Silberbauer Says:

Just a couple of books that I would recommend on branding, design and innovation.

Tom Kelley: Ten Faces of Innovation.
A very inspiring book on how to beat the Devil’s Advocate and Driving Creativity Throughout Your Organization.

• Good:
  - All in all, it’s a very good book for anyone with an interest in generating creativity and innovation in their own company.
  - Kelley makes an very important distinction with his focus on faces and not phases. It’s people that drives innovation, not Gant diagrams and Project Management phases and schedules.
• Bad
  The next time Kelley writes about innovation, he should make up his mind whether he wants to promote Ideo or write a serious book about innovation. He knows a lot about innovation, no question about it!, but to much cheering about the wonderful successes of Ideo does not make him or his argumentation any more credible or convincing.

Tom Peters: Design

Tom Peters has the ability to get you pumped up with enthusiasm just by the way he writes and in this book the content is just as inspiring as well. This is a book with a message and you feel the commitment throughout the book.

• Good:
  What I like the most about this book is the radical all-or-nothing message that it sends out, for example this passage from the first chapter:

The harsh news: THIS IS NOT OPTIONAL. The microchip will colonize all rote activities. And we will have to scramble to reinvent ourselves – as we did when we came off the farm and went into the factory, and then as we were ejected from the factory and delivered to the white collars towers.
The exciting news: THIS IS NOT OPTIONAL. The reinvented you and the reinvented me will have no choice but to scramble and add value in some meaningful way.

• Bad:
  If you’re reading the book because you want to know more about design, you’re going to be disappointed, it’s not about design, it’s all about business and not about new colour schemes and design trends.

Martin Lindstrom: Brand Sense

The Danish Brand Guru Numero Uno has created a follow up to his previous bestseller Brandchild.

• Good:
  Basically, he’s making a point with his concept of branding for all five senses. It’s obvious that there’s room for improvement and that we need to consider all elements of human cognitivity when we are trying to make an impact on customers. But the way he’s trying to measure human senses is not convincing. It seems to me, that he’s got a point and he knows it, but in his ambition to prove his idea, he is crossing the line from giving proffessional advice and doing academic research. And there’s a very big difference!
• Bad:
  As in Tom Kelley’s book about innovation it seems to me that Lindstrom sometimes doesn’t know which one of his two objectives that’s most important. Is it to contribute to the shared pool of knowledge about branding? or is it to use his own branding abilities and tools to strengthen his own brand “Martin Lindstrom”? It’s not clear to me, but I would prefer a honest personal branding exercise without the want-to-make-ground-breaking-academic-research stuff.

Anyway, all three books are worth reading. Enjoy!

Over the last two weeks me and a colleague have executed four workshops with a client who is building a complex B2B portal. The client has for some time been working on the concept and business model but as the process needed to move forward into design we were called in to take the process to the next level – and to do this quickly as deadline was approaching mightily fast.

As the concept was not entirely documented but mostly existed inside the project team members’ minds, our design process had to be very flexible to allow for sudden changes in scope and strategy.

We soon realized that we needed to get very visual indeed to shift the team members from strategic thinking into design mode (from the “what and why”-mode to the “how”-mode), and that we also needed a lot of face time with the client to understand the complex organisational needs without doing a some thorough analysis first. So we simply brought a laptop with Axure RP 4.2, a projector and a Wacom digitizer and did 4 x 5 hours of intense rapid prototyping with the client.

We were 2 of us, 3 of them and, very importantly, the head of the company that eventually will implement the system: A skilled system architect with a great understanding of the need for IA and interaction design. We’ve worked with him before and it’s always a pleasure (I can’t mention names here, but he’ll know who he is

He and I lead the discussion while my colleague prototyped like mad in Axure, constantly reflecting the team’s decisions on the screen (he’ pretty fast in Axure – and one needs to be to keep up with 5 team members constantly changing their minds).

The first couple of hours of workshop one went by without much progress but suddenly the site started to emerge on the screen. Today we concluded the fourth and final workshop and I must say that this approach really has moved the project forward.

Live prototyping with a team of 6 is not the cheapest way to do it, but there no question that both the project and the quality of the IA and the design have benefitted from this approach.

Anyway: Tomorrow I leave for Berlin to attend the second European Information Architecture Summit. Two days of fun and educating stuff, I hope. And the IA happy hour friday evening. What’s a summit without hang overs?

I’ll blog about this event when I’ll get back, but please be patient – the next week is screwed up schedule-wise so we might reach the weekend before any posts appear.

I’ve always liked Discovery Channel. Even though some of the shows are targeted war maniacs or chopper lovers, the programs are always about some part of our reality. It’s entertainment of course – but it isn’t fake. It isn’t a lie. Until now.

Discovery Channel Europe now airs “A Sense of Murder” produced by Danish Egmont. It’s a show about some proclaimed “psychics” that “helps” the police “solving” crimes. Well, they don’t, really, because they can’t. As their so called “powers” don’t exist they are just walking about making stuff up – but what matters is that the program does not question their abilities at all. (Sorry about all the quotes). One of the psychics on the show is in fact the ever present Marion Dampier-Jeans.

In one episode of “A Sense of Murder” a Danish police officer tells the interviewer that the information given to him by the psychics could mean that the case would be reopened. Now think of this: A gun carrying member of a European police force really thinks that this freak “sees” something? If I should ever commit a murder, I want that dummy to lead the investigation. While he’s busy looking in the crystal ball I’ll be getting out of the country.

I don’t know – maybe Dampier-Jeans and her fellow wackos really do think they see something. In that case I think they should consider getting some professional psychiatric help. Or – and I think this is the case – they are just lying to make some easy money and sadly Discovery Channel seems eager to help.

The channel originally devoted to science and reality has sold out. Shame on you, Discovery Channel.

If you’re still on iTunes 6, stick with it for the time being. V7 skips like crazy when you are moving windows around or opening documents. And sometimes it skips just for the fun of it.

It’s incredible that Apple cannot produce a player that’ll play a standard 196Kbps MP3 without errors on a fast 2006 pc. I mean – Winamp 2 decoded MP3s with the cpu usage of a standard household toaster and never skipped – no matter what you did to your machine.

Some iTunes 7 victims have found that this helps: http://www.geekzone.co.nz/juha/1308 – but only if your music is extremely distorted. The random skips don’t go away.

Maybe it’s time to check out Anapod instead of Apple’s cpu-hogging beast.

[UPDATE]
7.0.1 is out. Faster but still skips on my machine, though.

The functionality is ok – but let’s face it: It’s ugly.