./emilychang eBot

Agile is here to stay. The economic difficulties of the past months have finally put waterfall out of its misery; now more than ever, long requirements phases and vaporous up-front documentation aren’t acceptable. Software must be visible and valuable from the start.

For many designers, Agile is already a fact of life (and for those less accustomed, some recommended reading follows at the foot of this article). We are reaching the point where we must either acclimatize or risk being bypassed. The good news is that Agile does allow us to still do the things we hold dear-research, develop a vision, and test and improve our designs-we just need new techniques. Now is the time to get real, and prove design can adapt, if we want to stay relevant in these increasingly unreal times.

BREAKTHROUGHS often beget other breakthroughs, and Apple’s slick use of touch technology on its iPhone has set touch-screen makers to salivating. An industry once relegated to niches now sees the potential for riches.

Mr. Tulley’s transformation highlights a little-noticed movement in the world of professional design and engineering: a renewed appreciation for manual labor, or innovating with the aid of human hands.

Apple’s iPhone has raised the bar for mobile Web design by bringing buzz, investors, and new technology to the sector.

Jonathan Harris calls himself a storyteller. But he’s also equal parts visual artist, computer scientist, anthropologist, data voyeur, photographer, digital anthropologist, interviewer, and designer. What might be more appropriate is “story revealer” or even “story enabler,” for Harris has the ability to uncover the complexity of human stories by starting with a simple question. 

Let me admit a real prejudice that I have, and maybe you can try to convince me that I’m wrong: it’s my belief that you just can’t get great design out of a design agency with a staff larger than a dozen or two. Design doesn’t scale well, in my opinion, or at least it doesn’t do so easily.

"I thought this was a great little blurb about innovation. It’s about how we should focus on how to use our existing tools in better and more creative ways rather than worry about coming up with the next ‘killer app’.”

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Here it is: I like to find (a) simple solutions (b) to overlooked problems (c) that actually need to be solved, and (d) deliver them as informally as possible, (e) starting with a very crude version 1, then (f) iterating rapidly.

But Emily Chang, the cofounder of Ideacodes, a Web designing and consulting firm, detected consistent messages, and summed them up: “His site is more youthful and hers more regal.”

Edward discusses the iPhone interface and “computer administrative debris.”