Design Research and Strategy
Remember “synergy?” AOL Time Warner was designed to save money and make money. But it was not designed to be a true organization. 10 years ago, Time Warner aimed to blast into the 21st century by “synergizing” with America Online.
The New York Times has a fabulous retrospective of the merger.
In their teaser video, Robert Puttnam, former [...]
Categories: anthropology · culture · home · innovation · organizations · sociology
Designing an innovative organization doesn’t necessarily mean a “flat” organization. We tend to believe that innovation and hierarchy are antithetical, but in truth, innovation often thrives in hierarchical organizations. Here are the key ingredients to an innovative organization, whether hierarchical or not.
The Internet: A Democratic Utopia We tend to believe that hierarchy kills innovation and [...]
Categories: Blog · culture · design · home · innovation · management · organizations · sociology
We are facing a collective conundrum: how do we continue to consume enough to keep our economic engine rumbling, while at the same time, not consume too much to destroy that very economic engine? This is a contradiction explored by Marx and Polanyi, and now by sociologist George Ritzer, author of The McDonaldization of Society.
Ritzer [...]
Categories: bourdieu · class · luxury goods · sociology
For those of you who caught my Ignite TO presentation, here are the slides. For those of you who missed it, below is a text summary that goes with the slides.
I’d like to give thanks to my teacher and friend, Dr. Karen Anderson, whose scholarly work underpins many of the ideas in this presentation.
Slide 1:
This [...]
Categories: Popular · design · facebook · goffman · interaction design · sociology · technology design · user experience
I am a big fan of MUJI, the simple Japanese housewares company. So I was quite interested to read a post by their art director Kenya Hara on the New York Times’s “Room for Debate.” Hara argues that Japanese people have
…a special ability to focus fully on what’s right in front of our eyes. We [...]
Categories: anthropology · culture · design · discourse analysis · food · product design · sociology