April 2004 Archives

Andrew Hinton writes a thorough and insightful review of my book. He was swayed by my suggestion that the tools of marketing research should not be thrown out with the bathwater of bad marketing, which I'm happy to hear, as it was one of my goals in writing the book.

Thank you, Andrew!

I will write more about this later, because Molly and I are taking a couple of days off after the craziness of the 2004 Milan Furniture Fair (the Salone dei Mobile in Italian). I'll write some more afterward, but here are some random images from I took.

Some first impressions:

• Orange is still the new red (red is also still the new red)
• Woodgrain is still the new Formica
• Comfort is still nonexistent
• As far as most "mainstream avant garde" design is concerned, it's still 1970
• The Barcelona Chair is the most frequently copied classic chair

Last week I resigned from Adaptive Path, the user experience consulting company I founded in 2001 with Lane Becker, Janice Fraser, Jesse James Garrett, Peter Merholz, Jeff Veen and Indi Young. Resigning AP was one of the most difficult choices I've ever had to make. The company has been extraordinarily successful in the three years since we started it and is now the best company doing what it does in the world, on many levels. Exciting companies with large, interesting projects are continually knocking on the door and the ideas generated in our little Hobart Building office are some of the most innovative in the field. We've chosen to grow slowly and, as a result, have had the luxury to handpick the best people as our employees and consultants. It's a tremendous company and I'm immensely proud of it and of my partners.

The work that I am most interested in at the moment, the work that I have been most passionate about over the last year, deals with ubiquitous computing, ambient intelligence and smart furniture. I really wanted to get serious about this stuff, since it's what's exciting me most, as much as the Web excited me 10 years ago (yikes!). I wanted to pursue it and follow the ideas, and I wrestled with how I could meld these interests with the kind of work Adaptive Path does. Ultimately, I decided that it was not strategically appropriate for me to be doing this kind of R&D work inside AP, since it was a distraction for both of us while I was pursuing it inside.

So, with a heavy heart and anxiety about the future, but confidence that what I helped build at Adaptive Path was more than strong enough without me in an active role, I decided to move on. My partners and our employees have been incredibly supportive and I look forward to working with them again in the future, and I will beam proudly from the sidelines as they take the company to (as the saying goes in Silicon Valley) the next level.

Watch this space for more from me about my current interests and look for my article on smart furniture in the June issue of Metropolis magazine.