Sketch Pad is a cool New York Times column that asks architects or designers to create a vision of what an apartment, house, loft or shack now for sale might look like in order to “help real estate shoppers learn to see past ugly paint, too-small kitchens and a warren of rooms.”
In one of the columns, Updating the Trundle Bed, architects Yen Ha and Michi Yanagishita of Front Studio give an imaginative makeover to a tiny, 380-square-foot studio. It’s a great case study that shows how embracing constraints can lead to creative solutions.
The big-picture goal was to get rid of clutter and give the idea of separation without actually closing off rooms. The top initial question: Where to put the bed? The solution: Raise the end of the living room about 18 inches, and slide the bed under it. This narrated slideshow explains the thinking behind the design (and lets you see the images without the gray bar in the middle).
Other similar hideaway solutions followed. The office and the kitchen are enclosed by translucent panels which don’t close them off the way walls would: “In a solution like a Rubik’s Cube, the corners can swing outward, opening the kitchen and the office to the living area. Make dinner or type a letter, then shut off the area for the rest of the evening.”
The idea for hiding the bed came to the architects during a trip to a Korean restaurant…
“In Asia, lots of things have double uses,” said Ms. Ha, who was born in Vietnam…
“We were frustrated thinking of all these different solutions, and we got hungry,” Ms. Yanagishita said. “We went to have Korean food in a restaurant on 32nd Street. We were eating kimchi — pickled cabbage — and we noticed the raised platform we were sitting on.
“Then all the little pieces came together like a Japanese puzzle box: things slide out, things fold in, things tuck away. It is clean, we hope, without any fussiness.”
Almost two months ago, I decided that I wanted to try working standing up, rather than sitting down. When sitting in my comfortable, reclining office chair, my posture was terrible, my attention span was narrowing rapidly, and I was constantly battling fatigue. After looking around online a bit, it sounded like standing was the way to go.
So I propped my keyboard and mouse up on a few encyclopedias and gave it a go. The first week was rough on my feet and legs, which ached constantly. I kept a bar stool handy for resting periodically on, but I really tried to stand at least 80% of the time. After that first week, though, things improved rapidly.
My attention span improved, too. I noticed an immediate increase in my ability to focus on a problem for longer, and with greater clarity. When I was blocked by some problem, I was able to just walk away from the desk, whereas before the effort of getting up from my chair often made me prefer to just sit and stew in my frustration.
So now, nearly two months later, I am able to replace my book-stack keyboard platform with a real stand-up desk, and I love it. When I was shopping around for a new desk, I quickly realized that I didn’t want stainless steel or plastic. I wanted wood, being the xylophile that I am. And of all the places that sold wooden stand-up desks, Standupdesks.com (the web outlet for Amish Country Furniture Sales) was the most compelling. I purchased a 4-foot-wide variant of this computer desk, and am very pleased with it so far (it just arrived yesterday). The workmanship is top-notch, and I love its simple elegance.
We’ll be posting something about design for the home (or architecture) every day this week.
Hansen Living offers a minimalist, natural approach to kitchens that’s worth a look. Apartment Therapy took a luck at the company’s interesting approach: 1. They get ideas by asking pro chefs what they hate about consumer kitchens and then doing the opposite. 2. They try to limit space intentionally so people don’t fill it up with things they don’t need. 3. When clients ask for more, they tell them to wait 6 months and see if the need is still there (it rarely is).
Knud explained that when he embarked on designing Hansen’s product line, he asked some of the best chefs in Copenhagen what made them ‘laugh at the typical consumer kitchen.’ Then he did the opposite. The result is a collection of free-standing units with no overhead cabinets, but rather drawers below counters. Each drawer is lined with a metal perforated bottom to allow air circulation. The base pieces are raised on legs to allow access for cleaning the entire kitchen floor.
The chefs and Knud agree that overhead cabinets decrease the use of available counter space, increase the chances of hitting one’s head while chopping vegetables, and make any space look smaller. They also agree not to “give people too much space” or they might try to fill it with things they don’t need. In fact, Knud told me, if clients, ask for more cabinets once the kitchen is delivered, he encourages them to think about it for 6 more months and if they still feel a lack of space, they can call him and he’ll concede. According to Knud, they never call.
“We draw inspiration from what’s happening in digital media at large, regardless of whether or not a news organization is explicitly involved, and often regardless of whether a given digital product deals in the news at all. That means that sites of miscellaneous classification like YouTube, Wikipedia, Craigslist and Facebook — and countless others, many of which might have only recently emerged from their founders’ garages — are of as much interest to us as top-shelf competitors like The Guardian and our other peers.”
“Remember that whatever you pay attention to grows in your mind. If you focus on what’s going wrong in your life—especially if you see it as ‘bad luck’ you can do nothing about—it will seem blacker and more malevolent. In a short time, you’ll become so convinced that everything is against you that you’ll notice more and more instances where this appears to be true. As a result, you will almost certainly stop trying, convinced that nothing you can do will improve your prospects.”
“Another thing you notice when you see animals in the wild is that each species thrives in groups of a certain size. A herd of impalas might have 100 adults; baboons maybe 20; lions rarely 10. Humans also seem designed to work in groups, and what I’ve read about hunter-gatherers accords with research on organizations and my own experience to suggest roughly what the ideal size is: groups of 8 work well; by 20 they’re getting hard to manage; and a group of 50 is really unwieldy.” [tx Sean]
“[One of Apple’s latest patents] would clearly indicate that there’s a store front involved here in order for a user to know that it’s a sunny day in the fall in this virtual world. Something a little outside of the box I’d say and definitely far beyond anything known by any of us shopping at the Apple Store today.”
Startups can bring new ideas to market. They can give people a chance to change the world on their own terms. They can create something where nothing existed before. There is no doubt that they are exciting things to be a part of.
But, as much as the tech world tries to treat them as special, we don’t believe startups are special. They aren’t born out of big bang moments where the laws that govern other businesses don’t apply.
From the moment they go live, startups are as real as any other business. They are governed by the same set of market forces and economic precepts that wrap around every other company, new or old.
At the atomic level, all businesses need to generate revenue to pay their bills, grow their business, and stay in business. The sooner they find themselves in the black, the better chance they’ll have to survive. Call it a business survival instinct — businesses have to feed themselves or they’ll die.
Suggesting startups — specifically tech startups — don’t need to look for revenue opportunities now is akin to spoiling a child and shielding them from the outside world: They’re far less prepared when they eventually have to leave the house for the first time.
A poorly run startup is a poorly run business. A wonderfully run startup is a wonderfully run business. I don’t believe there are many great startups that are bad businesses. Maybe less than 1%. If the business is bad the startup is bad. A great idea, maybe, but a great business, no.
So if you start something up, start a business, don’t start a startup.
The stereotypical startup dream hire is a 20-something with as little life as possible outside of computers. The one that’ll be happy working 14-hour crunch days for weeks on end sprinting for an ever-shifting target that keeps being 90% done for 90% of the time. The one you can make sleep under the table or please with a foosball table in the center of the room. The one where the company paying for dinner pizza is “awesome”.
I should know. I used to be that gullible and even take an odd pride in being up to the job. But it didn’t take long to catch on to the idea that packing a room full of these people was merely a crutch for shoddy management, lousy execution, and myths like “this is the only way we can compete against the big guys”. And you certainly need the latter if you’re trying to give turds wings, but how about just not trying to make crap fly in the first place?
That’s why I like working with the family man or woman. They come in as a cold bath of reality. When people have other obligations outside of work that they actually care more about than your probably-not-so-world-changing idea, the crutches are not available as an easy way out, and you’ll have to walk by the power of your good ideas and execution or you’ll fall fast and early. That’s a good thing!
From the experience I’ve had working with family people, I’ve found an amazing ability to get stuff done when the objectives are reasonably clear, the work appears to have meaning, and if it can be done within the scope of what should constitute a work week. When there are real constraints on your time, like you have to pickup the kids or make them dinner or put them to bed, it appears to bring a serenity of focus to the specific hours dedicated to work.
This is what companies need, startups or not. They need constraints and especially constraints on how often you can play the hero card to Get This Very Important Project Done. Most projects are just not that important and most things just shouldn’t be done anyway, despite how good of an idea you feel it is in the heat of the moment.
Update: Removed potential confusion around labor discrimination.
When you’ve got a small group, you don’t need to constantly formalize things. You communicate and you know what’s going on. If you have a question about something, you ask someone. Formalized rules, deadlines, and documents start to seem silly. Everyone’s already on the same page anyway.
Ten-groups
According to British author Antony Jay, there are centuries of evidence to support the idea that small groups are the most efficient. In “The Corporation Man,” he talks about how humans have worked in small groups, usually five to fifteen people, as hunters and farmers for hundreds of generations. The ideal group size is a ten-group:
He found the most efficient to be organised in groups of eight to fourteen people which he came to call ‘ten-groups’, each group free to find its own way towards a target set for it within the general objects of the corporation…
“The basic unit is [a group] which varies from three to twelve or fifteen in number, and perhaps optimizes somewhere around ten; that this group is bound together by a common objective, and that the bond of trust and loyalty thus formed can become an extremely powerful uniting force; that the group needs to decide on (or at least take part in deciding on) its own objective, and to work out for itself how that objective shall be achieved…”
He offers up interesting examples to back up the theory, from sports teams to juries to army squads:
Jay draws attention to units of around this size in many fields beyond the corporation. A committee works best with about ten members; if it grows much beyond that size the extra people do not take a fully active part. Nearly all team games use a group of about ten on each side. Juries have 12 members and the Jewish minyan 10. In an army, organization often decides life and death, and under this pressure armies, too, adopt a basic unit of about ten; the British army, the US army, the ancient Roman army and that of Genghiz Khan, in fact every long-standing successful army, has built up its larger formations from squads or sections of about this size.
That mention of the Roman army takes us back some two thousand years, and Jay traces the ten-group back still farther, back to the foraging communities. The ten-group, found today as a structural unit in successful corporations began, he argues, as the male hunting-group of pre-agricultural times, still with us and still functional.
So now, nearly two months later, I am able to replace my book-stack keyboard platform with a real stand-up desk, and I love it. When I was shopping around for a new desk, I quickly realized that I didn’t want stainless steel or plastic. I wanted wood, being the 
