Advocating for greater design maturity can be frustrating - it seems that design will perenially be pigeonholed as the craft of making things pretty. This morning I’ve spent some time thinking about the root causes that lead to design being boxed in, and I’ve come up with a couple ideas. I’d like to hear more […]

That’s the title for a recent News.com story. But I couldn’t find a literal answer in the article, so I decided to calculate it myself.
First, there’s the question of how much Google weighs - so I started from the cliche that a company is its people:

Number of Google Employees

7,942

Average Weight: Male

189.8lbs

Average Weight: Female

162.9lbs

Price of Gold […]

There’s a seduction to being an expert, an assumption in society that credibility relies on deep (and narrow) expertise. However, for people operating at the edges, interesections, and overlaps where innovation thrives, being a generalist is far more powerful. Reading Frank Herbert’s Dune Messiah on vacation, I came across this quote, describing mentats (people able […]

Meeting Stephen Anderson was one of my Summit highlights - and one of my regrets was not getting to talk with him about his poster that shows a model for classifying experiences.

So there’s a lot of conversation about outsourcing product design and development, with an undercurrent of Western fear - that *my* job, my salary will leave and go overseas. It’s polarizing, and often nationalistic, with an artificial “designed in the USA” product patriotism.
There is a real conversation there, but it’s a red herring for most […]

An important note: don’t take the actual term ‘design thinking’ too seriously. It’s useful shorthand, but has some significant drawbacks. The real point of the design thinking conversation is about advancing a mindset and skillset that can produce better results.
At the same time, if ‘design thinking’ has its drawbacks, what should we use if we’re […]