YakShaving

Sorry Ya’ll. I’ve been watching my repeat customers on my blog go down over the past few weeks as my posts have been less frequent. No excuse, I know, but I have been super busy with work (I’m taking 5 ID classes, including 3 workshops, and one B-school class, international business)

I thought I’d at least let friends and acquaintances know what I’ve been toiling on lately:

• Design Synthesis: Continued work on making the new harvest of prefab modernist dwellings more appealing to potential homebuyers by creating new conceptual directions.
• Advanced Design Planning: Energy independence. We’re crafting an innovation agenda for the next POTUS that will be published in the October issue of Esquire
• Design Entrepreneur workshop: Can’t share much here, but I’m pretty happy with the way things are going. I’m realizing how making the concept a platform (rather than just a standalone product) makes it so much stronger– but just how hard that is to do when you’re doing it on your own without the resources that a large company might have.
• Prototyping workshop: New Options Initiative. Defining what a venture/incubator model might look like for out of school youth who are creative, talented, and are capable of contributing to the creation of wholly new enterprises
• Social Human Factors: Observe through a social HF lens, Vella Cafe, a coffee shop under the Western blue line subway stop, and report about it on a weekly basis
• Strategic Design Research: Emerging Markets/BOP. Establishing a framework for success in emerging market entry for companies. How do companies work with NGOs and foreign governments to create an ecosystem of development and collaboration? We’ll try to figure it out in a workshop that will take place on May 1st and 2nd.
• International Business: My 1 obligatory B-school class this semester. Calculating trade-gains and forex rates. Yikes, what did I get myself into?

The other stuff that I’m inextricably tied to:
- the design research conference content committee– Finding speakers and workshop facilitators, defining the theme for next year’s conference.

Because I have too much going on, I had to drop Jeremy Alexis’ Problem Framing (I’ll take it next year). Sadly, I’ve also stepped down as organizer of the Chicago Futurist Meetup. It’s entirely possible that I could pick this up again if I have more time this summer.

As a heads up to ID folks, I am giving a lecturette on blogging at the Institute of Design on Thursday. I will be covering the basics of setting up a blog, why people should (maybe) blog, and Vince LaConte will be talking about wikis. And I might throw in a few other random tidbits. So, if you’re around, come. And eat the free food.