Full-body computing

“Channeling all interaction through a single finger is like restricting all literature to Dr Seuss’s vocabulary. Yes, it’s much more accessible, both to children and to a small set of disabled adults. But a fully-functioning adult human being deserves so much more.” – [Bret Victor](http://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesign/responses.html)

My favorite movie design moments

Documentary or drama, I’m a sucker for watching people be creative. Here are a few of my favorites:

Drama

• Don Draper pitching the Carousel – the ultimate example of story beating tech specs.
• Inventing the hula hoop from The Hudsucker Proxy – especially the naming at 2:40.
• Once studio session – The way the mixing guy gets gradually interested, the sheer sense of exhaustion at the end of the night, the way they all head out into the sun in the morning. The build of the scene is awesome. The linked scene is just part of it; the scene starts at 56:00 in the full movie.
• Dodge Dart: How to change cars forever ad – I love the way they celebrate sketching and prototyping. Tons of other versions with different examples too.
• Homer Simpson designs a car – in one fell swoop The Simpsons lampoons both expert-driven design and focus group techniques. The shot of Homer in the wind tunnel always gets me.

Documentary

• Making The Incredibles (some clips; the DVD has the best stuff) – My all-time favorite. About 90 minutes of in-depth stories and explanation about the process of making the film, with a ton of similarities to great product design. I watch this at least once a year. My notes.
• The Mystery of Picasso – Picasso painting on an illuminated sheet of glass, so you see the strokes build and change into something completely different than he started with. The paintings at 1:00:00 and 1:04:30 are mind-blowing.
• Comedian – Jerry Seinfeld tries to follow up his outlandishly-successful sitcom career by getting back on small comedy stages and writing a new standup act. Inspiring to see the courage and introspection that goes into it. My notes.
• Sketches of Frank Gehry – Gehry’s experimental way of developing buildings combines art and science in a unique way. My notes.
• A Day in the Life of John Lassetter – Lassetter seems like a wonderful leader (2017 update: not always) and his optimism is infectious. My notes.
• Art and Copy – I find advertising has a lot of parallels to concept design, and this film collects the thoughts and processes of several different advertising luminaries. My notes.
• The Pixar Story – The way they build collaboration among roles in a team is unparalleled. My notes.
• Tough Room – Ok, this is just audio (from NPR) but The Onion’s headline pitch session is amazing. I love how they judge stories by the headlines alone.
• Six Days to Air – How each South Park episode is made in a week. The forced constraints have created a lot of innovation in process and technologies.
• Get Back – The extended version of The Beatles’ Let it Be sessions is worth watching in its 9-hour entirety to see how the famous band actually operated. I love how they mostly sound like a bad Beatles cover band, forgetting words and hitting the wrong notes, until you realize they’re coming up with the iconic songs on the fly. My highlight is watching Paul noodle his way to the composition of Get Back over 4 amazing minutes.

A different kind of direction

[A nice comparison of film directing styles](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-galenson/not-all-auteurs-are-dicta_b_909764.html) by David Galenson, ranging from the conceptual dictator to the experimental collaborator. Also draws parallels to the different design approaches of Apple and Google.

> [Robert Altman] encouraged his actors to improvise: “What I want to see is something I’ve never seen before, so how can I tell someone what that is? I’m really looking for something from these actors that can excite me.”

> Altman considered collaboration the essence of creativity: “If the vision were just mine, just a single vision, it wouldn’t be any good. It’s the combination of what I have in mind, with who the actor is and then how he adjusts to the character, along with how I adjust, that makes the movie.”

Galenson expands on the two styles in [a post exploring the “lifecycle” of creativity](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-galenson/the-two-life-cycles-of-ar_b_758086.html).

Fortune’s favor

Most of doing great design work is preparing for great design work.

Bike shop innovation

[Was manned flight a victory for rapid prototyping?]( http://m.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/11/the-man-who-would-teach-machines-to-think/309529/)

> You can credit the development of manned aircraft not to the Wright brothers’ glider flights at Kitty Hawk but to the six-foot wind tunnel they built for themselves in their bicycle shop using scrap metal and recycled wheel spokes. While their competitors were testing wing ideas at full scale, the Wrights were doing focused aerodynamic experiments at a fraction of the cost. Their biographer Fred Howard says that these were “the most crucial and fruitful aeronautical experiments ever conducted in so short a time with so few materials and at so little expense.”

Speculative spending

> It’s actually very difficult to spend meaningful amounts of money, relative to Google’s scale, on things that are speculative.

– [Larry Page](http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2013/10/17/larry-page-google-should-be-thinking-even-bigger-with-its-rd/)

One of my favorite Larry moments was when he used to regularly ask the whole company to work on artificial intelligence [and no one would do it](http://money.cnn.com/2008/04/29/magazines/fortune/larry_page_change_the_world.fortune/index2.htm):

> My own experience within Google is that it’s hard to get people to work on those kinds of things because of the personal risk they feel they’re taking…

> I’ve told the whole company repeatedly I want people to work on artificial intelligence – so we end up with five people working on it. Guess what? That’s not a major expense. There’s a reason we talk about 70/20/10, where 70% of our resources are spent in our core business and 10% end up in unrelated projects, like energy or whatever. [The other 20% goes to projects adjacent to the core business.]

> Actually, it’s a struggle to get it to even be 10%.

The split-brain notebook

[Mark Parker’s sketchbook](http://www.fastcodesign.com/3019090/innovation-by-design/nikes-5-lessons-on-innovation-by-design) is pretty cool…one page for each side of the brain.

AidPod: Truly great design

I love [the ColaLife AidPod](http://www.colalife.org/about/aidpod/):

* Designed to fit in the empty space in Coca-Cola shipping crates, piggybacking on the most successful distribution network in the world
* Provides diarrhea medicine (the Kit Yamoyo) along with literacy-not-required instructions
* The sustainable business model provides value at every step of the supply chain

That’s great design. You can [help fund the AidPod project at Global Giving](http://www.globalgiving.org/projects/colalife-aidpods-for-african-children/).

Update Interesting follow-up: the founder says that actually [fitting into Coca-Cola crates wasn’t important after all](http://www.colalife.org/2013/05/30/the-colalife-innovation-map-take-2/)… but it drove them to simplify the product in ways that made it successful.

Proving imagination

> What is now proved was once only imagined. – [William Blake](http://www.blakesociety.org/about-blake/gilchrists-life-of-blake/chapter-x/)

Framing the problem

[Heard this one in a presentation today](http://blog.kiwicreative.net/2011/01/25/how-many-art-directors-does-it-take-to-change-a-light-bulb/):

> Q: How many product designers does it take to change a light bulb?

> A: Does it have to be a light bulb?

Heh.