Hello. It’s Friday time for me to look back though my Twitter favourites and pull out my favourites from my favourites. No real theme this week although I think my favourites on Twitter do offer a peek into my current interests and there seem to be a lot about design/ux/people sharing their working out which I find fascinating to read but not really Friday Reading type material. That being said two of the links this week are very much design related, one about how big organisations aren’t very good at it and another that looks at a horrific experience that effectively forces customers to steal your content (even though they have already bought it). The other articles can be summed up with these words TED, Track, Workplace, Secret, Innovation, Stock, Flow, Disney, Sucking. Enjoy.
Design is the easy part…
“At first glance, the solution is strategy. Get more designers higher up the food chain and involved in the creation of strategies that would guide an organisation to make better decisions. Sounds right, but the reality is different. Most places I encounter these problems have all kinds of strategies talking about how important design and the end user is to them. They all handwave the right way, but the execution doesn’t match the strategy.”
Getting ultraviolent about UltraViolet™
“A good UX can be hard to quantify, but you sure know when you are having a bad one. And over Christmas I stumbled over a really good example of a bad one.”
Inside TED: the smartest bubble in the world
“The crowd is diverse, but not exactly the kind of diversity you think of when you hear the word. There are celebrities, CEOs, politicians, engineers, designers, scientists, philosophers, artists, even royalty. And while there are attendees from around the world, TED feels very white, for lack of a better way to describe it. This observation is not simply my own: it was communicated to me, unsolicited, by a number of other TEDsters during the conference. White in that specific way you can feel white people striving for diversity.”
Tracking Sensors Invade the Workplace
“Lewis Maltby, president of the National Workrights Institute, an employee advocacy group, says current sensing technologies don’t seem to violate employment laws. “It’s not illegal to track your own employees inside your own building,” he says, adding that the data could be helpful in improving firm and worker performance.”
The Truth Behind “Secret” Innovation At Nike, Apple, Google X
“So what’s with all the hush-hush? Culture. Employees internalize their own stories–that their work is imbued with a value worthy of secrecy, vaulting Nike into the lofty heights of philosophical (and sometimes self-important) corporate cultures alongside only Apple and Disney. When I bump into Nike coach and three-time New York City Marathon winner Alberto Salazar, in between the campus’s Olympic-size swimming pools and sky-high climbing walls, even he tells me, “This place is like Disneyland.”
How Disney Bought Lucasfilm—and Its Plans for ‘Star Wars’
“His company maintained a database called the Holocron, named after a crystal cube powered by the Force. The real-world Holocron lists 17,000 characters in the Star Wars universe inhabiting several thousand planets over a span of more than 20,000 years. It was quite a bit for Disney to process. So Lucas also provided the company with a guide, Pablo Hidalgo. A founding member of the Star Wars Fan Boy Association, Hidalgo is now a “brand communication manager” at Lucasfilm. “The Holocron can be a little overwhelming,” says Hidalgo, who obsesses over canonical matters such as the correct spelling of Wookiee and the definitive list of individuals who met with Yoda while he was hiding in the swamps of Dagobah.”
and finally here is a link to a full book in ‘blog from’ by the brilliant Hugh MacLeod
My next book: “The Art Of Not Sucking”
“Generally, the real world doesn’t go out of its way to tell you to go create something useful and/or meaningful. Usually, it just tells you to keep your nose down and don’t rock the boat. The fact that this could quickly destroy your soul in the process is irrelevant to them.
So I’m afraid it’s you who must take the initiative; I am equally afraid that it’s you who has to take the heat if things go terribly wrong.”
When I said finally above I meant ‘finallyish’ because here is a blatant inclusion of a link to one of my own posts from this week. Shameless.
Banking conferences are broken…
“‘Oh boohoo poor little mid management banker can’t afford to go to conferences, my heart bleeds’ Yes, yes I can imagine there is very little sympathy for me but all I want is an event that tries to bridge the worlds of new and old but also opens the door to others that may be interested.”
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