I’ve learned from working with the experts in human inquiry methods at the Institute of Design a lot about learning about patterns of daily human life. As we know, there’s very little asking of questions necessary in most interviews on the researcher’s part.
Lately I’ve been looking into more participatory approaches into design, which somehow [...]
Archive for the 'Innovation' Category
This… is….Spartaaaaaaaaaaaa!
06Jun08When I was wee little lad, I loved this book so much. It’s a book in the time machine series (of which I’ve read quite a bit), it’s from the makers of choose your own adventure. Back before the interactive days of the internet, Choose Your Own Adventure books were the best way [...]
I didn’t fully appreciate the lessons that I received from Larry Keeley’s Innovation Frontiers class last semester until I started to explore the X-prize model in depth.
Listen to their elevator statement:
“The mission of the X PRIZE Foundation is to bring about radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity. The Foundation fosters innovative, high-profile competitions that [...]
On May 22-23 (Thursday and Friday), the Institute of Design is hosting a Strategy Conference at the Museum of Contemporary Art.
As usual, I’m pretty excited about the speakers: notably, Bill Buxton, AG Lafley, Roger Martin, John Seely Brown, and Paul Polak! How amazing is it that we get so many great minds in [...]
Hi everyone, I am working on creating a prototype of something called the New Options Initiative at school, in concert with the Kellogg Foundation. I’d love to get your thoughts on a video mockup that we plan to show business leaders.
If you have just a few minutes, I’d love to get your thoughts on [...]
I promise I won’t keep doing this… Throwing down AAPL/the iPod/iPhone/MBAir/etc as an innovation case study. Actually I’m not even using it as a case study this time.
I’m only responding to this comment over on the FastCompany blog, that suggests that Apple should start doing some B2B work by leveraging its credibility that it [...]
How To Make Things “moddable”
23Jan08
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source: Tyler Hicks, NYTimes
Game developers have known for a long time now that a clever way to win consumers is by making their games “modifiable” — That is, adding custom levels in Quake, or creating scenarios in strategy games like Civilization.
As designers/innovators, we all know it’s particularly insightful to observe extreme/lead users and [...]
According to Gary Hamel (whose book I have yet to finish reading), you can teach an old dog new tricks. His assertion that corporate leaders invest very little on training of innovation methods may well be true: even truer might be that corporate expenditure on innovation might be wasted in bizarre ways. [...]
It would appear that growing enterprises and [buffalo wing] restaurants really do have a lot in common.
From Business Week:
Restaurant owners weren’t failing because they had ill-defined competitive strategies. They weren’t failing because they lacked access to capital, or because they chose poor locations, either. (These are factors, Parsa says, just not typically make-or-break [...]
This guy is my hero…
28Dec07… Not because his car is particularly good looking, because it definitely got beat with the ugly stick a few times, but because he adapted an old (1992!) car to enable him to hypermile by changing the body style of the car– No engine mods necessary. This is what Amory Lovins has been campaigning [...]
10 Types of Gorillas
22Dec07Can I just say, that sometimes, I feel like I’m in Pee Wee’s playhouse when I’m reading some random blog entry, design observer, or the latest McK Quarterly and I see the word “innovation“. All the fun creatures and puppets in the playhouse start screaming and yelling around me and I become anxious and [...]
Sometimes, while in the very fragile state of mind, during ideation sessions you bolt out with a flash of inspiration and a great idea, someone in your team (or an rss-feed-equipped-photographic-memory troll from the deep recesses of your brain) will leap up and pull up the website of a company that is–to be blunt–already doing [...]
Well, it’s about time
11Dec07Why compete on being the low price vendor, when you can boast about taking the least time out of your client’s life?
Anab Jain has an interesting thought experiment and project about this. What if everything you purchase (products and services) were denoted by the amount of time that they took to consume (hours/minutes spent reading [...]
Support Design Education.
25Nov07Design Continuum created a set of videos about design/design education and why they believe it is necessary. Check them out, here.
There’s also a BusinessWeek article about it, here.
There is a tremendous demand for design thinkers today. In industry and in consulting, those who can marry creative right-brain thinking and analytical left-brain thinking are at a [...]
Surveys for the Developing world
19Nov07In Keeley’s Design Planning class, we’re trying to nail the plan for a platform solution that aggregates data, uses some sort of human or computer powered inference engine, and visualizes the data in a meaningful way that is actionable by urban planners, city officials, or business leaders.
The work is part of a project titled 19-20-21 [...]
