RAFFIAPALM

Resources for product teams from industry experts.

The real world is infinitely complex, and so any symbolic representation must necessarily omit certain attributes of artifacts. A good representation is one that suppresses detail that is irrelevant to the task of exploring the space of possible designs, yet makes explicit those attributes that have a large impact on the quality of an eventual artifact produced from the design.

— Design: Creation of Artifacts in Society by Karl Ulrich

Source: Amazon Kindle

Related Stories and Excerpts:

  1. Don’t count on breakthroughs. Move ahead early and find the market for the current attributes of the technology. You will find it outside the current mainstream market. You will also find that the attributes that make disruptive technologies unattractive to mainstream markets are the attributes on which the new markets will be built. — The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail (Management of Innovation and Change) by Clayton M. Christensen Source: Amazon Kindle […]
  2. When the mapping from functional elements to components is one-to-one, each component implements one and only one function. Such components are therefore useful in any other applications where their associated functions occur. Components of an artifact exhibiting an integral architecture would potentially be useful only in other artifacts containing the exact combination of functional elements, or parts of functional elements, implemented by the component. A modular architecture also enables component interfaces to be identical across several products. Interfaces in modular architectures are decoupled—that is, a particular component will not have to change when surrounding components are changed. Therefore, different […]
  3. In this world, design is less and less focused on the creation of a single perfect artifact and is increasingly a puzzle requiring creative problem-solving and analytical judgment about product architecture, production process technology, supply chain structure, and market strategy. — Design: Creation of Artifacts in Society by Karl Ulrich Source: Amazon Kindle […]
  4. When studying events, we look at them through analytical, logical lenses. We break them down into small, understandable chunks, and we fish for scapegoats while looking for cause-and-effect relationships. Is the economy going south? It must be the result of the poor decisions of a politician. Is the newspaper arriving late? That lazy mailman. For sure, he stopped to chat with the neighbor. Is your wife cold and distant lately? It must be her job. We seek linear, immediate, sensible explanations for problems surrounding us. But by doing so, we run the risk of seeing issues as being inflicted […]
  5. Exploration almost never results in a single plan, but rather exposes several alternatives that are promising enough for serious consideration. Evaluation of alternatives typically occurs “on paper” before an artifact is produced. Once an artifact has been produced, there is almost always an evaluation through testing by the user. Users are clearly best at assessing, through their own experience, whether an artifact actually closes the sensed gap in their experience. — Design: Creation of Artifacts in Society by Karl Ulrich Source: Amazon Kindle […]

In:

Topics: , , , ,