New York, New York!

Woo double post! (After our posts stop affecting our grades, darnit!) Anyway, I'm in New York/New Jersey for spring break, and having a blast!

I was at the MoMA yesterday and saw a couple of cool things I wanted to show. First, as a homage to our sustainability class, GROW: a wall installation that uses thin-film photovoltaic cells, piezo electric generators, and conductive ink to capture solar and kinetic energy.

Next is Sol LeWitt's Serial Project, I (ABCD).

According to jenlaaa, he pioneered a type of work where the actual work is an idea and a possibly a set of instructions, with the actual execution left to anyone. Basically, the idea is the work of art, and the representation is the transmission of the idea. Originally conceived in 1966, I think it has relevance in today's global competition. We've often heard that the only way for the US to have any competitive advantage now is through differentiation by design. Once the idea is there, you can outsource nearly all aspects of manufacturing and distribution. Like in LeWitt's work, ideas are key.

Lastly, some of these names look familiar!

Some thoughts

First, I'm really bad at posting regularly. I inevitably build up a pile of draft posts which never get seen because they reference events that are no longer current, or because I never get around to finishing them.

Second, there was a business conference somewhat recently in the UK called "The Big Rethink" (http://www.economistconferences.co.uk/redesigningbusiness/home) If nothing else, I think we can take away the 4 big future trends stated by Robin Bew:

1. The Shift to Emerging Markets
2. The Rich World's Aging Population
3. Carbon Pricing
4. A Lack of Capital

Basically, the game's a lot harder now than it used to be, and it's just going to get harder. Not only do you have to make stuff, you have to do it with less, and you have to do it responsibly. That's probably the way it always should have been, but coming from where we are now, it will certainly be a challenge.

The Last of the Consultancies?

In light of our recent class readings in supplier relationships and sourcing, I felt like talking about crowdsourcing. (Shoutout to Skyrien for getting me thinking about this with his own post last month) How is crowdsourcing similar to outsourcing, and how is it different?

The most obvious similarity between the two is the huge cost-reducing potential of both crowdsourcing and outsourcing when compared to doing things in-house or through a consultancy. However, with outsourcing many companies lose out in the end by outsourcing core competencies and giving away their source of competitive advantage. With crowdsourcing, unless a company was using in-house design before, there's seemingly no competitive advantage lost vs using a consultancy.

What advantages can a consultancy have over the freelancer? Certainly, resources -- capacity to work on larger projects is probably also a factor. If a company is going to be establishing a long-term relationship with a designer to keep its design language consistent, a consultancy is arguably more consistent. Is this enough to keep consultancies safe? Will other areas of consulting fall to crowdsourcing as well? It certainly seems like there is an oversupply of MBA graduates -- why has strategic consulting not been crowdsourced yet?

In the end, I think -- and this applies to design consulting as well -- the main crowdsourced elements are the technical design skills, not the actual design process or strategy. Design strategy and implementation is probably something consultancies still have an advantage in, as seen by the continued success of IDEO, which may not come up with the snazziest renderings but focus on applying the design process to identify opportunity areas.

A New Dynasty?

It's been a couple of weeks since CES, but I thought this was an interesting article: blogger Jeff Yang comments on the decline of Japan as a consumer electronics powerhouse in favor of Korea and eventually China. During the 2008 fiscal year, Sony, Panasonic, Toshiba and Sharp lost a staggering total of $12.1 billion. At the same time, Samsung alone earned $9.64 billion. What could have caused this shift in power?

N'Gai Croal suggests that product ecosystems are perhaps more important than the products themselves now: "Back then, it was all about building the best product. But in a digital era, it's all about the network effect -- it's not as important to consumers that any individual product is superior, so much as that all of your different products work well together." In addition, some say Sony's insistence on proprietary formats such as Betamax and Memory Stick has worked against them by hindering adoption (maybe I'll do another post on Blu-ray sometime). Then again, proprietary formats don't necessarily prevent products from achieving widespread adoption. Apple has a long history of proprietary hardware and software, locking users (willingly or unwillingly) into their product ecosystem. Why, then, has Apple succeeded where Sony failed? Is it possible for proprietary formats to win over open-source or common standards in the long run?

Design Morality

Just yesterday, Google released an announcement that it may consider withdrawing itself from China in light of the Chinese government's censorship policies. Google had suffered backlash in 2006 when it agreed to censor its results in China, so many praised Google for finally standing up to the Chinese government. Others see it as a last-ditch attempt to salvage some good press out of a poor branch (Google has struggled to increase market share past 25-30% in China, and Google could rebuild what reputation it lost in 2006).

Whatever Google's motives, it brings up the interesting point of morality in business, and in design. Matt Parkinson spoke last quarter about designing for human variability, and how design may result in disproportionate exclusion of certain demographics. As designers, we need to ask ourselves the question: is the greater evil for a designer to do work he opposes, or to deprive end users of the value the designer could have added?

One of Google's 10 "commandments" is to "Do no evil". Is censorship evil, though? Regulation of information occurs in parental control, and website age restrictions, and fewer people argue against it. It might be argued that censorship is a sub-optimal solution due to the net reduction in available information--sub-optimal, however, is not evil. I personally contend that Google censored in China is better than no Google in China.

Let's hear from you: when faced with a situation where there may be no perfect solutions, what and how do we prioritize?

Blog Revival, Round 2

So much for more updates. Now, though, with a forced revival of this blog for class purposes, I guess there will be more content to look forward to... eventually.