In his book “Serious Play: How the world’s best companies simulate to innovate” Michael Schrage wrote “The truly insightful model is a truly inciteful model.” More than just a clever play on words, it brings up the real role of prototyping. Prototypes should create questions, not just answer them. A well aimed prototype should foster conversation
I think, based on this theory, and my reading of the market, that Social Media is not good enough yet, and is therefore too premature to benefit from open standards. Host applications (like FaceBook and Pownce and others) need to keep their systems (called “Containers” in the field) highly optimized so all these busy developers out in the wild can continue writing add-ons that are tightly coupled to their specific set of capabilities.
Echoing what I’ve been preaching for years now around my day-job, firms that are seen as customer advocates will reap rewards in measurable increased wallet share. This takes “soft” business cases built around “blue dollars” and adds real substance to them. This also extends into the Community play of for transparency and value to the
If you’ve ever struggled to make a decision … you’ve engaged in the design process, though you may not have even known it. In the next 5 chapters I’m goign to describe the 5 phases of design: Discovery, planning, design, execution, and follow-up.