Category: Strategy

  • Damn proud of the PM’s plane

    After publishing Keith Branscombe’s article about the PM’s plane, which quite honestly mirrored thousands of comments in the newspapers and on television albeit with far more flare, I was lucky enough to have the designer of The Government of Canada CC1-150 paint scheme email me a short but polite “Drop me a line”. So unlike…

  • Another federal design disaster

    My good friend Keith Branscombe is at it again. A couple of days ago he sent me a beautiful rant about the Canadian Government and its lack of thinking when it comes to branding our national image. This time it is about the new paint job on the Prime Minister’s military Airbus jet, the Polaris…

  • Designing Health Care Solutions

    It’s great to have modern health care in Canada, but we all know and have experienced that our Health Care System is excessively administered and not properly designed for people to understand and be empowered to lead their own health initiatives. In fact, we all have all found it to be overly confusing and too…

  • Strategically speaking

    I was asked the other day about strategy and what that meant for client engagements. Obviously an open ended question, with few parameters. There was no use case study to help construct a foundation nor was there any sense of timeline for this imaginary engagement. So I gave my best response at the time but…

  • Question what you ask

    In life we ask questions to elicit information we need. But the questions we ask may not motivate people to deeply reflect, or inspire a careful response. The idea of exchanging information through questions and answers is something that we take for granted. We don’t always think if the question is the right one or…

  • It has to be Readable

    There are so many key phrases in the design industry and for the last decade the technology industry has supplied the design industry with even more jargon. We now talk about sustainability, ROI, stakeholders, experiential design and usability as we have evolved from paper, to screen, to multitouch to gestural… and the list keeps growing.…

  • Positive Deviance

    On Wednesday, November 10, 2010 I participated in a session that dealt with the practice of Positive Deviance (called PD after this). This conversation was facilitated by Erika Bailey who calls herself a ‘Human Systems Consultant’. I have had the good fortune of talking with her in the past but I never had the opportunity…

  • Appreciative Inquiry

    Appreciative Inquiry was first conceived in 1986 by David Cooperrider and Suresh Srivastva while they were studying an organization. In this study they interviewed half the organization looking for “problems to be solved” and the other half looking for “miracles to be embraced”. What they discovered was that the information they collected was significantly different…

  • Help me first – more meaningful ROI

    Businesses always want to increase their ROI. This is a pretty straight forward statement and one which no one ever argues against. The question of “How do we, as a company, increase our capital within the confines of our set marketing and advertising budget?” is an issue every company has.

  • Uffe Albaek speaks at DwD

    Late last year I attended a lecture in which Uffe Elbaek, founder and former Principal of the KAOSPilots – International School of New Business Design & Social Innovation, recounted his time with KAOSPilot and gave a talk on his challenging but satisfying role as the CEO of the World Out Games held in Copenhagen.

  • Design and Transformational Change

    Presently I am enjoying a informative workshop headed by Peter Jones of reDESIGNreSEARCH. Once a month a diverse group of us discuss how to best organize and assist people and organizations to make positive change using different methods of dialogue to engage them. Most of the time these discussions are limited to a three hour…

  • The Seven Laws of Interfaces

    On July 28th I attended a talk given by Dr. Carlos Scolari about the Seven Laws of Interfaces. Carlos is a professor at the University of Vic in Spain. He is a media ecologist and a semiotician; he is a teacher and researcher and also holds a position at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. For…

  • Framing the Right Questions

    I recently attended a workshop headed by Peter Jones of reDESIGNreSEARCH whose company focuses on better design through in depth research. He also manages a website Designing with Dialogue which promotes a Toronto-based ‘dialogue community of practice’ which advocates better methods for communication.

  • A Designer’s Many Hats

    Lately I have heard a lot of people describe and define what it means to be a leader, an entrepreneur, an innovator and a designer. Each of these requires various skills to succeed and each is hard to master. To an extent, each seems too complex to properly describe.

  • Jane Fulton Suri of IDEO

    I recently went to see Jane Fulton Suri speak at the Ontario College of Art and Design, she is the Chief Creative Director of IDEO which is a California-based design firm. She comes from a background in human factors psychology and architecture and is a one of the people championing and trying to evolve human-centred…

  • Editorial Markup

    I realize that this article should be common knowledge but it bears repeating because not everyone is aware of standardized editing marks. I am sure anyone that has worked in a business environment has received feedback on something they wrote and had to figure out what the proofreader was trying to say.

  • Stages of an Online Project

    One of the very first important issues I had to deal with when starting my first business was how to effectively manage a client through a project. At first the jobs were relatively small, so I reinvented the wheel with each of my clients, but that quickly became tiresome and besides I was focusing on…

  • The Beginnings of a Plan

    Each day people have a great many articles to read. Whether it is for personal or professional consumption, the sources of information are virtually unlimited. Since there is so much information competing for our eyeballs, it is crucial for content providers to produce that information in a manner which is easy to find, read and…

  • Change Management

    It is important, or rather necessary, to detail any changes that you or your company make on the request of a client and you must keep a proper record of all changes implemented during a project’s lifecycle. More often than not it will be the duty of the Producer/Project Manger to ensure the implementation and…

  • Good foundations for eCRM

    Ever company talks about eCRM and in the late 90’s it used to be one of the industry’s most favourite buzzwords. Since then the hype has calmed down, possibly because there aren’t as many companies hopping on to the bandwagon. Nevertheless eCRM is just as important today but perhaps better understood. eCRM is basically a…

  • Naming Methodology

    There are many theories on how to best structure a site, but it suffices to say that it is best determined from the intent of the product or service and from the type of content. That is why this article will solely deal with a naming methodology for various sections and single content pages within…