This is Mona

Excellent article about keeping grounded in design by focusing the approach with the end user in mind. 

• Start with exploratory research. This is the time where researchers deliver findings and insights to the design team and client. This is also the time where most design research programs end—where designers’ imaginations (and sometimes their egos) may start to subtly compete with user insights.

• Keep researchers involved continuously. We must keep assessing design and engineering concepts with users to ensure that we have properly interpreted their needs. Ron and his team, for example, go back to the users with working prototypes to ensure we have not deviated from the original goal. 
  
  
• Meet with users again and again. Even as the product is passing though mechanical engineering, we check to make sure that any production modifications made for the sake of efficiency or branding have not diluted the product’s benefits.
  
  
• Establish a set of checks and balances. This ensures that designers, engineers and the complete product development team maintain a healthy modicum of empathy for users unlike themselves.

Full article here

Fantastic rebuttal-esqe piece from Fast Company on shifts in online news consumption. Before I copy and paste highlights, let it be known that the very action I am undertaking, and a good portion of my blog content, fuels blogger Brian Cray’s argument:

Everyday I see more crap clogging my Twitter stream and delicious iGoogle boxes. “Top 10 things widgets for your Web site.” “5,000 ways to do __________ in jQuery.” Well, it all wasn’t crap at one time. At one time it was somebody’s hard original work. But after the 50th article rounding up the same damn thing it’s suddenly crap…Is there hope? Yes. When I see articles by Paddy Donnelly, Dustin Curtis, and others spreading originality I get hopeful.

Fast Company’s rebuttal takeaways, which I am in agreement with as well: 

• But even if you’re a more professional, journalistic blog publishing upwards of 40 stories a day, you’re not gonna be able to produce the type of content that Dustin Curtis produces once every six months.
• Print media usually tries to get the whole story, and present it as completed product on the printed page. They don’t cover it as it moves. Web publishing does, and as a result, it’s far more diffuse.
• And that in itself is a valuable service in the information age: When there’s too much information, it’s valuable to have a (free) source of news and original content, curated for a sensibility that suits your own. 
• Now, this might not seem like an ideal state. But it’s one created by the market. Blog and Web site readerships are skyrocketing. Newspapers and magazines are struggling. More and more people are deciding they’d rather get tidbits of bunches of stories, as they develop, for free—and less and less want a tightly bound, carefully selected group of stories once a month.

Well said, CLIFF KUANG. 

(Via: Fast Company) 

Co-creation at its finest. 

58 billion on the go coffee cups get thrown away into landfills every year. This is not sustainable. The Beta Cup is a community based initiative to tackle this problem. Starbucks has agreed to sponsor Betacup’s contest to redesign the coffee cup in an effort to reduce the waste.

Betacup from the betacup on Vimeo.

(Via Fast Company)