I ummmed and ahhhhed quite a bit. I wasn’t sure. Finally, I came up with chopsticks. At first people were sceptical. They can be difficult to use, isn’t a fork better?

Here was my rational. Their simple, and yet extensible, when you become good at using them you can find them easy, it’s almost a badge of honour to be able to use them well. Their design hasn’t changed much in decades. They can tell you a lot about personality and traits (Cathy mentioned that in China there’s a belief that you must hold them at a certain position, too high means you’re too ambitious, too low means you’re not ambitions enough). For me they’re cool in their simplicity and watching someone eat with them can almost be artistic – or a train wreck.

Chopsticks also are a good analogy for decisions in design. Simple beats complex. Less complex lowers costs (in most cases), can make messaging and use much easier. From Twitter, to Google to the Mac, to the kindle, books, amazon.com, Spotify, to iTunes. From Uniqlo to the Gap, Hulu to the iPlayer, simple products with a focus on quality and execution can lead to success.

I’ve had an iPod touch for about a month and a half now and I’m about to buy a Mac.  Having had a Blackberry for over a year and a Windows mobile before that, and a Nokia for most of my adult mobile using life, I’ve tried all the different major handsets and I have to say the iPod is a killer computer. I use it to surf the web, tweet on twitter, play games, and write the occasional email – don’t get me wrong the bb wins hands down when you’re writing loads – and man do I enjoy using the Apple product.

Now I want a mac, especially since the WWDC and saw the new Macbook pros.  I’ve never been a mac fan boy.  But using the iPod really does open your eyes to how good Apple’s products are.

At first I wasn’t sure about Macs, they’re pretty expensive compared to entry level PCs, but there are a couple of things that really got me. The speed, iPods start up and launch apps like a bullet, and from what I hear the Macs work in the same fashion.  I started a three year old PC this weekend that acts as our music centre in the house and it took me nearly an hour to play a tune from Spotify.  Whereas everyone I know with a mac swears it takes minutes to get started with applications, even years after purchase.

The other is usability, no one should ever have to know anything about logs and other madness that comes with knowing how to trouble shoot a PC.   But at the same time finding Mac support can be difficult, but talking to my IT guy at work he’s much happier trouble shooting Macs then PCs, as he put it “The troubleshooting is less often and easier to fix”.

So while Apple’s continuing to make in roads using it’s iPod and iPhone mobile handsets, I think they’re really converting a lot of people to becoming Mac users.  So they can afford to launch lower price point models and iterate on the handset development while moving people from the PC to the Mac.

The key learning point here is entry into lower margin and other products should be done in a way where you can migrate and convert users to using more of your products at higher price points.

But how did we get here? How did we move from efficiency to inefficiency of scale? By getting to big too fast in the wrong areas in the wrong way. Too many organisations took too much public money, earned buckets of cash, spent said cash like it was in a burning house, hired too many people, without thinking efficiency.

How do you prevent such a thing from happening? I don’t know, I haven’t created a multi billion dollar organisation (yet, you never know, give me a couple of years). But I do think is that Umair Haque has it right on the Harvard Business Blog when he compared Obama’s campaign to the edge economy and innovation. What I’ve taken out of his post and my reflection on the post is that having a big hairy audacious goal is good – like Obama’s “Yes we can” and “Change the world”, but at the same time you have to keep your execution light, fluid and responsive, something that becomes difficult in a bloated, overstaffed, organisation.

Don’t get me wrong, I feel terrible for people who are being laid off, I have some friends around the world who are scared of losing their jobs, heck I’m scared of losing my job. But more then feeling terrible I’m a bit pissed off at the organisations who grew without a plan, who tried to get bigger, without focusing on getting better. In my opinion, they’re the real culprit behind this not the credit crisis and economic downturn.

But I won’t be switching from Firefox, my browser of choice, just yet. I’ve tried Chrome a lot over the last couple of days, and I like it. I’d probably put it on my mom’s computer. But for me it’s just not integrated enough. While I was using it I found myself opening up the same site I was browsing on Chrome on Firefox and adding sites and pages to my delicious account. I found myself using Firefox to update and read through my twitter pages. And then I found myself sticking around Firefox after doing these tasks.

Don’t get me wrong, I think Chrome’s got potential and I’ll keep using it off and on to see how it develops and if I’m on another computer that doesn’t have all my Firefox extensions but has Chrome, it would be a no-brainer, Chrome here I come. But 99.9% of the time Firefox is still going to be my browser of choice.

I can see Chrome taking market share from Internet Explorer (my prediction is IE get’s hit hardest), Firefox, Opera, Flock (yes people do use Opera and Flock). But this user is sticking with Firefox. For now.

At the same time I’m reading a lot about the credit crunch and how people are no longer spending as much as they used to how people are looking for a bargain and how places like Asda and Aldi here in the UK are gaining market share as users try to save more on their expenditure. That makes sense for every day goods that people need like bread and milk and other daily necessities, but it doesn’t hold true for the success of the iPhone 3G – which even Swisscom has run out of. If people are tightening their belts why are they spending on an iPhone?

Here’s my hunch, design is a powerful tool against downturns in the economy. When you spend a lot of attention to detail on design and build something that users want – and sure marketing and inventory controls probably have something to do with it – you’re likely to see off the headwinds and do okay. Building more features which ratchet up the price of a good isn’t a good strategy. Design is about making things simple and elegant, and during a downturn less is definitely more.