A weekend!

It actually felt like a weekend -- slower pace, different activities. Not that I did anything exciting, unless you count filling two boxes that previously held many reams of pristine white paper with my used, once extremely important, but now discarded papers. I also threw away scores of old backup floppy disks (remember those?) and CD-R disks. Who needs to remember the 2004 SER? Not I. It's getting easier and easier to shed my former life.

I even had time to "talk trivia" with three colleagues - without even thinking about how Skype enables "real presence" conversations across miles and oceans. And Ulla's report on the Service Design Network Conference held last weekend in Madeira brought me close to the community of the Business and Design Lab.

I've almost finished reading Roger Martin's "The Design of Business." I'm still struggling with the genre of "professional books" where the author writes with such authority and without a glimmer of critique. But, if I take it at face value - or from the value-system I attribute to the author, which as an ironist I am compelled to do - it is logical and easy to read, with interesting examples -- all positive, of course. Martin frames his thesis in terms of reliability and validity, a clever way of distinguishing the work of reliability-focused traditional analytical managers versus validity-seeking designers and design-thinking managers. His metaphor of a knowledge funnel - mystery to heuristics to algorithms to code - is clever. I'll be more critical later when I switch to another perspective. This is the first of about 10 new books (including four 'design primers for business people') I've purchased as essential designerly reading. and I've told myself I cannot buy another book until I've read them all. I plan to be ready for the upcoming BDL "fika conversations".