For over six months, I was a warrior. From one infusion to the next, there was always another battle. Then came the end of chemotherapy. Driving home from my last appointment, I had to pull over. I was having a panic attack. What next? I was now a warrior without a war. It was just me. And the rest of my life. —Joan, Cancer Survivor
I just wrapped up a project for Memorial Sloan-Kettering as part of a seminar in Service Design taught by Mark Jones of IDEO. Joining me on the project were three of my colleagues from the Institute of Design: Jessica Striebich, Nikhil Mathew, and Julia (Joohyun) Lyoo.
While this presentation represents preliminary thinking toward providing a service design solution, there exists an undeniable void with regard to codified psychosocial care during and following chemotherapy. It’s also undeniable that many of the analytical tools and algorithms used to aggregate and analyze online sentiment can very practically be applied to tracking and visualizing a chemotherapy patient’s emotional journey.
It’s my hope that our thinking on low- and high-tech continuity of psychosocial care aids efforts at MSK and other cancer centers . . . drop me a line if you should happen upon this and find our thinking useful for similar projects.
Two years ago today, Pam Taucher passed away following a long fight with breast cancer. Pam was my mother’s best friend and colleague and was like a close aunt to me. Her infectious sense of humor and lovingly brutal honesty are what I cherish on days like today.
I recently interviewed my mother toward better understanding what Pam went through as she received chemotherapy. This little piece of unedited, raw ethnography was conducted for a service design project I’ve embarked on for Memorial Sloan Kettering’s new Brooklyn chemotherapy clinic. With help from some extremely gifted colleagues from the Institute of Design, my hope is to learn from Pam’s experience toward creating a new approach for continuity of care following a course of chemotherapy. And who knows, maybe sharing raw footage like this will help someone on a similar quest.
Last week, Apple made a policy revision to the App Store that will now allow developers to sell additional content through free apps. This change may seem subtle to the casual observer, but as Brian Chen of Wired points out, this seemingly minor change actually points the way to Apple’s broader potential to save the newspaper and publishing industries:
Picture a free magazine app that offers one sample issue and the ability to purchase future issues afterward. Or a newspaper app that only displays text articles with pictures, but paying a fee within the app unlocks an entire new digital experience packed with music and video. This is an example of the “freemium” model that Wired magazine’s Chris Anderson explains in his book Free . . . It’s plausible to imagine that a freemium strategy would be much more effective through a tablet app than a website. If the tablet is indeed designed like a 10-inch iPod Touch or iPhone, as insiders have described it, then publishers developing apps will be able to take advantage of features such as the accelerometer, GPS, live video streaming and multitouch to innovate the way they engage with their audience — and, ultimately, persuade them to pay.
As I’ve said in the past, freemium and content convergence are Apple’s doorways into redefining the print industry while simultaneously giving the tablet form factor a unique place in people’s lives (well beyond what the Kindle and Sony Reader have achieved). This is another great example of Apple’s platform thinking at work — they are poised to create new economics for the newspaper and print industries through a retail, distribution, and hardware ecosystem. Such an ecosystem certainly makes Microsoft’s Courier tablet demo look like a lonely piece of hardware.
But this much is obvious.
What has yet to be seen is whether newspapers and publishers can complete the picture with innovative content partnerships and build sustainable business models for the tablet ecosystem. Simply going the route of the Dallas Morning News and Amazon revenue-sharing model will be unsustainable for newspapers. Remember what James Moroney, publisher of the Dallas Morning News said in his testimony to Congress about the fate of the newspaper industry (quoted by Malcolm Gladwell in his review of Chris Anderson’s Free):
They [Amazon] want seventy per cent of the subscription revenue, I get thirty per cent, they get seventy per cent. On top of that, they have said we get the right to republish your intellectual property to any portable device.
And herein lies the most difficult part of getting this right. With music and film, Apple’s iTunes created a new marketplace and service ecosystem around content that is in ever-increasing demand. That is to say, music and movies didn’t have to be reinvented to develop the iTunes experience — they just needed to be digitally rendered, distributed and delivered. But in the case of newspapers and publishers, the experience needs to be entirely re-imagined before people are willing to pay a premium.
Otherwise, we’ll just continue to consume the smorgasbord of free content at our fingertips.
Many in the tech press are wondering whether Google Wave will achieve mass adoption. And while I haven’t yet been granted a golden ticket to try the beta, I’m already skeptical of whether this platform will find a place in my lifestream. I think the biggest issue I’ll have with Wave is that it strives to be synchronous while at the same time having few design constraints. Let me explain . . .
I find utility in Twitter, Yammer, and Facebook as both synchronous and asynchronous platforms. At times, I’m actively engaged in streams of data from these services. At other points in time, I momentarily dip into the stream or receive push notifications of certain types of information. And all three of these platforms have inherent technical or behavioral constraints, which is actually what makes them so useful: Throughout the day, I snack on bite-sized Tweets and bit.ly links from people involved in my interests. At work, I tap into Yammer to get a brief glimpse of what colleagues are tackling. And Facebook, while not as constrained as Twitter, provides me with a ready stream of social snacking. All three of these platforms combined with MMS, Skype, and good old telephony are always at hand with my iPhone.
So while constraints have helped make platforms like Twitter useful for me, Google Wave’s lack of constraints and demand for synchronicity may ultimately make it useless. Lev Grossman said it well in his recent review of Wave:
Wave operates in real time, it demands immediate attention like an IM or a phone call, or for that matter, a crying baby. When Wave is up, it’s hard to focus on anything else. That isn’t a defect, but it does narrow the scope of its usefulness. Getting more information right away isn’t always the most efficient way to work.
I suppose only time and experience will tell whether Wave is a useless firehose of distraction or a useful collaboration and aggregation platform. So I best get back to finding myself one of those golden tickets.
The fanboy web is abuzz with the above conceptual video that demonstrates Microsoft’s proposed Courier in action. The Courier is a notebook-style tablet computer with gesture and handwriting recognition that uses the familiar activities of paper-based note-taking and scrap-booking as metaphors for how one would use the device. With all the speculation surrounding the forthcoming Apple tablet, some have suggested that Courier is a reminder that we shouldn’t take our eyes off Microsoft’s secretive work in the sub-laptop arena. But aside from the very well-produced concept mockup demonstrated here, what fascinates me about Courier is that it is built on a very different design metaphor compared to supposed mockups of the Apple tablet. That is to say, Courier emulates using a notebook . . . or dayplanner . . . or Trapper Keeper.
But is this the right design metaphor?
One could argue that this is the perfect blend of the familiar and the new that could open up a new category of mobile computing. But on the other hand, this could be limiting. Where the Courier demo excels at demonstrating the device’s exceptional on-the-fly note-taking and inspiration-gathering capabilities, it seems ill-fitted for media consumption. I can’t imagine using the device for entertainment content.
And herein lies a clear indication of how Apple and Microsoft will compete in the sub-laptop arena: Apple’s tablet will likely major in entertainment (no duh) while Microsoft will stake out mobile business and academic utility.
Stay tuned to see how this plays out. For now, I’ll take one of each.
Over the past year, there’s been no shortage of press surrounding Peter Arnell’s failings with the Tropicana and Gatorade brand redesigns at Pepsi. I just read Fast Company’s Masters of Design feature on David Butler, head of design at Coke, and was impressed by the stark contrast he represents to Arnell’s approach. David Butler’s philosophy (not to mention personality) certainly sounds markedly different from Arnell’s “purveyor of pop culture” approach which found him on a “five-week world tour of trendy design houses” as a major source of inspiration for the Pepsi assignments:
“It’s great that when David speaks, he doesn’t speak in the language of design,” says Joe Tripodi, Coca-Cola’s global marketing chief. When he talks to folks on the manufacturing side, to the bottlers, to the retailers, Butler’s message, Tripodi says, “is very simple: Here’s what I’m going to do to help you sell more stuff.”
Contrast that with his counterpart, Pepsi’s design consultant, Peter Arnell, who titillated the blogosphere last spring with a 27-page memo he wrote called “Breathtaking,” defending his new logo design. He cited inspiration from da Vinci’s Mona Lisa to his Vitruvian Man, and described the “gravitational pull” of a can of Pepsi on a supermarket shelf. That was before he compared his genius at creating a 3-D Super Bowl ad to Thomas Edison’s invention of motion pictures. Many designers were mortified, fearing Arnell had discredited the whole tribe with his claptrap.
In many ways, Butler is the anti-Arnell, a first-class designer who shuns the latest trendspeak. “I read all the journals. I love design theory. I’m a junkie for that stuff. But that’s at home,” he says. “At work, I don’t use the phrase ‘design thinking.’ Here, it’s about creating more value. How do we sell more of something? How do we improve the experience to make more money and create a sustainable planet?”
David Butler is inspired by design theory and pop culture as much as the next designer, but his real drive comes from approaching big problems through systems thinking:
[Butler's experience at Studio Archteype] and a run-in with Peter Senge’s book The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization changed the way Butler thought about design. He saw how systems thinking could be applied in a more holistic way. In the past, he says, design had been focused on straightforward problems: Come up with a drinking vessel, say. But now it was being asked to solve multipronged problems: How do we get clean drinking water? “We’re moving from linear problems to wicked problems,” he says, and the old default solution — hire a rock-star designer — no longer works. “The model of a master of design creating that magical object that is going to change the business is an old way of thinking. I can’t use it to work on wicked problems. I need to have capability internally.”
Side note: This trajectory was pioneered by Esslinger at frog design and is a major focus of his new book, A Fine Line:
I’m a bit obsessed with this print by Chad Hagen, part of his Nonsensical Infographics series. It feels like the elusive framework we’re all searching for — you know, the one that helps us predict what’s next from what we glean from the present and past. A familiar sense from the nonsensical.
