Thoughts on innovation, product development, engineering, and industrial design

Thursday, May 22, 2008

6 Standards for Good Design Strategy & Research

One of the issues facing the design world is a lack of standardized vocabulary found in other professions. "Innovation" is perhaps the most obvious example, but "research" and "strategy" are two others. To some people "research" means going to the store and looking at products on the shelves, to others it means exhaustive qualitative and quantitative studies that take months. In my opinion, both could be valid in certain contexts, and the right way to judge their validity is through a set of universal, context-free criteria.

To that end, I came across Harold Kincaid's set of standards for good science that also apply very well to design research & strategy (as presented in Philosophy of Social Sciences, by Robert C Bishop, page 349):
Falsifiability
Hypotheses and theories must be capable of standing before the court of experience and being proven wrong. (See Karl Popper's work)

Predictive Success
Empirically adequate theories exhibit both a high quantity and high quality of predictions borne out of observation and testing.

Scope
Theories should predict and explain a wide variety of phenomena.

Coherence
Good theories exhibit logical consistency as well as cohering with the best information available from other sciences.

Fruitfulness
Theories should lead to new insights and developments, suggest new avenues for research and guide experimental investigation among other results.

Objectivity
Our best theories should reflect the way the world is, not the way we want it to be.

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posted by Finn McKenty at 2:25 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, May 15, 2007

Chevron's Data Overload

Following up on my earlier post on information overload comes an interesting article about Chevron's massive overabundance of data:
Chevron, the oil company, says it is drowning in data and will spend about 10 percent of its information technology budget over the next two years to get its head above water, reports Pui-Wing Tam in The Wall Street Journal (5/8/07). That’s a lot of money when you consider that Chevron spends “hundreds of millions of dollars” on IT each year. But it’s an ocean of a problem for Chevron, where the number of employee-created digital files has grown by 60 percent over the past two years. The article doesn’t say whether there is a connection between Chevron’s digital bloat and the price at the pump.

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posted by Finn McKenty at 9:05 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, May 08, 2007

Data, Information, and Knowledge

Data
Data is simply raw facts and figures: measurements, statistics, and so forth. Thanks in large part to technology, organizations have access to an incredible amount of data. They get it from POP, from customer service departments, from suppliers, distributors, retailers, sales people, and any number of other channels. Anything that can possibly be measured probably is, and it's probably stored in a database somewhere.

But what to do with it? Data is pretty useless on its own. In fact, it's worse than useless: sorting through all that data takes a lot of resources. We feel like we can't just ignore it, we can't just let all this data collect without doing something with it, but the sheer volume of data available is intimidating. Where do we start?

Information
Once data has processed, interpreted, and collected into some sort of presentable format, it becomes information. For example, a chart illustrating the top five widget makers in North America for Q2 2006 is a piece of information.

This is where most organizations stop. They take all the data, run it through a QA package or whatever that makes some charts, write a report, then pat themselves on the back. The worth of information is oftentimes measured by its "thud factor"- that is, how loudly it thuds when you plop it on someone's desk. It's like you're paying by the inch!

The truth is, though, that information isn't worth a whole lot more than raw data in today's business world. I mean, we've all seen what happens to this stuff. We get a huge mountain of a report, say "Oh wow, thanks! This looks great!" then banish it to the "stuff I have to read" pile on our desk... which means it never gets read.

And who can blame us? Who doesn't suffer from information overload? We all have way more "stuff to read" than we have time or energy to even think about looking at. It's basic supply and demand: as the amount of information increases, the value of information decreases. The really valuable stuff is knowledge.

Knowledge
Knowledge is information that is contextual, relevant, and actionable. It's insights and ideas that drive action, that become the fuel for design, marketing, innovation, supply chain, retail, and every other facet of an organization. It cuts through the clutter, the noise, through the constant barrage of information and speaks clearly and concisely.

As Guy Kawasaki says, we have to constantly ask ourselves, "So what?" It's not fun, but it has to be asked. Ask yourself "So what?" at regular intervals. See if there's anything you can take out, anything you can simplify. Use visualization and prototyping to tell complex stories in an instant. Above all, don't let yourself fall into the trap of mistaking information for knowledge.

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posted by Finn McKenty at 5:48 PM 0 comments