"the performance of light on objects" – Ridley Scott discusses (and shows) the art of storyboarding in planning a film. http://t.co/vnzYIee8

"When it was suggested, on an uncommonly busy day, that I could be absolved of my regular visit to the market, because a friend was on her way there and could pick up what I needed, I would have been mad to decline the help. But I did decline it, and I was not mad. The outcome would have been the same: the food would have made it to my table. But I am interested in more than outcomes. I am wary of finding myself in the middle of an existence too busy, too arrogantly busy, for elementary things. I inhabit a universe in which busyness is a measurement of importance, but really what is taking place is an exchange of one variety of importance for another. It is often a bad bargain."

“How do we observe the future?” So began the presentation of Duane Bray, partner and head of IDEO’s global digital business, at our Mashable Connect conference in Orlando, Fla., last weekend.

Bray says he’s no futurologist, but he did point to some signs — namely, current human behaviors — that can help us understand what the future might look like.

This is an unfair characterization of TED talks http://t.co/Y1yrtqj5

For geophysical scientists, though, Mt. Pinatubo provided the best model in at least a century to help us understand what might happen if humans attempted to ameliorate global warming by deliberately altering the climate of the earth.

For years, even to entertain the possibility of human intervention on such a scale—geoengineering, as the practice is known—has been denounced as hubris. Predicting long-term climatic behavior by using computer models has proved difficult, and the notion of fiddling with the planet’s climate based on the results generated by those models worries even scientists who are fully engaged in the research. “There will be no easy victories, but at some point we are going to have to take the facts seriously,’’ David Keith, a professor of engineering and public policy at Harvard and one of geoengineering’s most thoughtful supporters, told me. “Nonetheless,’’ he added, “it is hyperbolic to say this, but no less true: when you start to reflect light away from the planet, you can easily imagine a chain of events that would extinguish life on earth.”

A task force of business, government and academic leaders set out to confront obstacles that keep women from participating fully in the economy. Here are their recommendations.

But too much of the debate is still around financial valuation, as opposed to the underlying intrinsic value of the best of Silicon Valley's new companies. My own theory is that we are in the middle of a dramatic and broad technological and economic shift in which software companies are poised to take over large swathes of the economy.

More and more major businesses and industries are being run on software and delivered as online services—from movies to agriculture to national defense. Many of the winners are Silicon Valley-style entrepreneurial technology companies that are invading and overturning established industry structures. Over the next 10 years, I expect many more industries to be disrupted by software, with new world-beating Silicon Valley companies doing the disruption in more cases than not.
[SOFTWARE2] QuickHoney

Why is this happening now?

So the growth of sociable robotics is one thing that changed my mind. People are so vulnerable and so willing to accept substitutes for human companionship in very intimate ways. I hadn’t seen that coming, and it really concerns me that we’re willing to give up something that I think defines our humanness: our ability to empathize and be with each other and talk to each other and understand each other. And I report to you with great sadness that the more I continued to interview people about this, the more I realized the extent to which people are willing to put machines in this role. People feel that they are not being heard, that no one is listening. They have a fantasy that finally, in a machine, they will have a nonjudgmental companion.

Does this also point to emerging disruption in #workplace design and build-out?

...Cities are more than the sum of their parts because it’s not their parts that make them great. It’s the thing in between those parts — if you live in a city, you know what I’m talking about. “Cities built from scratch have generally failed because they don’t become cities that people evolve through,” says Shepard. “Quite often, it’s the productive friction these places produce that make them dynamic.” Not that life in PlanIT Valley couldn’t end up being dynamic despite itself. “The funny thing about these cities programmed for efficiency, you find a lot of conversations about how to design serendipity back into them to make them more interesting,” says Usman Haque, founder of Pachube, an open Web service that manages real-time data.

You can rediscover a life of harmonious passion by intentionally changing your behavior and by replacing harmful thought patterns with helpful ones. To help you with this process, I've disclosed the thoughts I most commonly see coursing through people's minds when they feel stuck in a state of obsessive passion and offered suggestions on how to modify them.

The competition outcome might also tell us that designers have reason to be encouraged. With only 15 minutes to convince a skeptical panel of experienced professionals about a new idea that doesn’t exist in the world today, they fared significantly better than their MBA counterparts. Why? Because they shared real user insights to engage us emotionally, used narrative and stories to compel us, drew sketches and visualizations to inspire us, and simplified the complex to focus us. It’s proof positive that numbers and bullet points, while important, aren’t necessarily what drive executive decision making.

Does lunch on the company leave little appetite for #innovation? http://t.co/RXvqwmfP

Moving design from object to system http://t.co/gkxCNxfv

Why should I fall in love with Scrum?

As seen with Appie, Scrum methodology allows for flexibility and prioritization of features, going beyond the original scope of a project where appropriate. With this new technology, any iteration becomes a deliverable product, ready to be released to the public, tested and reviewed. Scrum allows the change of a project’s priorities and ensures the most relevant features are released in the right order, allowing a frequent inspection of the roadmap and change according to needs discovered throughout the process Scrum also focuses on the relationships between individuals and the emerging needs for those teams rather than the rigid structure of the process. The creed of Scrum can be summarized as follows:

- Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
- Working software over comprehensive documentation
- Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
- Responding to change over following a plan

Austerity policies are driving us towards a double-dip recession, warns US economist Joseph Stiglitz. He sat down with Martin Eiermann to discuss new economic thinking and the influence of money in politics.

Things bring us happiness when we use them, but not so much when we merely think about them. Experiences bring happiness in both cases

When designing something, think about the memory its user will have with its experience: Memory As A Consumer Durable

The economic hardship of my family and of many others, a century ago, was caused by a monopoly, the American Tobacco Company, which had eliminated all competitors and thus was able to reduce as it pleased the prices it paid to farmers. The American Tobacco Company was the work of James B. Duke of Durham, North Carolina, and New York City, who, disregarding any other consideration, followed a capitalist logic to absolute control of his industry and, incidentally, of the economic fate of thousands of families such as my own.

My effort to make sense of this memory and its encompassing history has depended on a pair of terms used by my teacher, Wallace Stegner. He thought rightly that we Americans, by inclination at least, have been divided into two kinds: “boomers” and “stickers.” Boomers, he said, are “those who pillage and run,” who want “to make a killing and end up on Easy Street,” whereas stickers are “those who settle, and love the life they have made and the place they have made it in.”2

it means that 35 years ago, designers were thinking about increasing their scope from object to system, about how to elevate themselves from beyond providing the superficial aesthetic appeal of a product to considering its strategic consequences, even its point of existence. And honestly I think it’s telling and somewhat depressing that we’re still struggling with this whole discussion today.

Graduate students in the health sciences are very clear about the kinds of spaces where they learn best: Well-lit rooms with plenty of table space; comfortable, moveable furniture, and convenient power sources. And more often than not, they want their classmates there, too.

Collaborative space, also called informal learning space, is becoming ubiquitous at medical educational facilities. The need for it is so great that even formal instructional space is co-opted by students after class, so that it too must be designed for flexibility and collaboration.

This is a nice reflection on the aesthetics of digital tools

It may seem strange to champion hand drawing in 2009, especially in view of the universal triumph of digital graphics, when every progressive architect in the world seems obsessed with elevating computerised delineation to new heights of illustrative supremacy. At the same time, as the software revolution increasingly takes precedence, there appears to be a fresh incentive among many architectural students (actually, a kind of quiet revolution) based on a new-found desire to hone their manual skills and learn to draw in the old way.

What counts in science is the importance of the discovery. What matters in literature is the originality and power of the metaphor. Scientific reports add a tested fragment to our knowledge of the material world. Lyrical expression in literature, on the other hand, is a device to communicate emotional feeling directly from the mind of the writer to the mind of the reader. There is no such goal in scientific reporting, where the purpose of the author is to persuade the reader by evidence and reasoning of the validity and importance of the discovery. In fiction the stronger the desire to share emotion, the more lyrical the language must be. At the extreme, the statement may be obviously false, because author and reader want it that way. To the poet the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, tracking our diel cycles of activity, symbolizing birth, the high noon of life, death, and rebirth—even though the sun makes no such movement. It is just the way our distant ancestors visualized the celestial sphere and the starry sky. They linked its mysteries, which were many, to those in their own lives, and wrote them down in sacred script and poetry across the ages. It will be a long time before a similar venerability in literature is acquired by the real solar system, in which Earth is a spinning planet encircling a minor star.

Alain de Botton contends that we don’t live in the modern world. Rather, we do live in the modern world in that we exist in it, but we don’t live in the modern world in that few of us choose to make our homes there. As de Botton sees it, the residents of the developed world have, despite keeping up with the latest cars, clothes, and gadgetry, chosen to hole up in shells of aesthetic nostalgia: our mock Tudors, our restored cottages, our Greek Revivals.

Urban digital presence is an increasingly delicious attraction for me. I feel a compelling desire to be in a city in which the availability of information becomes compounded by digital means. Will this digital information presence become the growth engine of the future?

..."Cities aren’t just about transport and infrastructure, but about information – tools like telephones were a revolutionary technology that allowed people to build massive buildings. We’re now seeing powerful information systems that make new kinds of cities possible. Knowing where transport infrastructure like taxis or buses were was a dream – it seemed inconceivable to put GPS receivers on all parts of an infrastructure, but that’s now becoming reality. And we’re seeing new systems to understand people, understanding large patterns from studying human behavior. We may be a short distance away from building systems that can learn from human behavior, like Google’s autonomous vehicle, which has learned in part from thousands of human hours building Google Streetview."

Consider, if you will, the current state of our nation. Despite hints of economic progress, we’re still in the midst of an immense disaster, in which unemployment and underemployment are devastating millions of American lives. And none of this need be happening! There has been no plague of locusts; we have not lost our technological know-how. Americans should be richer, not poorer, than they were five years ago. Yet economic policy across the board has become almost passive, has essentially accepted this disaster instead of trying to end it.

This ability to hyper-focus on one stream of sound amid a cacophony of others is what researchers call the "cocktail-party effect." Now, scientists at the University of California in San Francisco have pinpointed where that sound-editing process occurs in the brain—in the auditory cortex just behind the ear, not in areas of higher thought. The auditory cortex boosts some sounds and turns down others so that when the signal reaches the higher brain, "it's as if only one person was speaking alone," says principle investigator Edward Chang.

These findings, published in the journal Nature last week, underscore why people aren't very good at multitasking—our brains are wired for "selective attention" and can focus on only one thing at a time.

Paul Romer, a former Stanford University economist best known for his Charter City initiative, has a scheme for building new cities from scratch – and using competition to spread the benefits to old cities over time. As he points out, if you want a new business model, you don’t fix an old company; you start a new one. In the same way, if you want a new kind of city, it is easier to build a new one than to change an old one.

The usual narrative is that capitalism and perfect competition are synonyms. No one is a monopoly. Firms compete and profits are competed away. But that’s a curious narrative. A better one frames capitalism and perfect competition as opposites; capitalism is about the accumulation of capital, whereas the world of perfect competition is one in which you can’t make any money. Why people tend to view capitalism and perfect competition as interchangeable is thus an interesting question that’s worth exploring from several different angles.

When it comes to greenness, size matters; as urban regions grow their populations, the rate of growth in their emissions actually declines.

Is there a role for design in public policy?
"As was true for the invisible worlds discovered by Einstein and Freud, the hidden universe of design surrounds us; we just need to develop the x-ray eyes to see it. All human artifacts and activities — not just our objects and architecture, but also our organizations and operations, policies and procedures, systems and infrastructures — have been designed, and too many of the most critical have been badly done by professionals and politicians who didn’t know the first thing about design. While we cannot blame them for what they didn’t know or couldn’t see, the stakes have gotten too high for us to continue in this way. The expansion of design into these "invisible" realms has practical value not only to design professions in which labor-intensive work is increasingly automated or outsourced, but also to the entire human population and to the planet as a whole, suffering from the unsustainability of a badly designed world."

"As surreal as the night was, it paled in comparison to the architectural wonderland I'd landed in: Rural Studio, then about 40 modern structures spread, as if dropped by tornado, across an unlikely part of the country. Among shotgun shacks and lacy Victorians were a community center topped with car windows, living quarters made from bundled cardboard and a house with a winged roof that looked ready for flight."

New York has recently made a bold bet to support industrial diversity: encouraging a new applied-science campus on tiny Roosevelt Island, between Manhattan and Queens. After holding a tough international competition, the city awarded the land for the campus, plus $100 million worth of infrastructure support, to Cornell University. The connection between education and metropolitan success is empirically robust; Berkeley’s Enrico Moretti has shown that an area with a land-grant college before 1940 is likelier to enjoy economic success today.

The Roosevelt Island investment seems like a wise gamble. We don’t know, of course, whether the campus’s benefits will exceed its costs, whether it will mesh well with other local engineering-related efforts, or whether the island will prove connected enough to the rest of the city to encourage spin-offs and fuel an industry. But New York needs industries other than finance, and applied science seems like a plausible one. For hundreds of years, the city has derived strength from its wide proliferation of different industries and sectors, and New Yorkers should hope that the science campus kicks off the latest episode in that remarkable story.

This groundswell of participative design, rapid manufacturing techniques and hacking is starting to challenge Milan's design orthodoxy, making us forget about products and think about processes. Because the furniture fairs of the not-too-distant future will be for exhibiting new services and technologies, not just objects.

The 7 business models that Failed in 2011 /by @nickdemey

Start-ups aren't smaller version of large companies. You can't put execution strategy on top of a start-up and expect to succeed.

Most companies that have embraced unassigned workspaces have done so to cut real estate and other costs, in some cases by placing workers closer together. Shrinking an office's footprint can save millions of dollars annually in rent and energy expenses.

But the new configurations also have brought some unexpected benefits—from encouraging workers to collaborate to reducing internal email.

Will Instagram displace Apple as the great strategic story of the decade? http://t.co/xw3xGyE5

Why Kodak couldn't do #Instagram? It was held hostage by its customers #strategy #innovation

Stock and flow, Part 2

Stock and flow, Part 1: Speculating on metrics that matter in the design of the #workplace http://t.co/J8N1NFbg via @wordpressdotcom

Is architecture a better economic indicator? | SmartPlanet

Excellent excerpt from "Design is a Job" on getting clients

to innovate well, teams must be permeable, inviting the outside in and engaging the broader community

I hesitate to advance Hyundai, but this is a great story about brand transformation and the culture that gets it done

The city of Paris cold fit inside Detroit's vacant land! #Detroit #urban

I have no interest in casinos, but a very high interest in how design affects behavior – This is an excellent sample!

Maybe this does not go far enough? Don't social issues in the supply chain start with the "design chain"? #apple http://t.co/bkaplUKS

Maybe this does not go far enough? Don't social issues in the supply chain start with the "design chain"? #apple

How your dentist was trained to think of you: 12 dental training heads http://t.co/JSBvXXuU

How your dentist was trained to think of you: 12 dental training heads

Sorry, here's a better reference for comparison – Amazon: Design Prototypes For New Towers In Downtown Seattle http://t.co/JMJqalDQ

Sorry, here's a better reference for comparison – Amazon: Design Prototypes For New Towers In Downtown Seattle

How will Amazon's urban hirise HQ be different from Apple's "spaceship"? | architects offer details on towers http://t.co/VbKGc19W

How will Amazon's urban hirise HQ be different from Apple's "spaceship"? | architects offer details on towers

5 Ways to Make Corporate Space More Creative - 5 tactics you can use to improve a less-than-ideal work environment.

Innovating: creating space--elbow room, space to roam free...and head room, freedom to think wildly and aim higher

I've come to really like Quora, and here's a good explanation why – What Makes an Answer a Great Answer? http://t.co/m9IC13RR

I've come to really like Quora, and here's a good explanation why – What Makes an Answer a Great Answer?

The dream setup – getting to a workplace design that supports the way work is done http://t.co/AfelORJn

The dream setup – getting to a workplace design that supports the way work is done

Open-plan offices must die | Great insights in this conversation over at Y-Combinator http://t.co/McZuTDnl

Open-plan offices must die | Great insights in this conversation over at Y-Combinator

GM’s best strategic play may be not with MTV but with the oil companies and the government and a sustainability philosophy. Constraining one, stimulating the other, and comprehending the third might bring people back to cars – cars providing authentic experiences designed, built and sold by people who’ve had those experiences.

Is MTV Scratch the next binder on the wall at GM Headquarters? http://t.co/Ff0XFKDM

Is MTV Scratch the next binder on the wall at GM Headquarters?

What a fantastic reminder about the power of place and space! Most of the spaces where we work are the products of considerations that are very remote and abstract, and far from this kind of sensitivity to the “tuning” of the space and thoughtfulness about people “working together in a clearly-defined space.” Imagine what’s lost as a result.

Or rather, imagine how Abbey Road informs the workplace. Imagine the potential creativity and output that could be had by “making the source material as good as it could be” and by “laboring over making the rooms as pleasing as they could be.”

Imagine a workplace designed for “the basic discipline of people working together in a clearly-defined space.”

"The Space" – How Abbey Road informs the #workplace http://t.co/9ixj6JFA

You don't compete by purchasing airplanes...

Theater and journalism: 'This American Life' Retracts Apple-China Story -

Wow! These are beautiful! (my wife's work) Featured Artist :: Saltlabs | Camille Styles