This blog post is not about software development. Or maybe it is. I will leave that up for you to decide.

On the flight home from Frankfurt last night I was reading D2, a magazine that comes out every Friday as part of the Norwegian newspaper Dagens Næringsliv. I haven’t read D2 before, but I was surprised by the quality of design and print as well as the great feature stories. Some of the quotes in the stories caught my attention and I want to share them with you.

The first feature story was about the perfume industry, and the increasing popularity of smaller, more exclusive and personalized niche perfumes. I’m not at all interested in perfume and cosmetics, but it was still fascinating to read about the movers and shakers of that industry. I want to share a quote from Francis Kurkdjian, one of the most famous perfumers in the world:

The problem with this industry is that there are too many people involved in the process. There are too much thinking and rationalizing, and too little passion.

- Francis Kurkdjian, famous perfumers.

The next quote is by Sissel Tolaas, taken from the same story:

Excellent perfumers have been forced to make a commercial soup. It came a point where they said; “this is boring, we can do better”.

- Sissel Tolaas, artist and perfumer

The next story was about Mario Batali; perhaps USA’s most famous chef. Mario owns 15 restaurants, and is in charge of 1800 employees. He has also written several books and appeared on multiple TV shows. Mario is a fascinating guy, with a great passion for his craft. The following quote is taken from his answer about whether his colleague education and specialization in Spanish classical theater is of any relevance to his profession:

All knowledge about the world around you makes you better suited to complete the task at hand. I could teach a fucking chimpanzee the manual work involved. But I cannot teach him to love it, day after day, thousand days in a row.

- Mario Baltali, most famous chef in the USA

The third story was about the Norwegian architects Geir Brendeland and Olav Kristoffersen, who became famous for creating the tallest building in Norway built using solid wood. They now run their own architecture office where wood as a building material is one of their specializations.

We are extremely interested in the field of architecture. Our goal was not to build up a large office; the goal was to learn the craft and create projects. To build.

- Geir Brendeland, architect

The distance between architects and craftsmen has gotten way too big.

- Olav Kristoffersen, architect

Last month I was lucky enough to attend and speak at the Smidig2009 (Agile 2009) conference in Oslo. This was my first time attending the conference, and I’m really impressed with the content, speakers, organizers and attendees. The format of the conference was four lightning talks per hour in three simultaneous tracks before lunch, and open spaces after lunch. The formatted worked out really well – and I got to see several inspiring and educational talks, as well as taking part in some interesting discussions in open spaces.

My talk was about UX prototyping as a natural part of an agile software project. This is something I have written about both on this blog, as well as the Capgemini technology blog. The talk covered UX prototyping as a technique and the benefits it gives you in an agile project, as well as showing two short demos of mockups in Balsamiq, and interactive prototypes in SketchFlow.

Thanks to Tandberg video recordings of the entire conference was made available almost instantly. The image blow takes you directly to my presentation. I have also uploaded the slide deck to Slide Share and embedded it into this post.