Stephen P. Anderson, formerly Principal User Experience Architect for Sabre and currently Vice President of Design at Viewzi, will be speaking at MX San Francisco on how to get visionary ideas made into realities. He uses George Lucas’ work on Star Wars as inspiration and a practical example. We had a conversation over e-mail about changing organizational culture, managing design teams, and doing things that have never been done before.

Todd Wilkens [TW]: Well, Stephen, even though your talk is all about visionary ideas, let’s get the ball rolling with a practical question: What got you so interested in how visionary ideas get pushed through an organization? Why and how has this been relevant to you? What made this an itch you needed to scratch?

Stephen Anderson [SA]: As a consultant, you see a lot of really great ideas that, for whatever reason, never get implemented. Or when they do, there is little resemblance between what actually gets produced and the original concepts. In 2006, I moved from the world of consulting to become a UX director at a large, enterprise company. Needless to say, it was a real eye-opener. I think I went in with a rather naive faith in the power of prototypes and ‘leading with an inspiring product vision’. While I still value this approach, I quickly learned that there is much more to pushing visionary ideas through an organization.

For starters, if you want to bring a great product/service experience to market, you have to first change the company culture. This is basic — and critical. So many other forces are at play inside large organizations — competition, politics, procedure, history. It’s about much more than creating business value. In fact, the biggest shock for me was discovering how internal business units compete with each other in ways that hurt the larger organization…

Read the full interview.

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Creativity seems to never run out. This time, we'll see the incredible use of shadows in advertising.

Some of these are really clever, and I enjoy trying to figure out how the heck these guys came up with such great ads. 100% creative. Awesome! From Design / Marketing / Psychology.

Lego

WWF

WWF

Ariel

Dukes of Hazzard

John Lewis

Fishermans Cove

McDonald's

Volkswagen

Children of the World Trust

Author: Paulo Antunes | If you want to write an article and have it published here send it via email to abduzeedo[at]abduzeedo.com

The year has just started and there are lots of things happening in the design world. This looks like this year will be the year of the contests. There was the Veerle Poster Design Contest, there’s the Firefox 3 T-Shirt Contest, and the U-Printing International Poster Design Competition, which I will be one of the Judges, thanks Gino.

These contests are a really good way to promote your work and get some worldwide recognition. Besides that there are the prizes. The U-Printing International Poster Design, for example, have some great prizes like: an iPhone, $250 Printing Credit, and 300 iStockPhoto credits for the winner.

Power up your computer, grab an energy drink and get your creative juices flowing because the U-Printing International Poster Design Competition is here! Designers will go head to head to try and create the most awe-inspiring posters ever seen!

For more information visit the U-Printing Poster Design page, the first round starts on March 1st.

Registration prices for Adaptive Path’s UX Week 2008, the premier conference for user experience professionals, go up after tomorrow. This conference is unparalleled in its combination of inspiration, information, and practical savvy. Did you see that Johnny Lee, inventor of those amazing Wiimote hacks, is presenting?

See you in August!

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In my mind, it seemed perfect: Technologists and transit-enthusiasts coming together to rethink the transit experience. A chance to bring the experience design gospel to an industry in need. Brimming with missionary zeal, my transportation planner husband and I headed off to the Bay Area TransitCamp.

I wasn’t prepared for the culture shock. My idealism was greeted by a ragtag bunch consisting of khaki-clad engineers, frumpy transit riders and suit-wearing transit officials. The engineers preached the possibilities of open-source data. White-haired transit riders screeched frustrations about their particular pet issues. And the transit officials defended cuts to bathroom-cleaning with the hard, cold facts of their bureaucratic reality.

Welcome to TransitCamp.

Could this possibly be the crowd that would transform transit? It felt like anarchy. “No complaints without solutions” was the only rule, and organizer Tara Hunt had to reiterate it again and again. Yet as idealism and realism collided, something impressive happened. We learned from one another. iPhone app developers learned that 40% of riders are below the poverty line. Cost-conscious officials learned that dozens of techies are eager to develop solutions — for free.

I realized that making a difference requires a humble and listening posture. Transit is an interdisciplinary problem that requires interdisciplinary understanding. While it produced interesting ideas, TransitCamp’s greatest triumph was fostering an atmosphere of learning and collaboration between unlikely bedfellows.

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A couple of weeks ago I participated on a panel on Conscious Capitalism at the Commonwealth Club of California. We covered quite a bit of ground in an hour, from how experience design could offset conspicuous consumption to issues like making meaning in the lives of customers, consumer activism, and lifestyle brands.

We had a packed audience for the panel, which I shared with Rajan Dev of Hot Studio, Nathan Shedroff of the Design MBA program at CCA, and Eric Ryan, co-founder of the Method line of green cleaning products. I’d love to tell you more about the discussion, but can do one better, since Fora.tv is now broadcasting their recording of the panel:

Some of the issues we didn’t have time to hit on that I really feel are a part of this discussion on conscious capitalism:

• The design stage for a product or service is worth investing in. It’s when 80-90% of a product’s life-cycle economic and ecological costs are determined (Hawkins, Lovins, and Lovins, Natural Capitalism), but it’s also the best time to incorporate insights about people and their needs. The design stage is often rushed through to be first-to-market, but that’s rarely that big of an advantage — anyone remember the first MP3 player? (hint: it wasn’t the iPod.)
• People’s attitudes towards consumption are hopefully nearing a change. Individuals in the U.S. consume roughly twice as much as they did 50 years ago, and 99% of what we buy isn’t even in use 6 months later (Annie Leonard, Story of Stuff). But recently there has been a shift in attitude, where some consumers look to buying more services and experiences (e.g., travel, spas, OnStar) as a sign/use of their wealth rather than buying more goods. And while new consumer markets are springing up around the world, many of them can leapfrog bad old systems of production and consumption.
• A 21st Century business will operate (not just talk) differently than the old models. Some qualities I foresee: [1] a strong passion for addressing the needs of a customer over the short- and long-term; profit is a by-product of this passion; [2] a focus on services and experiences; designing, supporting, and continuously improving a total customer relationship; [3] measuring development in means other than just aggregate growth more sales isn’t the sole indicator of a better business.

Big thanks to Kevin O’Malley of TechTalk for hosting a great panel!

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Firstly I’d like to thank you all for the emails, I really appreciated them. Besides that, I’ve received some requests from readers, what is awesome because sometimes I don’t have much time to think on ideas for tutorials.

The best thing about this requests is that I can learn new techniques and explore Photoshop in a new way. This new tutorial I’m writing is an example. Some users sent me emails asking how to create explosions, like breaking apart some objects in images. So yesterday I took some time and did my first image, you can see it below.

I have to say, the breaking apart effect was easier than I thought, at least for this image. I will try new ways to achieve explosion effects as well. And please, keep sending requests.