A short guide to six broad categories of digital product: how they work, why they matter and the different jobs they do for consumers and businesses.

Select a piece of music to suit your mood from a choice of the best classical recordings ever made; exchange fitness tips with a friend, arrange a run together and record the run; recognise a loyal customer and offer them a better deal; swap shifts with a colleague at the restaurant where you work and get the manager’s OK; transfer an excess balance to an interest-bearing savings account, automatically, as and when available; edit and break a news story instantaneously across three content channels using multiple content types, then spread it over social media. …

Most of what is written about digital transformation focuses on means, not ends. There’s plenty of noise around process and mindset (design thinking, lean start up, agile development, etc.) but very little about the strategies required to achieve the impact that ambitious businesses are seeking to achieve, being:

• changing the growth/profit profile
• achieving market leadership
• building new capabilities

So, to bolster consensus with conviction, provide more concrete form and structure and also to remind ourselves that digital transformation has a point, we analysed more than 20 Made by Many client engagements carried out since 2014 to identify patterns in strategy and impact. …

In June 1854, from his room in the Oriental Hotel in Vere Street, London, Ghulam Mohammed wrote to Abercromby Dick to inform him of the safe and personal delivery of his letter to their mutual friend, Elliot Macnaghten, Chairman of the East India Company; also, to thank Dick for the protection given to his family — “the Mysore family’”— from “the oppression of the unjust magistrate” in Calcutta, where Dick was a judge in the Sudder Court, the supreme court in British India in matters of property and revenue.

Ghulam Mohammed went on to write, “We have been very Kindly received in England by all parties and particularly by her Majesty and Prince Albert. Also by Sir Chas. Wood and other members of Gov. And the principal Nobility of England”. He described his sea sickness on the voyage and the wonderful “rail road travelling … quite astonishing us to think that we travelled from Southampton to London, a distance of near 90 miles in about 2 hours”. …

Alessandro Mendini died last month. His obituary appeared in the Guardian only today. I admired his old-fashioned rebelliousness and didn’t share his taste; anyway, that’s the message from this slightly arch interview, published in Blueprint in 1996. I remember it was a very enjoyable day trip to Bremen, and an enjoyable piece to write...

Alessandro Mendini is a bird-like character, a small man with silver hair with a beak of a nose on which spectacles sit framing big, watery ostrich eyes. Mendini has a voice like moist gravel but it issues from a mouth which often breaks into a wide smile. …

The first wave of digital transformation in the airline industry was all about selling inventory and it happened a very long time ago. Airlines were amongst the first businesses to insert networked software into the value chain, placing global distribution systems into travel agencies as early as the 1960s and ’70s. Forty or fifty years later, sales and marketing remains the primary focus of the digital team in most airlines.

Now, the smart mobile internet and onboard wifi are opening up new opportunities to differentiate across the entire customer experience, not just at the point of sale.

One of these opportunities is in sales: we can sell inventory and ancillaries in smarter ways, by thinking afresh about how customers search for, select and pay for flights; but the second opportunity is to build value in the core product, by adding a layer of flight management, entertainment, information and shopping services on top of the travel experience. …

Made by Many has 10 years of experience in digital transformation and product innovation. To be brutally frank, it hasn’t always been easy. Yes,we have a phenomenal success rate — but it’s built on hard learning. First, learning how not to do it in the dotcom bust and boom (siloed, linear, waterfall); later, working out an agile, lean, integrated and iterative approach to product development that brought not only success, but also an understanding of how to promote change and new capabilities in our clients’ businesses. In the last four years there has been an increasing demand for help in establishing dedicated innovation teams (labs, garages, factories…choose your metaphor for making, testing and learning). A constant tension has been the relationship between the lab (let’s call it that) and the core business, a tension between the desire to nurture learning and change and the need to exploit existing assets and to scale. What’s the best way to deal with that dilemma? …

Sir Keppel Archibald Cameron Creswell (known as Archie) spent a lifetime investigating Islamic architecture: photographing and surveying sites in Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Palestine, Tunisia and Turkey; writing essays and books including his two-volume Early Muslim Architecture; and, in the 50 years to 1973 when he finally returned to England, he also built an extensive archive of his own and related works at the University of Cairo .

Creswell’s photographic negatives and prints, his notes, drawings and books are held across many institutions, including the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. (See the first part of this series — Emergency Archeology 1: a dig in the V&A’s photography archive). Today, the archive is stored in cupboards and shelves, tucked away in rare and hard-to-find books or in public digital files in mid- or low-resolution on grimly hard-to-search websites. We thought that this vividly accurate cultural record should be made more freely available, and especially to the scholars, architects and archeologists actively working to conserve Islamic heritage. And so we made a prototype to explore how the different parts of the archive could be connected together intelligently and opened up at the highest resolution. …

Like any building — in fact more than most — the Madrasa al-Halawiyya has gone through changes of style and substance. In just the last century it has turned from being a madrasa to a mosque, and it has also undergone changes of form and decoration, inside and out. We know this largely from the photographic record. Photographs by Gertrude Bell in 1909, K.A.C. Creswell in 1919 and unknown photographers in the 1930s demonstrate that the mosque in 2007 was quite different from that in 1970, and that in 2010 was different again. Over the 107 years to 2017 there were at least five distinct cycles of addition, dilapidation and restoration. The photographs we found on the internet demonstrated that there was no obvious or definitive state that any future restorer should aspire to, but that the museum archives and internet record created informed choices and more and better data to work with. …