March 2010
You are browsing the archive for March 2010.
If you’re reading this blog, you most likely know the vital importance—and enormous challenge—of good revision control when designing and manufacturing products. Lost in the Woods: The three things you should do to prevent revision control failures is the second installment of the Product Disaster Series and can be found in the Arena Dispatches, where [...]
I returned from Vancouver a few weeks ago and unlike the NHL players, my Olympic hangover is finally gone. If you ever get a chance, I highly recommend attending the Olympic Games. It is rare and exciting to be able to see so many different sports played at such a high level in a central [...]
Dan Nocera thinks he can solve our energy crisis with an Olympic swimming pool. MIT Professor Dan Nocera believes he can solve the world’s energy problems with an Olympic-sized pool of water. Nocera and his research team have identified a simple technique for powering the Earth inexpensively–by using the sun to split water and store [...]
Adopting new software, which companies do when they become Arena customers, is just one type of change that can impact a company’s processes. Even when a company is making a change for the better, requiring people to adopt new ways of doing things is not always easy. If you find yourself trying to effect change [...]
Ever since the publishing of Cradle to Cradle, William McDonough and Michael Braungart’s tour-de-force manifesto on the complicity of industrial designers in the filling of our landfills, product companies have been searching for ways to minimize the impact of their products while still maximizing their profits. With the help of books like this, as well [...]
Anyone building products for the public or handling product service should check out this blog post chronicling a woman’s battle for appropriate customer service with a washing machine company—and how her public complaints to social networking sites got results. Her story is both hilarious and a great object lesson about the power of social media in [...]
To call Local Motors the designers or even the manufacturers of the Rally Fighter is not quite accurate. While the company’s badge will be on the car, it has been a facilitator more than anything else. Local Motors is a new type of car company. It employs just 10 people and plans to expand only [...]
The benefits of rapid prototyping have long been self-evident: earlier visibility into tricky aspects of a design and more chances to refine your ideas mean getting to market faster with fewer mistakes. But as the typical product has become a symphony of electrical, mechanical and software components, prototyping the physical interaction between your product and [...]
Products that resonate with their users on an emotional level become ingrained in user’s lives and generate their own grassroots marketing buzz. These are the products that users rave about online, tell their friends about in great detail, and wax enthusiastic about to strangers in the grocery line. Building this kind of product takes in-depth [...]
