WeBlog
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
The We-Think Generation
"We think, therefor we are!"
CNN's Becky Anderson looks at how the internet has helped shape a new way on innovative thinking and sharing. This video features our friend Garrick Jones, founder of The Ludic Group and long-time lover of art, innovation and creative business strategy.
It profiles bottom-up communities like Instructibles.com who teach how to make welders from microwave ovens and East German scientists who mash-up physics, mathematics, sociology and technology over coffee.
CNN's Becky Anderson looks at how the internet has helped shape a new way on innovative thinking and sharing. This video features our friend Garrick Jones, founder of The Ludic Group and long-time lover of art, innovation and creative business strategy.
It profiles bottom-up communities like Instructibles.com who teach how to make welders from microwave ovens and East German scientists who mash-up physics, mathematics, sociology and technology over coffee.
Labels: innovation, technology, video
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Monday, August 04, 2008
TechShop
Remember your friend's dad with the way over-the-top organized garage with every tool imaginable? (If that was your dad, I'm sorry.) Well, I bet he didn't have plasma cutter or 3-D printer, and if he did, you didn't have the security clearance to touch it!
TechShop is that cyber-cool chop shop. Plus, if you are a member, you can touch all the tools, and, for example, make your own BattleBot. They have wicked classes like "How To Cut Shapes Out of Metal with the Plasma Cutter" and "How To Use a Laser to Cut and Etch Food".
TechShop was founded in 2006 by Jim Newton, a lifetime maker, veteran BattleBots builder and former MythBuster. The original TechShop is located in Menlo Park, California, on the San Francisco peninsula 25 miles south of San Francisco, with nine other locations across the US.
[ Thanks to M. Frisse. ]
TechShop is that cyber-cool chop shop. Plus, if you are a member, you can touch all the tools, and, for example, make your own BattleBot. They have wicked classes like "How To Cut Shapes Out of Metal with the Plasma Cutter" and "How To Use a Laser to Cut and Etch Food".
TechShop was founded in 2006 by Jim Newton, a lifetime maker, veteran BattleBots builder and former MythBuster. The original TechShop is located in Menlo Park, California, on the San Francisco peninsula 25 miles south of San Francisco, with nine other locations across the US.
[ Thanks to M. Frisse. ]
Anyone can come in and build and make all kinds of things themselves using the TechShop tools, machines and equipment, and draw on the TechShop instructors and experts to help them with their projects.
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Labels: cool tools, social networking, technology
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Friday, May 30, 2008
NPR: High-Tech Pen Makes Note-Taking Easier
I have just tested the LiveScribe SmartPen and might be in love.This pen is a digital audio recorder and camera built into a large ballpoint pen. It timestamps every note I take using the special spiral-bound notebook with almost imperceptible dot-matrixed paper.
After I finish taking notes, i click the pen on the part of the image or text and the audio recorder plays back whatever was being recorded at that time.
Now, if they can just come out with a 4' x 8' whiteboard version with multiple colors and a portable Aeron chair with lumbar support, I'd be set!
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Labels: technology, visual learning
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Sunday, March 16, 2008
The Wisdom of Designing Cradle to Cradle
Gavin Blake in Australia, suggests viewing this video from TED 2005. William McDough quotes Kevin Kelly, "There is no end game, there is only The Infinite Game."
Architect and designer William McDonough asks what our buildings and products would look like if designers took into account "All children, all species, for all time." A tireless proponent of absolute sustainability (with a deadpan sense of humor), he explains his philosophy of "cradle to cradle" design, which bridge the needs of ecology and economics. He also shares some of his most inspiring work, including the world's largest green roof (at the Ford plant in Dearborn, Michigan), and the entire sustainable cities he's designing in China.
Labels: architecture, design, sustainability, technology
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Monday, February 04, 2008
Ready to Ware
Clothes That Look Hip and Track Your Vital Signs, Too
"Even when you are sick, if you have something that doesn't look nice, you don't want to put it on." |
Labels: healh, mobile technology, social media, technology
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Tuesday, May 08, 2007
Getting the Whole Spimey Backstory
We can know whether the pig in the sandwich had a happy life, or, more important, if it was exposed to harmful bacteria or unethical farming practices.
In his book Shaping Things, Bruce Sterling makes much of the emerging product form tagged with his self-created neologism... spime.
These are "material instantiations of an immaterial system, digitally manufactured things from virtual plans." In layman's terms, these are objects that can be manufactured, tracked, interacted with and recycled through digital systems embedded in the object and the environment. Now, knowing a product's backstory is emerging as a core principle of commerce.
[Listen to Sterling's discription of spime here. Or watch the oddly unnerving interview segment, SpimeTime on Rocketboom.com.]
As the public gains interest and personal investment in living more sustainably, knowing the backstory becomes increasingly important. Whether it's food, lifestyle products, building materials -- most everything in the designed or built environment -- a big part of making good choices involves knowing where things come from, what's inside them, and how they got to point of use. If we know the backstory as consumers, we can make good choices; and if businesses and designers know they'll have to tell the story of their product, they make sure it's a story someone would want to hear.
Labels: social media, systems thinking, technology
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Friday, February 16, 2007
The Monastic Help Desk
After a year of working on MissingLink with GradientLabs, and trying to introduce it to the larger graphics and facilitation world, I identify with this Old School Brother of the Monastic Help Desk.
[Thanks to Mark Frisse]
[Thanks to Mark Frisse]
Labels: technology, video
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Monday, January 01, 2007
The Future Perfect Sense
My New Year's resolution is this: To be more observant.Recently, my family downshifted from living in a city neighborhood behind two national sports team stadiums (oh, the fireworks--they never ceased!) to living in a little house on a 23-acre farm in rural Tennessee.
Now, I find myself walking and listening again in a way that had been degraded by the rhythm of taxi-airport-work-airport-taxi-home. This morning as I walked along a muddy gravel road, instead of the dull thuds of a souped up Lincoln Navigator thumping Hip Hop beats, I heard what turned out to be two teenage boys galloping up the ridge on horseback.
Jan Chip is an extreme observer. As Principal Researcher in the Mobile HCI Group at Nokia Research, Jan divides his time between running user studies and developing new applications, services and products. As he writes, "If I do my job right, you'll be using the product 3 to 15 years from now."
In the majority of culture that his team studied, three objects were considered essential across all participants, cultures and genders were keys, money and mobile phone. (Read Jan's essay Why We Carry Mobile Phones).
But his job (and personal obsession) is observing The Now through the eyes of an ethnologist. Whether beer bottles discarded at Tibetan holy sites, playfully designed rat traps in Asian airports, or the menu of a Chinese "greasy spoon" (rats again!), or international rubbish collection norms, Jan's eye catches the easy-to-miss details and strings them into deep cultural patterns.His blog, Future Perfect, is inspired by the traveling research required by his day job, but Jan admits, "The material that you see on this site is what I do in my spare time - the stuff that inspires or challenges me, helps me understand how the future might turn out."
Labels: ethnography, technology
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