one of my favorite rory sutherland anecdotes is about how pe...

one of my favorite rory sutherland anecdotes is about how people complained that an elevator took too long to arrive. it would cost ~ a million dollars to make the elevators 5% faster. they solved the problem for ~$100 by adding mirrors so people groomed themselves while waiting

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You have to know why people behave as they do—and design around their foibles and limitations, rather than some ideal.

Robert Fabricant • User Friendly: How the Hidden Rules of Design are Changing the Way We Live, Work & Play

Test counterintuitive things only because no one else will.

Rory Sutherland • Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

There are brilliant examples all over the place of people tweaking time subjectively. One of my favorites is the Uber map. It doesn’t change how long you wait for the taxi. It changes the quality of the waiting time by reducing uncertainty. If you look at human emotions, although humans might say, “I don’t like waiting for a taxi,” what makes them ... See more

Adam Grant • Are We Too Impatient to Be Intelligent?

I think there are things in life that you want to telescope and compress and accelerate and streamline and make more efficient. And there are things where the value is precisely in the inefficiency, in the time spent, in the pain endured, in the effort you have to invest. And I don’t think we’re going to differentiate between those things. Because ... See more

Adam Grant • Are We Too Impatient to Be Intelligent?

The psychological complexity of human behaviour is reduced to a narrow set of assumptions about what people want, which means they design a world for logical rather than psycho-logical people.

Rory Sutherland • Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

If you want to solve the problem, you have to understand ‘the real why’. Some

Rory Sutherland • Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense

When curiosity is at tension with productivity, and play is eclipsed by monetization, we get nothing good.

As Rory Sutherland sees it,

“People effectively are laser focused on the things they can get bollocked for. And it's much, much easier to get bollocked for being illogical than it is to get bollocked for being unimaginative.

You can't bollock

Matt Klein • Self-Sabotaging Innovation: The Art of Doing Dumb Shit

What happens when you give a load of engineers a brief? I always ask the question: What would’ve happened if you hadn’t given the brief for High Speed 2 to a load of engineering firms who immediately focused on speed, time, distance, capacity? What if you’d given the brief to Disney instead?

They would’ve said, “First of all, we’re going to rewrite ... See more