Jim Lipsey

In product development, a great deal of effort is made in specifying a product’s affordances – the capabilities and actions that it will provide to the user. A product developer in the UK recently launched Architectures of Control, a blog that documents the increasing practice of infecting products with ways to restrict, rather than expand, [...]

I just added Unusual Business Ideas That Work to my slowly-growing blogroll. It’s a site that profiles oddball ideas that ended up being wildly successful, like the guy who sends mail from Santa Claus, or folks who sell t-shirts. While the business concepts draw our attention for being quirky, the recurring theme in all these [...]

Vince Adams asks “Should Analysis Be Left to the Specialists?”, and decides that designers shouldn’t be afraid perform Finite Element Analysis (FEA) in their development efforts. People who specialize in FEA tend to take the opposite position (see this discussion) – that FEA is a specialized science that impacts product safety and should be left [...]

The PDMA recently launched a blog with ruminations from a variety of product development experts. It seems better than the typical “we’re a professional organization, so we ought to have a blog for our members” effort. Plus, I hadn’t come across Strange New Products, which is Engadget for those with twisted minds.