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Showing posts from September, 2017

What's the 'trick"?

Many articles on Steve Job’s tenure at Apple have focused on the mystery of Job’s approach to his work. The articles are representative of the ongoing desire to uncover the recipe or secret sauce that made Apple’s products so dominant in the market place. The focus on design is often mentioned as Apple’s essential core competence during the Job era. Job’s character is often critiqued, but mostly the center of attention is on trying to discern his—i.e. Apple’s—design approach, processes and methods during his time at the helm. As a popularized guess, ‘design thinking’ has become the normative category to use when referring to these or anyone’s methods or approaches to successful designing. That was not Job’s approach but ‘design thinking’ has taken on a life of its own. ‘Design thinking’ in fact has become a highly touted approach for businesses and governments to take whether focused on products or services. ‘Design thinking’ is being pushed in text and video as the strate

Design Intelligence

Without knowing exactly what ‘intelligence’ is, the term is used liberally nowadays especially in relationship to ‘computer intelligence’ aka ‘artificial intelligence’ (AI). It seems fair then to initiate a discussion concerning ‘design intelligence’ (DI) in this context. Design intelligence is a form of ‘human intelligence’ (HI). DI is not as studied and discussed as AI, which is a concern. Design intelligence is what makes us human. Other forms of intelligence may be shared by animals or machines but DI is our distinguishing competency. The world is flooded with news concerning ‘artificial intelligence rivaled only by news about big data. The push for big data is pretty clearly economic while it is not as clearly the same for AI, although there are obviously mercantile interests present. There are warnings about the  dangers of AI  to human welfare    and  t here are questions about the  challenges of being human  in the presence of ubiquitous AI. It was drilled into me when