Lessons in Bias

The first person whom I contacted for guidance after first creating AdaptivePatterns told me something I didn’t want to hear. “Cobbie, clients of software consulting companies will not pay to do research into whether or not they are solving the right problems, because they are already convinced their solutions are worth implementing.” I insisted that she was wrong. If only one demonstrated to people the shaky ground that they layered their subjective evidence on, and how easy and cheap it was to scientifically provide scaffolding and generate ideas from external evidence rather than nepotistic guessing, people would at least TRY testing their ideas and conclusions.

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Navigating the Design Landscape

Multiple industries are poised for new intersections, and resulting complexity, as digital and physical paths merge. We now have the near instant communication of devices (IoT), advanced pattern recognition and automated inference (AI), and on-demand manufacturing (3d printing). What the field of design offers can be essential to managing that complexity. This post is a guide and a record of the checkpoints that were helpful to me. Initial Survey My journey to design started with Don Norman’s “The Design of Everyday Things,” after hearing the term “Norman Doors.

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Our Principles

Like a stream from an alpine lake that allows you to navigate a pass, we use our principles to guide our work. In the spirit of the Agile Manifesto, you can see our principles as preferred options. * We make this comparison as a preference for the item on the left, but that doesn’t imply that there is no value to be had from the item on the right.

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The Foundation of Our Values

To understand why our values matter requires a brief look back to the soup from which our company was formed. The spice for that soup is a mix of 18 years of engagement in the agile software community, as a developer, consultant, and leader. All of that experience was suspended with a lot of empathy, which pushed me to learn, do more, help others, and talk to users—when permitted.

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