What is meant by “product”?
In CMU-speak, a product can be a lot of things. It has a very broad, liberal interpretation, referring to anything artificial, material or immaterial, resulting from deliberative human effort and…
Original design thinking* = Rhetorical thinking
* “Design thinking” has unfortunately become an overused buzzword, adopted by Silicon Valley digerati and strategy fashionistas to refer to solving problems in a “designerly” way. I hope to clarify…
The rhetorical stance (quote)
Wayne Booth, “The Rhetorical Stance” (1963) The common ingredient that I find in all of the writing I admire (excluding for now novels, plays, and poems) is something that I…
The product as argument
Another key tenet of CMU-style of design thought centers around this concept of shaping and delivering arguments, based upon rhetorical motives of effective, persuasive communication. If you treat your product…
There is no perfect design
This pithy phrase may seem like a defeatist, cynical dismissal of product design reality, but it actually refers to the title of a noteworthy book written by Henry Petroski, the…