I just finished Michael Pollan's "The Omnivore's Dilemma" and am grateful to him for removing yet another of the veils that industry attempts to cast over us through clever marketing: that all eggs are the same, that all meat is the same, etc.
The design of food systems that are hurting (some might say destroying) the health of a civilization that lacks a consistent, traditional food culture (i.e. the U.S.A) is surely design -- and power -- placed in the wrong hands. What the book did for me was to deliver the design of my own eating and drinking and consuming back into my own hands.
I marvel at the widespread impact Michael Pollan's work has now had on our society -- the benefits that thoughtful journalism can still provide. And yet, after all his work and all his reporting, one of Pollan's most lasting contributions for me is his newer book, "Food Rules", in which he summarizes his philosophy on food and eating in 7 words: "Eat food, mostly plants, not too much."
Here's a really entertaining, short interview from the Daily Show that encapsulates much of what's both wrong and right with food today:
I'm sure there are plenty more, but IDEO, Frog Design, and GOOD are really darn, uh... excellent at doing open innovation and crowdsourcing. Truth be told, I'm not entirely sure if I can call them excellent at this, since I don't know the actual outcomes yet. But here's some info on them:
OpenIDEO sources ideas from the crowd on how to make the world a better place:
FrogMob solicits ethnographic data from the crowd to "gather a quick visual pulse on behaviors, trends and artifacts globally." It aims to give a rich visual description of how products are used globally.
GOOD gathers ideas and content for their magazine issues from the crowd on topics ranging from Work to New Orleans to Water. Fascinating what they come up with.
Who else does this well? I'd love to hear about the groundbreakers in this space that I'm surely not aware of. Thanks!
I was recently given his book, "The Design of Business," to read by a friend. It came with an endorsement of Martin's balance of creativity vs. analysis, exploration vs. exploitation, "madness vs. measure." Sure, I thought. Everyone in their right mind supports that balance, to one degree or another.
But about halfway through the book, I understand why Martin is one of the leading thinkers in the field. His discussion of reliable vs. valid is pretty fascinating. Martin defines reliable as "consistent and predictable" and valid as "producing a desired result."
Here's a piece of the argument (directly from the book, with some bits removed for brevity):
"What organizations dedicated to running reliable algorithms fail to realize is that while they reduce the risk of small variations in their business, they increase the risk of cataclysmic events that occur when the future no longer resembles the past and the algorithm is no longer relevant or useful... Such organizations inevitably come to see the maintenance of the status quo as an end in itself, short-circuiting their ability to design and redesign themselves continuously."
As a former journalist, I understand the acute challenge of presenting information in the most accurate, digestible way possible (especially in short attention span era). As hard as it might be for writers to swallow, sometimes infographics are kind of the best way to present complex or data-rich topics in a readily understandable way.
Here are a couple I found through Fast Company. They show something pretty basic (the most common kind of restaurant by neighborhood), but in a way that's illustrative of more complex societal dynamics at work in America's greatest city, especially in the Queens example. For more infographics, check out GOOD magazine's site for a whole bunch of fascinating ones.
I just finished a pretty incredible book by Christopher McDougall called "Born to Run," about ultramarathoners, a tribe of Mexican Indians called the Tarahumara, and the lost skill/art/practice of distance running. The book is all about why (when humans have actually evolved to be distance runners) we are constantly getting hurt and have largely stopped enjoying what should be a healthy and liberating activity.
The short answer: it's in the shoes. In fact, McDougall says that "running shoes may be the most destructive force to ever hit the human foot." As just one small piece of backup, he cites a 1989 study that proved that the greater the padding in the shoe, the greater (not less) the impact on the runner.
In the name of profit, McDougall says, Nike, the inventor and designer of countless running shoes since the early 1970's (and the rest of the running shoe industry), promotes more and more "advanced" shoe designs that are worse and worse for your feet.
It leads me to a conflicting conclusion: that better, or at least more "advanced" design can actually be worse for the end user. In this case, more padding and support actually inhibits development of muscles and other structures that are protective of the foot.
So who's to blame, and how can design come to the rescue? I think it's safe to say the blame can be spread around; this isn't about Nike. After all, I'm responsible for my running technique and the impact it has on my body. But from a design perspective, McDougall and others say that we already have access to the best design, which is to say no design at all, other than our foot itself. He says that running barefoot actually promotes a correct and healthy running style.
Check this out:
But of course, business has the ability to capture value from "barefoot" running. Take a look at the below from Vibram, which is the latest in running shoe design:
For the last two weeks or so, I've been running barefoot and in the barefoot style (for the record, I don't own the above shoes). And though it's still early in my experiment, it's so far been a tough design lesson I'm happy to have learned.
I recently read an interesting blog post by Idris Mootee, the CEO of idea couture, an innovation and design consultancy based in Toronto. "What is design thinking?" Mootee asks in the post. "Design thinking is not about design. It is about helping companies and individuals to think differently about strategic options and system impact."
Mootee worries that companies won't reap the benefits of design thinking if it's viewed simply as a buzzword and is "over-theorized" (his word) and under-acted (my word).
To avoid this over-theorization of design thinking (at a time when, it can be argued, companies need it more than ever) Mootee recommends three design techniques -- observational research or ethnography, visual sense-making, and rapid prototyping -- that he says are "most powerful if you combine them with strategic context..."
These, he says are "where D-school meets B-school" -- and how we can keep our hands busy creating and our heads out of the over-theorized clouds.
