About SweetSpot
I recently read a post over at 37signals that unfinished software projects are the ‘inventory’ that programmers need to minimize just as manufacturers need to minimize stuff in warehouses in supply chain management.
I realized that as designers, we often have good design ideas that we don’t have time to act on. If your goal is to be a better designer, or to make money on those ideas, then the right thing to do is squirrel them away (possibly put in a patent lawyer’s hands so others have to respect your ‘prior art’). But as an academic, my goals are different: to make other people better designers, and to make the world a better place. And, to reduce my own ‘inventory’ of backlogged ideas that I don’t have time to implement.
Even among academics, there are misers and spenders. Misers worry they will only have one great idea. They hoard their ideas like gold, and they spend them only if they themselves can get lots of fame and fortune. Spenders realize the more ideas you hand out, the more people will come to treat you as a fount of good ideas, and ultimately the recognition follows the carry-through on those ideas. We only have so much time for carrythrough, so why not hand them out? Of course there is a third category, the scavengers. They have the benefit of good taste and can tell a nice idea when they see it. Then they prefer to package it up as their own. The easiest way to defeat the scavengers is to have their sources made public, so it’s clear what came first, and they can’t succeed in claiming precedence.
So with that in mind, this blog is a place for half-baked ideas for designs (usually educational and/or technological, but who knows) that we don’t have time to think through. It’s the freecycle of design ideas, and it’s essentially helping us reduce our own inventory around here, minimizing distractions.
I recently came across ze frank’s take on this. The vlog is not safe for work (i.e., ‘explicit’) but nails these issues humorously.