenure in a role, with rel­e­vant expe­ri­ence hav­ing a direct cor­re­la­tion to years in the role. ? In a high-variance sit­u­a­tion, where we are expect­ing an inno­v­a­tive out­come, but have lit­tle to no sense what the right answer might look like, we need a dif­fer­ent def­i­n­i­tion of what “expe­ri­enced” means.? In this con­text, we want peo­ple who are expe­ri­enced with the process of inno­va­tion — in other words, peo­ple who have gone through the “under­stand — build — test” cycle of Prin­ci­ple 4 many times.? We want folks with a lot of mileage under their belt, in other words, but that mileage need not be strictly cor­re­lated with years at work.? For exam­ple, one of the rea­sons why Honda cycles its pro­duc­tion engi­neers through its var­i­ous rac­ing pro­grams is to increase their inno­va­tion process mileage; design­ing a new com­po­nent for a mass mar­ket auto­mo­bile takes sev­eral years, so between the time an engi­neer grad­u­ates col­lege and turns 40, they may have only shipped three to four designs to mar­ket (if they’re lucky).? Con­trast that with a race engi­neer, who faces the chal­lenge of opti­miz­ing a race car for a dif­fer­ent track con­fig­u­ra­tion every two weeks for eight months, as well as man­ag­ing an arc of inno­va­tion for the entire car over those same eight months.? Dur­ing that short period of time, they may expe­ri­ence 10, 15, even 20 cycles of “under­stand — build — test”.? So when it comes to pick­ing an engi­neer to go fig­ure out the future of mobil­ity, which one would you choose, the “I’ve shipped the same thing to mar­ket three times” per­son, or the “I’ve done 20 cycles every year for the past? four years” indi­vid­ual?? By my reck­on­ing, in this world an engi­neer age 26 could have 20 times the rel­e­vant process expe­ri­ence as a per­son 14 years their senior

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17: It’s not the years, it’s the mileage

2009-08-11 14:27:05

Awe­some post from Joi Ito today , talk­ing about inno­va­tion process and gov­ern­ment pol­icy.? An excerpt: Gen­er­ally speak­ing, it’s prob­a­bly cheaper and faster and more effec­tive to make a pro­to­type than to make pre­sen­ta­tion deck. It’s also prob­a­bly eas­ier to test some­thing on real users than to do lots of mar­ket­ing and guess­ing. My rec­om­men­da­tion to just about any­one with an idea is to just build the thing, iter­ate until you have some user trac­tion, then pitch angel investors based on that traction

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Joi Ito on inno­vat­ing with agility

2009-08-11 01:58:52

This Porsche raced at Le Mans in 1970 and cap­tured my imag­i­na­tion as a boy like no other race car.? Beyond being a mem­ber of the ultra-gnarly 917 fam­ily of Porsches, this car sports a paintscheme like no other.? Cam­paigned under the brand umbrella of Mar­tini, those iris swirls were as arrest­ing then as they are now, and are what lended this par­tic­u­lar car the sobri­quet of “hip­pie”.? It’s a beau­ti­ful design that’s stood the test of time, and I’d wager it is a flex­i­ble one, too; if this pat­tern were printed on the side of resuable shop­ping bag from Whole Foods, none of us would bat an eye.

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Who designed the Porsche 917L Mar­tini “hip­pie” car?

2009-08-05 13:47:15

I just posted a piece over at Deep­Glam­our: Top 10 Most Glam­orous Cars, 1945 — present I have a feel­ing not every­one will be happy with my opin­ions, so please don’t slash my tires.? But don’t fret, there’s no M Coupe on the list.? Let the debate begin!

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Deep Glam­or­ing…

2009-08-02 21:47:42

As far as this art and sci­ence of bring­ing cool stuff to life thing goes, Maira Kalman really nailed it in today’s NYT.? You have to see it all .? It’s the triple dis­til­la­tion of pure awe­some­ness.? Here’s a quote: Every­thing is invented. Lan­guage.? Child­hood.? Careers. Rela­tion­ships.? Religion.

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Maira Kalman on the Amer­i­can Message