Chart of Darkness

The Demo serves many purposes, but its main one is to secure commitment from sponsors. For a demo to work to maximum effect, its designer cannot obsess about details and adherence to design best practices.

1. Touched by a Rose.
2. On the Fence?
3. Agricultural Growth in Sub-Saharan African Countries and China: 95.
4. His Life Abiding.
5. Bringing Numbers to Life?

These can all be dealt with at a later time, once the main point of the demo has been accurately conveyed. This can cause stress and doubt for designers if they are forced to use designs that are inconsistent, unoptimized, or unsustainable for a long-term product design.

Again, the designer needs to rely on their experience to know what parts of the demo can be forgotten, glossed over, and fixed later on in service to the overall message. For concept car designs, certain product aspects need to be featured or even exaggerated in their impact and effect, in effect intentionally over-shooting what will likely be possible to achieve if the concept is productized.

The art involved in this effort is to overshoot by just the right amount so as to be inspirational without being misleading. While this is a healthy approach for design at all levels of scope, the further one moves into production phases, the more conservative and comprehensive the approach needs to be. This approach is not without risk, as it exposes your work to nitpickers who, with various reasons and intents, can derail the train.

I worked for someone long ago who would, during key presentations to visiting clients, inscrutably interrupt to mention typos in our own slides. Visionary concept car work can be criticized for wasting resources on frivolous and speculative junkets that only serve to create false expectations. If the work is never implemented in revenue-generating products, this conclusion is easy to arrive at.

Apocrypha 2: Chart of Darkness

It can also be seen as a useless distraction, fueling doubt or even despair about initiatives already underway. However, even vision work that is not implemented exactly as shown, or that is used to define a strategy that is not adopted, still has value to the sponsoring organization as an example of something that they COULD pursue.

This intellectual property, whether or not it is ever made public, provides valuable knowledge to the sponsor organization, even if just as a contrast to the status quo or other alternatives it is considering. It can also reveal potential threats in the form of what competitors or unknown disruptors might already be working on, or attempt in the future.

These third parties likely employ similar designers, tools, methods, and market intelligence to that of your organization, and are likely to eventually discover these opportunities if they in fact exist. The creation of any vision-level practice is rarely definitive or clean.

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The visionary employees get frustrated, and convince management to let them split off into a separate, research-oriented innovation team to envision the next generation of product. These elite teams go about inventing all the innovative new stuff they were distracted from doing in the production teams, and naturally get lots of attention from management. Desperate to keep the attention of customers and investors, management publicizes this work to distract others from the inevitable delays and mundane details of building robust functioning software.

Meanwhile, the production teams begin to resent the innovation team for getting all the attention and making them look slow and old-fashioned. Plus, at this point they are often suffering from having had the most talented resources plucked from their teams. The innovation team begins to resent the production teams because none of their new ideas are getting implemented. The marketing team gets restless having to maintain interest from customers, and creates their own demo team, using smoke-and-mirror tactics to wrestle the current product into customized, but superficial and unsustainable, showcase examples.

This often results in the creation of unsustainable hacks, which are then fed back to the production team in an endless stream of unprioritized enhancement requests. Large customers, having created these pet features, lobby and pay for their ongoing upgrades and support, further bogging down the now-bloated product. Work in all groups proceeds, each making valid progress, but with different incentives and contributing to a confusing soup of hype, reality, and expectation.

Chart of Darkness | Bringing Numbers to Life

The Field thinks it knows what customers really want because they talk to them every day. Marketing is in a perception arms race against competitors. Research writes off both as profiteers and superficial attention whores. Production stops listening as they try to meet their development sprints and release milestones. Third-party consultants, partners, and software vendors orbit the mass, filling in any cracks or missing pieces with advise, toolkits, product bundles, extensions, and component plug-ins. Meanwhile, academics and industry analysts berate the entire affair from the sidelines and, for a fee, try to make sense of it all for external stakeholders at large.

Eventually even corporate branding gets involved, wondering whether the product is underutilized as a customer touchpoint for brand identity and awareness. When talent availability or trust dwindles far enough, management hires mercenary design consultants that threaten and shame the horde into submission. This is, more or less, the overall reality of enterprise software product management. But, as with anything else, the dynamic can be managed and executed well or poorly. While I think the division into research and execution is valid and can work, one issue in particular needs to be given special management attention.

Given that innovation is necessary for a product to evolve and remain relevant, the alternative is to keep the visionary function within the production group. This creates different problems however. Both models can work. The trick is to 1 coordinate and set expectations for these different roles with different scopes, timeframes, and risk factors, and 2 avoid the tendency to value and reward big-picture innovation at the expense of those working in the trenches. Design Thinking and Lean can help with these efforts.

This poem from a 13th century Zen master represents, to me, the presence in life of a fractal recursiveness — the recurring presence of similar organizational patterns in systems of any scale. I use it as an inspiration to maintain the habit of practicing DT not only for large projects but for small ones as well, yet applied at appropriate levels so as to not over-analyze things. Note that at the time, DT as we know it today resided in a vague collection of content referred to as Design Methods.

While at the time DT typically referenced larger-scale case studies from architecture, urban planning, and business strategy, I wanted to see what it was like to use them on a micro-level, to sort of force DT into a subconscious habit. The persistence described in the Peoplesoft Gantt chart project is an example of this approach.

My passion as a designer was to, as Pirsig wrote about, draw upon both art and science to make stuff look and work better. One inspiration was the artist Christo. While designers engage in the delivery of more practical utilitarian value, Running Fence answered a perceived plea for an expression of indulgent, transient, majestic beauty. One role of the artist in society is to serve as a cultural antenna, sensing these pleas and divulging them as artistic expression.

The conference presented a 7-step structured design process, chosen from among those I had discovered in my research. When designing the sample pieces, I myself followed the same process, and documented all of my work towards the final design solution, which included steps of Problem Acceptance , Problem Research , Problem Definition , Solution Ideation , Solution Selection , Solution Implementation , and Solution Evaluatio n. My intent was not to develop a better process, but rather to demonstrate a way to improve the practice of the chosen process.

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2. Lulu and the Treasure Hunt (Wagtail Town).
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4. Reward Yourself.
5. Futuro presente (Italian Edition).
6. Humiliated in Diapers.

I was being egged on from the grave by none other than American poet Edgar Allen Poe. While he wrote the essay after the fact, and is accused of using hindsight to reverse-engineer his thought process to suit his contention, it is nonetheless an amazing description of the rational hows and whys behind a creative masterpiecee. Some of his higher-level rules for The Raven: It goes on and on into more detail. At the very least it is a fine piece of academic self-criticism — or in this case, self-affirmation.

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Graeme Davis was born at an early age and has lived ever since. His enduring fascination with creatures from myth and folklore can probably be blamed equally on Ray Harryhausen and Christopher Lee. He studied archaeology at the University of Durham before joining Games Workshop in , where he co-wrote the acclaimed Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay game among others.

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He has worked on over 40 video games Graeme Davis was born at an early age and has lived ever since. He has worked on over 40 video games, countless tabletop roleplaying game products, and a few more sensible books in the realms of history, mythology, and folklore. He blogs at graemedavis.