We’ve all seen examples of bad design in our daily lives: appliances that break on first use, floor plans that are difficult to navigate, and of course, computer software that makes tasks harder, not easier.
We’ve all seen examples of bad design in our daily lives: appliances that break on first use, floor plans that are difficult to navigate, and of course, computer software that makes tasks harder, not easier.
Today, it seems that almost every software development organization employing more than one programmer subscribes to the Agile methodology. In fact, it’s difficult to find one that doesn’t. Given its pervasiveness now, it’s hard to remember that only a few years ago, Agile was a newfangled idea that only a few development shops were trying, while others dismissed it as a passing fad or were “waiting to see…”
Even before there were digital images and image editing software, graphic artists had an occasional need to extract an arbitrary shape (such as the outline of a human subject) from an image so that it could be placed in other images. In the days of chemical photography, this involved complex darkroom techniques or even painstakingly cutting things out of paper prints with scissors. Imagine fitting that into your schedule these days!
Science fiction is littered with sentient, omnipresent computers that respond to voice commands. From the fatally flawed HAL 9000 of 2001: A Space Odyssey to the cool, confident Starship Enterprise computer to the snarky, easily distracted Heart of Gold computer in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, humans have imagined anthropomorphic computers that hear all, know all and control all.
As a society, we have grown accustomed to straight-line trajectories for technology: from concept to practical application, relentless performance improvement, and finally to maturity. The internal-combustion engine, personal computer, and smartphone have all followed this path, and have consistently lived up to whatever hype has been generated around them. It’s so common that we forget that not every technology follows this trajectory.
In this new occasional feature in our blog, AndPlus Innovation Lead Abdul Dremali shares his thoughts on what he’s learning in the Executive Education courses he is taking at MIT’s Sloan School of Management.
