I recently wrote an article for iMedia Connection called 4 Online Gimmicks that failed. Some hightlights:
Feel free to leave comments – here is fine, but on the article is best. I’d love to hear your feedback!
I occasionally blog over at my company's blog, Molecular Voices.
I’ve been chipping away at the stack of New Yorker magazines that have accumulated on my nightstand recently. One of the better articles was John Colapinto’s “Lunch with M.” from the November 23, 2009 edition, in which he tags along with a reviewer for the New York edition of the Michelin Guide. I’ve been thinking about ways we, as designers, can help move away from our culture of consumption and help brands deliver real, sustainable value by focusing on providing service to the consumers. Based on that article, we can learn a lot from the Les Freres Michelin.
Please excuse the wonkiness over the next day or so. The blog is undergoing a pretty significant overhaul and redesign, as I am preparing for my return to the written word.
I occasionally blog over at my company's blog, Molecular Voices.
I’ll be blogging occasionally, along with the rest of my experience design, digital strategy, and emerging technologies brethren, over here at Molecular Voices. My first post, about the New York Times as a Service Platform, is up!
Thanks to the wonders of DVR technology, I might have missed Larry Lessig publicity stop on The Colbert Report last Thursday. Lessig was there to promote his new book Remix: Making Art and Culture Thrive in the Hybrid Economy.
It was a brief but enjoyable interview; Colbert clearly gets the value of the hybrid economy (he of the Green Screen Challenges), but he’s still Stephen Colbert, so he behaves badly as he always does. Does Larry look a little frazzled?
I love questions that start with the words “what if.” What if dogs suddenly gained the power of logic and rationality? What if the moon were made of cheese? What if we had no thumbs?
“What if” questions spawn the greatest conversations.
With a tip to Ad Freak, this video asks the question “What if there were no stop signs?”
What if a corporate, groupthink agency designed the stop sign?
Happy New Year!
It’s time to spend some time reflecting on 2008 (and some time relaxing in Vermont).
In the meantime, a small but important announcement: I’ve made the decision to rededicate myself in 2009 to publishing here (and elsewhere) on the web about my professional and personal efforts and endeavors. Expect to see some changes around here very shortly, but more importantly, expect to hear (and see) more of me.
A few weeks ago I shared the story of Studio Wikitecture with a number of architect friends of mine. Studio Wikitecture is a group of professionals from diverse backgrounds dedicated to bringing the core concepts of the open source movement (crowd sourcing, shared IP, decentralized intelligence) to the architecture of physical spaces. The group recently won the Architecture for Humanity‘s Founder’s Award for their design for a health facility in Nepal, submitted through a challenge issued by the Open Architecture Network. The kicker is that the majority of folks involved in the Studio Wikitecture project aren’t architects at all:
Studio Wikitecture assumes the principles of good design are universal enough that they can be learned in one discipline and applied in some fashion to another. Through Studio Wikitecture, we are trying to provide a channel where these individuals can apply these skills to the design of a building. This does not negate the fact that a certain foundational knowledge is still necessary to design a building that will actually function and stand up, but SW feels that this knowledge can be acquired through a number of channels and should not be restricted to just architects and their particular educational path.
What did my architect friends think about this?
There was significant unease — accompanied by some outright skepticism — with the concept that good design can be had by committee. Kelley says:
I do agree that architectural design benefits from the input of other design realms – and input from non-design realms, like the end users – that’s why we spend so much time asking questions & listening at the beginning of a project. But why does everyone seem to believe that anyone can sit around and come up with a good building? People don’t seem to think that about a lawyer’s closing argument or a doctor’s research paper.
In my response to Kelley I noted that no one was arguing that “just anyone” can produce good design on their own — Studio Wikitecture is a classice example of Jame Surowiecki’s thesis on The Wisdom of Crowds
In the case of Studio Wikitecture, each participant contributes his own independent design ideas based on their own background and capabilities. The key to the system is the “wiki tree,” a doric-column like structure within their collaborative environment (Second Life) which allows all participants to view all contributions and vote on them.
The wiki tree in Second Life
Of course, any crowdsourced building design would likely fail — structurally and aesthetically — if educated planners and designers aren’t part of the crowd. Kevin Kelly But it’s nice to see that socially-enabled technology allows design massively collaborative design efforts in almost anything. Earlier this year, Kevin Kelly states in “The Bottom is not Enough” that “the bottom-up hive mind will never take us to our end goal. We are too impatient. So we add design and top down control to get where we want to go.” Obviously SW has mastered this approach. The result: a design that incorporated innovative design elements, examples of which are provided by the O’Reilly Radar:
Designers in all fields should take several things away from Studio Wikitecture’s success. First, the emergence of technologies that enable social interaction permit egalitarian participation in the design process, allowing stakeholders or other interested parties — like consumers — to contribute. Second, the environments, platforms, and frameworks that are necessary for these types of projects to be successful will need to be designed as well — in short, it’s a good day to be a designer.
Studio Wikitecture’s submission panels for the Nepalese Health Facility can be found below.
Randy Pausch, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, virtual reality pioneer in the realm of virtual reality, human computer interaction, and design, died today. He was 47.
Aside from being a passionate advocate for the commingling of computer engineering and the arts — a topic that I hold dear — Randy movingly spoke about both living and dying well in his Last Lecture at CMU. His speech had in some ways pushed me on a slightly different course in life. The themes he talks about are the same ones that come up when we talk about how to succeed in our new world of openness. He will be remembered as a man who stood up and spoke directly to the inner desire in all of us to be better tomorrow than we are today.
There’s no better person from whom to hear it then Randy himself. The video is over an hour long, but it’s worth it.
We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand. If I don’t seem as depressed or as morose as I should be, sorry to disappoint you.
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The Onion: Internet Archaeologists Find Ruins of ‘Friendster’ Civilization
I was just thinking this evening about our digital dossier, specifically about what digital archaeologists will be able to dig up hundreds of years from now from fragmented chips found buried in the rubble — and it turns out, The Onion was thinking about the same thing.