Quite simple he'd like us to think. I happened to chance upon this interview (from 2017) of the founder of SoftBank, Masayoshi Son, today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sa2_VBu0d7k He come across as quite a funny guy and of course I recommend watching it. This is how he describes his innovation process: MASAYOSHI SON: I ask my friends, isn't …
Design your own Street
Today I came across this web app to design your own street: Streetmix. Quite a soothing exercise, and I recommend taking a go at it. And once you do, check out the equally if not more interesting story behind the design - You are a street designer. It mentions how this tool got people to reach …
Ninjas and Knights
A few days back I came across this compelling presentation about... design and would like to share it here. Ninjas & Knights It's quite deeply philosophical, but also damn good storytelling.
Design for Positive Emotion
"The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have." - Steve Jobs Thinking about Positive Emotion From the last few weeks, I have been thinking over how to create better emotional experiences for people who use digital products. It turned out that I lacked a good vocabulary of emotions. We …
What questions are you asking?
Our daily actions are answers, or attempts at answers, to the questions we ask ourselves. They shape our experience by focusing the energy of our conscious and subconscious thoughts on the search for answers to these questions. They become the lens through which we view reality. The Simpler Questions "How can I have more money?" This …
Dangers of being focused on design execution
These days I am enjoying a show in which participant magicians come on stage to fool two experienced magicians who act as judges. The experienced magicians claim that they know every trick in the book, as they have been doing it for 35 years. And that too in a city known for magical things, Las …
Continue reading Dangers of being focused on design execution
What is your product like?
One way to look at design: anything which produces a meaningful influence on human behavior. I am always keen to know about small things which change people's behavior. So recently, I came across this story from AirBnB: As part of the onboarding process at Airbnb, the company encourages new employees to ship new features on …
Three levels of making (digital) products
Yesterday I came across this informative piece about Product Design hiring at Facebook. The part which stood out was about the three kinds of questions through which they evaluate a design. I find these categories informative and want to explore them in this post. Base Level: Craftsmanship // visual, aesthetic, satisfying, making it look good The …
Returning to human scale
Some people are feeling the urge to return to human scale, to localism. If we just look at the last decade or so, globalization seemed positive and inevitable. People would be able to move, explore, experience the world, economies would prosper from global trade and immigration. But there have been previous trends where globalization came …
Better designed products
In 2017 I wrote that soon we will see better designed products because companies which make design tools were getting big rounds of venture capital. While this has been true, I am now seeing some very well designed products. But not because someone used better tool to make them, but because they were made more …
