A quick round up of activities going on by MAYAns lately to start things off…
I’ve been guest blogging at the Economist’s Idea’s Economy:Innovation site and was on a panel of design thinking thought leaders. David Kelly, Tim Brown, and Sara Beckman from the Haas School of Business at Berkeley rounded out the panel. We had a good time, I sorta forgot I was on stage and just enjoyed the conversation. The line-up of speakers at the conference was really second to none. I felt humbled to be on the same stage as many of them over the course of the 2-day event.
Check out this list of speakers to see what I mean.
Over 400+ people ended up coming to the conference (about double what everyone expected). It was an amazing and intense 2 days.
Dutch, Marc, Paul, I, and some amazing people from the Economist designed, developed and moderated a hands-on innovation session with attendees and thought leaders on the second day of the conference. We had about 130+ attendees that participated in our “Innovation Court.” The challenge was to come up with the cover story for the 2014 edition of The Economist’s Innovation issue. It was a very different experience from most conferences and gave attendees a chance to interact and brainstorm with leaders in Healthcare, Finance, Environment/Energy, Business Models, Education, Human Resources, and Interdependence. You can see a few pictures from Innovation Court here. It was really a form of an alternate world exercise where we asked “What Would The Economist Do?”
I think clips from the conference will be up on their site within the next month or two. When they’re up I’ll post a few of my favorite.
A wonderful lecture (about an hour) about how everyone (designers and non-designers alike) can use quick prototyping to think about new products and services, by our very own Bill Lucas from a recent session at IIT. I’m not sure if I think the clip of his son prototyping a video game or just Bill saying “LUMAloop” over and over again is my favorite part of this, but frankly it’s all gold.
Last but not least, our very own Chris Pacione had a deep and insightful article in the most recent issue of Interactions Magazine. The whole issue was dedicated to Design Thinking. Chris lobbied quite strongly for design literacy to be a core part of education in the next century. If you can get the actual magazine, do it. Ifnot, read the article. It’s worth the time (though he never actually says “LUMAloops.”)
—————-Book Reviews?——————-
Alright, I have a few quick ones. First I got exactly zero out of Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Killer. Ok, I guess you could have figured that out, but I had to try to read it. Don’t.
On the other hand, I enjoyed a small “coming of age inside of a Bucky-dome” story called, The House of Tomorrow. It included a grandmother obsessed with Fuller, a kid who has never been outside of the dome and a teen from the town who was deeply into punk rock and wants to start a band.
I also finished a pulp comic book style story called, The Long Man about magic and some sort of immortal warrior DJ fighting an evil cabal that runs the world. By the same person who wrote the Batman and Dark Knight comics that inspired the movies. Not deep but fun.
Black Hills by Dan Simmons (of Drood fame) was a really enjoyable book about an 11 year old native american child, who finds himself with the ghost of Custer stuck in his head after counting coup through the death fields of the last stand. The story is historical fiction and covers the time from the last stand all the way up til the death of the child, known as Black Hills, in the early decades of the twentieth century. You learn about the horrible things done to the Native Americans during that period, journey across the country with stops at the world’s fair, the building of the Brooklyn Bridge, and Mount Rushmore, and experience the world through the eyes of the Lakota. If you like historical fiction, or just love a good thriller (the main character decides, when he’s 60 or 70 to blow up Mount Rushmore right when FDR is scheduled to come for a visit), read it.
On to the top five…
———————Top Five———————-
1. When I first came to MAYA, Pete said that you should think of a fax machine as a network device for paper. Looks like these paper networking devices need better security.
2. Innovation for the lowly coffee cup. Heatswell.
4. Infoporn du jour… World Risk Network…# or at the other end of the spectrum, baby data streaming cyber utopian, from IBM.
5. iPhone football, with a real ball.
——————-The Rest———————
Content Aware Phil? A new feature pretty much replaces all photoshop masters named Phil.
Neville Brody, named head of Communication Art and Design at Royal College of Art.
Nano-tube exhaust pipe wonder power.
Shanghai expo in picture. Worth looking.
One step closer to regeneration. Newts beware!
The next flight of the VSS Enterprise…
Turing for makers, 2010 edition.
Erykah Badu takes the single gun theory one step further.
This is just a fun painting tool…
Memory polymer can shift to three different shapes dependent on temperature.
Ten years late, but finally a jetpack goes on sale commercially. The future must be here. Um, if you have a spare $90k it is.