Searchlights and sunglasses: Chapter one. 11 Untranslatable Words From Other Cultures. EdTech Index. Design Council: What Is Design? Incomplete Manifesto for Growth. Startups, This Is How Design Works – by Wells Riley. The Art of Insight and Action. Why you’ll always think your product is shit. Lobby of the Pixar offices in Emeryville, CA “My product isn’t quite there yet.” You’ve said this before. We all have. Anyone working on getting their first product out to market will often have the feeling that their product isn’t quite ready.
Or even once it’s out and being used, nothing will seem as perfect as they could be, and if you only did X, Y, and Z, then it woould be a little better. In a functional case, this leads to a great roadmap of potential improvements, and in a dysfunctional case, it leads to unlaunched products that are endlessly iterated upon without a conclusion. About a year ago I visited Pixar’s offices and learned a little about this product, and I wanted to share this small story below: Over at Pixar… Matt Silas (@matty8r), a long-time Pixar employee offered to take me on a tour of their offices and I accepted his gracious offer. I’ve always been a huge fan of Pixar – not just their products, but also their process and culture.
“Then there’s our building. Wow! What True Love Has To Do With Great Innovation. If there’s one thing we know about great innovations, it’s that they always break from the status quo. The best creative thinking occurs outside of the usual systems at work. The problem is, most of us live and work inside the system. So you have to purposely jam the controls. Create blips in the patterns. 1. The long days of summer offer two crucial things: time and freedom. 2. Who’s paying for this date? 3. You need to go make out. 4. When it comes down to it, when you’re in love, you feel like the best version of yourself. What Do You Think? Scott McDowell takes the risk out of hiring your management team. Copy, Adapt, Reproduce (AKA solving problems without creativity) « Mindflip. Evolution has allowed life to adapt and survive in the harshest of environments. The copy, paste, randomly change model allows for life to continue evolve and succeed in incredibly hostile conditions.
Survival of the Best Adapted. Yet with our own culture, rather than emulate the success of this model, we have pursued the God Model. A hierarchical system of control that could only possibly work if you were omnipotent and omniscient. Furthermore, should we achieve such a model, we will have created the ultimate dystopia. Our environment is changing more rapidly than this traditional model can possibly keep up. If we can’t understand these systems, how can we possibly design for them? We can’t and we shouldn’t. Instead we should adopt what has proven to be successful – Life. Copy, Adapt, Reproduce Copy: When we find a problem we should first look to find a solution that has already worked (you know how to google don’t you?) Let’s not let old paradigms stand in the way of a sustainable future.