epicentre or ripple software design

Niko led me to an article at 37signals about Epicenter Software Design:

"But, what’s the epicenter? It’s the events themselves. Without those you don’t have a calendar. You can have a calendar without color coding. You can have a calendar without alarms. You can have a calendar without dragging and dropping. You can have a calendar without displaying a mini calendar of the next three months. You can have a calendar without a lot of things. But you can’t have a calendar without being able to add events. That’s where you start."

I beg to differ to the specific example.

No event - calendar event, letter written, invoice added to the accounts stands alone - all are direct results of some other event.

And more, most of them will lead to more events.

For me these events are the ripples, the epicentre is far earlier.

I think that the true "epicentres" in most organisations are few and easy to see - like a potential customer calling or walking in the door.

When that happens stuff (things, objects, information) starts to flow, through event after event, nicely in a long thread (with loops and branches) all the way to a happy customer.

Those "first" events, that's where you start. Calendar events and word processing and transactions and procurement and everything else follows.

That of course is how the thingamy "thinks" :D

Comments

[peter]

Hi Sig,
I think the 37signals folks refer to GUI/interface design there: start with the most important part of the interface and add only what's really needed... (they usually start with the UI, then the functionality itself when developing, as far as I know..)

[sig]

Peter,
I completley agree, thing is I could not hold my horses when I saw the example ;)

I'm a sceptic to stand alone applications like word processors and calendars as you might have gleaned from other posts here... as if a meeting or a letter would have any value at all on it's own!

They're all a result of something, and so much software forgets that - to the detrimental effect of how organisations operate...

But hey, you know that :D

[Alex]

Hi Sigurd,

This is excellent and I think your "ripple design" applies to consumer websites as well, in addition to enterprise software. I would encourage you to write more about this!

See you at Reboot, I hope.

Cheers,
-Alex

[sig]

Hi Alex,

thanks, good idea to revisit - especially these days when consumer and enterprise systems are getting closer. Web 2.0 moving to Office 2.0 to Enterprise 2.0 - and not to forget social software in total.

And you're right, we should all check out what we tinkered with earlier and revisit - never knows what that could lead to :)

And definitely, Reboot is always on my calendar!