Noise Between Stations

An Inconvenient Truth is Al Gore’s film about global warming. A friend of a friend who saw a preview said it blew her mind. Who Killed the Electric Car? investigates, murder mystery style, the birth, limited commercialization and subsequent death of the electric vehicle in the United states.

Since I’ll be teaching Business+Design at the Pratt Institute here in New York this Fall, I plan to check out the graduate show to get inside the heads of these bright young designers. The show is open to the public May 9-11. Inspired by graffiti, t1-12 by Victoria Haroian is a living room chair that [...]

[ this is a first draft of a chapter in Evolve, comments are appreciated ] Healthy organizations share information promiscuously to speed communication and generate tacit knowledge. Share current, important, non-urgent information using information radiators. In 1966 the New York Stock Exchange installed a huge electronic board that displayed the stock prices of every company [...]

Dr. Rudi Webster, a sports psychologist, is striving to improve the relationship between the West Indies cricket board and the players association prior to the 2007 Cricket World Cup to take place there. He’s advocating for a generative approach: …I feel that the time has come to use a new paradigm to resolve this problem. [...]

The recent Frontline documentary on China, The Tank Man, set a striking contrast of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests against the business and economic boom created since then. They describe this flow one to the other as an unspoken social contract between the government and the people: we’ll give you jobs and prosperity if you [...]

Jess and I thought it would be great to host an event where people could explore the intersection of business, innovation, and design in more depth than conferences allow. So along with some friends we created Overlap which will happen at the end of May. It’s small, non-profit, inexpensive, and centered on conversations. We’re hoping [...]

Since I’ve been thinking about tangible futures and why companies should envision the future (including car companies) I thought a visit to the Auto Show here in New York was worthwhile. The biggest surprise for me was the Toyota exhibit. While I love their process, I’m usually bored with their high quality but plain cars. [...]

In Good Poems Keillor suggests that what makes a poem good depends both on what one intends to use it for and who intends to use it. If one wants a poem for English majors to analyze in a seminar room, certain qualities are likely to be prized—complexity, density, ambivalence. But if one intends poems [...]

Tangible Futures, Part 3: Principles These are principles I’m using to develop tangible futures now… Tangible Futures are Inspirational, touching us both intellectually and emotionally. Pragmatic, optimistic in a realistic way. Innovative, they are a vision of something that is a mystery now because, by definition, we haven’t invented it yet. Strategic, describing something happening [...]

I’ve talked with several people who are heads of business units who have faced up to the what of the innovator’s dilemma but aren’t sure about the how. They have the determination to make difficult changes in how they serve their customers. They have P&L responsibility, but not necessarily a large scale budget that allows [...]

Tangible Futures, Part 2: The historical context The Wilson Quarterly’s Winter 2006 issue focuses on future studies and includes this historical review, Has Futurism Failed? In it the authors cite several practitioners hailing the importance of our images of the future. To me this could include our science fiction, our movies, and our political rhetoric, [...]

Sometime during the second half of the 20th century, American companies forgot how to dream. The social and political upheaval of the 1960′s and 1970′s may have squelched the raw optimism of previous decades, but this only made the need for inspiring visions even more important in the face of new, complex business environments. In [...]

Stewart Brand knew the power of this photograph before it was publicly released. In 1966, “…he sold buttons which read, ‘Why Haven’t We Seen A Photograph of the Whole Earth Yet?’ Legend has it that this accelerated NASA’s making good color photos of Earth from distant space during the Apollo program and that the ecology [...]

Leonardo Da Vinci possessed one of the greatest abilities to imagine the future potential for humans and work out these ideas as an engineer or designer would. It’s telling that we remember his drawings more readily than his words. Here is his pen and ink drawing of A Flying Machine from 1490…

Imagine it is the year 1900 and you own a large corporation needing offices in a major city. You want to construct a building that makes a grand statement of your financial strength and contributes to the civic infrastructure. Currently the highest buildings are about 20 stories, but you are told new construction techniques are [...]