You can download free pdfs of those sections from The Little BIG Things Synopsis Series* by clicking below:

#36 Time
#37 Design

*The Synopsis Series is an adaptation that gives you a taste of the BIG idea in each of the 163 Little BIG Things. More information on the book can be found on this page. The Synopsis Series as released thus far can be found here.

1. Press and hold the "Alarm 1" or "Alarm 2" button until "Alarm Time" appears on the display. Press the "Settings" knob and the alarm hour will blink.
2. Rotate the "Settings" knob to change the hour and press to set.
3. Rotate the "Settings" knob to change the minutes and press to set.
4. Rotate the "Settings" knob until "Source" appears on the display and press to select iPod, buzzer, FM or AM and press to set.
5. Rotate the "Settings" knob until "Exit" appears on the display and press to exit.

Of course it was virtually impossible to read all the gibberish that appeared on the clock's screen. Add the fact that while you were holding and pressing you could not simultaneously see what was on the screen. (At one point I was pushing and pressing and had the damn thing cradled in my lap so that I could at least partially see what I was doing.) The final indignity was that by the time you had twirled and pushed and pressed and then pressed and twirled and pushed, you had ... ZERO ... confidence that you had set the damn alarm correctly.

Excellence in design is on the tip of many a tongue.
That's great, and a monumental change in a decade.
We've come a long way.
We ain't there yet.

I got an email this morning [08/24/09] with this Tom Peters quote: "Design is... an understanding that all the senses were created equal."

It's true. And it's interesting to think about what that on earth that might really mean.

I was talking with a marketing colleague this morning about a potential project she has for a website aimed at moms. As a mom, I'm always very suspicious of any kind of "marketing to moms" because it's often like other marketing to women... lots of pink and cuddly photos, as if that is all it takes to be relevant to me as a female consumer.

What does any of this have to do with "Design is... an understanding that all the senses are created equal."?

It is this:

Design is not about making something look cool (or cute, or mom-like, or macho, or techie, or whatever it is you think the audience is).

Design is about making something relevant.
It is about making a connection with your audience.
Which means you have to truly understand them, and you have to have a clear communication strategy.
The messages need to be relevant to the audience.
The way in which they are delivered needs to be relevant.
Remember which senses to address. (Is the color palette friendly or serious? Is the nomenclature for website sections based on an internal organizational structure or does it support the user's needs? Does the paperstock feel rough or smooth, heavy or light? How should all of these elements, and more, feel to the user/audience?)

Designing a website for moms, like any website, requires the integration of a site architecture with a communication strategy and a careful prioritizing of messages. (Written and/or visual messages.) Then the final design and all of the details of its execution (words and images used, color palette, type styles, and so on) supports the higher communication goals, serves the end user well, and tracks back to what you figured out needed to be done in the planning stages.

I wholeheartedly agree with Tom that "Design is... an understanding that all the senses were created equal." Creators (marketers, designers, writers, technical developers, etc.) of websites or any type of communication have to remember that all of the senses truly are involved. The eyes, hands, heart, brain.. a website user or brochure reader takes in many elements and processes them via all of their senses. All of the elements require careful attention and need to be considered from a user's point of view. If the visuals are strong but the naming of website sections isn't right, the user won't respond as well as they would otherwise. If the brochure copy is great but the typesetting makes it feel like a chore to read... oh no! All of the details need to work together in a holistic, integrated way to support each other and the user experience—and thus build a relationship with your brand.

(1) Nice touch! Award-winning chef Sissy Hicks has opened a wonderful take-out, 3-meal-a-day place 5 miles from my home!! (My wife and I haven't cooked for weeks. Or, rather, I haven't cooked in the three weeks since Susan broke her leg and I "took over"!)

The food is pure "Wow" at Sissy's Kitchen, but I am always a sucker for the "little" touches—which of course aren't little at all! Above, see the wonderfully colorful ribbon Sissy ties to every bag!!!

(2) Repeat! I wrote about this one years ago, but it deserves another nod. Pictured below is the marvelous little tool that removes the outer skin from garlic when you roll the clove inside the blue rubber tube!! (Hats waaaay off to Zak Designs!) (And ... to Google for finding Zak Designs when I typed "thing to roll garlic in to remove outer skin.")

(3) Design matters! Everywhere!

See directly above. It is the "control panel" of my new Black & Decker SmartBrew coffeemaker.

One switch.
Two positions.
"On."
"Off."

I hereby declare that B&D not only wins Tom's User Friendly Grand Award—but retires the cup!!

(Some of you snobs will go on & on & on about the limitations of my Dearest Delight. And I will reply with a smirk. In a blind taste test, my coffee will be as good as yours!)

Home:

Interior designer: $25,000.
Landscape designer: $15,000.
Architect: $10,000.

Logic: We live and work and play inside the dwelling (mostly) and outside the dwelling (some to a lot, depending on the climate). The skin that divides in from out, the architect's work, is a third-order concern.

Office:

Interior designer: $30,000.
Landscape designer: $12,000.
Architect: $8,000.

Logic is pretty much the same, with a little added emphasis on the interior.

If this makes sense from a use perspective (and "use" is what we do), why is the architect typically treated like God, and the interior designer and landscaper as second-stringers ... if we use them at all?

I suppose because "we" like pictures of the places we live and work better than the places themselves? (Ever notice that in architectural magazines, there are never people?) (Okay, I'll be fair, there are rarely people pix in interior design mags either—again, alas, we design for a good picture rather than livability.)

Full disclosure:

My wife is a tapestry artist and home furnishings designer-entrepreneur.
My hobby is landscaping.
I despise most Frank Gehry buildings as extravagant ego-exercises.*
[*There is one architect I love. Christopher Alexander—coauthor of the magnificent Pattern Language. He focuses on living in/using a space—inside and out—rather than the sexiness of the skin.]

At 6 p.m. Monday, I was out brushcutting. I apparently woke up a yellowjacket neighborhood buried in the mud. In short order, I was stung perhaps a dozen times—one YJ got stuck under my shirt. Luckily, I didn't go into anaphylactic shock. But, in a few hours the reaction was body-wide. I went to an ER the next morning after a truly crappy night. The doc said I should have come at the time—because I had some wheezing, which meant I'd moved in the direction of impeded breathing.

The good news was that I was on the mend in 12 hours courtesy an elephant-sized Benadryl injection and prednisone—courtesy the latter, I'd definitely test positive on an Olympic doping test. The bad news: once stung so badly, my predilection for full-blast anaphylaxis in the future soared. The additional good news: if prepared, one can handle the bad stuff—hence an EpiPen was prescribed. (The EpiPen, to be carried with you at all appropriate times, lets you self-administer a blast of Epinephrine, usually adequate protection-against-disaster until you can hustle to an ER.)

That's all prelude to my design story. The EpiPen, upon being wanged into your thigh, through clothing, if necessary, ejects a needle that in turn injects the Epinephrine. The package includes two locked-and-loaded doses. Now the best part: There is a third dispenser—which is for practice administration. Upon being yellowjacketed again, God help me, there is no time to read the directions! So the practice pen, sans needle and Epinephrine, lets you pull the pin as you actually would, and if you smack your thigh hard enough, it indicates that you've passed the practice test—the practice pen is infinitely reusable.

As all of us know, manuals are almost always (99%+) infuriating. This was the exception, to say the least. There was a mini-manual, but the practice injector went above and beyond. Trust me, I have a couple of testers for this and that (e.g., blood sugar measurement), and the directions merit the standard D- grade if I'm in a generous mood.

So hats off to the EpiPen designers—winner of the Tom2008 user-friendly-design award.

(Now all I have to do is pray I'm not stung again—and if so, pray that the Epinephrine was not made in China out of anti-freeze.)

On the non-yellowjacket side of the balance, a couple of pictures from the farm last evening.

**"Great things" are more valuable than not-so-great things. (The "duh" "epiphany.")
**"It" [Design] is everything-ubiquitous.
**Everybody's doin' it.
**If "everybody's doin' it," then how do we do it differently-sustainably?
**Everybody will do "it" differently. (But "design zealots" in Japan are about the same as design zealots in Italy.)
**"It" works only if it is "a way of life." (Apple. BMW. Cirque du Soleil. Starbucks.)
**Consider my term-of-choice: "Design-mindfulness." (Design-mindfulness is a universally shared attitude.)
**"It" does not work if it is a "program"!
**"It" is not about "cut and paste," not about sticky-noting a rock star designer—this may, in fact, be counterproductive.
**Designers must become a cherished "part of the family," not "those weird creatives."
**Designers as "dreamers with deadlines"—creative & loose ... with hardass deliverables.
**It's already faddish. (To say it is not to do it.)
**Don't try to "engineer it"—there is an essential "spontaneity" dimension. (Southwest Airlines.)
**"It" starts with the vendors and the vendors' vendors—and especially includes packaging and delivery folks. (And parking lot attendants. Think Disney and the gum-free Orlando airport.)
**In the long run, the "Mittelstand" will make the difference! (National-regional design prowess is powered and sustained by middle-sized companies headed by fanatics.)
**"Design hegemony" applies to the 3-person accounting shop.
**Acquiring design firms is (very) tricky; "they" don't readily fit into ordinary bureaucracies.
**There are no "exempts"—"it" applies as much, albeit in a different way, in purchasing as in product development.
**IT IS NOT ABOUT "MARKETING"! (Though marketing is a piece of it—like everything else.)
**The entire "supply chain" must be on board.
**As always, "MBWA" [Managing By Wandering Around] rules—embedding something new in a culture is a "walkabout" affair.
**"It" is about the way every individual conducts himself or herself. (E.g., the hotel housekeeper, restaurant busboy.)
**We [most of us] live in a "service economy." Design achievement, design dogmatism, applies as much to service "products" as to goods-lumpy objects.
**Design applies as much to a "PSF" [Professional Service Firm] as to a bank or car wash. (From dress code to calling card to flowers in reception to the look & feel of Client reports—to religiously capitalizing the "C" in Client whenever the word is printed to referring to you & the Client as "We.")
**Aesthetics and usability are equally important—with perhaps a slight edge to usability. ("'It won a prize' is the ultimate criticism."—Don Norman. The burning question: "Is the building livable?" Not, "Gosh, it's pretty-in-plan.")
**There is a "bet the farm" element at play—Dubai, Apple, China's Olympics.
**Great design does no less than "change the way we experience the world."
**Design is about "love" and "hate," not "like" and "dislike"—and hence the key to emotional bonding, internally as well as externally.
**When it comes to shaping behavior, there are few tools comparable to interior design and office arrangement—e.g., putting marketing and new product development next door to one another.
**There must be a far higher than normal dose of autonomy-accountability—love of the odd and oddball throughout the enterprise—in the end "it" is about perpetually renewing "value-added through creativity-freshness-spontaneity."
**Since we are dealing with artistic expression and open-endedness, a restless ethos of "trying a lot of stuff, fast" and then "trying again, fast" is of paramount importance.
**"It" must show up in the schools by age 5.
**"It" becomes the chief organizing principle for education.
**When it comes to aesthetics, you get most of "it" from the genes you were dealt. (You can "train in" appreciation, but not artistic flair.)
**As a result of the inescapable need to start the reconstruction process that will underlie a self-regenerating "soft economy" by reinventing-revolutionizing our schools, the transition to a "new [soft] economy" will likely be about 25 years.
**The cataclysmic shift described above—autonomy, creativity, the arts front and center—demands a "Jefferson" (powerful artist-visionary-politician) as national-regional-urban leader.
**Beware of engineers! (Said with affection—I am one.) They (we!) are reductionists—design is about wholes.
**Beware of MBAs (Said with no affection, even though I am one.) Analysis is imperative—but also reductionist. In "real life," emotion rules—but not at the B-schools!
**The education bit is less about aesthetics and more about encouraging individualism—to take a risk on design, you must have a burning desire (to the point of willingness to suffer) to do things differently. (Schools—ours, yours, everyone's—are brilliant at suppressing creativity and "excessive" shows of passion.)
**Capturing "best practice" only goes so far.
**"Six Sigma" can be a deadly enemy. (Tighten down too hard—bye bye creativity-spontaneity.)
**In "design world": Gender differences are ... enormous.
**Women buy most stuff, hence women must design most stuff. (And be very amply represented in management ranks—for reasons of profit, not social justice.)
**Think: "Success through design."
  Think: "Women!!"
**If you are interested in selling to Europe and the U.S. and Japan (etc.), then you must explicitly (!!!) focus on the over-50 market. (For example, think "7/13"—Americans buy 13 cars in a lifetime on average, 7 when they are 50 or older.)
**If you are serious, the Chief Design Officer [and/or Chief Experience Officer or, per Kevin Roberts, Chief Lovemark Officer] must sit at the same level as the CFO. So, too, the Chief People Officer!
**"It" must be on every (literally) agenda; in project reviews of every type "it" must hold its own with, say, the budget discussion. (Every = every.)
**You'll never be able to explain "it" to the analysts in so many words—hence it will always be to some extent an act of faith.
**Steve Jobs is god. Alas, Steve Jobs is too abnormal to learn from. (Apple is a great example of design primacy, but SJ is "10-sigma man.")
**Design competitions at all levels of society-business must be very big deals.
**Community—small as well as large—investment in the arts (festivals, museums, etc.) is imperative.
**Buy art. (All businesses of all sizes.)
**In the public sector, "it" starts at the airport for foreign visitors especially—an experience that includes signage, traffic management, cop courtesy, air quality, etc.
**You can do a lot for 2 cents! (Think Singapore—details to follow.)
**And don't ignore the subway map. (Think London.)
**Or the public toilets. (Think Paris.)
**Be merciless about urban trash—spend yourself poor if necessary on the removal thereof. The political leadership must be directly involved.
**Good design transforms healthcare facilities (especially hospitals)—and abets healing.
**Good design in eldercare facilities extends life and enhances quality of life—critical as the elder population soars.
**Small things are often (usually?) more important than big things.
**"Design Is Free" is closer to the mark than you would think.
**Process design excellence is a matchless tool—emphasizing aesthetics (!) as much as practicality.
**Throwing money at problems is almost always a dumb thing to do—Design Excellence included.
**Training in "service excellence" is often a better "design investment" than capital spending.
**This ain't limited to global enterprises.
**The overall quality and effectiveness of SMEs contributes more to the GDP and tenor-character of a nation-region than that of big ("famous") firms.
**Gandhi and Mandela and Churchill and JFK and Reagan and Thatcher and Sarkozy and Franklin and Washington set the tone to an incredible degree—their "personal style" was their "brand." ("It" starts with personal style of the tip-top leadership team. Sorry to be politically insensitive, but who would give a hoot about Tibet if it weren't for the look and style of the Dalai Lama?) Boss at any level: You're either on the "it" boat—or not.

Over to you ...

My "lick-worthy" candidate: my Western Digital 160 gigabyte external hard drive. It is sleek and black and austere—and though I haven't licked it, I have indeed fondled it.

(And hats off to Mr Jobs and company for stupendous earnings reported the day before yesterday. The company has been loved for "cool" and excoriated for not doing as well financially as Microsoft, a direct result of Steve's often unpleasant "I want it my way" mantra. Now Microsoft and Dell have a bushel of problems—and no obvious solutions since innovative leaps have not been their forte. Apple has stuck to their absurdly high new-product standard for decades, except in Jobs' absence, and, despite barbs and arrows and bad spells, it has paid off. Moreover, if innovation is your forte, when trouble arises your "fallback" is your forte.)

(Is my tribute to Jobs-innovation contrary to my tribute to Coach Schembechler-execution? Sure. So what? Scott Fitzgerald: "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." Bob Waterman found that one, and we used it as a chapter epigraph in In Search of Excellence. In Thriving on Chaos, I claimed that the #1 trait of a successful leader is "managing paradox.")

I've been writing pretty voluminously about Design for some 20 years. I have slowed down recently as it has become "in" and my work as prod-provocateur is largely done. While my ego would like me to take some credit for Design's march up the priority scale, the truth is that the accolades go mostly to the likes of China and Wal*Mart, the Mighty Duo. As the market for low cost stuff turned one thing after another into a commodity, Design won the "only thing left" to differentiate product after product.

(The recent overuse of the term "experience" has at once supported Design consciousness—and hurt it. I'm among the lot that frequently uses "experience" rather than "design." "Experience" is cool—and, indeed, potent as a differentiator. "Design," per my peculiar definition, comes directly from the genes—it's very basic, hence very, very potent.)

To skip steps, I was at one of my favorite bookstores (i.e., specialist in great stuff and weird stuff—The Gas We Pass: The Story of Farts) in the world, Ariel, at The Rocks in Sydney. Through jet-lagged eyes, I stumbled upon Design: Intelligence Made Visible, by Stephen Bayley and Terence Conran.

Oh, what a wonder!!
I'm hooked on design all over again!!

My mushy head took me back to my first trip to Beijing, in 1986, not that long after China began its (short) march to capitalist powerhouse. I was immediately struck by the bright clothing—very, very bright. The older (45+??) generation was still a sea of gray Mao jackets—but, oh, the youngsters!

Color!
Color!
Color!

It struck me, not a novel observation, I'm sure, that, given the chance, people universally moved to "stuff" that was energetic, and had a touch of style. Of course, 20 years later, China is home to a burgeoning set of the very cool.

And it strikes me again—with Bayley and Conran—that Design is, in the most fundamental terms, what makes us human! (Yikes, a potent assertion—did I write that?) You may not agree, but think about it. In fact, for one thing, I've noted that design-insensitive guys (like me) spend as much time in hardware stores deciding on which hammer will grace their garage or basement wall as many women might spend selecting a sweater. (Sexist? Tough.)

So, we're "doing" design more—and that's good. But, are we really using it strategically—has it gotten into the culture and soul of the enterprise, Sony style, Apple style, Deere style, OXO style, FedEx style? That's what I'm going to start yapping about. It's a bit like the "women's stuff" I'm obsessed about. It ever so rarely gets beyond "program"—and becomes a (very profitable) "way of life." (And "way of life," to be crude, is "where the loot is.")

My favorite three quotes from Bayley-Conran so far:

"You know a design is good when you want to lick it."—Steve Jobs
"Design is first and foremost an attitude."—Roger Tallon

And:

"It's futile to pretend that industrial design or styling has any other function than to support marketing."—Ford executive*

(*I still own a small office building in Palo Alto. My tenant is BMW. I think I'll run this last one by them the next time I'm in the Bay Area.)

(Proof, of sorts, of the power of this book: Though available at amazon.co.uk, I'm going to drag it from Sydney to Brisbane to Sydney to LA to VT in the next 6 days. Why? I need to lick it a little, Steve.)

As many-most of you well know, I'm no fan (understatement) of "built to last." I do not see longevity as an achievement of note. (Yup, I'm an Orioles fan, but Cal Ripken's "iron man" record is pale by comparison with, say, Ted Williams' "last .400 hitter" achievement, Joe DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak, or Bob Gibson's 1.12 ERA.) My mantra is clear: "Built to rock the world" rules! Google may well be on the scrapheap just a dozen years from now—but it has surely "rocked the world" in a way that will indeed be remembered in biz history headlines 50 or 150 years from now. To be sure, if you "keep on rockin' the world," I'm delighted if you last—think, at the moment, Apple. But longevity for longevity's sake??

But, perversely, this Post is about "built to last" in a traditional and admiring way. We're burying about a mile of power line on our VT farm. Though the pros (electricians, excavators) are in charge, our 1985 John Deere 2350 with 245 bucket loader time and again has been indispensable—and at age 22 it's as perky as ever. Sure there's been a replacement part or two along the way, but the solidity and durability of the machine rolls on like the Mississippi.

And its superb design—Deere's longtime hallmark, so unexpected in "farm machinery"—makes it a work of art as well as a piece of work.

Hats waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay off to John Deere!

Design, speaking of which, may be "in" right now and correctly so (and I do, I admit, crow for having "gotten there" 20 years ago), but it ain't easy, especially the "usability" part. I have bought two coffeemakers of late, a Cuisinart and a Krups, and the design in both cases stinks up the kitchen—in particular, the Krups pot pours poorly and the water-loading process in the Cuisinart is a bad joke. Reminds me to "stick with Braun." Also reminds me of the difficulty of getting so-called little things right, such as pouring effectiveness of a pot or, God knows, the quality and durability and usability of zippers!

(More "hoorays" re design and durability—I'm doing a lot of brutal brush clearing at the moment, and I am in love with my work-hiking boots, bought for our New Zealand trek 4 months ago. They come from Jack Wolfskin, a German company, I believe—at any rate I bought them in and hauled them home from Frankfurt.)

[Photo credit Luc Gallopin.—CM]

"There is no such thing as information overload, just bad design."

"Clutter is not an attribute of information, it is an illness of design."

"To simplify, add detail."

"Pitching out corrupts within."

Thoughts on those comments, or any other thoughts on Tufte?

I'd love to passionately disagree, but ...

For gawd's sake ...

(The next two Posts are oldies—about 10 days old—that just turned up on my Desktop ...)

That brings to mind a wonderful and compelling book, Thomas Hine's The Total Package. E.g.: "Packages are about containing and labeling and informing and celebrating. They are about power and flattery and trying to win people's trust. They are about beauty and craftsmanship and comfort. They are about color, protection, survival."

Go back to Bloomberg: Sure it's an odd couple, but Space Design and Packaging are two of the most under-utilized, powerful tools for organization change and branding success respectively.

Design! Damn it!

Not quite so fast. Susan and I bought a new high-definition TV for our Boston house, and an accompanying DVD player. Problem: It/they come/s with three (count 'em) controllers—sporting (count 'em) 117 buttons. Okay, subtract the 0 through 9 on each of the three ... and you're still left with 87 buttons.

87 = A lot. (87 = Useless. For me.) (To be fair, my 8-year-old niece, Honor Sargent, mastered the whole thing in minutes.)

Design, thou art the fairest of maidens—but please, for us Boomers-Geezers with the $$$, get the "usability" right!

Did a major office cleaning the other day, muttering a mantra of "get rid of it" as I tossed just about everything in sight. Old client files, articles, extra pens—you name it, I threw it out.

Despite this urge to purge, two things survived that seemingly shouldn't have: The box to my iBook and a plastic shopping bag from the Apple Store. I found myself identifying future functions for them so they wouldn't have to go. They're so pretty!