Month / June 2006

by Roger Dennis

Traditional workshops/forums = traditional outcomes

After sitting in a two day corporate workshop, I took time out to read gapingvoid. The latest post has a cartoon with the caption : “Working for a corporation means having to worry about getting fired on a daily basis.”

It started me thinking about why almost every workshop is the same format, almost every conference is in a bland boring venue and why so many people sigh when they discover they have been selected to attend an offsite.

It’s because they are designed/planned to be safe. Nobody gets their nose out of joint, everyone knows what to expect. and nobody gets fired for breaking the paradigm. How do you design an event that’s not safe? An event that people not only remember, but value? An event when nobody falls asleep after lunch?

Gaping Void's Unconference

You can start by reading this list of nine things that are wrong with the conference/workshop/off-site format :

1. Passive events = passive thinking : an event composed of talking heads on stage provides little chance for interaction and leads to people tuning out.

2. Never give handouts before a presentation. People read them ahead of you, and then switch off.

3. There’s hardly any divergent thinking to engage and challenge people. If you get more of the same speakers from within your organisation then you will get more of the same outcomes.

4. Agendas – a known format allows people to tune out when they feel like it. If they don’t know what’s coming, they don’t know when they can go and check email and answer messages. Take people out of their comfort zone and refuse to give them an agenda.

5. Powerpoint. It’s a tool for showing images, not a word processor. Do yourself a favour and give all presenters a copy of Seth Godins “Really Bad Powerpoint” well before the event.

6. Conference rooms. Beige walls, flourescent lighting, lecture-on-a-stage and inflexible furniture. It’s all stuff people have seen many times before, and makes them comforted. Comfortable people aren’t going to start revolutions.

7. The belief that adding excessive decoration to a bland conference room adds value to the outcome of an event.

8. A seating plan that lets people stay in the same seat at the same desk for the entire event.

9. No follow up from management. On the off chance that you come away from the event with enough energy to burn a block of asbestos, the walls that you encounter on the return to the office will soon stifle your enthusiasm. What’s needed is a structured program of follow-ups and refreshers.

What’s your 10th item?

by Roger Dennis

The problem with Eric von Hippel’s innovation style

The excellent Business Week design/innovation blog has a piece on Eric von Hippels thoery of user led innovation. If you don’t know the theory, it focuses on getting what von Hippel terms ‘lead users’ to generate new product/service ideas for you, based on the idea that as a ‘lead user’ they know the use – and intended use – of your product.

While this is a step in the right direction for many corporations there are a couple of issues :
1. It assumes that even within a strict framework users know your product best. At face value this may seem logical, but if you read Anthony Ulwicks thoughts on innovation you will see the flaws in this approach
2. It’s damn expensive, and probably prohibitively so for all but the largest companies (I wrote an article about how you combat this for the Stanford University d.School magazine which you can find here)

Read the Business Week post here

by Roger Dennis

Podcasts of interest…

If a picture tells a thousand words, then a podcast tells…err…lots more. The beauty about them is that rather than attending various expensive conferences, you can use sites like IT Conversations to find gold nuggets without having to endure cattle class seating, endless taxi rides and bad hotels.

What’s more, nobody minds if you listen to their presentation while munching a bag of really noisey crisps.

Here’s a selection of some recent favourites :
IT Conversations: Clayton Christensen – Capturing the Upside

IT Conversations: Malcolm Gladwell – Human Nature

IT Conversations: Tom Kelley – Tech Nation

by Roger Dennis

Etsy – an extraordinary online shop

It’s almost a riddle – what has the feel of a blog, the design of graphic art site and a slick interface that would make Apple proud? It’s called Etsy and it’s an extraordinary marketplace place to buy handmade items from around the world.

Etsy

Browse by country, by category, by almost anything.

It enables individuals who handmake products to put up a very slick site and link into a global market to source unique products. My litmus test for the word ‘global’ is very simple – are there any New Zealand shops? In this case the the answer is yes.

The interface is almost game like, and with nods to Google Earth it begs you to go searching around the world for shops. Or, if you prefer, search by colour. Now here’s the interesting bit – what would the bricks and motar equivalent of an Etsy shop look like?

by Roger Dennis

New wheelchair design

From the BBC comes this article about a Formula One engineer who decided to re-design the wheelchair. He notes that the basic design of a wheelchair chassis dates back to vintage car days.

This product cuts across a couple of fields, arbitraging the best of racing car design (a carbon fibre monocoque) to bring about a radical redesign for the wheelchair.

What is more interesting is that the designer was not disabled himself, and was not a wheelchair user. He has founded a company called Trekinetic. Since the BBC story it looks like the site has got so much traffic that it is temporarily down. It’s not surprising, since a lot of wheelchair users are probably very frustrated.

The carbon fibre wheelchair

Next in line for a re-design should be those terrible looking mobility scooters – with a rapidly aging population it surprises me that this has not been tackled already.