6+-SP


 * 6 Long Annotations**

By Don Norman
 * //The Design of Everyday Things//**

__What three quotes capture the critical importance of the text?__

“Appropriate human centered design requires that all the considerations be addressed from the very beginning, with each of the relevant design disciplines working together as a team… All great designs have an appropriate balance and harmony of aesthetic beauty, reliability and safety, usability, cost, and functionality.”

“Tools affect more than the ease with which we do things; they can dramatically affect our view of ourselves, society, and the world... Even apparently simple innovations can bring about dramatic changes, most of which cannot be predicted.”

“Good design exploits constraints so that the user feels as if there is only one possible thing to do—the right thing, of course. The designer has to understand and exploit natural constraints of all kinds.”

__What is the main argument of the text?__

This book primarily focusses on making products that are understandable and usable. It was motivated by the author’s frustration from his inability to use objects due to their poorly designed interfaces. Norman answers the question of why so many everyday things are so difficult to understand and use. In the products we design, we must abide by certain principles that Norman fleshes out to some length. These include making things visible, and providing adequate conceptual models to enhance usability through, mapping, constraints, and feedback. Visual cues should not exist in excess and should be interpreted seamlessly and naturally to convey the correct message. This is to say that just by looking at an object; the user can understand the possible actions he or she can perform with that object. This is what is needed for designing for people.

__Describe at least three ways that the main argument is supported__.

- Don Norman gives the example of door handles and how we are often unsure whether to push or pull the door open. We often blame ourselves for not knowing better; however, is completely the fault of the designer for not appropriately assigning the right of four dances to the door handles so as to visually indicate to users the physical constraints of the door. A flat plate constrains users to push the door whereas handles afford pulling.

- Norman provides examples of poorly designed objects and systems through describing temperature control devices such as refrigerator temperature control and home thermostat control. In our refrigerators/freezers, two compartments are used to separate controllers; however, there is only one cooling unit for the system.

- The main argument is also supported through a number of examples that demonstrate the importance of the challenges in designing a truly usable and great product. He examines the design process throughout chapter 6 and examines the relations to aesthetics. “Hill climbing” is the term he references for the old way of designing. He argues that most of today’s products are far too complex to follow this design path.

__Describe the main literatures that the text draws on and contributes to__.


 * Petroski, Henry. //To engineer is human: The role of failure in successful design//. New York: Vintage books, 1992.
 * o This work is a relevant and interesting contribution to ongoing discussion on the degree of the necessity of iteration instilled in final market ready products as well is the conditions that correlate to degrees. Researching and reading about this has topic has lead me to the conclusion that in specific contexts where early market introduction is critical to the success of a company and the realization of an innovative idea, iteration is necessary. Then one could argue that this very criterion, which justifies incremental product development and change, does not sound so incremental at all but innovative, right? It is the oversaturated markets with too many options for consumers, and yet, few to none really well designed to meet customers’ needs through innovations distinct as visionary in design and in attention to future trends.


 * Braudel, Fernand, and Sian Reynold. "Civilization And Capitalism, 15th-18th Century, Vol. I: The Structure Of Everyday Life (Civilization & Capitalism, 15." (1992): 623.
 * o This work discusses the development of civilization and capitalism in the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries and outlines the impact of rapid developments in culture and technology on ordinary people.


 * Dreyfuss, Henry. //Designing for people//. Skyhorse Publishing, Inc., 2012.
 * o Industrial Designer Henry Dreyfuss’ book on human centered design, the points of contact between that which is designed and the consumer, as well as the role of industrial design in shaping everyday things and in turn our daily lives.

__Explain how the argument and evidence in the text supports, challenges or otherwise relates to the argument or narrative that you imagine developing.__

Certain sections of this work are particularly interesting to me, most notably, the chapters on user centered design, design challenges, and affordances. In the first chapter, Norman concludes that design is not an easy task and technology is often paradoxical in that it is intended to make our lives easier when it often makes things more difficult. Nevertheless, this is no excuse for poor design. This conclusion is one that I mostly agree with and have noticed through experience, but it seems that Norman approaches product design from the view of a user and not a designer. He mentioned nothing of products’ sustainability in relation to human centered design; not even the psychological influence of greenwashing or responsible purchasing. In his concluding chapter, Norman does advocate for product boycotting, paying more for better design, and activism or communication with corporations and manufacturers. This is all from a usability perspective and although I think it is important, and by far the element most likely to influence customer satisfaction and brand loyalty. Usability is a measure of the effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction with which specified users can achieve specified goals in a particular environment. Design complexity is associated with inevitable tradeoffs for numerous product features, user groups, and product value propositions. Simplicity and usability is stressed as essential to good design. “We must fight for good design.”

__List of at least three details or examples from the text that you can use to support the argument or narrative that you are developing__.

In chapter 6, Norman discusses and even justifies the need for incremental product versions and interactions in design to test out and introduce different features into a product. He argues that this is a necessary process with products that are very complex, including most electronic devices today. This is a conclusion I would like to counter reason on the basis of sustainability and more of an innovative and holistic perspective on design thinking from a designer’s perspective and not a user/consumer psychologist’s vantage point. “Norman Doors”: Anything that is difficult to use due to poor design is a Norman thing now. It is interesting that his book has adopted the exact opposite perception of that which he had intended for it; and yet, it has still become successful or at least notorious in design and consumer spheres of critique. From the very beginning, Norman assures the reader that there is much more that goes into good design than just good usability, affordance, and intuition; however, he is only focusing on this aspect of design because it is what causes him the most frustration and is the framework for how we interact with the products we use (on a physical and functional level, which in turn affects our emotional connection to the object). Most of the design principles that Norman endeavors to instate are quite intuitive to an engineer or designer with relevant experience with human factors and psychology. At least to me, his recommendations for improving design quality are common sense and the examples used to back these principles, although sufficiently supportive to be convincing, are in fact oversimplified to varying degrees. This may have to do with the audience he is trying to reach but I would have like to see him examining the design process and reasoning for affordance selection for a complex product like a computer or electronic device interface and aesthetic: something that could provide clear illustration of these principles in action in higher caliber design briefs so that he could more sufficiently justify his advocacy for incremental design in most consumer product markets. This is not to say that it is always an easy process. In designing objects of greater complexity, there is a lot to consider for instance; target user groups, latent needs, appropriate mapping and affordances without compromised aesthetics and all while avoiding feature creep; nonetheless, the core human centered design principles remain the same. The gradual progression to more automated objects that may utilize emerging technological advancements consequently increase in complexity; yet simultaneously, assume users’ perception as more simple and elegant object as a result of streamlined, well-thought-out interfaces. With more complex products or even just in highly saturated markets, the inadequate execution of these design principles can make or break a products success and even a company’s existence if not its reputation and customer loyalty. What I am arguing is that Norman isn’t really addressing a huge problem with this work, only huge frustrations; inconveniences, however common, that can be all but eliminated with the brief attention of a few intelligent designers with a seasoned design intuition and the right mindset to fully consider the necessary affordances and visual cues in accordance with specified user needs. It is precisely the aspects of design that Norman leaves out that present the greatest organizational design challenges in the greater effort to provide product design to the best possible capabilities and considerations of the group responsible for its conception.

By Tim Brown
 * //Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation//**

__Three quotes:__

-“Rarely do these temporary placeholders (brainstorming sessions and other corporate innovation exercises and tricks) make it to the outside world in the form of new products, services, or strategies. What we need is an approach to innovation that is powerful, effective, and broadly accessible, that can be integrated into all aspects of business and society, and that individuals and teams can use to generate breakthrough ideas that are implemented and that therefore, have an impact. Design thinking offers just such an approach” – Tim Brown

- “What we need are new products that balance the needs of the individual and of society as a whole, new ideas that tackle the global challenges of health, poverty, and education, and new strategies that result in differences that matter and a sense of purpose that engages everyone effected by them. The challenges we face so vastly exceed the resources creative resources we have brought to bear on them”

- “Systematic design based innovation that engages people at the deepest level… Past innovations are no guarantee of future performance… As the center of economic activity in the developing world shifts inexorably from industrial manufacturing to knowledge creation and service delivery, innovation has become nothing less than a survival strategy… Design has become too important to be left to designers.”

- “Designers can’t prevent people from doing what they want to with products they own, but that does not excuse them form ignoring the larger system. Often, in our enthusiasm for solving the larger problem in front of us, we fail to see the problems we create. Designers are in a position to make important decisions about what resources society uses and where they end up.”

__Main argument:__

There is so much potential out there for change but it is becoming clear that we need new choices. Design has the power to shape the world around us. We as designers must strive to create the best possible experience for customers through the products we design. So mush is dependent upon the decisions we make. We must become more than designers, we must become design thinkers. This book proposes the idea of Design Thinking and the power that it has to change the world. The book is divided into two parts, the first part defines the stages of what design thinking is and the second explores how it can be used to meet our global challenges. In an effort to pair human needs with available technical resources within the practice needs of business, design thinking uses the skills previously thought to come only from specifically trained and conditioned designers, to integrate technological feasibility, economic viability, and human centered needs. Design thinking puts the tools for good design in the hands of those closest to the problem. An overreliance on the rational and analytical can be dangerous. Empathy and emotion are key elements of design.

__Three supporting examples:__

- Shimano, A Japanese bike manufacturer teamed up with IDEO to create a new market of adult coaster bike riders who had previously been left out of the bike design world and never considered as a specific user group of interest. Design thinking strategies and interdisciplinary ethnographic studies found the gap market which became a game changer.

- Divergent and convergent thinking are enhanced through drawing, prototyping and storytelling in order to accelerate innovation. Brown gives project examples from IDEO but these principles and strategies should be employed in a daily way of thinking about the things we design and the people that use them.

- IDEO worked to develop a hugely successful kid’s toothbrush with Oral-B, yet while on vacation, one of the leads of the project found toothbrush washed up on the shore of a beach in Mexico. This example leads into a discussion of the challenges of sustainable design practice and what Brown sees as our best way forward.

__Literatures the text draws on or contributes to:__

-Bruse Mou “The massive change that is called for today” []

//Silent Spring// by Rachel Carson (1962), environmentalism entered the mainstream

//An Inconvenient Truth// by Ale Gore, Imagery to motivate fundamental change

__How the argument relates to my argument:__

The main argument of this work and supporting examples serve in support of my narrative because design thinking does well at explaining the right type of mindset needed for approaching design from a sustainability perspective. There is far more to take into account when trying to address the needs of all the various stakeholders throughout a product’s lifespan, and not just the end user or the client. Design thinking depends upon observing how people actually use products. People often discard their products that are obsolete to their lives. If we can eliminate the types of products that are poorly designed and don’t satisfy user needs, we can greatly reduce the amount of junk that is being accumulated in landfills daily. What if all the products we manufactured, no one ever wanted to throughout? “Rapid change is forcing us to look not just to new ways of solving problems but to new problems to solve.” One of these new problems will be the practice implementation of sustainable product designs.

__Examples to support my narrative:__ Brown list tree things we must do to as designers to use design thinking to make products more sustainable. These include informing ourselves about what is at stake and making visible the true cost of the choices we make, a reassessment of the processes and systems we used to make new things and last, to find ways to encourage individuals to move toward more sustainable behaviors. “More good ideas die because they fail to navigate the treacherous waters of the organization where they originate than because the market rejects them.” The success of a product has everything to do with how well it is designed. I am also interested in examining the conceptualization phase of the design process where the big decisions are made that really contribute to the eventual ecological impact and lifespan of a product. “Although it might seem as though frittering away valuable time on sketches and models and simulations will slow work down, prototyping generates results faster.” “Prototyping is always inspirational – not in the sense of a perfected artwork but just the opposite: because it inspires new ideas.”

By Warren Berger
 * //A More Beautiful Question//**

__What three quotes capture the critical import of the text?__

“Ask yourself an interesting enough question and your attempt to find a tailor-made solution to that question will push you to a place where, pretty soon, you will find yourself all by your lonesome, which I think is a more interesting place to be.”

“We see questioning is so fundamental and instinctive, that we don’t need to think about it.” We operate on autopilot… but when we want to shake things up and investigate change, it’s necessary to break free of familiar thought patterns and easy assumptions… With the constant change we face today, we may be forced to spend less time in autopilot and more time questioning to adapt…”

“A beautiful question is an ambitious yet actionable question that can begin to shift the way we perceive or think about something—and that might serve as a catalyst to bring about change.”

__What is the main argument of the text?__

This book is about the power of inquiry to spark great ideas. It examines in great detail how designers and engineers solve problems and come up with great ideas. Through an examination of leading innovators and creative minds in various industries, Warren Burger draws the conclusion that the inquisitive mind founded in relentless questioning and continual curiosity and criticism will inevitably come to useful insights and a better understanding of the world around them. Breakthrough inventions can often be traced to a critical line of questioning that sparked a new insight. So why do some keep questioning where others stop? We have transitioned into transitioning.

__Describe at least three ways that the main argument is supported.__

- The authors why, what if, how model for questioning seeks to inform readers of the ability within them to look at the world from a new frame of reference: A framework to guide one through various stages of inquiry.

- The ability to ask the right questions has enabled business leaders to adapt in a rapidly changing marketplace. Inquiring minds can identify business opportunities and fresh possibilities before competitors become aware of them.

-“Why do we have to wait for the picture, papa?” This was the question that inspired Edwin Land to create Polaroid. As children, we never stop asking why. It is through this inquisitive nature, guided by a focused approach to a problem that yields some of the greatest insights.

__Describe the main literatures that the text draws on and contributes to.__ - Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action by Simon Sinek

- Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All by Tom Kelley and David Kelley

- Imagine: How Creativity Works by Jonah Lehrer

__Explain how the argument and evidence in the text supports, challenges or otherwise relates to the argument or narrative that you imagine developing.__

Product design is intrinsically linked to innovation and innovation is, as this book details, founded in questioning the world around us. As complexity increases and change accelerates in our modern era, it is of critical importance that we as designers be able to formulate and ask the right questions. People are prone to thinking they know more than they do or that their hunches are more valid than they really are; this often causes them to question less than they should. Naïve questions can be the best kind. This is why it’s often best to bring in outsiders to look at a problem or situation with “beginner’s mind” and ask fundamental questions. The purpose of asking questions is to explore something unknown. If we ask only about what we already know, we’re not learning. Experts are often not good questioners. I will tie this in with my argument for the sustained existence of consultancies as well as multidisciplinary design teams and perhaps even crowd sourcing in the right context They may be too close to a subject to see what they’re missing; they may believe they have the answers already.

__List of at least three details or examples from the text that you can use to support the argument or narrative that you are developing.__

The move from “why” to “what if” is the transition from questioning to action. Questioning is often perceived as inefficient by many business leaders. Many companies have established cultures that inadvertently discourage questioning. Questioning can even be hazardous to one’s career. Our educational systems have developed in much the same manner, where divergent thinking is not nurtured and critical thinking is neglected. “Questioning isn’t taught in schools, nor is it rewarded.” If we constantly question the validity of our own assumptions, we often find our preconceived notions to be incorrect and limiting us from a more accurate understanding of the underlying problems we are trying to address.

By Steven Johnson
 * //Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation//**

__What three quotes capture the critical importance of the text?__

“The patterns are simple, but followed together; they make for a whole that is wiser than the sum of its parts. Go for a walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down, but keep your folders messy; embrace serendipity; make generative mistakes; take on multiple hobbies; frequent coffeehouses and other liquid networks; follow the links; let others build on your ideas; borrow, recycle; reinvent. Build a tangled bank…. Chance favors the connected mind.”

“Legendary innovators like Franklin, Snow, and Darwin all possess some common intellectual qualities—a certain quickness of mind, unbounded curiosity—but they also share one other defining attribute. They have a lot of hobbies.”

“A good idea is a network. A specific constellation of neurons—thousands of them—fire in sync with each other for the first time in your brain, and an idea pops into your consciousness.” “two key preconditions become clear. First, the sheer size of the network: you can’t have an epiphany with only three neurons firing.” “The second precondition is that the network be plastic, capable of adopting new configurations.”

“The trick to having good ideas is not to sit around in glorious isolation and try to think big thoughts. The trick is to get more parts on the table.”

“This is not the wisdom of the crowd, but the wisdom of someone in the crowd. It’s not that the network itself is smart; it’s that the individuals get smarter because they’re connected to the network.”

“Good ideas may not want to be free, but they do want to connect, fuse, recombine. They want to reinvent themselves by crossing conceptual borders. They want to complete each other as much as they want to compete”

“When you don't have to ask for permission innovation thrives.”

__What is the main argument of the text?__

This book primarily focusses on the question asked in the tittle from an environmental perspective. He attempts to answer the question of what are the spaces that have historically brought about more innovations. Many ideas undergo an incubation period where they stay dormant and slowly grow overtime into something more when combine with other “half ideas”. Our hunches need to collide with other hunches in order to create real breakthroughs and so we need to create systems and spaces that facilitate the convergence of the right hunches. “Jane Jacobs observed in The Death and Life of Great American Cities: “The larger a city, the greater the variety of its manufacturing, and also the greater both the number and the proportion of its small manufacturers.” Diversity is essential to divergent thinking and creating good ideas. “We have a natural tendency to romanticize breakthrough innovations, imagining momentous ideas transcending their surroundings, a gifted mind somehow seeing over the detritus of old ideas and ossified tradition. But ideas are works of bricolage; they’re built out of that detritus.” Burt would probably disagree with this but it is a fair point to examine.

__Describe at least three ways that the main argument is supported__.

- The 18th century coffee houses of the enlightenment created a multidisciplinary space where ideas could “have sex” to create new forms. Increased connectivity with technology, telecommunication, and the internet now enable us to reach out and exchange ideas with people around the world at profound pace. Migration across borders between fields is far more important than specialization. The actual creation of the internet came as a result of the slow hunch method. “Keeping a slow hunch alive poses challenges on multiple scales. For starters, you have to preserve the hunch in your own memory,” This is where technology takes over. So part of the secret of hunch cultivation is simple: write everything down.” Social media and the internet give humanity the tools to spread ideas and connect the right ones so that the pace of innovation is accelerated. Hashtags on twitter are user-generated filters and ways of categorizing and organizing the complexity and variety of ideas we generate and converging and distilling these ideas down so that those hunches can merge with other hunches and their understanding is simplified and sustained. “When it first emerged, Twitter was widely derided as a frivolous distraction that was mostly good for telling your friends what you had for breakfast. Now it is being used to organize and share news about the Iranian political protests, to provide customer support for large corporations, to share interesting news items, and a thousand other applications that did not occur to the founders when they dreamed up the service in 2006. This is not just a case of cultural exaptation: people finding a new use for a tool designed to do something else. In Twitter's case, the users have been redesigning the tool itself. The convention of replying to another user with the @ symbol was spontaneously invented by the Twitter user base. Early Twitter users ported over a convention from the IRC messaging platform and began grouping a topic or event by the "hash-tag" as in "#30Rock" or "inauguration." The ability to search a live stream of tweets - which is likely to prove crucial to Twitter's ultimate business model, thanks to its advertising potential - was developed by another start-up altogether. Thanks to these innovations, following a live feed of tweets about an event - political debates or Lost episodes - has become a central part of the Twitter experience. But for the first year of Twitter's existence, that mode of interaction would have been technically impossible using Twitter. It's like inventing a toaster oven and then looking around a year later and discovering that all your customers have, on their own, figured out a way to turn it into a microwave.”

- “Bill Gates (and his successor at Microsoft, Ray Ozzie) are famous for taking annual reading vacations. During the year they deliberately cultivate a stack of reading material—much of it unrelated to their day-to-day focus at Microsoft—and then they take off for a week or two and do a deep dive into the words they’ve stockpiled. By compressing their intake into a matter of days, they give new ideas additional opportunities to network among themselves, for the simple reason that it’s easier to remember something that you read yesterday than it is to remember something you read six months ago.”

- GPS was created as a result of engineers and scientists passionately interested in collecting the signal broadcasted from Russia’s Sputnik in order to determine its orbit and eventually location. Started as a side project for fun, it eventually was develop to the point where it attracted attention, the right people saw it and asked if the processed could be reversed to find the exact location of a point on earth from a known position and trajectory of a satellite. Military applications were in mind and the idea and technology eventually evolved into the modern Global Positioning System (GPS) in our cars and phones.

__Describe the main literatures that the text draws on and contributes to__.

- His newer work //Future Perfect: The Case For Progress In A Networked Age//

Seltzer, Ethan, and Dillon Mahmoudi. "Citizen participation, open innovation, and crowdsourcing: Challenges and opportunities for planning." //Journal of Planning Literature// (2012): 0885412212469112.

- Starko, Alane Jordan. //Creativity in the classroom: Schools of curious delight//. Routledge, 2013.

- McKenney, Susan, and Thomas C. Reeves. //Conducting educational research design//. Routledge, 2013.

__Explain how the argument and evidence in the text supports, challenges or otherwise relates to the argument or narrative that you imagine developing.__

In order for designers to be creative and come up with better ideas and designs, it is important to understand what we know of how these moments of great insight come about. If particular spaces and factors tend to output more creativity and innovation, these should be implemented within any form of a design solution I would conceive of for sustainable design systems. The free exchange and intermingling of ideas brought about by the internet and our connected world plays a large role in my discussion on open source innovation vs the patent system, accessibility of invention, and the pace of advancement. “If there is a single maxim that runs through this book’s arguments, it is that we are often better served by connecting ideas than we are by protecting them.” This will greatly contribute to my open innovation and intellectual property discussion on the usefulness of patents. Examining how to leverage the physical spaces in which we create things, as highlighted by the “war on conference rooms”, is also of great importance to my innovation discussion in my thesis.

6. __List of at least three details or examples from the text that you can use to support the argument or narrative that you are developing__.

We as designers want to get away from the idea of the lightbulb moment or the spontaneous eureka moment. “the more disorganized your brain is, the smarter you are.”(debatable but applicable) We end up being less creative if we try to chase those epiphany moments. Most ideas come out of slow hunches that develop over years. Serendipity has its place as well and we need to create environments that promote spontaneous intermingling of ideas. “Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.” One of the old MIT buildings with its temporal existence promotes a sense of non-commitment to structured space and consequently, an increased tendency for serendipity, creativity, and a culture of innovation. Feathers originally designed for warmth turned out to be serendipitously good at gliding and eventually flying. This could be a great example to bring up in relation to evolution and what we consider to be good ideas that evolved in nature. Necessity is the mother of invention for humans and environmental pressures and natural selection is the mother of creation for Mother Nature. A surprising number of breakthroughs actually happen in labs where people are convinced they have made mistakes and this actually leads to entirely new approaches to the problem. Often, support from someone outside this project can recognize this error as the entirely new direction that is the real breakthrough. “Her research suggests a paradoxical truth about innovation: good ideas are more likely to emerge in environments that contain a certain amount of noise and error.” “De Forest was wrong about the utility of gas as a detector, but he kept probing at the edges of that error, until he hit upon something that was genuinely useful. Being right keeps you in place. Being wrong forces you to explore.” The ones that are actually mistakes could be analogous to mutations in genetic material in nature which leads to diversity and eventual change in a species. The diversity of the group of people with which one shares their ideas is of great importance for this divergent thinking strategy.

By Phil Baker
 * //From Concept to Consumer: How to Turn Ideas into Money//**

__What three quotes capture the critical import of the text?__

“The invention is often just five percent of all the factors for success… Coming up with the right idea, turning it into a product, and having it succeed in the marketplace is critical to a company’s growth…but, you must get to market at just the right time, with just the right product that sells for just the right price still produces profit. You need customers that are willing to buy. You need effective marketing and distribution that enable you to get the product into the right location to see try and buy. Most important, you need good timing and just plain luck if any of these links in the chain are broken, it can spell disaster… Thinking of a product is a long way from making and succeeding.”

“While innovation is typically confined to the product, it is beneficial to bring the same level of creativity to the development process. Finding ways to speed up time to market, reduce development costs and avoid the common bureaucratic delays that occur in large companies can provide a big competitive edge in establishing a brand and maximizing profit.”

“Small focused teams are much more effective than large organizations because they communicate better, there’s less bureaucracy and decisions are made more quickly. An ideal team has five to 10 people who represent each of the key functional disciplines: engineering, industrial design, marketing, finance and manufacturing. That’s few enough to work well and communicate together while still providing the diversity of resources needed to address almost any issue.”

__What is the main argument of the text?__

What is involved in taking a product and transforming it into a successful product? Creating a successful product is much more than creating a great idea. It involves a wide range of activities that bring together a variety of disciplines and the author claims that no other books examine this design process as a story to be told for each product rather than processes behind product development. In this work Baker tries to convey the real-life day-to-day issues of developing a product through his own personal experience with various consumer products including cameras and electronic notepads from companies like Polaroid and Apple.

__Describe at least three ways that the main argument is supported.__


 * While working at apple, Baker took part in the design and development of one of the first notepads that stressed handwriting recognition as one of its primary features. However, there was much more to be considered in the design and debugging of this feature and this it was scratched for emphasis on the fact that it was a notepad much like modern iPads, the product would have been far more successful and apples Empire would have begun years before.
 * Outsourcing services to China and other nations overseas is entirely necessary to stay profitable and competitive in the modern consumer product design culture and markets. Baker takes us through various products conception and iterative design process to illustrate the necessity to get to market first through means of parallel development tasks being accomplished for each product which requires outsourcing of not only manufacturing capabilities but design and part analysis as well. The competence of companies overseas is increasing and specializing and it is no longer practical to do everything in-house.
 * Industrial design can make or break a products success and meeting user needs is the most essential part of the new products introduction. Baker covers market saturation and the need for novelty within each market. Although the invention is only part of the process. It is the most important part in that if the idea is not sound and novel and an actual invention, it may not have widespread adoption and will become obsolete very quickly if successful at all.

__Describe the main literatures that the text draws on and contributes to.__

- Khota, Irfaan, and Leon Pretorius. "Harvesting IP-based value potential: The intellectual property scorecard as a mechanism to capitalize on technological innovation, knowledge, and IP." //International Journal of Innovation and Technology Management// 9.02 (2012).

- Khota, I. A., and L. Pretorius. "Sustainable change-driven-innovation: a Private Equity/Investor and IP hierarchy perspective for new product development companies." //23rd Annual SAIIE Conference Conference Proceedings//. 2009.

- "From Concept to Consumer: How to Turn Ideas into Money." //Journal of Product & Brand Management// 18, no. 4 (2009): 314-315.

__Explain how the argument and evidence in the text supports, challenges or otherwise relates to the argument or narrative that you imagine developing.__

In this book, the pace of innovation and iteration to be the first to market and gain market share is stressed as critical. I found this strategy to be a contradiction to the ideas proposed in the work //Longer-lasting Products// because it implies that the design process needs to be abbreviated to be first to market because, as the author emphasizes, this is the most essential thing. Getting to be the first on store shelves and to establishing your company as the first provider and inventor of the product is far more important than getting your product perfect the first time around and risking other companies getting to market first. This is the alternative to more thoughtful design where product life cycle is factored in and the product is designed with various stakeholders thought its life in mind. This book also offers new thinking strategies and resources for what it takes in this changing modern world to introduce new and innovative products to market successfully.

__List of at least three details or examples from the text that you can use to support the argument or narrative that you are developing.__

Poleroid’s SX 70 camera had a viewfinder and camera focus that was difficult to use and made it impossible for users to get a focused image. Baker had identified this problem and come up with a solution to fix it but by this time, the product was close to launch. Apple’s Newton message pad was designed with its primary feature being handwriting recognition which was very buggy and not yet ready to be commercialized. By trying to push something that wasn’t ready, the entire product was unsuccessful. The author does not talk about the implications of this and how after introducing subsequent versions of the products, the one that he worked on would eventually become obsolete. Disruptive innovations are an entirely different category and something I will detail in my innovation section based on insights from this work. Phil Baker draws on his experiences with Polaroid, Apple, Stowaway, Fuego and numerous others to show what must be done to make new ideas into successful products. He goes behind the scenes and tracks how product development has evolved. His most valuable insights include an explanation of why you need partners in Asia, where to look for them, how to select them and how to manage these relationships.

By Mark Miodownik
 * //Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World//**

__What three quotes capture the critical import of the text?__

“The appreciation of wine was based solely on the way it tasted. The invention of drinking glasses meant that the color, transparency, and clarity of wine became important, too. We are used to seeing what we drink, but this was new to the Romans, and they loved it.”

“This is essentially why gold is still valuable in the twenty-first century. If gathered together, all the gold ever mined would fit inside a large town house.”

“When you bend a paper clip, it is in fact the metal crystals that are bending. If they didn’t bend, the paper clip would be brittle and snap like a stick. This plastic behavior is achieved by the dislocations moving within the crystal. As they move they transfer small bits of the material from one side of the crystal to the other. They do this at the speed of sound.”

“While glass had been used by the rich to drink wine for hundreds of years, most beers until the nineteenth century were drunk from opaque vessels such as ceramic, pewter, or wooden mugs. Since most people couldn’t see the color of the liquid they were drinking, it presumably didn’t matter much what these beers looked like, only what they tasted like. Mostly, they were dark brown and murky brews. Then in 1840 in Bohemia, a region in what is now the Czech Republic, a method to mass-produce glass was developed, and it became cheap enough to serve beer to everyone in glasses. As a result people could see for the first time what their beer looked like, and they often did not like what they saw: the so-called top-fermented brews were variable not just in their taste, but in their color and clarity too. Not ten years later, a new beer was developed in Pilsen using bottom-fermenting yeast. It was lighter in color, it was clear and golden, it had bubbles like champagne—it was lager.”

__What is the main argument of the text?__

This book is about the ingenuity of humankind and argues that the stuff and materials that make up that stuff all around us, have far more of an impact on our lives and society than what one might think. This work reveals the hidden structures behind much of what our world is made of and it narrates the hidden and fascinating stories behind them.

__Describe at least three ways that the main argument is supported.__


 * The story of how concert and concrete rebar reinforcement came to be widely used. An how the chemistry behind it affects us all. The amount of complexity in each consumer product and the chemistry affected by the wants and demands of humans embedded in a society of constraints is marvelously illustrated through the example of the story of chocolate. “These days the type of milk added to chocolate varies widely throughout the world, and this is the main reason that milk chocolate tastes different from country to country. In the USA the milk used has had some of its fat removed by enzymes, giving the chocolate a cheesy, almost rancid flavor. In the UK sugar is added to liquid milk, and it is this solution, reduced to a concentrate, that is added to the chocolate, creating a milder caramel flavor. In Europe powdered milk is still used, giving the chocolate a fresh dairy flavor with a powdery texture. These different tastes do not travel well. Despite globalization, the preferred taste of milk chocolate, once acquired, remains surprisingly regional.”
 * The main argument is also supported by the example of the story of concrete and the unique relationship between reinforced rebar and concrete that has helped us to build skyscrapers and expand our cities into the skies. This is also shaped much of the urban environment and landscape of cities, all from serendipitous discoveries of unique chemistries that form the arsenal of materials from which we build modern society.
 * Humankind’s vast materials library serves as an example of the story of invention and innovation and now itself serves humanity as a toolbox for further experimentation, exploration, discovery and invention of the future world we wish to live in. “The library is now located and maintained at the Institute of Making which is part of University College London. You could rebuild our” The story of foam is particularly interesting because of my relation with Eban Bayer and his sustainable mushroom alternative to Styrofoam packaging.

__What literatures does the text draw on and contribute to?__


 * Martin, Gerry, and Alan MacFarlane. //The Glass Bathyscaphe: How Glass Changed the World//. Profile Books, 2011.
 * Faraday, Michael. //The Chemical History of a Candle: With an Introduction by Frank AJL James//. Oxford University Press, 2011.
 * Howes, Philip, and Zoe Laughlin. //Material Matters: New Materials in Design//. Black Dog Pub Limited, 2012.

__Explain how the argument and evidence in the text supports, challenges or otherwise relates to the argument or narrative that you imagine developing.__

In this work, the author’s elaboration of our complex relationship with material objects and the chemistry and story of materials, one is shown a glimpse at how our management of these materials and the environmental impacts the created came to be.

__List of at least three details or examples from the text that you can use to support the argument or narrative that you are developing.__
 * New forms of sustainable materials to reverse the damage caused by the old versions of the very same materials. Some affects cannot be reverse and we must live with the consequences.
 * Government regulation and elimination of the sale of biohazard materials like aerosol spray cans and other harmful products
 * Cost, practicality, and development of aerogels and their applications highlights the complexity of using a new technology for various applications in society. The world has ignored the amazing applications of aerogels as a fireproof supper insulator. The factors that influence the successful adoption and spread of the use of a material are quite complex and a very curious story for each individual material and product.