Written in 1998, the Incomplete Manifesto is an articulation of statements exemplifying Bruce Mau’s beliefs, strategies and motivations.

1. Allow events to change you.
You have to be willing to grow. Growth is different from something that happens to you. You produce it. You live it. The prerequisites for growth: the openness to experience events and the willingness to be changed by them.

2. Forget about good.
Good is a known quantity. Good is what we all agree on. Growth is not necessarily good. Growth is an exploration of unlit recesses that may or may not yield to our research. As long as you stick to good you'll never have real growth.

3. Process is more important than outcome.
When the outcome drives the process we will only ever go to where we've already been. If process drives outcome we may not know where we’re going, but we will know we want to
be there.

4. Love your experiments (as you would an ugly child).
Joy is the engine of growth. Exploit the liberty in casting your work as beautiful experiments, iterations, attempts, trials, and errors. Take the long view and allow yourself the fun of failure every day.

5. Go deep.
The deeper you go the more likely you will discover something of value.

6. Capture accidents.
The wrong answer is the right answer in search of a different question. Collect wrong answers as part of the process. Ask different questions.

7. Study.
A studio is a place of study. Use the necessity of production as an excuse to study. Everyone will benefit.

8. Drift.
Allow yourself to wander aimlessly. Explore adjacencies. Lack judgment. Postpone criticism.

9. Begin anywhere.
John Cage tells us that not knowing where to begin is a common form of paralysis. His advice: begin anywhere.

10. Everyone is a leader.
Growth happens. Whenever it does, allow it to emerge. Learn to follow when it makes sense. Let anyone lead.

11. Harvest ideas.
Edit applications. Ideas need a dynamic, fluid, generous environment to sustain life. Applications, on the other hand, benefit from critical rigor. Produce a high ratio of ideas
to applications.

12. Keep moving.
The market and its operations have a tendency to reinforce success. Resist it. Allow failure and migration to be part of your practice.

13. Slow down.
Desynchronize from standard time frames and surprising opportunities may present themselves.

14. Don’t be cool.
Cool is conservative fear dressed in black. Free yourself from limits of this sort.

15. Ask stupid questions.
Growth is fueled by desire and innocence. Assess the answer, not the question. Imagine learning throughout your life at the rate of an infant.

16. Collaborate.
The space between people working together is filled with conflict, friction, strife, exhilaration, delight, and vast creative potential.

17. ____________________.
Intentionally left blank. Allow space for the ideas you haven’t had yet, and for the ideas
of others.

18. Stay up late.
Strange things happen when you’ve gone too far, been up too long, worked too hard, and you're separated from the rest of the world.

19. Work the metaphor.
Every object has the capacity to stand for something other than what is apparent. Work on what it stands for.

20. Be careful to take risks.
Time is genetic. Today is the child of yesterday and the parent of tomorrow. The work you produce today will create your future.

21. Repeat yourself.
If you like it, do it again. If you don’t like it, do it again.

22. Make your own tools.
Hybridize your tools in order to build unique things. Even simple tools that are your own can yield entirely new avenues of exploration. Remember, tools amplify our capacities, so even a small tool can make a big difference.

23. Stand on someone’s shoulders.
You can travel farther carried on the accomplishments of those who came before you. And the view is so much better.

24. Avoid software.
The problem with software is that everyone has it.

25. Don’t clean your desk.
You might find something in the morning that you can’t see tonight.

26. Don’t enter awards competitions.
Just don’t. It’s not good for you.

27. Read only left-hand pages.
Marshall McLuhan did this. By decreasing the amount of information, we leave room for what he called our "noodle."

28. Make new words.
Expand the lexicon. The new conditions demand a new way of thinking. The thinking demands new forms of expression. The expression generates new conditions.

29. Think with your mind.
Forget technology. Creativity is not device-dependent.

30. Organization = Liberty.
Real innovation in design, or any other field, happens in context. That context is usually some form of cooperatively managed enterprise. Frank Gehry, for instance, is only able to realize Bilbao because his studio can deliver it on budget. The myth of a split between "creatives" and "suits" is what Leonard Cohen calls a 'charming artifact of the past.'

31. Don’t borrow money.
Once again, Frank Gehry’s advice. By maintaining financial control, we maintain creative control. It’s not exactly rocket science, but it’s surprising how hard it is to maintain this discipline, and how many have failed.

32. Listen carefully.
Every collaborator who enters our orbit brings with him or her a world more strange and complex than any we could ever hope to imagine. By listening to the details and the subtlety of their needs, desires, or ambitions, we fold their world onto our own. Neither party will ever be the same.

33. Take field trips.
The bandwidth of the world is greater than that of your TV set, or the Internet, or even a totally immersive, interactive, dynamically rendered, object-oriented, real-time, computer graphic–simulated environment.

34. Make mistakes faster.
This isn’t my idea – I borrowed it. I think it belongs to Andy Grove.

35. Imitate.
Don’t be shy about it. Try to get as close as you can. You'll never get all the way, and the separation might be truly remarkable. We have only to look to Richard Hamilton and his version of Marcel Duchamp’s large glass to see how rich, discredited, and underused imitation is as a technique.

36. Scat.
When you forget the words, do what Ella did: make up something else ... but not words.

37. Break it, stretch it, bend it, crush it, crack it, fold it.

38. Explore the other edge.
Great liberty exists when we avoid trying to run with the technological pack. We can’t find the leading edge because it’s trampled underfoot. Try using old-tech equipment made obsolete by an economic cycle but still rich with potential.

39. Coffee breaks, cab rides, green rooms.
Real growth often happens outside of where we intend it to, in the interstitial spaces – what Dr. Seuss calls "the waiting place." Hans Ulrich Obrist once organized a science and art conference with all of the infrastructure of a conference – the parties, chats, lunches, airport arrivals – but with no actual conference. Apparently it was hugely successful and spawned many ongoing collaborations.

40. Avoid fields.
Jump fences. Disciplinary boundaries and regulatory regimes are attempts to control the wilding of creative life. They are often understandable efforts to order what are manifold, complex, evolutionary processes. Our job is to jump the fences and cross the fields.

41. Laugh.
People visiting the studio often comment on how much we laugh. Since I've become aware of this, I use it as a barometer of how comfortably we are expressing ourselves.

42. Remember.
Growth is only possible as a product of history. Without memory, innovation is merely novelty. History gives growth a direction. But a memory is never perfect. Every memory is a degraded or composite image of a previous moment or event. That’s what makes us aware of its quality as a past and not a present. It means that every memory is new, a partial construct different from its source, and, as such, a potential for growth itself.

43. Power to the people.
Play can only happen when people feel they have control over their lives. We can't be free agents if we’re not free.

Ref: Bruce Mau Design

Although the chances of two bombs being in the same place is lower than one bomb being in that place, does not mean that always carrying a bomb will reduce your chance of getting blown up.

-Understand the big picture number you are trying to achieve.
-Set low and high values for each quantifiable negotiation point.
-Develop likely and unlikely scenarios to reality check your assumptions.
-Re-prioritize negotiation points based on the scenarios.
-Total quantifiable points to see how they compare to the big picture.
-Make adjustments that will help you win in the aggregate, not just on a specific point.

Ref: Harvard Business Review

User requirements usually are just raw data that describes a symptom or a limited solution. Therefore they should be translated into need statements.

5 Guidelines for writing need statements:
1. "What" not "How" <= Translate the solutions to problems
2. Specificity <= Specify the problem
3. Positive not negative phrasing <= Conditions of satisfaction
4. An attribute of the product
5. Avoid "must" and "should" words

Next steps:
• Design some concepts and force them to prove its value
• Code the winner(s)

Executives who do all the talking are those who are deaf to the needs of others. Sadly, some managers feel that being the first and last person to speak is a sign of strength. In reality, though, it’s the opposite. Such behavior is closer to that of a blowhard who may be insecure in his own abilities, but is certain of one thing—his own brilliance. Such an attitude cuts off information at its source, from the very people—employees, customers, vendors—whom you should trust the most.

Ref: Harvard Business Review

When your work speaks for itself, don't interrupt.

- Henry J. Kaiser

1. Set an agenda, thus defining the objective.

Request a meeting agenda ahead of time, that outlines what the participants want to discuss and the best way of using the allocated time. Agendas need to have flexibility, and should act as a tool that force individuals to think about what they want to accomplish in meetings. The agenda helps all involved to focus on what they are trying to achieve and how best to reach that objective.

2. Assign a note-taker.

I'm a big believer in capturing an official set of notes, so inaccuracies and inconsistencies can be caught immediately. All those who attended, and those who missed the meetings receive a copy of the notes. When people are trying to remember what decisions were made, in what direction the team is going, and what actions need to be taken, they can simply review the notes.

3. Discourage politics, use the information at hand.

This idea can and should apply to meetings in organizations in which people feel as though the boss will use favoritism for the individual instead of embracing the idea. Use the Six Thinking Hats, or at least talk on the raw information you have. Don't mix in feelings, without letting people know that it is just feelings.

4. Stick to the clock.

To add a little pressure to keep meetings focused, get a timer on the wall, counting down the minutes left for a particular meeting or topic. Impose structure amidst creative chaos. The timer exerts a subtle pressure to keep meetings running on schedule.

A friend of mine once said that the entrepreneur is a person who, in order to avoid working eight hours a day, works sixteen hours a day.

Ref: "Thick Face, Black Heart" - Chin-Ning Chu

Imagine yourself in a room, there's a meeting, 8 other people are there and the boss is speaking in monologue, talking about everything from hard facts to gut feelings, taking in points from one or two of the others in the room as he/she sees it fit. Most people sit there and take in whatever is being said, and hence is agreeing to whatever the decisions of that meeting are. Recognize it?

Edward de Bono introduced in 1985, Six Thinking Hats, as a framework of thinking about things. A framework that works in meetings as well as your own thinking. Lets look at the hats.

Six distinct hats are identified:

Questions The White Hat - considering purely what information is available, what are the facts?
Emotions The Red Hat - instinctive gut reaction or statements of emotional feeling (but not any justification)
Bad points judgement The Black Hat - logic applied to identifying flaws or barriers, seeking mismatch
Good points The Yellow Hat - logic applied to identifying benefits, seeking harmony

- Creativity The Green Hat - statements of provocation and investigation, seeing where a thought goes
- Thinking The Blue Hat - thinking about thinking

Using the Thinking Hats in a meeting, has proven itself well worth the time it took to understand and explain them. It allowed me and others to stop the Boss's inconsistent monologue, and say: "Now take on the White Hat" (Hard facts with no prejudice) or "Take on the Red Hat for a minute" and get the gut feeling about the subject from all the people around the table.
Sometimes having too much information can interfere with the accuracy of a judgment, commonly called "Analysis paralysis." The challenge is to sift through and focus on only the most critical information to make a decision. It is a lot easier to give input on a subject, when you are forced to think about it in a certain manner, which the thinking hats facilitates to nicely.

Your mind is often your greatest tool, but as anyone who has been taken over by fear, frustration, or worry knows, it can also be your greatest enemy. Whether you're concerned about not having the respect of your peers or that a customer isn't calling you back because she's gone to a competitor, over-thinking the issue only serves to compound the worry. Instead, pretend you have what you want. Act as if your peers respect you or the customer is loyal. These may be fantasies, but what you're worrying about may be as well. It's better to stop the worry and act confidently; chances are better you'll get what you want.

Ref: Harvard Business Publishing

An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way.
An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.

- Charles Bukowski

Who are you trying to please?
What are you promising?
How much money are you trying to make?
How much freedom are you willing to trade for opportunity?
What are you trying to change?
What do you want people to say about you?
Which people?
Do we care about you?
(and after each answer, ask 'why?')

Ref: Seth Godin

Coach more, direct less
Good executives and managers inspire their staff to develop their confidence and skills so they can seize critical "big game" opportunities.

Celebrate passing
Break teams into smaller groups of three to six to increase the number of triangles where team members can pass ideas and responsibilities.

Everybody touches the ball
Find one or more key responsibilities for every player. Don't relegate team members to the corporate equivalent of football linemen who rarely touch the ball.

Teach overlapping skills
Create opportunities for team members to assume nontraditional roles and push forward initiatives. Invite techies to brainstorm big concepts and sketch out ideas and encourage those with less technical bent to access technology issues. Find out team members' unique passions and interests, and put them to work.

Less dribbling, more goals
Encourage the sharing of ideas and initiatives. Solo dribbling can give a project the critical first push, but then you need teamwork to bring a project home.

Ref: 10 faces of innovation by Tom Kelley

Five “discovery skills” separate true innovators from the rest of us.

The Innovator (1) talks with 10 people—including an engineer, a musician, a stay-at-home dad, and a designer—about the venture, (2) visits three innovative start-ups to observe what they do, (3) samples five “new to the market” products, (4) shows a prototype he’s built to five people, and (5) asks the questions “What if I tried this?” and “Why do you do that?” at least 10 times each day during these networking, observing, and experimenting activities.

Reference: Harvard Business Review

If I'd asked my customers what they wanted, they'd have said a faster horse.
-Henry Ford

You cannot only ask the right questions, you have to ask them the right way as well.

Reference: Wikiquote and somewhere in dialog.

If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn't thinking.

-General George S. Patton

What's the least we could do, that would have all the necessary functionality to be shipped. In software/web industry you can change your product every day. Don't make the developing list be set for the next year or two.
Rest assure, the requirements for what's needed will change as you go along. Figure out what the necessary features are, and filter out the nice-to-have's, build quicker and deploy.

Text: Smidig 2008 [no] Picture: Modern Art

It’s the journey between pages or screens, not the pages and screens themselves, that can cause the most problems for users. Plus - problems with the journey are the most expensive problems to fix.

Design the journey between states first, before designing the states.

Reference: 101 things I learned in interaction design school

Design depends largely on constraints. … Here is one of the few effective keys to the design problem—the ability of the designer to recognize as many of the constraints as possible—his willingness and enthusiasm for working within these constraints….

—Charles Eames

UX matters