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Open publication - Free publishing - More creativity

Nokia Vine Experiment

I was using the new Nokia Vine and is very interesting. This is my experiment that has photos for some urbansculptures in Mexico City, which are part of the "ruta de la amistad" built for the 1968 Olympic Games

http://vine.nokia.com/#/vid=1026607&cc=&mid=&lc=&page=home

T-Mobile G1 (or whatever it's called) takes in some fresh air

Why wait for next Tuesday's grand unveiling? Well, the short answer is that most of us have no other option -- but a small handful of exceptionally lucky individuals are getting their Android on just a little early. This particular example of the G1 (or Dream, Nightmare, Slumber, whatever the hell it's going to end up being called) allegedly hails from a Google staffer, looking a little less... shall we say, "controversial" than other shots have made it out to be. Yeah, we're jealous, we admit. Anyone want to give theirs up for a few hours?

[Via Talk Android]

Design thinking in the New York Times

vía metacool de Diego Rodriguez el 5/10/08

The New York times ran a great article yesterday called "Design is more than packaging". Of course, if you're part of the metacool community, you already know that. But it is great to see this meme getting out there and sticking. I'm very happy to see that the article was published in the Business section. Cool!

Among others, the article mentions IDEO, my employer, and the Stanford d.school, my other employer.

A couple of quotes.

Tim Brown:

Design thinking is inherently about creating new choices, about divergence. Most business processes are about making choices from a set of existing alternatives. Clearly, if all your competition is doing the same, then differentiation is tough. In order to innovate, we have to have new alternatives and new solutions to problems, and that is what design can do.

George Kembel:

It would be overreaching to say that design thinking solves everything. That’s putting it too high on a pedestal. Business thinking plus design thinking ends up being far more powerful.

Well put, gentlemen!

Innovation Universities Are Hot--Rotman, Ziba, IDEO, Continuum, Stanford, Institute of Design.

vía BusinessWeek Online - NussbaumOnDesign de bruce_nussbaum el 28/09/08

I just got off the phone with Roger Martin, dean of the Rotman School of Management at the U of Toronto, who told me that corporations are flocking to his institution to learn integrative thinking (design thinking). I've heard the same thing from innovation consultancies who are setting up their own "universities" to teach design thinking to corporate managers.

The latest is Ziba U that founder Sohrab Vossoughi is establishing. IDEO and Continuum have long been teaching institutions and now demand for their brand of experiential learning is soaring. Consultancies have developed a new form of teaching--workshops, not classrooms, conversations not lectures, interaction not passive listening. It's a new form of educational IP (well, experiential learning has been around a bit but new to the business world) that B-Schools should check out. IDEO even has a new experimental lab.

Social innovation is also building informal universities to teach people the creative skills of using market forces at the bottom of the pyramid. Acumen Fund is starting Acumen U to do just that. And PopTech is offering a three day workshop of social innovation "bootcamp" to people.

This is good news. Even in the face of very deep recession and loss of revenue, companies and civic organizations. are investing in building their creativity cultures. They aren't cutting back. Which is a great sign that coming out of the recession, there will be companies prepared to win.

Kenchikukagu: Apartment Folds Out of a Box (Well, 3 Boxes)

vía TreeHugger el 23/09/08

How cool is this? A kitchen, an office and a bedroom that fold out of these lovely cabinets, designed by Toshihiko Suzuki Architect. ..

Steve Jobs @ Stanford

Ithaa: An UnderSea Restaurant

Ithaa, positioned five metres (15 feet) below sea level is the world’s leading undersea restaurant enclosed by a coral reef, at the Conrad Maldives Rangali Island in Rangalifinolhu, Maldives. Synonymous to Pearl in Dhivehi, the restaurant is sheathed in R-Cast acrylic, which is a translucent acrylic roof providing 270° panoramic view to its patrons. Served with a Maldavian-Western Fusion menu with a price range varying from $120-$250, counted 14 people can dine in one go.

Designed and developed by a New Zealand-based design consultancy company M.J. Murphy Ltd, this $5 million restaurant was constructed in Singapore and was later shipped to the island on a colossal barge outfitted with a massive derrick to enable it dive in the sea. The thrilling experience starts right on the way as the unique wooden walkway directs you to reach the welcoming door of restaurant. Carsten Schieck, the GM commented on the usage of aquarium technology that serves diner face-to-face with the spectacular submarine surroundings of the Maldives.

Via Elite Choice

The Need for Sleep

ZOMG! No Android phones till Q4 2008... right on schedule!

There's a lot of hoopla today over a Wall Street Journal piece stating that Google's first Android device has been pushed back to late 2008 for release -- yet the article fails to mention that this is right inline with what Google has been saying for quite awhile now. Admittedly, the fresh-faced mobile competitor probably is finding itself somewhat mired in carrier demands, which doesn't seem unexpected given the broad swath of partners it's collaborating with and the open source nature of the project, but as phone release schedules go, it hasn't veered off the path much. The breakdown is something like this: from what we've been told, you can expect an Android-powered handset before the new year (i.e., HTC's Dream driven by Google's OS), followed by a crop of higher profile phones showing up in early 2009 (as previously stated by companies like LG and Samsung). So... feel free to switch off the alarms anytime you like.

[Via GigaOM]

IDEO'S TIM BROWN ON HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW

The fact that the Harvard Business Review asked IDEO's CEO Tim Brown to write about Design Thinking in the current issue is as important as what he had to say in the piece. It marks the acceptance and legitimization of design/innovation as an important business process and strategic tool for managers.

HBR was behind for a time in covering innovation and design but it is running some very interesting pieces now and Brown's article brings it up to date/a>. I think that lag reflects the reluctance of business schools to embrace design thinking and innovation process. This is now changing, but slowly. Harvard Business School is making efforts to incorporate innovation, but in the end, we are talking about a sharp paradigm change embodied in curricula and teaching, and that is happening in only one B-School that I can think of--the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto run by Dean Roger Martin.

Brown's HBR piece is an excellent primer. He begins by showing how

Design Thinking is a formalization of the methodology used by none other than Thomas Edison who not only invented the lightbulb but envisioned and built a whole electric industry (we'd call that an ecosystem today) devoted to meeting the unmet needs of consumers (needs they couldn't yet visualize). He used a team-based approach to innovation in his famous lab, iterated famously (his "99% perspiration" comment), failed often and learned from his mistakes.

The HBR piece has great stories on medical service innovation at Kaiser and the Aravind Eye Care System in India. There's another on the Keep The Change program at Bank of America.

At the end of the article are two short takes. One is A Design Thinker's Personality Profile (Empathy, Integrative Thinking, Optimism, Experimentalism, Collaboration). The other is How to Make Design Thinking Part of the Innovation Process (check out the piece).

I also like Brown's definition of design thinking--"it is a discipline that uses the designer's sensibility and methods to match people's needs with what is technologically feasible and what a viable business strategy can convert into customer value and market opportunity."

Does that work for you?

vía BusinessWeek Online - NussbaumOnDesign de bruce_nussbaum el 25/06/08

Micro-Interactions: Making The Experience Portable

Update: Coverage on our panel in Ad Age (Digital Next)
Last week I went to a local gathering in Chicago where people in the industry were meeting informally over a few drinks. It's the typical scenerio that we keep seeing more of—most people had been meeting for the first time even though they had heard of each other from some type of social network or another such as Twitter.

Mike, an Apple employee was one of the first to greet me—and he extended a simple gesture. As he introduced himself he held up his iPhone which was displaying a digital name tag generated on the Web that he had just personalized moments ago. Within minutes, nearly half of the attendees of this small gathering were doing the same. it had gone "viral" so to speak—each person found our where they could customize their own "badge" and some were even adding "@" symbols so that their "Twitter friends" could recognize who they were.

And this I thought was a simple but relevant example of how we are having "micro-interactions" in ways that we we can take with us.

Today I'm moderating a panel on this very topic with Steve Rubel, Ian Shafer, Matt Dickman, Stephanie Agresta, And David Malouf. It should be a lot of fun as we'll be discussing how indivisuals and brands are making content and functionality "micro" and designing it "to-go". And of course a conference like this had to have both an iPhone and a Widget version (below). If you are going to the event, hope to see you there.

Source: http://darmano.typepad.com/

Brand Interactions Are the Future: But Are Interaction Designers Part of Your Agency?

"Call them information architects, experience designers or Jack or Jane -- they are the design geeks who love to sweat the details. They care about "micro-interactions" and toil away at the building blocks of what actually results in a "lovemark" in the end. We love to use applications that help us do things like plan vacations, find old friends and share our passions with the world. The ad industry has made a big mistake in the past by thinking technology was for geeks. Technology, in fact, is a love affair."

Read The Full Article at Advertising Age (Digital Next)

Design Thinking to Finance Skyscapers

In her comment to my post on the recent HBR article on design thinking, my friend HK writes, “What the article is missing is some concrete examples — what do designers do at strategic phases of projects, when the problems they’re solving aren’t explicit design problems?” She goes on to describe three of her own examples.

I suspect it’s both very hard and very easy to show examples. Very hard because applying creativity to what are normally analytical activities is a design problem in itself. I’ve found that inventing even rudimentary tools is hard. It’s reinventing how we’ve done business for hundreds of years, and it’s going to take years to build a more creative practice as reliable as our current methods.

But finding examples of design thinking applied to business problems is also easy, there are examples all around us. Financial deals can be quite complex and structuring one requires creativity. I was reminded of this last night while reading Adam Gopnik’s Through the Children’s Gate, stories about living in New York. In one scene he tours midtown Manhattan with a property tycoon…

It was a cold, crisp fall day, and as we looked at all the great glass skyscrapers of Park Avenue — the Seagram Building and Lever House and the Citicorp Center — he unraveled for me the complicated secrets of their financing and construction: how this one depended on a federal bond, and this one on a legendary thirteen-year lease with a balloon payment, and this one on the unreal (and unprofitable) munificence of a single liquor baron and his daughter…

We can imagine the sort of creativity needed to solve a problem like financing a building costing hundreds of millions of dollars involving several parties, credit instruments, commitments over time, tax structure, and so on. I’d like to know if anyone in finance is studying these deals as creative activities to help us understand how to design them better (and if traditional designers will be interested in this sort of design!).

vía Noise Between Stations

Google Health--Who Can You Trust With Your Medical Records?

BusinessWeek Online - NussbaumOnDesign de bruce_nussbaum el 20/05/08

I've been looking at the new Google Health site. It can organize all your health records and link you up to other people with your own medical problems.

So the question is how much do you trust Google and other folks to protect your medical privacy? Or do you even care about medical privacy?

Privacy is one of those big issues that cleave the GenXers and Boomers right down the middle. Over 50=worried about privacy. Under 30=not worried about privacy. Yes, of course, with caveats and all. But members on our Innovation & Design team who are in their 20s put stuff up on their Facebook page that I would never reveal. It's just culture.

And maybe that's it. Culture. But maybe it's more than culture. Insurance companies still restrict coverage to people who have genetic dispositions to certain diseases. Lots of men and women hesitate to marry and have children with people who have genetic dispositions to certain diseases. And we're talking about a 3%-5% higher risk, nothing major.

Over at BuzzMachine, Jeff Jarvis has joined Google Health and revealed his atrial fib. Jeff is talking to others with this condition and finding good information and support.

So....Google Health? Not for me yet. You?

PARC Develops Low-Energy, Membrane-Free Water Filtration Technology

Leave it to the brainiacs at the renowned Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) to devise a water filter that manages to do away with two of the technology's most vexing problems: a high energy requirement and the need to constantly replace used up membranes. Their device, called a spiral concentrator, is a 50 cm long, 1 mm in diameter piece of plastic tubing that separates particles as small as 1 micron in size by centrifugal force, reports Technology Review's Lee Bruno. Those particles are in turn moved out of the ...

Green Roofs for Healthy Cities Awards 2008

California Academy of Sciences green roof

Green Roofs for Healthy Cities has just announced the Awards for Excellence 2008 honoring projects that exemplify the aesthetic and environmental benefits of green roofs and living walls. The winning installations are a showcase of innovation and awareness-raising ideas that standout among the growing field of building integrated green space. Honorees were recognized for several important aspects including design, research and policy development in seven award categories. The distinguished designs among this year’s winners are engaging examples that successfully deploy economic, ecological, aesthetic and functional considerations in gorgeous green form.

(more…)

MIT reinvents the Post-It note... with Post-It notes

We've seen countless attempts to re-invent the Post-It note, but no one's ever really managed to improve on the basic design -- which might be why MIT's "Quickies" concept doesn't even try. The electronic note system is instead based around a digital pen and special pad, which saves your notes as you jot them down on RFID-embedded Post-Its. Software on your PC then does some quick OCR and, according to the inventors, "uses its understanding of the user's intentions, content, and the context of the notes to provide the user with reminders, alerts, messages, and just-in-time information." Since the database can also store location information, sticking the note on a book or other object allows you to locate it later using the RFID tag, and you can even have notes SMS'd to their recipients. Pretty wild -- but we're more impressed someone finally found a good use for all those digital pens out there. Check a video of the system in action after the break.

Continue reading MIT reinvents the Post-It note... with Post-It notes

Foster + Partners’ New Green Complex for Singapore

A new green complex from world renowned architecture firm Foster + Partners will be adding more than a dash of green to the Singapore skyline. As sustainability becomes an essential ingredient to development in this island nation, the UK-based firm is leaving no stone unturned to make good use of alternative energy sources in this 150,000 square meter mixed-use project. As the winning design from an international competition, Singapore’s new eco-complex from Foster + Partners is pushing the green envelope from top to bottom in this sophisticated downtown design.

(more…)

EvolutiV by Olgga Architectes

The 70 square meter Maison evolutiV was shown at the Salon Européen du bois et de l'Habitat Durable in April. It looks like a few container projects we have seen but is made from wood. (that is the point of the Salon) It was designed by olgga architectes. ...

vía TreeHugger