As many of my friends know, I have been interested in the impact of living with screens on the evolution of the human species for some time now. In the past year a number of articles and books have been published that focus on the fact that we are now consuming huge amounts of information, read more
New Findings in Flocking
March 14, 2012 – 6:31 pm
The study of behavioral patterns of flocks of birds in flight may eventually lead to interesting models that can be applied to crowd-sourcing, as well as provide us some guidelines for optimizing our own collective behaviors. Evidently scientists are now looking at flocking as perhaps both mechanical and social phenomena. Findings that interest me (see read more
Augmented Reality (Part 1): The Ultimate Experience in Digital Learning
March 13, 2012 – 9:46 pm
My friend, Dana Hutchins (CEO of Imageworks), recently walked me through the augmented reality learning center at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute (GMRI) in Portland, Maine. GMRI does amazing work: everything from collecting/analyzing/reporting on ocean data, to teaching grade school children about marine ecology. Their programs are deeply considered. They include a number of read more
Are friends like particles?
March 26, 2006 – 9:45 pm
This article, The Physics of Friendship says that “By comparing people to mobile particles randomly bouncing off each other, scientists have developed a new model for social networks. The model fits with empirical data to naturally reproduce the community structure, clustering and evolution of general acquaintances and even sexual contacts.” I just love this kind read more
“human intelligence tasks” (HITs) and “artificial artificial intelligence”
March 21, 2006 – 9:45 pm
A great article in MIT’s Technology Review newsletter, The Impact of Emerging Technologies: Pennies for Web Jobs – Technology Review, discusses Amazon’s “Mechanical Turk”, a system designed to auction complex computing tasks off to human workers. The author, Sam Williams, sees this as “the latest in a string of experiments dealing with the complementary nature read more
Service Design… quick thoughts on design and evaluation methodologies
March 10, 2006 – 9:44 pm
I have recently been in discussions with a friend and business associate who is a Product and Service manager at a major global bank. His focus is on delivering customer support services. I was asking him about the service design and evaluation methodologies he sees utilized in his area. Here are a few quick extractions read more
Traditional business vs design?
March 6, 2006 – 9:44 pm
Excellent article on the differences between traditional business and design organizations: Creativity that Goes Deep by Roger L. Martin, Dean of Rotman School of Management. Martin outlines many of the challenges I (as a designer) have encountered working with corportate America: We work differently, are motivated differently, and ultimately we think differently. The article implies read more
RFID… R.evolutionay F.henomenon I.nitiating D.supercool!
September 23, 2005 – 9:45 pm
I am completely enamoured with RFID. There are so many possible and beautiful uses for it. It is propelling creativity in areas far afield from supply chain management. Here are a couple of interesting links people have sent me and/or I have stumbled upon that discuss applications both current and being developed: – RFID where read more
BCIs (brain-computer interfaces) know what you’re thinking…
September 13, 2005 – 9:45 pm
Earlier this year at CeBIT teams from the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Architecture and Software Technology presented a brain-controlled device to enable people to communicate through their thoughts. It seems the technology is still in a ponderous state as it takes 5-10 minutes for a person hooked into the system to write a simple sentence. read more
History of organizational silos?
June 8, 2005 – 9:43 pm
In an online discussion on why business organizational silos exist, Tracy Emerick (http://www.taurusmarketing.com/) had the following interesting comments to make: “The ‘silos’ in an organization have developed over time since WWII. After the war business schools supported the idea of a business being structured the same as the military command structure. In that structure there read more