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Frog Design, the Book: How Design Strategies Are Shaping the Future of Business

Frog Design founder and former CEO Hartmut Esslinger has written his first book, and it is available in stores now: A Fine Line – How Design Strategies Are Shaping the Future of Business. Part autobiography, part how-to innovation guide, part outlook to the future of design, A Fine Line is "a must-read for designers and business people alike" (Satjiv Chahil, senior vice president, Hewlett-Packard).

A Fine Line offers a step-by-step overview of the innovation process — from targeting goals to shepherding new products and services to the marketplace — in order to reveal how to arrive at an authentic human design that connects strongly with consumers. With a unique perspective, rich stories, and a global mindset, Esslinger explores business solutions that are environmentally sustainable and contribute to an enduring global economy.

Michael Moritz from Sequoia Capital, in his foreword, said it all: "Hartmut's book contains the ruminations of a man who has devoted his life to the challenge of marrying the aesthetic with the functional while standing firm against the deadening forces of mediocrity. His work shows that taste can triumph, design and production can be soul-mates, and the eye of an individual can shape a product and a company. The idea that finely designed products can change the fate of companies while also becoming our indispensable companions is a message that millions of us owe to Hartmut."

You can find the table of contents, sample chapters, testimonials, and videos on http://www.afinelinebook.com

And here are some excerpts from a video interview with Esslinger:

We're Still Moving

My colleague Sam Martin posted this great preview of our upcoming design mind issue on "Motion:"

"I used to do a lot of traveling. First it was to see the graves of my literary heroes like Yeats (Sligo, Ireland) and Keats (Rome) and then it became something of a sight seeing tour – you know, a more traditional traipse to museums, temples, and historic and natural wonders.

Eventually, though, I traveled just to get away – to see how far away I could get, both literally and figuratively. I wanted to feel the distance, and I wanted to become completely removed from what I’d always known, to really step outside my own culture and experience what it was like to live in Sydney, Nepal, Thailand, or Honduras. 

It was a long journey. All told, it took me seven years before I could comfortably accept that it was time to stop moving around the world and start moving at home (we don’t ever stop moving). During that time, I saw a lot and met a lot of people, but one of the most gratifying elements of my travels was the movement. There were times – a lot of times – in which I didn’t want to experience any more culture, or see another temple, or sit on another beach. I just wanted to move. So I’d get on a bus or boat or train and I’d leave just to be leaving, just to be moving.

With the upcoming issue of design mind (due out January 22nd), we wanted to capture this notion of movement in as many ways possible. People, ideas, and technologies move for many different reasons, and motion itself isn’t always what it seems. Our cover artist, French photographer Denis Darzacq, wanted to document the downfall of a generation of Parisians in his photo essay, La Chute, which translates to “The Fall.” And David Hoffer points out in his upcoming article, “Slow Innovation,” that new ideas may ricochet around the culture like pin balls but the ideas that really last move more like molasses in winter.

Also, what are we missing if we move so fast? Tjeerd Hoek explains the job of designing the spaces between moments. And what can we do if we can’t stop moving? frog President Doreen Lorenzo writes a touching essay about Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder, in which she discusses her son’s successful bout with the diagnosis, in an article  called “The Unique Brain: The link between ADHD and creativity is turning a problem into a gift.”

Of course, travel itself is many different things for different people. I plane hopped for pleasure, but my experience was nothing like the travelers in our feature story “Confessions of Extreme Air Travelers,” some of whom spend more than 300 days a year working the security lines and angling for the exit row seat (they have it down pat, by the way).

It’s also fair to ask about the auto industry. What will become of it? Our designers have their opinions on how we drive in an article entitled “Driver Experience Design.” Most auto innovations have come under the hood, but we think it’s time they get in the cockpit.

The farthest away I ever felt on my travels was Perth, Australia, and the farthest away from home I ever felt was, ironically, in Canada. But some of my fondest memories are of the transit between those places, when I abandon my expectations and stopped checking the train schedules – those times when I gave myself over to the passing of time and to the pure, comforting feeling you get when you can’t be anywhere else.

Look for design mind issue 9, Motion, in bookstores and for sale on this website in the new year. Until then, happy travels."

SXSW Interactive 2008: Who Will Be This Year's Twitter?

Next weekend, just a couple of days after the dust of the primary campaigns will have settled, national media attention will return to Texas as Austin is turning into party central for the annual South by Southwest Festival (SXSW, March 7-16). SXSW Interactive, added in 1994 to the music festival, has evolved into one of the most influential tech conferences in the country and beyond. While somewhat geeky in its first years, SXSW Interactive is now considered a must-attend venue for big tech players (Google, Microsoft, Seagate, etc. all have a strong presence at the show), start-ups, creative agencies, software developers, futurists, designers, artists, media, and bloggers alike, all of whom are chasing the next big digital thing. A key contributing factor for SXSW's success may have been that the initially narrow meaning of "interactive" has expanded its relevance to more industries, media, and platforms over the past few years and now serves as the modus operandi of all business, no matter how creative or digital it is. With its more solid business underpinning, SXSW Interactive has overtaken both the Push conference in Minneapolis and Wired's Nextfest in terms of relevance and commercial success.

The Soul of the Machine

Yet despite its explosive growth (16,000 overall attendees are expected in Austin this year), "South By," as conference goers dub it, has done a good job evading all attempts to be easily categorized. The interactive part, in particular, has somehow managed to remain its cutting edge. It still offers a wildly eclectic bazaar of topics, trends, opinions, and applications, and one can truly say that all of the tech conferences out there it is the one best positioned to explore "the soul of the machine."

The organization is professional but there is still a lot of room for the unexpected, below-the-line, grassroots eccentricity that gives the conference its special flavor. A big part of this can be attributed to Austin, which has emerged as a thriving hub for creative people and embeds SXSW in the kind of community fabric that doesn't tolerate any over-spin or sell-out. The organizers have also made a point to add many community elements to the event: web 2.0 for web 2.0sters, if you will. For example, this year, they pioneered a "panel picker" that allowed users to vote on submitted panel proposals and essentially democratized the entire programming. I'm not entirely sure if this is the best application for the "wisdom of crowds" since there is a real danger that the panel selection turns into a popularity contest or an easy target for PR professionals and speaker bureaus. I, for my part, am old-fashioned and prefer conference programs to be curated by a curator, simply because it is otherwise daunting to ensure the right balance between diversity and cohesion. Anyway, it's too early to tell -- we'll see how it turns out.

In addition to the panel picker, SXSW has teamed up with Microsoft and frog design to create a rich, interactive online community hub for the conference. The application features premium content from SXSW Interactive, including video clips from keynotes and panels, as well as user-generated videos, Flickr images, and social networking content. At the same time, aggregators from Technorati and del.icio.us comb the Internet for relevant information, keeping the site dynamic.

But not everything at SXSW will be user-driven. In fact, some of the program highlights were carefully chosen: Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, will give the keynote on March 9. Other keynotes include Frank Warren (March 10) and Jane McGonigal (March 11). Opening Remarks (March 8) will be delivered by Henry Jenkins and Steven Johnson, and Michael Eisner, former head of Disney, will be interviewed in a special session on March 11.

Searching for the Killer App

As eyeballs wander towards Austin, it will be interesting to see which digital innovations this year's conference will bring. Google's Dodgeball blew up at SXSW Interactive in 2006, and last year, a hitherto unknown service called Twitter enabled attendees to chat about panels in real-time and in public, and as instant as the format was its proliferation in the blogosphere: Twitter became the app de jour at SXSW and then, quickly, the rage of all digerati.

So who will be this year's Twitter? Practically speaking: Meebo. The instant messaging service is the official sponsor for live chat at SXSW 2008 and has stepped into Twitter's footsteps, which is kind of ironic. Meebo as Me-too. And philosophically speaking? Who knows. It seems safe to place a few bets on models around the new "Digital Green." The conference will be hosting five panels devoted exclusively to sustainability issues (five more than in previous years, if you're counting), among them "10 Ways to Green-ify Your Digital Life" and "Green Software -- Really?" Another big topic will be how gaming, virtual worlds, mobile and contextual web will converge (yes, convergence is resilient!) in the "Age of Engage," including discussions on OpenID and hardware mash-ups ("the long tail of gadgets"). And then there are interesting sociological tangents such as "Sexual Privacy Online," "Self-Branding," or the existential question for the attention junkie: "Do You Have to Disappear Completely to Get Things Done?" The most exciting domain for disruptive innovation right now is probably news (which, as we know, is broken), and several panels will discuss the future of Internet radio, Internet TV, as well as crowdsourced, hyper-localized models of news production and aggregation.

Or maybe, after five days of "geekspasm" and partying, ReadWriteWeb's prediction may come to pass: "The killer app in Austin might just be beer."

Links

Here are a few helpful links to get you in the mood:

Official SXSW Festival Site: http://www.sxsw.com
Interactive SXSW Schedule/Calendar: http://sched.org/
Official SXSW Live Chat: http://www.meebo.com/sxsw
SXSW Insider Guide: http://sxsw.ning.com/
SXSW Facebook Page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/SXSW-Festival/7826953993?ref=s

The Telephone Book of Manhattan and the Ecstasy of Truth

In a NY Times interview, Werner Herzog, the legendary German filmmaker, responds to accusations that he’s taken liberties with facts in some of his documentaries and his latest feature, “Rescue Dawn:”

"If we are paying attention about facts, we end up as accountants. If you find out that yes, here or there, a fact has been modified or has been imagined, it will be a triumph of the accountants to tell me so. But we are into illumination for the sake of a deeper truth, for an ecstasy of truth, for something we can experience once in a while in great literature and great cinema. I’m imagining and staging and using my fantasies. Only that will illuminate us. Otherwise, if you’re purely after facts, please buy yourself the phone directory of Manhattan. It has four million times correct facts. But it doesn’t illuminate."

This statement reminds me of Stephen Glass and also the controversy around fabricated interviews with celebrities in the German SZ-Magazin (the equivalent to the NY Times magazine) several years ago, marking the end of “pop-journalism,” a free-spirited, highly damatized and subjective approach to documenting people and events (long before Lonelygirl15!).

I must say I still have a lot of sympathy for the pop-journalists, and I wholeheartedly agree with Herzog. I’m not saying making up or distorting facts is a prerequisite of great journalism, but facts can appear wrong when the solipstic truth behind them is not meaningful. Storytellers – and that includes both filmmakers and journalists - know too well that the moral of the story is that there is no story without moral.

frog Design Mind Speaker Series: Eric Ryan (Method)

The frog Design Mind speaker series will premiere in the San Francisco studio on Thursday, January 11, 2007, at 6 pm PST. The kick-off event will feature Eric Ryan, co-founder of Method, in conversation with Valerie Casey, executive creative director at frog. Method's well-designed, non-toxic cleaning products have taken American homes by storm, and Eric Ryan will discuss the impact of design on the user experience, the brand, and the bottom line. The event is free for everyone; snacks and beverages will be served. Don't miss it!

Stealing Fashion Moments: Fashion TV Podcast about Elle Muliarchyk

A few months ago I blogged about Elle Muliarchyk, the Belarussian model who photographs herself in fashion store dressing rooms. Elle got quite a bit of media coverage since she was featured in the NY Times Style magazine. Now one of her undercover performances has been featured in a podcast by Fashion TV ("Stealing fashion moments - the daring dressing room photographs of Elle Muliarchyk") - and it is interesting to see the thief at work. Click here to download the podcast (48 MB).

Steve Jobs on Ubiquity

“That’s like saying you don’t want to kiss your lover’s lips because everyone has lips.” - Apple CEO Steve Jobs, on the suggestion that the iPod might lose popularity because of its ubiquity.

– from abiresearch.com

Trust is a Leap of Faith

James G. March is one of the most renowned business scholars and one of the most influential patrons of what we today call “organizational behavior.” March considers organizations as social actors whose decision-making is not entirely rational, as Taylor and other neo-classic business theorists postulated, rather it is based on “bounded rationality,” tacit knowledge, and an ever-present ambiguity of available information.

This month’s Harvard Business Review includes a fascinating interview with March (“Ideas as Art”), and he has something remarkable to say about the concept of trust. Trust, in his eyes, is by definition an asymmetrical act; in fact, it is one that may not even be reciprocal. March argues that for trust to be anything but truly meaningful, you have to trust somebody who isn’t trustworthy: “If we trust only when trust is warranted, love only when love is returned, and learn only when learning is valuable, then we abandon an essential feature of our humanity.” In other words: Trust is a leap of faith.

“We justify actions by their consequences. But providing consequential justification is only a part of being human. It is an old issue, one with which Kant and Kierkegaard, among many others, struggled. I once taught a course on friendship that reinforced this idea for me. By the end of the course, a conspicuous difference had emerged between some of the students and me. They saw friendship as an exchange relationship: My friend is my friend because he or she is useful to me in one way or another. By contrast, I saw friendship as an arbitrary relationship: If you’re my friend, then there are various obligations that I have toward you, which have nothing to do with your behavior. We also talked about trust in that class. The students would say, 'Well, how can you trust people unless they are trustworthy?' So I asked them why they called that trust. It sounded to me like a calculated exchange. For trust to be anything truly meaningful, you have to trust somebody who isn’t trustworthy. Otherwise, it’s just a standard rational transaction.”

March ends with, “In the end, you know, we are very minor blips in a cosmic story. Aspirations for importance or significance are the illusions of the ignorant. All our hopes are minor, except to us; but some things matter because we choose to make them matter. What might make a difference to us, I think, is whether in our tiny roles, in our brief time, we inhabit life gently and add more beauty than ugliness.”

No Apprentice Tonight...

There was no episode of "The Apprentice" on Monday, which was pretty devastating for an "Apprentice"-addict like me. I have not missed one episode so far, and at one point I even half-considered applying for the next season that will be shot in Southern California this summer. But I think Salon’s review today well-articulates why this guilty pleasure will have to stay one that I observe from my couch rather than from the boardroom.

"The trouble with "The Apprentice" is that even if you had a bunch of smart, cool people on the show, they'd still be limited to inventing ways to promote Sam's Club or dreaming up jingles for Arby's new chicken sandwich. Jesus, how about last week's product, the P'EatZZa, a name so asinine even that whoring slutmonkey Donald Trump couldn't say it without choking on his own tongue? Basically, since only three of you know what I'm talking about, it was a sandwich that consisted of -- brace yourself -- two slices of cold pizza with lunchmeat in between. Just watching the yuppie ass-kissers on the show trying to choke back these awful congealed-looking things and then proclaiming them delicious was enough to make you retch. Of course, if there was any doubt that the product sucked, it was squelched by Trump's repeated and very false-sounding proclamations, "How great is the Puh-eat-zuh, guys?" "Did you just love the Peat-za? Don't you think it's going to be a huge hit for 7-Eleven?"

For all of the times Daddy Warbucks throws his ankles behind his head for the corporate sponsor du jour, he remains the best thing about "The Apprentice" by far. The Donald is just an odd bird, glad-handing and grandstanding and making egocentric declarations and patting himself on the back and talking about how alluring his daughter is in the most inappropriate terms. But through it all, Trump just gets more and more likable. There's just something fallible about the man, something soft and squishy down deep inside, so that even when he's being a pudwhacker, he's still just a nice dad and a surprisingly good guy, given his dumb buildings and his vainglorious displays. One suspects that he's sort of a softie of a boss, too, at least to his favorite employees. And despite the yes men he parades in front of us during the "business tip" portion of the show, if he were really dumb enough to surround himself with empty yes men, would he ever have hired Carolyn and George, two of the crabbiest, most outspoken, grumpiest know-it-alls ever to grace the small screen?

I'm just going to come out and admit it: Even though the finale is inevitably awful and makes me wish I had the 13 hours I wasted watching the show back, I can't resist "The Apprentice." Bickering yuppies running late to meetings, brainstorming bad ideas, and then failing miserably, with Trump waiting in the wings to call them idiots? What's not to like? Watching this show brings me all the delicious backstabbing evils of the dysfunctional workplace without the bad coffee and the tedious staff meetings."

Sproutit Offers E-Mail Management For Small Businesses

Sproutit provides a product called Mailroom, a web based e-mail management system designed exclusively for small businesses. It is set to debut at the DEMO conference on Monday (2/6). Here's Sproutit'spitch: "Everyday, small businesses, bloggers and freelancers waste hours answering their e-mail. This fall Sproutit.com will introduce the first software built exclusively for small businesses and individuals to solve this problem."

The Technosight blog offers a sneak preview of Mailroom and also an interview with Charles Jolley, one of the founders and the President and CEO of Sproutit.