February 2012
38 posts
When strangers become humans
gurivenstad:
It’s early morning and I’m on the subway. Everyone in the carriage is looking empty out in the air in front of them and trying to keep to themselves. Suddenly, a cup of coffee flies through the air and lands on my lap. The woman next to me looks just as surprised as I probably did, and we both start giggling at the same time as she excuses herself (or her coffee cup) and I am a...
13 tags
Week 2: Customer Development
Week two focused on the customer development process and running experiments.
The Customer Development process, developed by Steve Blank, offers a framework for product development that can feel familiar to designers trained in empathetic human-centered design. (Though Blank uses Customer Development to bring the rigor of the scientific method to the art of starting a company, a scientist’s...
“Here’s the truth: People, even regular people, are never just any one person...”
– Jonathan Nolan in Memento Mori from Candy Chang
8 tags
Week 1: Perspectives
When Christina and I began the process of designing the course, we came up with a few principles to help us think about the content, structure, and goals of the class:
1. Networks are a foundational concept.
As a society, we are undergoing one of the most significant macro-level shifts in our lifetimes: the shift from centralized hierarchies to decentralized networks. We’re just...
Talent is the desire to practice.
— Sarah Adams (@speckledwords) February 13, 2012
Popular tweets (1500+ RTs in four hours)
#RelationshipsShould be like thistwitpic.com/8kcl3z
— Francesco (@Londonandreams) February 15, 2012
“Twas the night before start-up and all through the net, not a packet was moving;...”
– RFC 968 by Vint Cerf
I wish I could draw on 750words, then I’d hit a thousand words easily every time. #hw
— Nikki Sylianteng (@nsylianteng) February 14, 2012
this morning I did a favor for some people, feel quite satisfied.
— Shanshan Gao (@gaoshanshan) February 14, 2012
Words.: In which i make very little sense while... →
speckledwords:
.. We are shaping behavior in a way the Bauhaus couldn’t. We are not (yet) shaping a moral behavior, but we are manipulating a psychological one. We design a framework for motivations. We create the platforms that bring people back, over and over again.
11 tags
An Important Time for Design →
From Fictive’s Cameron Koczon
“If we want to really show what design is and what it can do, we need to get...”
– Cameron Koczon on An Important Time for Design
3 tags
The Alphabet Soup: on an evolving web presence
sanarao:
I started writing when I needed a space of my own while living in a hostel, with cluttered rooms and intertwining lives. What was not possible to mould in reality could easily be created, moulded and shaped in the virtual. And so, my first blog came in to existence. I was petrified at the thought of someone coming across my blog, and seeing a part of me that I wouldn’t usually share...
5 tags
“The internet, at this time in history, is the greatest client assignment of all...”
– Ben Pieratt
10 ways to be invisible, or rules for making →
bobulate:
Elmore Leonard with rules to remain invisible when writing a book that help show rather than tell.
My most important rule is one that sums up the 10: If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.
Substitute the word “writing” for whatever it is you do, and this becomes the most important rule for making — not only true for writing, but for anything we make.
[via]
“Above all, do not lose your desire to walk: every day I walk myself into a state...”
– Søren Kierkegaard
5 tags
The value of daily writing
tomharman:
“Seated. Sofa. Relaxed. Two large cushions to my right, stacked on the arm. The blades of a helicopter circling nearby gradually fade as the action moves further afield. A sense of calm restored. My phone lying beside me next to a ragged pile of laundry. A mindful start to the day.”
This was how my morning began. It’s my 30th 750 words post in as many days. That’s been one every...
8 tags
Unbundling Ice Cream
tonyhschu:
An article in Entrepreneur.com chronicled how a couple ladies who ran a gourmet ice cream shop in Seattle closed up their unsuccessful storefront and had phenomenal success selling out of a ice cream truck instead.
I was immediately reminded of the lecture Albert Wenger gave at the Entrepreneurial Design class on unbundling at USV two weeks ago. Albert talked about the nature of the...
Are there any introverts who love bloggingor tweeting? I would love to know their thoughts on writing publicly.
— Joonseo Bae (@jsbae27) February 1, 2012
Question: Is done better than perfect?
— Tony Chu (@tonyhschu) February 6, 2012
9 tags
“Don’t worry too much about what people will think of you. And since...”
“Hit the right note, and your readers become like bees, stopping by your site to...”
– Significant and Silly at Buzzfeed
“So I decided to shift my perspective. It’s not about adapting myself to...”
– Joonseo Bae: I’m an introvert
3 tags
Welcome to Entrepreneurial Design!
Welcome to the official blog of Entrepreneurial Design, a course from the School of Visual Arts’ MFA in Interaction Design program taught by Christina Cacioppo and Gary Chou.
The purpose of Entrepreneurial Design is to provide a time and space for students to think broadly about what they aspire to create and how they will do so.
The course will focus on three things:
1. Understanding...
“One reason people who’ve been out in the world for a year or two make better...”
– Why to Not Not Start a Startup (via speckledwords)
“But because we grew up surrounded by big dramatic story arcs in books and...”
– Kurt Vonnegut explains drama (via krislane) (via tashwong, krislane)
January 2012
21 posts
"I need a new language" →
“What is the reason for this?” —> “How do they feel?”
The creative process →
tonyhschu:
Assignment 8: Become part of the online workforce →
In which our hero Tash decides that Amazon Mechanical Turk might diminish your faith in humanity but will definitely get you some small money.
60 minutes as a mechanical turk →
In which our hero, Nikki, checks out Amazon Mechanical Turk after spurning Task Rabbit, Work Market, GigWalk, and 99designs
A photographer's dilemma →
Prachi
“As long as you are curious to learn, most people can add skills to become better...”
– Guri
“The lesson I learned through this assignment is that, yes as a designer, I have...”
– Joonseo
'Exploiting Users' →
tashwong:
I want to live and work in a world where we are actively engaged with our audience, not taking advantage of them. Seeing the people I design for as rich and complex yields many more exciting opportunities than reducing them to a set of eyeballs with a credit card.
Shortcuts →
As designers in an agile world, creating something which is ‘just enough’ to communicate our ideas and then iterating on it is an increasingly common approach, and one that I fully believe in. But how can we find ways to apply this same thinking to the creation (or consumption) of non-design-artifacts? Like reading, writing or learning? I don’t yet know the answers but i’m keen to explore the...
“Trials make us think; thinking makes us wise; wisdom makes life profitable.”
– Les épreuves nous font réfléchir; la réflexion nous rend sages; la sagesse rend la vie profitable. (via joonseobae)
Prototyping Business Design →
Can we think of MVP as a sketch of a business model? Shouldn’t our MVP be quick, timely, inexpensive, disposable, suggestive and all that?