January 2010
6 posts
Viveka Weiley on Imaginary Tablets →
Viveka is doing his PhD on creativity support tools. He’s been making prototype tablet-like things and he posted this brief analysis the day before the iPad launch.
Some of the prototypes have been slates, of various shapes and sizes. Form factors made from foamcore, weighted with aluminium; interactivity simulated with my (jailbroken) iPhone. I’ve been carrying them around and imagining...
2 tags
Simple is not Obvious
My friend Drew Smith re-appropriated some 31-year-old automotive journalism to consider the iPad:
The iPad is a tablet computer with quite a pleasant appearance, a quite efficient processor, quite comfortable physical dimensions, a quite nice user experience and a quite reasonable price. And it is quite well constructed. So, you might say it was merely average. But can it really be that...
1 tag
Week 159
Anne posted her first weeknote earlier this week, and I agree that it seems like a good sort of habit to try and form. I’ve been trying to keep a sort of personal daily research diary journal in VoodooPad and this is a nice way to expose some of that, too.
Anne started her weeknotes at week 436 and Phil Gyford started at 335 and the idea of not starting at 1 has some appeal for me too, so...
4 tags
Persona or Target Market?
In July last year the NYT reported that “Antonella” was a persona invented to inspire the design of the Ford Verve concept car, a thinly disguised new Fiesta. I was unimpressed.
But, in April last year, Autocar had a story on Antonella being representative of the target market for the Fiesta. If Antonella first came to light as a target market persona, rather than a design persona,...
“I think one of the ways to make awful services is by developing some pure,...”
– (via Bobulate: It’s not executional)
December 2009
0 posts
The unnatural environment →
This is a remarkable article by Tom Johnson, professor of business administration at Portland State University. Johnson covers demolishes the conventional story about the Toyota Production System.
Outsiders misinterpret what they see when they study Toyota because their own thinking is limited by assumptions inherited from the 18th-century world view that continues to dominate contemporary...