Antoine RJ Wright

…ren’t enough. Sony focused on design. DEC was vertically integrated (they made floppies). Even IBM. Vertical is a means to an end, not a cause.

21/ This isn’t scrum or agile or… — most would call it waterfall BUT IT IS NOT. It is planning, iterating, prioritizing, discarding, restarting, and more. I argued most of my career that having a strategy and prioritizing is the only way to execute to have this impact. QED.

… you don’t need or want something from a technology area in a release (eg maybe stability is good). One way to do this is to minimally staff a team to only offer what is required at the strategy level, which is one way to balance those conflicting goals — which is why the team does not act like a “product team” and have their own research and goals, they simply work on the strategic goals. In this era of WFH and remote, this challenge is going to be front and center much more than I believe people are considering.

What I mean by Apple’s model is not about its direct to consumer business or vertical integration, but the culture of having a “point of view.” Apple makes products that customers love and are delighted by, but it makes them by studying technology, the market, and usage to arrive at plans and strategies. Unlike what you read in textbooks, Apple is much less about responding to micro changes, hype cycles…

…es not work so well when it rushes products to market or listens too closely to hype (eg Home Pod). Apple is a company that has a point of view — when the point of view lines up with a great product people love, it can become an unstoppable force.

…esses, and served many different customers types. Some would even say more responsive to customers. Activity v. progress?

For the vast majority of users, the cognitive expectation associated with a car will shift. No more thrill from the vibrations of a roaring engine but the sharp excitement of a vehicle gliding, fast and silent on the freeway. And even if the sound of silence is not your cup of tea, the overall superior experience of drivin…

Folding bike homework has led me down several paths. I’ve looked at 16in and 20in (referring to tire size) models. Brompton, Tern, and Dahon sit at the top of the market, and the many makes you’d find at Amazon and other online shops for the heavier, but more price-accessible options. I looked at reliability and other metrics. In the end, there was a checklist put together through which I’d figure out the best model(s) for me:

I purchased a “very lightly” used Brompton this past summer to augment (then replace) the Citizen Gotham I’d purchased the year prior. While the Citizen had been an excellent bike — granting access to metros via consumer rail, and making a few longer trips more bearable by having a bicycle on deck — it was also a heavy bike, with gearing and weight meant for something larger. The Brompton was a want from the previous summer’s research, and after enough nagging and then a test ride, it became a purchase.

The stakes are high, so we shouldn’t relegate design thinking solely to those with “design” in their title. As a noun, design is a profession, but as a verb, it’s the act of considered construction. Within Ethics & Society, we employ user researchers, designers, engineers, psychologists, ethicists,…