Why is everyone so down on vanilla?
“That’s so boring; so vanilla.”
Have you ever tried real vanilla? It’s delicious.
Prototype as if you are right. Listen as if you are wrong.
Diego Rodriguez:
Once your prototype is ready for the world, it is important to listen as if you are wrong. You (and everyone around you) must be willing to respect the evidence that the prototype brings back, whether you like it or not. You must also go out of your way to put your prototype in to the world. Hiding it in a closet is only cheating the process, and ultimately, yourself.
“next time you hear something akin to “that’s the worst idea I’ve heard in a long time.” Say “Perfect, when did you know it was awful?”
Ryan Jacoby’s do_matic:To get it right, be interested in being wrong.
Compare with Diego Rodriguez’s “Prototype as if you are right; listen as if you are wrong”.
Co-incidentally, or perhaps not, Ryan and Diego both work for IDEO.
Vanilla
And lo there was A Logic Named Joe
And in 1946, an astonishingly complete vision of the future appeared in the magazine Astounding Science Fiction. In a story entitled A Logic Named Joe, the author Murray Leinster envisioned a world in which every home was equipped with a tabletop box that he called a “logic”:
“You got a logic in your house. It looks like a vision receiver used to, only it’s got keys instead of dials and you punch the keys for what you wanna get … you punch ‘Sally Hancock’s Phone’ an’ the screen blinks an’ sputters an’ you’re hooked up with the logic in her house an’ if somebody answers you got a vision-phone connection. But besides that, if you punch for the weather forecast [or] who was mistress of the White House durin’ Garfield’s administration … that comes on the screen too. The relays in the tank do it. The tank is a big buildin’ full of all the facts in creation … hooked in with all the other tanks all over the country … The only thing it won’t do is tell you exactly what your wife meant when she said, ‘Oh, you think so, do you?’ in that peculiar kinda voice “
Citroen DS (via Old Car Manual Project)
“It is obvious that the iPhone has fallen from the sky inasmuch as it appears at first sight as a superlative object. We must not forget that an object is the best messenger of a world above that of nature: one can easily see in an object at once a perfection and an absence of origin, a closure and a brilliance, a transformation of life into matter (matter is much more magical than life), and in a word a silence which belongs to the realm of fairy-tales. The iPhone has all the features (or at least the public is unanimous in attributing them to it at first sight) of one of those objects from another universe which have supplied fuel for the neomania of the eighteenth century and that of our own science-fiction: the iPhone is first and foremost a new Nautilus.”
With apologies to Roland Barthes…
On the Twitter Drew Smith suggested [1, 2, 3, 4] that Barthes 1957 piece on the Citroen DS also worked for the iPhone.
Until now, the ultimate in phones belonged rather to the bestiary of power; here it becomes At once more spiritual and more object-like, and despite some concessions to neomania, it is now more homely, more attuned to this sublimation of the utensil which one also finds in the design of contemporary household equipment.
“One of the most annoying things about the modern world is that it is so much less simple than it used to be.”
Bertrand Russell (via chrbutler)
On Authenticity
Steve Portigal and Stokes Jones recent article On Authenticity for Interactions is wonderful. So wonderful I’m not going to extract a bit here for your edification. You’ll just have to go read the whole thing.
Green Onions
(via tvinsider3)
1970 Dodge Charger 500
If an orange Charger plays Dixie, what would a brown one play?
(pic via Mopar Muscle Magazine’s readers rides. This one belongs to Ted, from Gray, Tennessee who restored it from a “beater”. Nice work, Ted!)
Via Davey G comes the answer.
