niblettes | Tasty Little Nuggets of Design and Innovation Goodness

Archive for February, 2006

Metaphors for Design part I

Monday, February 27th, 2006

There’s been lots of talk about design, what it means, what value it can offer, etc. There’s plenty of both navel-gazing and striking insight. However, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of simplicity or clarity. I thought I take a stab at some clarity by making my perspective on design concrete with a couple [...]

The Intellectual Vampires of Academe

Thursday, February 23rd, 2006

This post by Black Sheep really struck a cord with me. The gist of this rant is that the IP policies of universities basically rob students of what rightfully belongs to them (their ideas, or at the very least credit for their ideas) sucking creativity out of students for the institutions benefit without doing much [...]

Things to Avoid in your Conference Booth

Tuesday, February 21st, 2006

As a follow up to my list of things to avoid in your sales proposals, here’s a list of somethings you may want to avoid in your conference booth. Avoid numbing me with marketese. I’m surround by hunderds of other companies just like yours, filled with the same toothy Herb Tarleks, spouting the same pitch, [...]

Google, Greeks and Gifts

Friday, February 17th, 2006

Is anyone truly surprised about the potential for privacy invasion that Google Desktop opens up? In case you don’t know, it’s a tool that indexes every peice of digital information and textual content on your computer and makes it all really easy to find. And with the lastest version, it stores much of the information [...]

Pull My Finger

Wednesday, February 15th, 2006

In thier paper on pull as a new model for mobilzing resources “From Push to Pull – Emerging Models for Mobilizing Resources” John Brown and John Hagel quote William Gibson saying “the future is already here, it is just unevenly distributed.” Quite true. In terms of pull models the movie business has done it for [...]

The Greatest Trick the Devil Ever Played

Tuesday, February 14th, 2006

Ok, this isn’t exactly design or innovation related, but I just have to say something about this PresentationZen has a great post on one of last week’s Daily Shows where Jon Stewart interviews former DOD PR flack Torie Clarke (check out the clip, its painfully amusing). In the Usual Suspects, Verbal Kint said “The greatest [...]

Remote Associations and Innovation^3

Saturday, February 11th, 2006

My appologies for the the lame title–I just couldn’t come up with anything less bad.  Regardless… Blogrium has an interesting post on the sociology of innovation and the psychological perception factors that are conducive to fostering innovation within groups.  I was immediately struck by the fact that this is a model of product design as a professional and [...]

Terms I Like – Revisited

Friday, February 10th, 2006

I’ve put this on a permanent page at http://niblettes.com/blog/terms-i-like/ New terms I like…. Ninged: falling into the chasm of usability, where despite the potential value only geeks can figure out how to use your product Flocked: falling into the chasms of usefullness or desirability, where despite offering an easy to use product, only geeks want [...]

Innovation like Humor?

Wednesday, February 8th, 2006

So Scott Adams has a basic formula for a successful comic. In order for something to be funny, you need at least two of the following elements: Cute (as in kids and animals) Naughty Bizarre Clever Recognizable (You’ve been there) Cruel Looking through the funny pages (actually, the not-so-funny pages) this weekend I noticed 3 [...]