On June 1st Jason Fried published “Never Read Another Resume” via Inc.com. It was thematically correct in the sense that Jason tends to go on irreverently about strange abstractions of reality. For me it was just another moment in his timeline. For Scott Olsen, it was the last straw. Two days ago Scott wrote a scathing rebuttal to Jason and all who follow him. Scott is a great writer and I found his views both hilarious and on-point until… he came after Chicago.
FUCK! – I AM SO TIRED OF PEOPLE SNIPING AT CHICAGO!
First, let me take care of Jason with a quick highly editorialized review of his journey. Ten(ish) years ago Jason and his colleagues, members of the elite design group 3rst (thirst), spun off a web-design company that they creatively named 37signals after the total number of signals SETI had captured that *could* represent intelligent life. They were successful as we all were because it was the very top of the internet bubble. It was raining gold those days.
Then the bubble burst.
Instead of joining a pottery club, or going back to school, or weeping at the edge of a valley that became a trailer park, Jason and his team decided to build a tool to help other design firms build closer relationships with their clients. They were successful, it’s called Basecamp. We use it, all of you should. Jason grew his self-proclaimed tiny empire out of the rubble and has since released a number of other successful products (some more than others). Jason changed his game and ours – for that and that alone, he deserves his spot in the sun. So here it is… Thank you Jason, you have made my business better and my clients happier. You are crazy, but I love you.
So why dig up Jason’s history in his defense? Because I believe you, Mr. Olson, have a Pernicious Lack of Perspective. If you know anything about Jason you should understand that he’s just a guy pointing at the moon, not giving point-by-point driving directions. He is organic, responsive, and chaotic. He is also brilliant. I fault you for taking his rants literally and also not maintaining your “west coast calm.” Jason is notorious for his ‘question everything’ approach. We share that in common but to a large extent he has found greater success in it.
Quickly, I have my share of experience with San Francisco and Silicon Valley. I love them both, they are entirely different. I’ve spent quite a bit of time in Silicon Valley, in offices with “recycled” furniture for office equipment. I’ve sat across from Jeff Hawkins (his space was nicer) sharing ideas on the future of intelligent computing. Sure, I’ve occasionally referred to SV as “The Land of Unicorns and Rainbows,” but it has always been with love. Who doesn’t love unicorns? It makes perfect sense that San Franciscans are very eager to annex SV, it’s a magical place.
So why am I based in Chicago? Very simple… Family. I was raised in Battle Creek Michigan and my wife grew up in Milwaukee. We are northerners. I don’t find solace in subtle seasonal shifts. I like change. I like leaves that drop and cold that bites, and snow that… well whatever snow does.. you get it.
I also love the people. Nobody hunkers down and get’s it done like Chicagoans. Sure we have a temper (you’re getting that, right?) and sure some of us have a funny accent, but we love what we do and we *are* “The City of Big Shoulders.”
Here’s a short list of comparisons of the two cities:
Here is some more interesting comparative information from a technology company not founded in San Francisco. I’ve got work to do so I have to cut this short (lol) but wanted to give props to EveryBlock for their recent acquisition, Threadless for remaining oh-so-cool, McDonalds for making me fat, Tanagram (go us! – plug!), 37Signals, and the rest of us that don’t work for the park district (well… them too).
Shameless plug for the Chicago Poster Biennial!
9 Million of us are watching you Mr Olson. You betcha!
Posted by Joseph Juhnke on June 25, 2010
In my previous methodology post “The “Anti-Methodology” – A different approach to application design?” I talked about breaking down the barriers of role. This post is a continuation of that theme but we’ll be talking about the breaking down the barriers of the customer.
Remember that excited feeling you had at the beginning of a project where the sky was the limit and you were chomping at the bit to get started conceiving your next, greatest masterpiece? It’s now three-months later and you’re biting your nails raw in anticipation of the 3pm presentation of your concepts to your customer. It’s been a great exploration, you’ve done your best work, researched the heck out of the topic, and yet you are still praying they will love your ideas. What’s wrong with this picture? You may not know it but this situation is exactly the situation you don’t want to be in. The problem I’m illustrating is the conceptual disconnect that is causing you to lose sleep hoping they won’t dissect your concepts or worse combine them (not to mention that you are showing more than one concept). It’s the fact that the people sitting in the boardroom don’t know what they are about to see. Put bluntly, if your client is going to be surprised by your concept presentation deep into the project, you are risking failure. Sadly traditional methodologies encourage this pattern and the potential disconnects that often arise. To us, it’s just gambling.
How do we do it differently? We put our clients to work. A good friend of mine often refers to “Consultant’s Hubris” or the feeling that as a consultant we know more than the client. While we may be an expert at what we do, we hardly know the issues and opportunities the client faces on a daily (yearly) basis. We are not experts in their business, period. Face this and become more powerful.
Our contracts require client participation, sometimes significant hours weekly. When we kick-off we ask our client to designate a “steward” who will participate in the project heavily. The steward must have deep experience within the client organization and products we are working with. They are a Subject Matter Expert (SME).
We start with a working session to clearly define goals (or at least the first draft of the goals) and plan out how we are going to attack them. Following this are short 2-3 week work cycles (sprints) that involve twice-weekly working sessions where the client-steward and team are locked in a room discussing, researching, sketching and prototyping. Because our people are very experienced, they guide the steward’s ideas to merge with relevant trends and technology and result in beautiful solutions. At the end of each sprint we evaluate our collective success, present status to the larger client organization (gather additional feedback) and plan the next sprint. At the end of the project we have developed one concept with the steward that is not only extremely relevant but also co-owned. That’s right, the steward owns the solution because they co-developed it and they actually help ‘sell’ our collective solution to their organization as we develop it. Of course this means they are circulating pencil sketches and prototypes well before the final presentation, but they are also translating the thinking into meaningful dialog with their colleagues. It’s very powerful to watch. The best part is we together are all heroes at the end and if you can make your client a hero, you’ve done your job correctly.
The first thing people ask me when I talk about this approach is how we handle the “bad” ideas stewards bring with them. The answer is communication. We’ve had stewards bring us wireframes of the application with full expectation that we would build exactly what they had specified. We embrace their concepts and talk directly about them with the steward. We explore the concepts that inspired them and the needs they are trying to solve. These concepts are immensely valuable windows into the mind our partner/client. During this conversation we share experience, industry trends, competitor approaches, and user-centric best practices. We do the drawing – together we are each the best at what we are. I’m proud to say that in every project we used this approach, the results have been stellar. The solution is something both we and the client are immensely proud of.
Because this method is designed to break down the walls between the client and our team it works very well with companies who have stakeholders with competing needs. Our process works very well in this “federated” situation because we incorporate stewards from each department in our working sessions. The debates happen in real-time and if they can’t be solved on the spot, they are resolved within the week with follow-up discussions.
There isn’t enough room on our blog to talk through every detail of this approach but if you’d like to learn more about this process we’re happy to help. Drop us a line or post-back here and we’ll be glad to share. If you like we can present our approach, train your team, and even collaborate on your next big thing!
Posted by Joseph Juhnke on June 24, 2010
I recently participated in Core77‘s One Hour Design Challenge in Gestural Interfaces. The goal of the design challenge is to develop a concept that is a “a meaningful counterpoint to the all-in-one interface of the screen” and “invites the user to interact with information or their surroundings in a way that encourages discovery while delivering an element of performance.”
Initially I thought of automation concepts like a shower that adjusts temp if it senses the shower-ee cringing from overly hot or cold water. Useful, but not particularly inspiring.
But then I started thinking about discovering new music and how interacting with a screen tends to fracture the listening experience. How might gesture bring freedom, fun and serendipity?
My concept: Encouraging new music discovery through hand shadows. In a nutshell: user makes hand shadow; it’s detected by an infrared motion sensor + video cam tucked away in a lamp then wirelessly sent to a last.fm/Pandora-like app that interprets the shadows to intelligently determine the song to play.
I choose hand shadows because human hands are highly expressive, and creating shadows with one’s hands adds an element of playfulness. It feels natural to show like/dislike of a song through thumbs up/down or to control volume by holding up fingers; but the real fun is to imagine hand shadows for particular genres or bands.
Here are the sketches:
Posted by Kim.Dziedzic on June 9, 2010
If you follow us on Twitter, you probably know many of our team spent last week at the ARE (Augmented Reality Event) 2010 conference. It was graciously put together by the exciting team at Ogmento and sponsored by some really great big and small names in the tech industry. Tanagram presented our work on our iARM platform and I hope to be able to share the video of that presentation as soon as the ARE2010 folks get it processed and released.
ARE2010 did a lot of things for Tanagram. First and foremost it taught us that we aren’t the only crazy people out there. There were many hundred equally passionate (and equally insane) individuals working diligently to realize a vision that has been foretold for many many years. Attending were 400 enthusiasts, 90 speakers, and 40 sponsors.
The conference also re-affirmed that Augmented Reality (AR) is a new frontier. The discussions were widely diverse from immediate implementations of marketing gimmicks to future visions of integrated experiences and super-powered humans. Keynote speakers, Bruce Sterling, Will Wright, and Blaise Agüera y Arcas, and Jesse Schell were all brilliant. They taught us to be humble, focused, human-centered, and reminded us that this isn’t the first new frontier and to remember (and reuse) the past. Jesse Schell presented a humorous and sobering view of privacy and what AR could mean for it (his point was it was already too late…).
I personally had an opportunity to meet and discuss ideas with some of my all-time hero’s including Bruce Sterling and Blaise Agüera y Arcas.
On the technology front I can share that there is a definite future for head mounted display technology. We saw proposals for 150deg. FOV systems. It’s going to be a very exciting decade!
As soon as the ARE folks post the videos I encourage you to browse the sessions. I didn’t attend one that was not fascinating. The ARE event will be held next year in Santa Clara and we will definitely be there.
P.S. Through this experience I was introduced to Bruce Sterling’s Wired Blog – Beyond the Beyond. Bruce admits it is eclectic as hell and is really anything that interests him. He saw that as a weakness, but I see it as a strength. I really look forward to the “random” posts. They are always head-stretching. I also encourage you to review the twitter feed for the conference. Great stuff in there!
Posted by Joseph Juhnke on June 9, 2010
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