In a January 2019 post titled Progress or Perfection – Pick One I speculated that Tesla was simply being expedient when it built the Model 3 out of what reverse engineering firm Munro and Associates described as a crazy patchwork of parts and assembly processes. My claim was that if haste makes waste, then in…
Failure is good We get a lot of mixed messages about failure. “Failure is good.” “Fail early so you can avoid failure later on, because failure is bad.” “If you manage to succeed without failing then you have failed because your reach should exceed your grasp.” We are sometimes told to leap because the net…
It’s all about the user Design Thinking is emphatically focused on the end user of the product or service. Sometimes when I present on the subject of Design Thinking someone will point out that products can fail for lots of reasons, not just a failure to appeal to the end user. It can fail because…
Spin class is paying to pedal a stationary bike while somebody yells at you Peloton is a company that will sell you a stationary bicycle and yell at you in your home. They recently ran an ad which caused many to bristle. In it, a man gives his wife a Peloton machine for Christmas. Let’s…
Applying Design Thinking Design Thinking can make sense on paper but it can be challenge to adopt it in an environment where it’s never been seen before. This quick 90 minute exercise takes pairs of participants through the steps of empathy and prototyping. What I’ve found is that not only do the participants come away…
To be innovative means to venture into the unknown. Design Thinking is the ideal technique for this, because it doesn’t expect a perfect plan at the outset. In fact Design Thinking is in many ways a rejection of the project planning mindset. How can we reconcile planning with innovation? A great clue lies in the…
Meet a human need A key characteristic of Design Thinking is to be human centred. In the end, everything we design and construct needs to meet a human need. Take for example a hypothetical situation where you are a maintenance manager at a hotel and you’ve been asked to install kick plates on the guest…
Shockingly bad In June 2018, Bloomberg published an article describing Tesla’s latest controversial measure – producing Model 3 cars in a tent covering the area of two football fields, constructed in the parking lot of their existing Fremont, California production facility. (The tent is visible in the title image of this post, behind the Model…
My course is now live In my day job I support University faculty members. In part this means helping them get their courses online. It’s a fascinating endeavour and one I always wanted to try. Now at last I have created my own online course on using Design Thinking to increase project success. This is…
This Guy Edits “This Guy Edits” is a Youtube channel devoted to the art and science of editing video. In this video, “this guy” Sven Pape discusses on-screen drafting with Dr Karen Pearlman. Pearlman is a writer, director, editor and author of the book “Cutting Rhythms, Shaping the Film Edit”. A chapter in Cutting Rhythms describes…