I love TED, but it is not often that I find myself watching the same video over and over again. Using classical music as a medium, Benjamin Zander re-ignited my passion for classical music, my sense of purpose in life, and inspired me to not think about the tiny details which do not matter, and focus on experiencing everything with one broad stroke.
In this 147-page book (available for download as PDF), Hugh Dubberly collected over one-hundred descriptions of design and development processes in hopes to foster debate about design and development processes.
The book asks interesting questions: + How do we design? Why do we do it that way? + How do we describe what we do? Why do we talk about it that way? + How do we do better?
...with practical goals in mind: + reducing risk (increasing the probability of success) + setting expectations (reducing uncertainty and fear) + increasing repeatability (enabling improvement)
It's an interesting and inspiring read. Highly recommended.
Mozilla Labs posted a demo video of the Firefox Mobile on their site today and it's highly innovative using just a single-touch interface — providing yet another great example of how limitations can incubate innovation.
The interaction design is really sweet. For more information, check out the detailed description of all the features on Aza Raskin's blog. (Aza is the head of user experience at Mozilla Labs)
Ten Thousand Cents is a digital artwork that creates a representation of a $100 bill. Using a custom drawing tool, thousands of individuals working in isolation from one another painted a tiny part of the bill without knowledge of the overall task. Workers were paid one cent each via Amazon's Mechanical Turk distributed labor tool. The total labor cost to create the bill, the artwork being created, and the reproductions available for purchase are all $100.
Design and the Elastic Mind is the latest exhibition at MoMA with a focus on "the ability of designers to grasp momentous advances in technology, science and human behavior and convert those changes into objects and systems that people can understand and use." ...Huh?
Don't get it. No problem, fire up your browser and get an overview of the exhibit on the project's site to check out the projects together with an innovative navigational model that link you to related projects. Pretty nifty.
The Human Calendar™ is a calendar created by Craig Giffen where portraits of everyday people and puts them into a calendar, where everyone is looking at the current date.
In addition to the main calendar, there are also portable versions, i.e. widgets for Google Homepage, your blogs, MySpace, etc. Very neat. Here's the blog widget. I will look forward to seeing it change for tomorrow:
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SML Thank You I found this on the Facebook posted items from Tom Ajello (SML Wiki). Thanks!
I had the pleasure of visiting DirtyPatrick's studio (aka Toolshed) last Saturday and found some pretty incredible artwork:
DirtyPatrick's real name is Patrick Shawn Bradley (LinkedIn). He was born in Louisiana on December 3, 1966. He graduated from Louisiana Tech University with a bachelor of architecture in 1993, then moved to New York and became a designer for CNN as a broadcast visual designer for their on-air graphics department.
He now works full-time at R/GA as a senior visual designer. When he is not busy, he publishes a very popular fashion documentary which showcases the everyday fashion statements from the crazy people at R/GA.
His art can best be described as cubist constructivist photography. Each photograph will only be printed once and are signed and dated by DirtyPatrick himself. They can be printed at any size (maximum size: 5ft x 4ft). Pricing depends on the size of the print. DirtyPatrick is represented by SML Fine Art. If you are interested in his work, please email seeminglee+art@gmail.com.
Jeni Oye launched her own line of modern jewelry collection called Oye Modern. It is the source for contemporary jewelry by emerging and independent designers. It's unique, original and hard to find.
Jewelry is shipped internationally to 40 countries with a 14 day return policy. You can shop in any of the four currency as well: AUD, GBP, EUR, USD.
Fernando Luis Lara is a brazillian artist living and working in the US. He draws the 365 days of the year based on stories submitted by people around the world. Each day will only be drawn once. For $182.50 USD, you get an original drawing (9 x 12 inches = 23 x 31 cm) by mail, and your story and drawing will also be shown on the site. The idea is that over time the site will become a collection of special days around the world, thus serving as a reminder of how special each and every day can be.
It's a genius marketing idea for an artist, and it utilizes the mechanisms of the collaborative theme seen today in the rise of Web 2.0. Very inspiring. Check it out!
Stanford professor Larry Lessig gets TEDsters to their feet, whooping and whistling, following this elegant presentation of "three stories and an argument." The Net's most adored lawyer brings together John Philip Sousa, celestial copyrights, and the "ASCAP cartel" to build a case for creative freedom. He pins down the key shortcomings of our dusty, pre-digital intellectual property laws, and reveals how bad laws beget bad code. Then, in an homage to cutting-edge artistry, he throws in some of the most hilarious remixes you've ever seen.
When Adam, Brad and I went upstate to skydive, we stopped by a Burger King on our way to get some food. We didn't notice it at first but it appears that they have started installing multimedia monitors in place of their static printed menus:
More information + Skyrails Blog: official blog by the author + Download Skyrails beta: PC only, one generation before the current release, published on 2007-10-10
Yesterday I was having lunch in soho and I passed by an artist named Gregory Kirschenbaum (Google). He uses metal pigment (zinc, copper, iron, bronze) with an array of acid to bring out the natural oxidation on cotton canvas. I did an adhoc video interview with him because I thought that great art ought to be shared:
About Gregory Kirschenbaum Gregory Kirschenbaum (born 1969-09-21) grew up in New York with arts around him. His dad, Daniel Kirschenbaum, is an architect who helped design many New York public projects, including the La Guardia Airport.
Many people from the advertising world often mistaken Gregory to be related to Kirschenbaum Bond & Partners (Google). GK is not related to KBP by blood, but it turns out that KBP is a patron of Gregory. In addition, Gregory has produced some copper on cotton shirts which have been collected by the fashion icon Valentino (Wikipedia).
Collaboration Gregory is currently collaborating with Andrew Cotton (Google) and will be having an opening on Saturday, 2007-11-03 at the Ward-Nasse Gallery, the only non-profit art gallery in soho New York City. The opening is scheduled to last for an unprecedented nine hours: from 3pm to midnight.
The Economist published a special report on innovation on the October 13th-19th 2007 issue of the magazine. The report is broken down to seven articles spanning 20 pages and I don't want to distill it too much, so I will break it down to seven posts.
"The energy and car industries have not been innovative in many years because they have faced no real crisis, no impetus for change," [Vinod Khosla] inists. (Mr Khosla helped to found Sun Microsystems)
Larry Page, co-founder of Google, had earlier hosted a gathering of leading environmentalists, political thinkers and energy experts to help shape an inducement to get things moving: the Automotive x Prize, to be unveiled in early 2008. The organisers will offer at least $10m to whoever comes up with the best "efficient, clean, affordable and sexy" car able to obtain the equivalent of 100 miles-per-gallon using alternative energy.
Rapid and disruptive change is now happening across new and old businesses. Innovation, as this report will show is becoming both more accessible and global.
North America still leads the world in research spending, but the big labs' advantage over their smaller rivals and the developing world is being eroded by two powerful forces.
Globalisation, especially the rise of China and India as both consumers and, increasingly, suppliers of innovative products and services.
The rapid advance of information technologies, which are spreading far beyond the internet and into older industries such as steel, aerospace and carmaking.
One way to arrive at a useful definition [of innovation] is to rule out what innovation is not. It is not invention.
New products might be an important part of the process, but they are not the essence of it.
Clever ideas have always been everywhere, of course, but companies were often too closed to pick them up. The move to an open approach to innovation is far more promising.
"We firmly believe that innovation, not love, makes the world go round," insists John Dryden of the OECD.
With manfacturing now barely a fifth of economic activity in rich countries, the "knowledge economy" is becoming more important.
Jake is the founder and principal of Local Projects, an award-winning design studio that seeks to tell stories in public spaces, museums, and over the internet, often simultaneously.
Jake showed a project that I thought was particularly interesting. It's called Memory Map:
It is an environmental design project where the content is entirely user-generated. UGC is a commonplace in the age of Web 2.0, but what is special about this project is that it does not involve technology at all.
In a gist, the installation involves a New York City map, on which visitors of this Smithsonian exhibit share personal stories by anchoring hand-written notes to specific locations related to their memories. Much like the same phenomena witnessed on social networking sites, small clusters of conversations emerge on the map. People felt a sense of connection through these notes, and it is through these memories where the diversity of the city can be felt on this cultural ecosystem.
During the Q+A session which follows the presentation, Jake further emphasized his desire to not involve the use of touch-screens for his museum installations which he felt appear more like ATM machines and thus remove the emotional impact of a stories as told by human beings.
Additional interesting projects presented
StoryCorps. A nationwide initiative to instruct and inspire citizens to record each other's stories in high-quality audio. Participants receive a CD of their recorded interviews while a copy goes to the Library of Congress for a national oral history archive.
P.I.E. (The Public Information Exchange). A hybrid digital/physical interface designed to create an archive of the NYC projects, proposals, programs, and exhibitions presented or discussed at the Center for Architecture.
Timescapes. Said The New Yorker: "Four hundred years of New York History are compressed into a twenty-two minute presentation morphing maps, images, and narration in the new three-screen installation 'Timescapes,' at the Museum of the City of New York. It's an absorbing biography of the city, neatly organized into chapters that outline the city's explosion out into its five boroughs, up into the skyscrapers, and down into the subway system."
Looking at the published dates of these articles, it looks like that my radar is not very tuned at the moment but it's better than not knowing about it at all.
Here's a pretty funny spoof video of Microsoft Surface using Mojiti:
Recently I had lunch with a retired U.S.Marines veteran with more than 28 years of experience (LinkedIn: Joseph Brennan). The topic of teamwork came up, and he talked about what it means to be a team on the military:
Same ability. The military trains its soldiers to possess the same skills as everyone else, such that when one falls down in the field, another soldier can carry on the same tasks.
Same knowledge. To maximize the efficiency of communication, every soldier in the field have access to the latest information regarding the battlefield.
Interpret instructions the same way. Authorizations (the briefs) are always written in a clean and clear manner such that the action carried out will be the same regardless of the person asked to carry out the instructions. In a war scenario, when the person given those instructions dies, the next person given those instructions ought to be carrying out the same actions
Efficiency of the team depends largely on the team members having the same knowledge, speed and strength. To do so, they need access to the same information
The team can be as soon as its weakest member.
To evaluate performance of teamwork, take out half of the team and evaluate the length of time that team can still survive given the same condition
The military does not create specialists.
If we are to apply these methodologies into the business world, it will look something like this:
Everyone working at the same company ought to have the same level of knowledge related to works done by the company
In this ideology, designers should know how to write programs, and programmers ought to know design principals
Efficiency of the work force will be greatly enhanced if every bit of information is shared among the team
New acquired knowledge will be shared among all members of the force through either corporate emails or blogs.
When you can get everyone to have a working style that has almost the assemblance of a single person (hive mind), projects will be much easier to handle
I was doing some research on maps mashups recently and I found this little gem called TinyMap.net which can best be described as a marriage of the awesome tools utilized in Google Maps: My Maps and the ingenious everyday Web tool Tiny URL which transforms long URLs into short byte chunks.
As according to the official step-by-step tutorial, Tinymap.net allows the user to create maps, trace way-points, mark out points of interests with graphic icons and add notes on the Google map.
Content creation is surprising easy, and I created my custom map in record time, much quicker than using Google's native UI.
One thing I really like about the Tinymap is the ability to create password-protected maps, which allows you to share your map with others without sharing with everyone on the Web. Unless I have mistaken, The My Maps feature on Google Maps can only create private maps that are viewable by one person.
When you save your map, the site returns a short URL for you to send to your friends:
Found these amazing maps today which visualize the economics of nations from Albania to Zimbabwe. The maps are available in vector-format (EPS and PDF) showing data in 1985 and 2000:
