Deciding what to do next - How to design a career, business or education

Two article from Penelope Trunk's Brazen Careerist have been lingering in my drafts for some time. They were good articles, but I was not sure how to apply them to anything I was doing. My last post on design thinking and business got me to thinking about them again. This is still framing the question.

One article talked about how to decide what to do next. The focus is career-wise, which is Ms. Trunk's forte, but it can also be applied organizational-wise. The question is how to bridge and combine the two. Her example is Pastor Tony Morgan, chief strategy officer at NewSpring Church, whose blog mixes careers and church. In his book, Killing Cockroaches, he tells the story of when he was a city manager, and he was in the middle of running a meeting, and he heard a woman down the hall scream about a cockroach. So he got up from the meeting and killed the cockroach.

As Ms Trunk tells us, Really, all time management discussion is about this: How to know when to kill cockroaches and when not to. It's about why we spend time doing small, stupid stuff that is crawling around in front of us instead of the stuff that makes life meaningful. The dichotomy between wanting to make big-picture impacts on the world and being immersed in the more immediate issues bombarding us is a question for organizations and the individuals making up those organizations.What do we teach students about finding ways to make life meaningful, while still being able make it in the "real" world?

ALINA TUGEND wrote Shortcuts: Putting Yourself Out There on a Shelf to Buy in
YOUR MONEY back on March 28, 2009 in the New York Times. The article was about branding yourself in the job market. What caught my eye was Dan Schawbel, author of “Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success” (Kaplan, April 2009), advice that “Finding your niche is the key,” Which means:

Discover your passion and put it together with your expertise; create a “personal branding tool kit” (which may include a résumé, online profile, blog and portfolio of your work) that consistently reflects your brand; pitch your brand online and offline; and update and monitor any conversations about your brand.

At first glance this sounds in opposition to what was said in the last post, but not if we look at how to achieve this through his four-step process —

1. discover,


2. create,


3. communicate,


4. maintain.

All of which can be applied to hybrid thinking. The question is how do we teach this in classrooms? Ms Trunk points out that perhaps we should first consider changing how to lead in the new millennium.

Her reasons are that Generation Y has a lot of great traits, but classic, top-down leadership is not one of them. This is not a surprise: Because gen Y is the great teamwork generation. They did book reports in teams, they went to prom in teams, and they are notorious for quitting jobs in teams.

This should arguably make it easier to teach today's students the concepts of hybrid thinking and incorporate design thinking into students' career path.

Finally, I am including this TEDTalk (video) featuring Dan Pink on the surprising science of motivation which points out that our assumptions about motivation are also questionable. For the same basic reasons he raises in the last post Roger Martin says, What's Thwarting American Innovation is Too Much Science. Dan Pink says that the problem is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does. Is the same thing true of education?

Thinking (a bit more) about Design | Designing better Thinking

When I first start this blog, I was surprised at how often the concept of design came up as it was not my usual way of thinking. Although it has been in the background in the musings of this blog and Milestones for a New Millennium, I have not focused on it directly for sometime. Lately though I have been thinking about it from an educational perspective. If we were to integrate design thinking, in its broadest terms, into our economy and culture and wanted to prepare students to contribute to that culture, what would we teach them? This post does not answer that question, it begins to frame it.

Dev Patnaik discusses Mixing Design Thinking With Business with Roger Martin of the Rotman School of Management, who argues for a radical idea: to develop business leaders who are well-grounded in multiple disciplines.

The Rotman faculty aim to mold managers who are equally comfortable and adept at using tools and frameworks from business, popular culture, and design to solve the most urgent challenges of the day--what Rotman calls integrative thinkers and what I call hybrid thinkers.

They discuss The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage, Rotman's approach of integrating design thinking into traditional analytical MBA programs. Rotman believes new ideas must come from a new kind of thinking. At least new for today's analytical mindset. The logical leap of the mind, the apple falling on the head, that you can't prove from past data the American pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce called abductive logic.

• Strategy is an act of design.
• Highly skilled designers focus on new possibilities rather than the application of existing ideas. Create from data, guts, empathy, creativity, and a little thin air.
• Balancing the analytical and the intuitive is key to great leadership.
• Analytical thinking prevents them seeing promising new opportunities and driver of growth, but ideas still have to make sense from an analytical standpoint. Great leadership involves bringing both lenses to bear to find better possibilities.
• Roger's take on design thinking isn't rooted in design.
• Surprisingly designers aren't necessarily good at design thinking. A tremendous sense of aesthetics, prototyping, form, and ergonomics doesn't inherently reflect the ability to imagine previously unseen possibilities.
• Templates, not management theory, are the enemies of innovation.
• Neither businesspeople nor designers have a monopoly on good ideas because most people, regardless of background, are more comfortable reapplying a formula or using a template from an existing success than generating new possibilities.

Raising Dev Patnaik's question:

If design thinking isn't based in design and the abilities of designers, then the term may need to change. Without any question, increasing any organization's design capability will increase its ability to differentiate from its competitors, to build a more consistent brand, and to create more appealing products. But it's something else entirely to create a culture of innovation. We would do well to make this clear in the terminology we use.

He addressed this question in a previous article, Forget Design Thinking and Try Hybrid Thinking in which he asserts that, The secret isn't design thinking, it's "hybrid thinking": the conscious blending of different fields of thought to discover and develop opportunities that were previously unseen by the status quo.

Hybridity matters now because the problems companies need to solve are simply too complex for any one skillset to tackle. We're in an era when car companies are trying to grapple with massive changes in technological capability and market need, when cell phone companies are trying to own global entertainment, and when snack food companies face extinction unless they figure out how to promote health and wellness. As Lou Lenzi, a design executive at Audiovox, once told me, if you want to innovate, "You need to be one part humanist, one part technologist, and one part capitalist."

According to Patnaik, hybrid thinking is much more than gathering together a multidisciplinary team, it about multidisciplinary people. He uses John Lasseter, the co-founder of Pixar, as an example because he can effortlessly fuse technology, art, and storytelling together to create Toy Story, which is why he is beloved and admired, not because he's good at technology. In the video below from Edutopia Randy Nelson, Dean of Pixar University makes a similar distinction between cooperation and collaboration.

Technology, Design and especially Entertainment from TED

The following came from TED for the Week of March 13, 2009. This is another example or re-blogging what somebody else has done. The reason is that I find it all interesting, and at some level interrelated. I am adding a few more links to what the TEDBlog originally provided. This blog is primarily an exploration in what Tim Berners-Lee created and what has grown from it. What he says about numbers will have a profound impact on the world as demonstrated by some of the links to my Milestones for a New Millennium blog.

This blog has also discovered an interest in design and in the MIT Media Lab. Don Norman's three emotional design cues are Visceral, Behavioral and Reflective. Instead of Don Norman's site, when I Googled "design and emotion", with and without the "and" I got Design & Emotion Society. When I did "emotion and design", the Don Norman site was third and design & emotion - Marco van Hout site was first, regardless of the "and". So things can and do change and the exploring is fun. You will understand what this is all about when you watch the video. Below are the selected videos from the TED site.

20 years ago, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. For his next project, he's building a web for open, linked data that could do for numbers what the Web did for words, pictures, music and video: Unlock our data and reframe the way we use it together. Watch this talk >>

This demo from Pattie Maes' lab at MIT Media Lab, spearheaded by Pranav Mistry, was the buzz of TED -- and now the web. It's a device that enables a profound, data-rich interaction with our environment. Imagine Minority Report and then some. Watch this talk >>

PLUS: The TED Blog talks to Pranav Mistry (and he answers questions from the TED.com forum!)

Design critic Don Norman turns his incisive eye toward beauty, fun, pleasure and emotion, as he looks at well-designed products that makes people happy, from fast cars to the Philippe Starck juicer. He names the three emotional cues that a product must strike to become a success. Watch this talk >>

Some Related links:

Human Development - The Measurement of Human Endeavors

Understanding a dollar a day could be an invaluable resource for the Millennium Development Goals

Taking the Measure of Chronic Poverty

Simply the Best: Maeda’s the Man at RISD

Making A Come Back - Does This Mean Design Is Not Dead?

Lesson From Philippe Starck "Design Is Dead" Lesson From Hugh MacLeod "The Future Isn't"

Designing What We Live In, Where We Live At , How We Live

Designing For New Paradigms

Designing Your Future and Your Success as a Team Effort

This blog does not depend on late breaking news, though posts are often put out late. Back on October 17, 2008 in the Acronym blog post Design and choice, Blogger Lisa Junker asked Rohit Talwar about the title of the new book he and his company collaborated with ASAE & The Center on, Designing Your Future:

Q: What do you think it means for an association to design its future?

We deliberately chose the word "design," because design is all about making a series of choices, about form, about functionality, and about how you assemble the components. That was very much what we wanted to get the associations thinking about--a design-led approach rather than a formula-led approach. The nature of design is, you ask yourself a lot of questions on the journey, and you make a lot of choices. So, we wanted [association executives] to think about that and to recognize that this was all about making choices, asking yourselves tough questions about every aspect of what you do and then making choices about how you're going to respond. That's why we chose this notion of designing your future rather than implying there was simply a future to be chosen. You could create it, and you have the power to create it.

Rohit Talwar's thoughts seemed to combine well in my mind with Sam Davidson's, A Thought on Leadership: Defining Success. The inspiration for these thoughts goes even further back to August 27, 2008 from The Other Side of the Pillow - Official CoolPeopleCare.org Blog.

Sam Davidson wrote that everyone knows what it looks like when we're successful. What I am finding greater connection with is the concept at CoolPeopleCare, that one key metric for success is the depth of stories that emerge from our work.

We are successful when we hear from people about how our content, products and resources have helped them change the world. Therefore, we all work towards this end, each of us doing our part, performing our tasks in order to help others make a difference. That's the same page we're all on. And we all know it.

What happens many times is that people would be on the same page, if they only knew what that page looked like. Therefore, there's a deep need right when organizations form or start a new leadership cycle to have a candid and open discussion about how success is defined.

Are there any organizations like this in the real world of business? I came back to these concepts because of recent changes in my career and because I discovered one particular exemplar for what has been termed distributive leadership. The MIT Sloan School of Management invited Terri Kelly, President & CEO, W.L. Gore & Associates, who:

provides insights into the W.L. Gore Company, and explains its unique culture that encourages experimentation, risk taking and taking the long view Nurturing a Vibrant Culture to Drive Innovation.

The idea of leading by design through the creation of a common story that defines a role of beneficial change in the world rings true with me and will be explored further.

Making A Come Back - Does This Mean Design Is Not Dead?

I sometimes contribute to the diigo group ECO20/20, but as has been said before Energy Net contributes far more. One of his more recent contributions was on Philippe Starck Makes A Come Back, Designs Mini Wind Turbine ( philippe, starck,, designer,, wind, turbine,, mini, wind, turbine,).

It was just a short time ago that Mr. Stark was declaring design dead. In that post, I argued that there are more than enough opportunities to find meaningful purpose in designing for the other 80%, who could use a bit more materiality.

From Energy Net: Personal wind turbines are more often invented than actually manufactured. Those that make it to the commercial stage are mostly available at several thousands of dollars. That's why it is all the more surprising that as of next September you’ll be able to buy a true designer windmill for way less than that.

diigo tags: energy, energy.news, windpower, zounds!

Lesson From Philippe Starck "Design Is Dead" Lesson From Hugh MacLeod "The Future Isn't"

Back at the end of last year Phillipe Starck took the TED stage to answer the question Why design? During that time he railed against the cynicism of Raymond Loewy in the '50s.

Now Kottke.org tells us that Philippe Starck says that design is dead...

Here is Jason Kottke's post from kottke.org by jason@kottke.org back on March 28 of this year.

Philippe Starck says that design is dead and that he's retiring. Says Starck:

I was a producer of materiality and I am ashamed of this fact. Everything I designed was unnecessary. I will definitely give up in two years' time. I want to do something else, but I don't know what yet. I want to find a new way of expressing myself ...design is a dreadful form of expression. (link)

I am going to follow Seth Godin's advice and have an opinion. Sorry, but being ashamed of producing materiality seems to me to be pretentious. Deciding that you want to do something else that has more meaning for you, yes that I could find admirable, even deciding what you personally designed was unnecessary in regards to your designing it, but to decry design because it works with the elements of this world, well I am not ready to leave the material world just yet. There are more than enough opportunities to find meaningful purpose in designing for the other 80% who could use a bit more materiality.

Materiality is not the problem, it is limiting our vision of ourselves and our world to only materiality. Equally problematic is disdaining the material world.

On numerous occasions this weblog has turned to Seth Godin and Hugh MacLeod for insights. It is not the purpose of this weblog to market anything, yet I still find ideas in their writings that resonate with me, regardless whether or not that was their intention.

MacLeod's latest post, just picked up today, justifies again my labeling MacLeod as the world's most optimistic curmudgeon, with more emphasis perhaps on the curmudgeon. The post also sets a warning marker about being pretentious myself.

The latest source of optimistic inspiration is MacLeod's post on "the blue monster is the future of marketing" via gapingvoid: "cartoons drawn on the back of business cards" back in May of this year.

I am liberally paraphrasing MacLeod's post here for my own purposes, for his purposes go to his post.

MacLeod defines his Blue Monster as, a cartoon-based "Social Object" that me and my Microsoft buddy, Steve Clayton, unleashed on the good but unsuspecting folk at Microsoft.

I have been interested in the idea of the Social Object and how it fits into new marketing for some time. Not for marketing purposes, but how it defines how we interrelate with each other. It is too simplistic to take the position that it is just about making money. No doubt, if done well, it results in making money, but it is not at the heart of the gesture. The emphasis is on the social not the object.

5. My [MacLeod's] second big insight from this year was learning that, even with a fairly everyday product, you can create social objects simply by using your products to make social gestures.

Now the Blue Monster as a social object is arguably not material (sans pen, ink, paper), but other social objects promoted by MacLeod are. More importantly, they achieve something that perhaps Starck's designs did not, they take on a life of their own.

One of the reasons I haven't talked about it much lately, is simply because there is no longer the need. To paraphrase Steve, "It's already out there, it's already working its magic. It has a life of its own and it no longer needs us."

Perhaps Starck's designs practiced "Subversion as a marketing tool". Starck would not have called it "marketing", but whether it's marketing or telling stories or finding meaning, it can be counterproductive if not done with authenticity, especially if it comes from above, whether hierarchically or metaphorically.

Understanding the Blue Monster means understanding the need to be "bigger than yourself".

Cities Under The Microscope and From A Balloon

There have been a number of articles on cities passing my screen lately, but from varying perspectives. Another of the approaches of this weblog is to combine those different concepts together. The concepts in this post go from the technical to the artistic and from the abstract to the personal.

Science Magazine takes a special look at cities in February.
Science, Volume 319, Issue 5864, Cities dated February 8 2008, is now available:

Video Special: Cities
See a special video introduction to this week's special issue on the science of cities and

Science Podcast Join host Robert Frederick for interviews and stories on the environmental costs of biofuels development; the 2009 U.S. science budget; reproducing in cities; good monitoring relationships;

---

In this week's issue of Science: SPECIAL ISSUE:

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Reimagining Cities by Caroline Ash, Barbara R. Jasny, Leslie Roberts, Richard Stone, and Andrew M. Sugden

The TEDBlog on the other hand introduces us to Jaime Lerner , who has a maverick flair and a strategist's disdain for accepted wisdom and who re-invented urban space in his native Curitiba, Brazil.

He talks about how to revolutionize bus transit, awaken green consciousness in a populace accustomed to litter and blight, and change the way city planners and bureaucrats worldwide conceive what's possible within the tangled structure of the metropolitan landscape.

It is David Macaulay of The Way Things Work fame, who, in his TED Talk, provides a personal connection with one city in particular:

His love and fascination for Rome dates to his days as an architecture student, but found the path to his book Rome Antics took some unusual (and frustrating) turns. Through failed pop-up designs, scribbled-out title possibilities, surreal sketchbook pages (think "Piranesi meets Escher"), and rambling storylines, Macaulay details each step of his winding journey toward completion of his illustrated homage to the city.

Excepts from -David Macaulay: All roads lead to Rome Antics

I draw to better understand things. Sometimes I make a lot of drawings, and I still don’t understand what it is I’m drawing.

I also make drawings to help people understand things. Things that I want them to believe that I understand. And that’s what I do as an illustrator. That’s my job.

So I’m going to show you some pictures of Rome. I’ve made a lot of drawings of Rome over the years. These are just drawings of Rome. I get back as often as possible. I need to. All different materials, all different styles, all different times, drawings from sketchbooks, looking at the details of Rome. Part of the reason I’m showing you these is that it sort of helps illustrate part of what I go through with trying to figure out what I feel about Rome and why I feel it.

History of Visual Communication | Myth of Dream Communication

This was put aside for a while without fully realizing how cool it actually was. Besides the link below provided by Jason Kottke, there are others links resulting from some more web-mining.

Elif Ayiter is a lecturer at Sabanci University and PhD candidate at Planetary Collegium.

Sabanci University is a private research institution located in Istanbul, Turkey. Founded in 1996, it is the only college in Turkey that offers a liberal arts undergraduate curriculum.

Planetary Collegium is a research center where artists, theoreticians and scholars from many parts of the world meet to develop their research into new media arts. The hub of the Collegium is based in the University of Plymouth, with nodes in Zurich, Milan and Beijing. This network provides support for research at the highest level. The PhD is awarded by the University of Plymouth.

I found what has to be one of her most beautiful works at Architecture + JeanRicard Broek's blog.

Entre Loup Et Chien

This woman's work is to my lay person's mind very extremely impressive, both aesthetically and functionally. The entire Google Reader link is here from kottke.org. I fully expect to see a TED video featuring her at sometime in the future.

Bookmarked for some weekend reading: The History of Visual Communication...from...via kottke.org by jason@kottke.org on 2/1/08

Bookmarked for some weekend reading: The History of Visual Communication...from rocks and caves to the avant-garde to the computer. (via girlhacker) (link)

Subscribe to kottke.org using Google Reader

Designing What We Live In, Where We Live At , How We Live

As the TEDblog reminds us,"The D in TED stands for Design" -- and two recent talks demonstrate why.

Two more world class designers are featured, one for the building - Frank Gehry and one for what we put in it - Paola Antonelli.

Legendary architect Frank Gehry, in conversation with Richard Saul Wurman, looks back over his career and shares the deepest truths of his architectural practice. Watch this talk >> on many topics, including the power of failure, the importance of collaboration, and the need for architects to bring personal expression to the table. And MOMA design curator Paola Antonelli makes the case that this is a very special moment for design, right here, right now. Watch this talk >>; on a whistlestop tour of some design exhibitions she has organized, including "Mutant Materials," "Workspheres" and "Safe."

On 1/17/08, the TED | TEDBlog let us know that Antonelli had been promoted to senior curator of the New York Museum of Modern Art's department of architecture and design. The promotion was announced by MoMA 's director Glenn Lowry. Paola is currently preparing "Design and the Elastic Mind; an exhibition on science, design and innovation that will open at MoMA on February 24.

TED is following a similar path with my Designing New Paradigms online folder, which will now include these two TEDTalks, by making a dedicated page to design in new Theme: Architectural Inspiration .

Designing For New Paradigms

This weblog is in a constant state of experimentation and examination. Each change suggests further changes giving further opportunities for experiment. My last redesign brought about the realization that my online folders were not up to snuff, misfiling, old and not relevant website, etc.

I have created a Design for New Paradigms link under Pearls of Paradigm Processing at the left side of this weblog that links to a new public online Ask.com folder on design. I have also tagged the online folder under itself with the tag design using diigo and concurrently placing it under del.icio.us, blinklist and ma.gnolia. The diigo bookmark also links back to this weblog using its own design tag.

This doesn't mean that the design online folder or any of the other online folders are a permanent feature of this weblog, just another experiment, but it does organize things a bit better.

Asking The Big Questions

Beside Edge with "What have you changed your mind about? Why?" and YouTube with the Davos Question, TED and the TEDBlog are also asking "The Big Questions"

Many people come to TED -- and visit TED.com -- seeking something out of the ordinary. A chance to mentally recharge. A chance to step back and consider the really big stuff that's happening. A chance to understand life in a richer way.

• Who are we?
  
  • What is our place in the universe?
    
    • What is life?
      
      • Is beauty truth?
        
        • Will evil prevail?
          
          • How can we change the world?
            
            • How do we create?
              
              • What's out there?
                
                • What will tomorrow bring?
                  
                  • What stirs us?
                    
                    • How dare we be optimistic?
                      
                      • And the point?

The TED | TEDBlog provides a number of Web-based ways to make a difference

+ Share Ron Eglash's cool math tools, for studying math via breakdancing, Latin beats and cornrow braids
+ Dive into Richard Baraniuk's Connexions, a massive repository of open-source class materials
+ Visit Phil Borges' Bridges to Understanding site, which rounds up student films from all over the world
+ Browse Erin McKean's booklist "So You Want to Be a Lexicographer?"
+ Check out the beta of Gapminder World, powered by Hans Rosling's Trendalyzer software
+ Watch video and take action at The Hub, a platform for human rights media and action -- presented by Peter Gabriel's WITNESS
+ Discuss sustainable design and materials on the Cradle to Cradle forums, inspired by the work of William McDonough
+ Learn more about Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop per Child
+ Catch up with Majora Carter's Sustainable South Bronx -- or make a specific gift to SSBx via Changing the Present
+ Calculate your personal CO2 production -- and start helping the planet -- at the website for Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, produced by Jeff Skoll

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The Broad Stroke Of Good Design

I decided to break this in to two posts. For a more worldly view, below is a TED video on William McDonough: The wisdom of designing Cradle To Grave Design

Finally, does any of this work in the real world of business and entrepreneurship? Here is a link to The Value of Design Factfinder, which makes a strong case that it does.

The Fine Print Of Good Design

I am not a designer. Any glimmer of understanding I may have about design at this point is from working on this weblog. Regardless though, I have made a variety of comments concerning design which have for the most part been broad-based philosophical generalizations.

This weblog is designed as a learning tool. So I th0ught it proper to provide some links to websites on design that involved information that was more directly relevant to design itself. What is thinking as a designer? Not that there is any lack of philosophical insight from these designers.

Design Thinking... What is That? by Mark Dziersk From Fast Company Magazine

The methodology commonly referred to as design thinking is a proven and repeatable problem-solving protocol that any business or profession can employ to achieve extraordinary results.

Although Design is most often used to describe an object or end result, Design in its most effective form is a process, an action, a verb not a noun. A protocol for solving problems and discovering new opportunities. Techniques and tools differ and their effectiveness are arguable but the core of the process stays the same. It's taken years of slogging through Design = high style to bring us full circle to the simple truth about design thinking. That it is a most powerful tool and when used effectively, can be the foundation for driving a brand or business forward.

Fine Print A journey through the world of typography with graphic designer Michael Bierut

originally via kottke.org :: home of fine hypertext products

BrightCove

Read Virginia Postrel's related story: Playing to Type from The Atlantic, January 2008

"Given its subject, Michael Bierut's Seventy-Nine Short Essays on Design, published last May by Princeton Architectural Press, is remarkably plain. It has no pictures. It isn't oversized. It doesn't even have a dust jacket."

"Yet the book is a graphic extravaganza."

I decided to continue this in a second post.

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Authenticity Accessed Or Acquired? Re-write

It should be our intention to strive for authenticity when defining and presenting ourselves or our life's endeavors . The writings of Finn McKenty, who blogs at Lightheavyweight inform us that design also has authenticity as a purpose.

Finn McKenty extends the concern regarding authenticity to endeavors of social-engagement. Specifically using the example of the Greener Grass project, which is about connecting people with ideas designed to have a positive impact.

The source of insight that he sought was John Moore from Brand Autopsy , who provided the original link for this post on Authenticity .

Finn asks John asks a few questions in a short interview about the of role "authenticity" in branding which you can read here ...snippets below.

Greener Grass: Can authenticity be created? If so, how can companies build a culture that values authenticity, transparency and honesty?

John Moore:

"This belief that authenticity can be created is what gets companies in trouble. Authenticity comes from evolution, not from creation. No magic pill exists and no big bang will cause a company to become authentic. The honor of being authentic is earned only over time and through consistent, deliberate actions. Same goes for building a corporate culture. A company that respects its employees and treats its employees like family will be rewarded with being viewed by insiders and outsiders as an authentic company."

*** READ MORE ***

Simply the Best: Maeda’s the Man at RISD

From Fast Company can also be found at Kottke.org

Simply the Best: Maeda's the Man at RISD

• John Maeda, MIT Media Lab guru, artist, designer, computer scientist, author – in short, a guy who comes about as close as it gets to being a Renaissance Man, circa 2007 --- was just named the new president of the Rhode Island School of Design, one of the most prestigious design schools in the world. It's a great day for RISD – but also for the design world in general.
  

This is the TEDBlog post on John Maeda

TED | TEDBlog: John Maeda named next president of RISD

• Technology has outpaced humanity, I wouldn't say tenfold, I'd say a millionfold. ... Meanwhile, we're still trying to figure out, what is this stuff for? I think that arts have to advance the culture of knowledge around technology. It hasn't happened yet, but it has to happen.

Design seems to becoming an integral part of not only web 2.0 but the larger economy as well. There is some evidence that I am being too optimistic but the way I am beginning to see design is similar to the way I am beginning to see marketing. Which is no longer as a secondary, stand alone function but a function that permeates other functions of the organization. So then, is one aspect of marketing design that it effectively communicates a truth about you and your organization? I am going to have to do some more thinking about where design and marketing conjoin and where they don't. John Maeda makes the fact that there is a relationship between design and web 2.0 obvious and the nature of that relationship continuously creative and surprising.

Secrets Of Movement Mysteries Of Design

This is the post that was intentionally moved and fixed with the post below. A second look at the TED video convinced me to place it up front in the main section of this weblog. As I said below this post is also being placed under the tag design. Robert Full does incorporate functionality into design. His approach struck me as being a combination of J. Craig Venter and Saul Griffith. This also leads back to my burgeoning concept of intentional personal paradigm shift. While Maira Kalman seemed to fit without doubt under the tag creativity, this post seems better fitted to innovation though sometimes its hard to determine the difference, both provided inspiration.

Biologist Robert Full shares his fascination with spiny cockroach legs that allow them to scuttle at full speed across loose mesh and gecko feet that have billions of nano-bristles to run straight up walls. His talk, complete with wonderful slow-mo video of cockroach, crab and gecko gaits, explains his goal of creating the perfect robotic "distributed foot." (Recorded February 2005 in Monterey, California. Duration: 19:24.)

This one went under Paradigm Pathways Science Pathways.

Principles of Uncertainty Laws of Serendipity

This post was moved to here from back in November unintentionally. I was intentionally moving the post above this. However, embedding the video for the later post wasn't working and I used this video to edit so that it would. Regardless of that accident, these two posts do tie together under a tag that also has a wide and varied application - design. Originally I did not tag this post under design but I am rethinking that now. The concept of design has changed for me as a result of this weblog more than any other concept that has been dealt with, both in terms of its importance and its intricacy. I am no longer applying the concept of design only to things, particularly to only inanimate things.

The Principles of Uncertainty starts one off on a strange journey starting in the past, both in terms of the work and of Maira Kalman's life, and moving with uncertainty but also serendipity with no particular place to go. Maira Kalman doesn't bring functionality to design, she brings style.

Why design? Philippe Starck on TED.com

Why design? Philippe Starck on TED.com via TED | TEDBlog by on 12/4/07

The importance of design is made ever more apparent through the explorations done through this weblog, not only in terms of marketing, technology and architecture but biology and physics. Philippe Strarck provides inspiration beyond his physical designs.

Legendary designer Philippe Starck -- with no pretty slides behind him -- spends 17 minutes reaching for the very roots of the question "Why design?" Along the way he drops brilliant insights into the human condition; listen carefully for one perfectly crystallized motto for all of us, genius or not. Yet all this deep thought, he cheerfully admits, is to aid in the design of a better toothbrush. (Recorded March 2007 in Monterey, California. Duration: 17:07.)

Excepts

You will understand nothing with my type of English. Is good for you because you can have a break, after all these fantastic people. I must tell you I am like that [shakes hands], not very comfortable, because usually, in life, I think my job is absolutely useless. I mean, I feel useless. Now, after Carolyn [Porco], and all the other guys, I feel like shit. And definitively, I don't know why I am here, but -- you know the nightmare, like you are an impostor, you arrive at the opera, and they push you, "You must sing!" [gasp!] I don't know.

So! So! Because I have nothing to show, nothing to say, we shall try to speak about something else.

Because there is different types of design. The one, we can call it the cynical design, that means the design invented by Raymond Loewy in the '50s, who said, what is ugly is a bad sale, La Laideur se vend mal, which is terrible. It means the design must be just a weapon for marketing, for producer to make product more sexy, like that, they sell more, it's shit, it's obsolete, it's ridiculous. I call that the cynical design. After, there is the narcissistic design; it's a fantastic designer who designs only for other fantastic designers. [laughs] After there is people like me, who try to deserve to exist, and who are ashamed to make this useless job, who try to do it in another way, and they try, I try, to not make the object for the object but for the result, for the profit for the human being, the person who will use it.

That is our poetry. That is our beautiful story. It's our romanticism: Mutation. We are mutants. And if we don't deeply understand, if we don't integrate that we are mutants, we completely miss the story.

And here is something: Nobody is obliged to be a genius, but everybody is obliged to participate. And to participate, for a mutant, there is a minimum of exercise, a minimum of sport ... The first, if you want, there is so many, but one which is very easy to do, is the duty of vision. I can explain you. I shall try.

Reconnecting to MIT Low Technologies High Aims

There are a few past posts that I did not give the full attention that I wanted to at the time I placed them. One of those was MIT Low Technologies High Aims back in October. One goal of this weblog is to make meaningful connections from different sources. MIT continues to be a source of information and nspiration for this Weblog. The New York Times article cites Amy Smith, a lecturer at M.I.T, as the primary brainchild of the International Development Design Summit and a MacArthur winner. The article also feature the D-lab nicknamed “Amy’s World” "In homage to Ms. Smith’s passion for attacking poverty from the ground up".

“Nearly 90 percent of research and development dollars are spent on creating technologies that serve the wealthiest 10 percent of the world’s population,” Ms. Smith said. “The point of the design revolution is to switch that.”

The article also features Dr. Polak, who has become something of a guru to the design revolution movement, and Mr. Brandis who now helps run the Full Belly Project, which develops machines to simplify village work.

“What you try to do in virtually every situation is make their lives more efficient,” Mr. Brandis said. “That’s what the big revolution in America was between 1860 and 1960 — that a person doing a day’s work can produce a lot more product. And that means time is more valuable and that means he has more time to do other things.”

This weblog has also featured other MacArthur winners with an interest in design.

Below is a video of Amy Smith lecturing at TED.


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This Software builds its Own Hardware

Science is major area of interest of this weblog, though not enough has been written to justify that statement. A Pop!Tech talk featuring J. Craig Venter who lectures about the synthetic designing of DNA. Of particular interest is the design concept that duality between software and hardware does not exist with nature.





In an earlier post Saul Griffith takes a similar approach from a technological perspective.