Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

The A – B = C way to your next promotion

Friday, August 27th, 2010

A = The skills and knowledge needed to do the kind of work that your next job entails

B = The skills and knowledge that you have

C = The skills and knowledge you have to learn or get someone to teach you, or figure out some way to get someone else to do for you in your new promotion. These skills and knowledge should be made into a list that you need to check off one by one.

References

What Color Is Your Parachute. I adapted this from his chapter on how to start your own business. It was recently recommended to me to re-read “The Parachute” book once a year, so I am doing so now.  Additionally, it is useful to give me practical ideas/topics and to help focus my discussions with the people I manage and mentor. I highly recommend it.

See also: How to get promoted to Senior User Experience Designer

Agency of the Future

Thursday, August 26th, 2010

Been doing some thinking about what the agency of the Future Looks like.

I found the R/GA videos to be great.
What we do (11:44)
Our Model (4:18) The core of their concept
Our Vision (8:12)
If you are thinking of making a agency of your own, check out the way they present and show who they are. The model they present focuses on showing how they solve problem of integration. The presenters pass the “Yes, I’d love to have a beer with them” test.

I am also reading Jaffe Juice who I have recently stumbled upon and wrote a interesting article called The Agency of the Future.

And another great post on “who says the future needs an advertising agency?”

Talking about Managing

Friday, August 20th, 2010

Sometimes as managers and directors we don’t talk about management. We seem to talk about everything expect the core of our responsibility. A great blog I came across recently is by Bob Sutton – Work That Matters, it focuses nicely on management. Let the discussions begin.

References

Fred Leis is my manager who said “Lets talk about more about management.”

Sundar Chandrasekaran, a Sears employee now, a recent Stanford Grad who was a student of Bob Sutton and was telling me about him in our afternoon meeting. Thanks Sundar!!

Advertising lags Politics by 10 years

Friday, August 20th, 2010

Politics Over the Last 30 years

Late 80s -90s  in politics – Big national databases that segmented and targeted and identified “influentials”

90s -2000s in politics – rise of talk-radio hosts

Late 2000s in politics – neighborhood by neighborhood organizing the rise of niche micro-movements (donations, volunteers, etc)

Advertising Over the last 30 years – Basically take politics and lag by a decade

90-2000s – Big national databases that segmented and targeted and identified “influentials”

Late 2000s – bloggers who command attention like the talk-radio hosts and guerrilla advertising

2010 – The rise of twitter, niche advertising, and local and “badged” communities

References

From a late night conversation with Michael Leis on ways to explain advertising/social media

Confessions of a Public Speaker by Berkun

Thursday, August 19th, 2010

I read “Confessions of a Public Speaker by Scott Berkun. I enjoyed it and have used its advice. Here are my notes that I took from it.

I often condense all my notes into a single “image.” Here is what I have for this book.

Connectile Dysfunction

Wednesday, August 18th, 2010

Connectile Dysfunction by Mark Baskinger

A great read in UX Magazine. Almost a must read if you are looking into how interaction design can feed into industrial design.

Key concepts

  1. Design for Impact and Design for Experience
  2. Refrigerator- design of an organizational system for cold storage
  3. Boomer and Elderly similarities and differences
  4. Co-design
  5. Steering Wheels as insight for stove knobs (unified product forms and interactions)
  6. Strike Zones

Big Themes

  1. Integrating interaction into form
  2. Situated interaction in environmental context
  3. Express through physical/visual form
  4. Narrating the interaction

Online Profiles & the Movie “Salt”

Monday, August 2nd, 2010

The movie Salt gives us insight into deep culture’s conception of how many profiles one person can have.

Observation: In the movie Salt and in other spy movies we have seen a move from a single profile of a spy (James Bond) to a multiple profile spy (Salt) in which Salt is a spy, a counter-spy, and a counter-counter-spy. People nowadays seem to have no problem following this plot line  and character  (the wilderness of mirrors.) This is addition to her 2 “cover” profiles which would exist in each national culture.

Observation: In high schools now kids are no longer exclusively nerds, jocks, stoners, etc. Each of these can be short-lived roles even within a single day.

Observation: Facebook and Linked in are used by the same people in very different ways.

The Question: How many different profiles can a person have? And, how many different profiles of 1 person can other people keep track of?

Answer: I think the answer is 3 to 5. We see Facebook, LinkedIn, and usually peoples corporate in-company profile, and their personal profile (usually mediated through the channels of email/phone-calls/text messages. From the movie Salt we see 5. It is without a doubt more than 1.

References

Chris Messina talked about people having 5 profiles in NY at the Overlap event.

Why spies, counter-spies, and counter-counter spies are so popular right now.

The Official Site for the Movie Salt

Comments on high-school groups (I’m still looking for my reference)

See Also

Shoptimism

Coming Soon: Todd

Tuesday, July 27th, 2010

Build anticipation

At Akira, on State Street in Chicago I found this window display and thought it a good example of building anticipation. “New Shipment Coming Soon!”

Window Display Rothman’s Warehousr

Monday, July 26th, 2010

Rothman’s Warehouse storefront makes it look like it would be piled high with boxes inside. What an interesting window display.

Refining Your Bodystorming w/Techniques from Cindy Chastain

Friday, July 23rd, 2010

Last year at Overlap Cindy Chastain talked about screen-writing and scenes and people used those improve their bodystorming. At one point in the weekend she distilled her wisdom into 5 points.

  1. POV. Whose story are you telling? (Ask: Who are you telling it to?)
  2. Set up the scene” The Big Problem is “this”
  3. Inciting Incident: “What if” (concept elaborated)
  4. Climax: Result” How it solved problem
  5. Resolution: How the main character feels about it

If you come to my Bodystorming in the Park in New York next Month we will be working with some of these 5 points to take your bodystorming to the next level.