His ‘conversation’ with a machine at the end of the book was especially amusing and provides context for providing some human-machine interaction design rules from the machine’s perspective:

Design rules for human designers of “smart” machines

1. Provide rich, complex, and natural signals
2. Be predictable
3. Provide good conceptual models
4. Make the output understandable
5. Provide continual awareness without annoyance
6. Exploit natural mappings

Design rules developed by machines to improve their interactions with people

1. Keep things simple
2. Give people a conceptual model
3. Give reasons
4. Make people think they are in control
5. Continually reassure
6. Never label human behavior as “error” (rule added by the human interviewer)

Snippet from Amazon’s description: “In The Myths of Innovation, bestselling author Scott Berkun takes a careful look at innovation history, including the software and Internet Age, to reveal how ideas truly become successful innovations-truths that people can apply to today’s challenges. Using dozens of examples from the history of technology, business, and the arts, you’ll learn how to convert the knowledge you have into ideas that can change the world.”

It was a good, quick, interesting read and provides a glimmer of hope that innovation truly can happen anywhere, not just in the mythical scenario of the genius toiling away in solitude until that aha! moment of divine inspiration.

Check out Ferriss’ site for more.

I also found the table of contents unique (each chapter annotated with a simple list of the keywords and topics covered) and the “Easy Reference Guide” (a five-page CliffsNotes-like synopsis of the book) especially handy.

Alain is a Senior Associate at Kuczmarski & Associates, “the foremost management consulting firm specializing in innovation”.

Take a look at the site and/or subscribe to his feed (he’s still not using FeedBurner yet…. ;->) – Alain’s always had some great insights and I look forward to his future topics.

I have to use this next time my daughter complains about her violin lessons…

It’s a monster of a book, tipping the scales at over 750+ pages and includes a DVD that contains segments from all of the interviews along with examples of interactions being discussed. Based on a cursory skim this evening, I’m looking forward to diving into this since it’s still very fresh, having been first published in October 2006, and contains many recent products and designs.

The book starts with a five-page discussion of “Sense and Quintessence,” followed by 65 one-to-two page essays of “quintessential” products. My original intent was to get some insight into the attributes that give some products that inexplicable “it” factor via these essays – in a hope to, in turn, apply some of “it” to design – but I found the introductory discussion much more fascinating, useful, and moving.

Some excerpts:

“…things that offer more to us than we specifically ask of them and to which we respond more strongly than is easily explained…..that exhibit a rare and mysterious capacity to be just exactly what they ought to be.”

“With the advent of mass production, the odds against quintessence grew and have continued to grow. The craftsman’s skill played a smaller and smaller part in the manufacture of the ordinary things that people bought and used, and uniformity and efficiency replaced the slow and often enchanted variations of handiwork.” With mass production, “…quintessence lives, as vitally as ever; it’s just harder to discern amid the undistinguished plenty of our times.”

“One of the great dilemmas of our age is that while the powerful magic of advertising makes us want more, what we end up with we love less…we become drifters from one failed possession to the next…” “In The Context of No Context George Trow points out that ‘the idea of choice is easily debased if one forgets that the aim is to have chosen successfully not to be endlessly choosing.’”

It’s not about finding what’s ‘perfect’… it’s about finding what’s ‘right’…. choose well “…so you no longer need to go on choosing.”

“And despite the constant static given off by all the wrong stuff a desperate economy thrusts at us quintessence is always there to be found. It is the good news, shining through the bad.”

“Even though [things] may at some point have seemed unusual, even revolutionary, the way they are now appears self-evident and you can’t imagine how such a thing…could be other that it is…..more important, you don’t want to imagine it any other way so the idea of improvement becomes irrelevant. Rarely does a quintessential thing survive improvement….[it] cannot be made more quintessential; it either is or it isn’t, and if it is, tampering won’t do a bit of good and may ruin everything.”

“However clever a design or vaunted a purpose, quintessence can no more be stalked and captured than can true love. Either it occurs, or it doesn’t; and often it comes when least expected, or fails to appear when most desperately desired.”

“What this book is not is a list of what’s best. Worrying about what is best of anything is thingism at its most delusory, since, inevitably, the best of today is bettered tomorrow. A life defined by having the best is a life of endless choosing and endless letdowns…. ‘Best’ is a judgment based on statistics, not taste or instinct; and in a world of constant technological innovation and furious competition, being the best of anything is usually a short-term occupation. Quintessential things are blissfully beyond all that.”

Hallelujah.

Unfortunately, it sat on my desk for a few weeks and I only decided to pick it up when I got the library courtesy reminder that it was due in a few days (how’s that for procrastination…).

I finally found some time to start and polish it off today (it’s only a 113 pages, so it’s a quick read).

The title refers to an old saying that states that if the first thing you do each morning is to eat a live frog, you’ll have the satisfaction of knowing that it’s probably the worst thing you’ll do all day. Overall. it’s pretty straightforward and direct and there’s nothing terribly revolutionary here – just some common sense, logic and discipline.

It was a good, quick read (in the interests of simplicity, the author capped the book length to 100 pages) and in a strange coincidence, Parade magazine in today’s Chicago Tribune had an article by the author titled “How to Keep It Simple.”

Maeda presents ten laws and three keys:

1. REDUCE – The simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction
2. ORGANIZE Organization makes a system of many appear fewer
3. TIME Savings in time feel like simplicity
4. LEARN Knowledge makes everything simpler
5. DIFFERENCES Simplicity and complexity need each other
6. CONTEXT What lies in the periphery of simplicity is definitely not peripheral
7. EMOTION More emotions are better than less
8. TRUST In simplicity we trust
9. FAILURE Some things can never be made simple
10. THE ONE Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious, and adding the meaningful

1. AWAY More appears like less by simply moving it far, far away
2. OPEN Openness simplifies complexity
3. POWER Use less, gain more

The companion Web site is at http://www.lawsofsimplicity.com/.