How does the product manager keep the entire team on schedule despite the apparent random and divergent methods of designers? Encourage their free exploration, but hold them to the schedule (and budge...
How
I have long held the belief—and encouraged it in my students and employees—that failures are an essential part of exploration and creativity. If designers and researchers do not sometimes fail, it is...
If designers and researchers do not sometimes fail, it is a sign that they are not trying hard enough—they are not thinking the great creative thoughts that will provide breakthroughs in how we do thi...
If you want a golden rule that will fit everybody, this is it: Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.
In the university, professors make up artificial problems. In the real world, the problems do not come in nice, neat packages. They have to be discovered. It is all too easy to see only the surface pr...
It is easy to design devices that work well when everything goes as planned. The hard and necessary part of design is to make things work well even when things do not go as planned.
Learning should take place when it is needed, when the learner is interested, not according to some arbitrary, fixed schedule
Logical constraints are often used by home dwellers who undertake repair jobs. Suppose you take apart a leaking faucet to replace a washer, but when you put the faucet together again, you discover a p...
Most industrial accidents are caused by human error: estimates range between 75 and 95 percent. How is it that so many people are so incompetent? Answer: They aren’t. It’s a design problem.
One of my rules in consulting is simple: never solve the problem I am asked to solve. Why such a counterintuitive rule? Because, invariably, the problem I am asked to solve is not the real, fundamenta...
Predicting technology is relatively easy compared to predictions of human behavior, or in this case, the adoption of societal conventions. Will this prediction be true? You
Procedural knowledge is difficult or impossible to write down and difficult to teach. It is best taught by demonstration and best learned through practice.
Question everything. I am particularly fond of stupid questions. A stupid question asks about things so fundamental that everyone assumes the answer is obvious.
Radical innovation is what many people seek, for it is the big, spectacular form of change. But most radical ideas fail, and even those that succeed can take decades and, as this chapter has already i...
Recognize that most of our interactions with products are actually interactions with a complex system: good design requires consideration of the entire system to ensure that the requirements, intentio...
Rule of thumb: if you think something is clever and sophisticated beware-it is probably self-indulgence.
Semantics is the study of meaning. Semantic constraints are those that rely upon the meaning of the situation to control the set of possible actions. In the case of the motorcycle, there is only one m...
Standardization is indeed the fundamental principle of desperation: when no other solution appears possible, simply design everything the same way, so people only have to learn once. If
Standardization is indeed the fundamental principle of desperation: when no other solution appears possible, simply design everything the same way, so people only have to learn once.
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