April 2005
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User-centered automobile
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1 min read
This year’s Rinspeed concept car — the Senso — takes user-centered to the next level… The “Senso”, which runs on environmentally friendly natural gas, has, not without reason, been labeled the most sensuous car in the world. The “Senso” actually “senses” the driver by measuring his (or her) biometric data, and then exerts a positive…
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Farm Style
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1 min read
WNYC’s Studio 360 on graffiti barns and beautiful orange tractors. Farmers like to be sexy too.
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Conley’s new kind of professional
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1 min read
Chris Conley’s A New Kind of Professional declares There is a need for professionals skilled in navigating innovative work No specific professional discipline owns this space There is a lack of professionals who do this well In my mind I see a castle surrounded by a moat. On each side are designers, engineers and business…
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Strengthen your right brain
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2 min read
In the April issue of Scientific American Mind, Ulrich Kraft’s Unleashing Creativity ($*) investigates the physical and behavioral evidence for our creativity, still of course a mostly mysterious thing. One fascinating finding is how the left brain’s convergent thinking can inhibit the right brain’s divergent thinking. The neurologist Bruce Miller studied patients with dementia that…
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Environment alters DNA
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1 min read
WSJ reports ($) that the effect of a gene depends on the environment it’s exposed to. Several studies have shown, for example, that water-fleas will only grow hard-skull defenses if they are in waters with fish, that oak-tree caterpillars grow to resemble the food they eat, and that men with the “violence gene” only act…
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Bruce Nussbaum, design thinking champion
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1 min read
Bruce Nussbaum, editorial page editor for BusinessWeek, continues his crusade to spread the good word of design thinking to the business community. In The Empathy Economy he quotes GE Healthcare Technologies (GE ) CEO Joseph M. Hogan as saying, Today, when we think about designing, say, a new MRI system, we don’t just think about…
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Avoiding toxic co-workers
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2 min read
Diego has two worthwhile posts on avoiding assholes at work, using Richard Branson’s reality show as an example: Sir Branson took an innovative approach to the asshole problem by donning Scooby-Doo-ish makeup and mask before picking up would-be contestants from the airport in a London taxi cab. Disguised as an arthritic old cabbie, Branson was…
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Linking to the New York Times website
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1 min read
I just discovered two techniques for increasing your online enjoyment of the lovely New York Times: From blogs, links can lead behind the pay wall by creating a weblog-safe link (thanks Jason) If you live here and have a library card, you can access the newspaper’s archives back to 2000 — as well as the…
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Same product, new attitude
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1 min read
Irreverent online outfitter Moosejaw Mountaineering‘s homepage currently reads: “The person who wrote this text just started at Moosejaw. He is not funny. But we’ve got softball season coming up and he’s a ringer.” NYT Magazine says, This is not your standard outdoor-brand message, which tends to go something like this: Our stuff is strictly for…
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Design is to design a design to produce a design.
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1 min read
I was at Brand Experience Lab last week and David Polinchock was describing how he talks to clients about the potential of cutting edge interaction design hardware. He quoted someone else who pointed out that our children could have access to 3D printers and so, just before leaving to live away at university, they’ll print…
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The new posters
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1 min read
A bit of fun for Monday morning: AMPs – Alternative Motivational Posters, office art for the other side of your brain. I like Focus
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Premature optimization
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1 min read
“Premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming.” — Donald Knuth I think you can replace the word programming with the word design and that would still be true.
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Programming language design
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2 min read
For some reason I’m fascinated by programming language design. One reason is that innovation can happen at the tools level, and the tools that fuel software are undeniably important. In the hands of a great author, writing on this topic weaves together the technical, the social and the personal forces at work. One of my…
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Reflexivity of the dollar
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1 min read
James Surowiecki elegantly encapsulates yet another economic trend, this time it’s the falling-yet-floating dollar. Essentially the dollar is falling because Americans don’t save and keep spending, accumulating incredible debt, and the dollar is not crashing because Americans keep buying… from Asia, who is interested in buying lots of dollars to prop up our currency and…
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Creativity, logic and hindsight
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1 min read
Edward de Bono on the interaction between creativity and logic: …every valuable, creative idea will always be logical in hindsight. If an idea were not logical in hindsight, then we would never be able to appreciate the value of the idea. The idea would remain valueless. So we are only able to appreciate those creative…