I was thinking about my post from the other day, Learning from Nature, which discussed the need for us as a society to implement deep changes in how we think in order to properly deal with our environmental situation. In particular, the Janine Benyus quote (”People mimic form and shape, which can be very powerful, but that’s just the beginning - the next level is mimicking process.”). This is, outside of any environmental issues, a powerful idea on its own, which can be applied to plenty of other fields.

If you are a company who makes MP3 players, one short-term solution would be to copy features from the iPod. The long-term solution would be to copy Apple’s design processes and culture. Much more difficult to do, and takes more time, but could pay dividends in the long term.

One of Apple’s key strengths is identifying classes of devices where usability and design is poor, and rethinking them. We saw this many years ago with personal computers, and we’ve seen it recently with music players and cell phones. Apple applied their user-centric, iterative design, rapid prototyping, opinion and common-sense perfectionism to all of these devices and struck gold each time. The majority of customers didn’t seem to realize that their cell-phones/music players/PC’s were badly designed until Apple came along and raised the bar.

That isn’t to say that Apple’s success can be reduced to a formula, but their design and marketing processes have been successful, so why not emulate at least some of them?

Direct copying of features is seen as somewhat immoral, but the same stigma is not affixed to copying processes.