rodcorp: rodcorp: Projects and teamsProject management, team managementWIP: Lament: music for printer and five voices- July 30, 2003 I walked into the open-plan office upstairs and heard the girls mournfully talking about how the new printer was no good. I asked whether it was slow, or had poor print quality. No: they didn&146;t like the newly upgraded printer&146;s song, which was mechanical and annoying. The old printer&146;s noise had been repetitive but musical, so they used to sing along with it when it did a large run of flow charts. I asked them what the old printer song had been like, and one of them started humming..http://radio.weblogs.com/0105728/categories/projectsAndTeams/2003/07/30.html#a469 Books read in 2002, 2003- July 30, 2003 Rodcorp's books read in 2003 (now you know what we've been doing instead of working) and 2002.http://radio.weblogs.com/0105728/categories/projectsAndTeams/2003/07/30.html#a468 The Origins of Things: Sketches, Models, Prototypes- July 21, 2003 illuminates the process by which designers transform their often groundbreaking ideas into functional, manufacturable products. Drawings, cardboard models stuck together with tape and ultramodern computer animations are more significant here than the finished products, for they illuminate the designer's process in a way that the finished product--unless it is a deconstructive design object!--does not Buy in UK. Incidentally, some interesting looking related books here too. via MachineLakehttp://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/9056623184 Cabinets of Curiosity: desktops of designers- July 21, 2003 "For designers who collect, the cluttered workspace is a library of inspiration". The desks of designers Rob Cristofaro, Maira Kalman, Scott Stowell and Milton Glaser. via MachineLake, itself via manAmplifiedhttp://www.metropolismag.com/html/content_0703/cab/index.html Bike courier culture, alley cat racing- July 21, 2003 This weekend we met a bunch of bike couriers at a barbecue. Interesting people, with a strong sub-culture - sub in the sense that non-couriers know very little about what they are like, how couriering works etc. Unsurprisingly, most of them are mad about bikes, and it's a way to earn a crust. So there was much talk of the Tour de France. They knew only one person who'd gone on from couriering to 'proper' road racing. There are 600-1000 couriers working London at any one time, and they do about..http://radio.weblogs.com/0105728/categories/projectsAndTeams/2003/07/21.html#a454 IDEO: Give email a timeline- July 21, 2003 Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO, interviews with Master of Design MIT Tech Review (free reg reqd). Two interesting nuggets: first a slightly confusing vision of email + blog-like timeline = good way to organise (confusing to us anyway: we're not sure how this is significantly different from sorting emails by Received): There's something about e-mail that demands a reply, demands a response. But when you're getting thousands of these things, it becomes an impossibility to respond to everything. So we've.http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/wo_brown062503.asp Three sets of cards to help your head make connections faster- July 18, 2003 Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's Oblique Strategies: One hundred worthwhile dilemmas, "each of which is a suggestion of a course of action or thinking to assist in creative situations" Charles and Ray Eames' House of Cards: Comes in five flavours. "The images are of what Eameses called 'good stuff', chosen to celebrate 'familiar and nostalgic objects from the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms'. The six slots on each card enable the player to interlock the cards so as to...http://radio.weblogs.com/0105728/categories/projectsAndTeams/2003/07/18.html#a452 Ricardo Semler: a company should trust its destiny to its employees- July 17, 2003 From Ricardo Semler's Maverick!, the story of his anti-Taylorist experiment at Semco. To survive in modern times, a company must have an organizational structure that accepts changes as its basic premise, lets tribal customs thrive, and fosters a power that is derived from respect, not rules. In other words, the successful companies will be the ones that put quality of life first. Do this and the rest - quality of product, productivity of workers, profits for all - will follow. At Semco we...http://radio.weblogs.com/0105728/categories/projectsAndTeams/2003/07/17.html#a446 Kevin Kelly Recomendo has good mapping tools etc- July 16, 2003 Diagrammatic chart of world history: Displays with utmost intelligence 50 centuries of civilization, as revealed in the complex rise and fall of ancient powers. Not as linear as the (out of print) histomap (some interesting writingmaths histomaps here) Offroute: custom topographic maps world map wallpaper The Tiny Book of Tiny Houses: "Each very tiny house -- or should we say each shack and shed -- is photographed and sufficiently rendered in orthogonal view that one could construct.http://www.kk.org/recomendo/ Redundancy in software and structural engineering- July 2, 2003 Kurt Starsinic: "Redundancy" as it's usually practiced in software design is compared to the same in structural engineering, and found wanting. via Searlshttp://kstar.dyndns.org:8080/blog/030630.html |