Sweating the small stuff - an idea whose time has come

Take a look at this TED talk.

I remember at my last corporate job, as CFO, being frustrated with the User Interface of the applications we expected our employees to use. The stand-out example was the "Change Control System" - if you needed access to a website that was blocked, you needed to fill out a request. In that form, you had to fill in a field for something like "by when do you want this done?"

And there were these lovely drop-down lists. For date : 1-31; Month: 1-12; Year: 2000-2099; and I kid you not, Hours; Minutes; and Seconds as well had to be specified. And there were no defaults. So everyone who wanted access to a website, had to get into these six drop down lists and select the exact date and time to the second when he wanted this change to happen.

Get a Chief Detail Officer. Or as David Pogue recounts at another TED talk, get a "Tap Counter"

Business idea in Design

Do we need Design Commercialisation Houses ? As I look around the internet for sociall relevant designs (a great starting place is Inhabitat), I come across all kinds of innovative and brilliant products for problems people face in many parts of the world. Take this washing machine for example. Or look at Open Source Architecture. Or even the National Innovation Foundation. Yet I meet a lot of designers trying to create new solutions to the same issues, when existing radical improvements are available but not widespread. 

My sense is that there is a big business niche for people to take existing design and adapt it for a particular client or market situation, with the clear intent of making it successful (large market, profitable). There are a few firms that do this. Swiss firm Vestergaard Frandsen is one such firm. Surely the market needs many more firm of these firms. Maybe NID and IIMA should join hands to incubate these firms to help design and innovation get firmer commercial roots.

Design and its role in society

Design as a field seems to be exploding. Over the last 2 decades, new areas like UI design, human interaction design and game design have come up. Some areas that I find related have also grown, such as information visualization. Even more far flung fields like business model design or choice architecture are becoming prominent.

The common theme of good design - good to individuals and useful to society - has the common theme of "making it easier". This is really from a cognitive sense. Making functions obvious, reducing errors, making choices simpler, or better all end up using fewer cognitive resources and therefore easier for the user. In a way, its cognitive judo. How about a Design firm called Judo, with a tag line - Making It Easier !