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David Crow

Connector of dots. Maker of lines. Rider of slopes.

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Design

Do Great Work, Repeat

by davidcrow

The title is from Greg Story‘s article The Future of the Digital Design Agency in the United States.

I have been thinking about design firms.We can call them agencies, studios, evolutionary consultancies, or whatever. They are the firms that have unique skills, competencies and perspectives that it is difficult to capture or justify inside a company. Sometimes the value or impact is so important that it is better to have the resources in house. We are seeing this tension between agencies and in-house design being played out. Capital One acquired Adaptive Path. TeehanLax shutting down and the principals joined Facebook. SmartDesign shutting down. The misconceptions of working in-house.  This is compared to a bright future for design firms to compete on mindset. To build a new operating model to evolve at least as fast as the world around them.

The design firm is not going anywhere. The design firm, like a startup, has speed as their advantage. Being able to evolve the practice, the processes, the mindset, the tools, the outputs faster than the market while still doing great work is what defines the firms and people.

But there is something in the back of my mind that makes me think the business model is broken. This is most likely just a hangover from my >15 years of thinking about startups, venture capital and growth as the narrative of impact and success. The conversation to me is reminiscent of conversations I have with product companies and founders. It is probably just co-incidence.

https://twitter.com/mustefaJ/status/558374585117466624

@mustefaj @davidcrow @mmilan @tailoredux things get interesting with 2 years of cash on hand.

— Jon Lax (@jlax) January 22, 2015

https://twitter.com/mustefaJ/status/558382377375129600

Six months to two years of cash on hand is when the “studio is the VC for the org”. This is eerily reminiscent of funding for emerging companies. And it triggers a lot of questions for me:

How should design firms invest their profits? Should they invest in growth? Culture? New companies? Should the new companies come from inside the design firm, i.e., growth by attrition? Is the role for the design firm on that is like a General Partner (GP) at a venture fund? Is it one that is closer to a  Limited Partner (LP) that invests in funds managed by others? Are the skills and people that are capable of growing a design firm that is capable of having both growth and 2 years of operations in profits the same people to build emerging companies? Do skunk works and labs projects generate new businesses or new insights that can be incorporated into client work? Are their alternative monetization strategies and business models for design firms?

For design firms it is clear. Do great work, repeat.

Posted on January 29, 2015 Filed Under: Articles, Business, Design, Entrepreneurship Tagged With: bizmodel, Design, firm

Prototyping science fiction

by davidcrow

“The future cannot be predicted, but futures can be invented.” –
Dennis Gabor

Tiago Forte wrote a great piece about “What I Learned About the Future by Reading 100 Science Fiction Books“.  The article is one of the more inspirational posts about how to imagine, define and build a future for humanity. So much of what we as designers do is try to imagine a future. The devices, the interactions, the business models, the behaviours and the implications of choices played out on different timescales.

I also read a lot of science fiction (you can see what’s on my Kindle) but I had never thought about it as providing a near or long-term impact on to my speculations on the human condition. Here are a list of books including the Briand David Johnson book identified in the Tiago Forte piece that I need to add to my library and reading queue.


Photo credit: Ron Brinkmann CC-BY-NC-SA-20

Posted on January 23, 2015 Filed Under: Articles, Books, Culture, Design, Innovation Tagged With: Design, future, scifi

Stories about a future worth creating

by davidcrow

Updated: Adding Tobias van Schneider’s The Agency is Dead, Long Live the Agency and Ben Cline’s Design Studios are Not Going Away to list of 

The conversation around the shutting down of TeehanLax has been very interesting and insightful. For me, it has really shown the dominance of the venture fundable, highly scalable startup narrative in relation to technology, design and the human condition.

I have been focused on this narrative. We can call it venture fundable, we can call it scalable businesses, it doesn’t matter what we call it. Being able to build a company with 32 engineers that can surpass an entire industry is seductive. It is the American dream. Anyone can build a company with the scale, wealth and impact of The Social Network. It has dominated the conversation.

But is it the narrative that will allow us to tell stories about “a future worth creating“?

I remember the moment in 1995 where my role models changed. My role models had always been designers and commentators. People like Bill Moggridge, Don Norman, David Kelley, Brenda Laurel, Bill Buxton, John Seeley Brown, Nathan Shredoff,Lucy Suchman, Herb Simon, Stu Card, Abigail Sellen, Paul Dourish and others. (BTW this list is by no means complete). Designers of experiences and the explainers of behaviour. The moment was the Netscape IPO. It started to shift to David Liddle, Kelly Johnson, Ben Rich and the people that started the research labs and product development groups as companies. Then I was introduced to C. Gordon Bell’s High-tech Ventures: The Guide For Entrepreneurial Success. This was the first time I had read about venture capital and the types of company that can be built. It was eBoys: The First Inside Account of Venture Capitalists at Work about Benchmark that solidified it. I wanted to be a venture capitalist. It was the thoughtfulness, the wealth, the prestige and impact of this group of investors. It was Jim Breyer, Vinod Khosla, Mike Moritz and others. Because the story about new technology, new wealth creation and the ability to change the human condition were compelling. These were companies that affected my own behaviour. And it is still true today, I find myself reading David Skok, Mark Suster, Bill Gurley, Marc Andreessen, Mike Maples, Boris Wertz, Tomasz Tunguz, Reid Hoffman, John Lilly and others.

But is it the narrative that will allow us to tell stories about “a future worth creating“.

The Future of Design Agencies

“The future of design agencies lies not in their ability to become more like their in-house counterparts, but their ability to become more unique. They need to see, speak, and act differently. Their value lies in their ability to describe the changes they see in the world with new language. This, in turn, makes it possible for people to imagine the future differently from the present.” – Matthew Milan

I have not worked agency side in a long time. My only thoughts have been about the economics of scaling a linear business, and this is probably an artifact from a venture fundable view of the world (also see Jon Lax’s talk Let’s Kill the Billable Hour). It is time to start thinking about different narratives. It is  time to look to a new group building new models for inspiration.

  • Matthew Milan’s It’s never been more important for design agencies to think differently
  • Mustefa Jo’shen’s Design Thinking × Education × Community, and the death of the design agency and Agency, Agents, and Aging Models
  • Mark Pollard’s A New Agency Model
  • Aaron Dignan’s The Operating That is Eating the World
  • NOBL’s The Evolutionary Edge
  • Jon Lay’s Here’s why the teehan+lax shutdown isn’t the end of client services
  • Tobias van Schneider’s The Agency is Dead, Long Live the Agency
  • Ben Cline’s Design Studios are Not Going Away

I’m looking forward to spending more time listening and learning about different models for impactful businesses. What are the businesses and business models that inspire and intrigue you?

Feature Image – Photo credit Guigui-Lille

Posted on January 22, 2015 Filed Under: Articles, Business Development, Design Tagged With: agency, Design, future

Reinventing Email

by davidcrow

I was just struck by how similar my GMail experience was to the ReMail work that the CUE team at IBM Research published in 2003.

ReMail by Collaborative User Experience (CUE) team in IBM Research

The experiences are different. But the integration of the GCalendar, live names (think GTalk status), thread size and threaded messages, thread visualization (reminds me of Rapportive), collection categorization (a combination of tags and priority). It’s amazing how prescient this work was almost 10 years ago. Amazing.

The best part is being able to track the researchers on LinkedIn:

  • Eric Wilcox
  • Bernard Kerr
  • Daniel Gruen
  • Paul Moody – joined Google in 2011 to work on Google News and Google+

Posted on November 6, 2012 Filed Under: Articles, Design Tagged With: gmail, prescient, remail

Mapping the next three decades of health tech

by davidcrow

Envisioning the Future of Health

The good folks at Fast Company sourced an interesting visualization from futurist Michell Zappa and the Envisioning Tech crew. Lots of science fiction, but it provides an interesting analysis based on the breaking down of information silos.

Follow @envisioningtech

“This visualization is an exercise in speculating about which individual technologies are likely to affect the scenario of health in the coming decades. Arranged in six broad areas, the forecast covers a multitude of research and developments that are likely to disrupt the future of healthcare.”

The article provided interesting links to 2 other visualizations:

  • The Future of Emerging Technology
  • The Future of Education Technology

Posted on September 14, 2012 Filed Under: Articles, Healthcare, Infographics, Innovation, Technology Tagged With: emerging tech, envisioningtech, health tech, infographics

The Mobile Developer Journey

by davidcrow

The team at VisionMobile have updated their Developer Economics 2010 and Beyond research report with an infographic that describes the decisions a mobile develop makes from app design and platform selection to go to market and monetization.

Infographic - The Mobile Developer Journey by VisionMobile

Posted on September 2, 2011 Filed Under: Articles, Infographics, Mobile Tagged With: developer, economics, infographic, Mobile, visionmobile

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