Anders Ruler
{summary}We recently completed an excellent crash course in service design with some guys from Livework, a great service design company in London & Oslo. Read abut it here.
During the course I was introduced to the concept of Ander’s Ruler, as explained by John Holager.
The basic idea is that on any project with a short time frame you can only achieve half of this ruler. You can do a good project with limited resources, as long as you don’t try complete the whole ruler.
- On the left is the question stage, where you have an area you want to explore or a question to answer.
- In the middle is the concept stage, where you’ve a variety of ideas and concepts to solve a problem.
- And on the right is the shiny stage, where you have a developed concept that works well and has a nice finish to it.
So, you can do a good project if you start out with a good question and develop it to a rough concept or prototype. Or you take take a concept or idea and develop it into a finished piece, but you can’t do both. Often, I was explained, people start with a question, develop the idea, and then try kill themselves in the last 2 days to make a polished piece. This can backfire because then people evaluate the project as a finished piece, and not as a prototype or concept, which is where 90% of the energy was focused.
Seems like a good way of thinking about things to me. Also, we’re about to start our mini-thesis shortly, with only 3 months to complete it, we’re definitely going to have to pick which portion of the ruler to focus on.
Thanks go to Anders Kjeseth Valdersned for the idea and John Holager for the drawing. 