Brain Brandy: A plea for information density, not information for the dense
The other day I was reading the New York Times online which was reporting on the financial crisis a year after the crash. They created the most fantastic...
Cool Idea: A smart coffee cup named Smug
I love the story of Chris Halberg the founder of Smug Coffee . He was in class at Marquette University and invented the idea of adding an RFID chip to a...
Designing Interaction 2.0: Microsoft Natal Reinvents “The Screen”, Google Wave Morphs “Context”
My friend, and Diamond Fellow , Dan Bricklin wrote a wonderful essay on July 7, 2009 called "New Modes of Interaction: Some implications of Microsoft Natal...
Disruptive Design: Icarus meet air traffic control!
Oliver Yeh a first year Mechanical Engineering student at MIT just successfully designed, launched and retrieved a camera 17.5 miles into the atmosphere and...
Google's App Inventor: More needed duct tape for our digital world
When something gets modular, the opportunity to create many more innovations skyrockets. Hundreds, or thousands or millions of inventors can give something...
Google's FastFlip: Good for us! Good for media?
Google's new fastflip technology which has launched with three dozen publishers -- including Slate, Cosmopolitan and the New York Times -- implements an...
Intel & Vice: Innovation where hip meets bits, and the Digital Gift meets art
It always amazes me how the most creative folks often have one part of their radical plan which is very old style and conservative. In particular, Vice ,...
Is “The Gig” The Right Way to Design Creative Knowledge Work?
Yesterday, my colleague Caroline Calkins and I were on the phone with Dr. Robert Ballard , the man who found the Titanic, and also helped find two lost...
Jan 15Is This Innovation Too Disruptive for My Firm?
One of the trickiest decisions in business is to assess: is this innovation too innovative for my firm? You need to decide, will the core business embrace...
Simplicity is Really Complicated with Paul D'Alessandro (Also posted at HBR)
Intuit just bought Mint.com for $170,000,000. Mint is a simple, web and phone based tool with a great design interface that helps people manage their...
Sometimes It's Just Genius
Well, the more I stare at this poster by Milton Glazer, created to announce his own work, the more I think of the phrase: the eternal lightness of being...
The "New" Control Revolution: Or why the current analytics trend is not a fad...
One of my favorite business books of all times is The Control Revolution by James Beniger. It has been some time since I read it, but as I remember the...
The Netflix Prize: Designing a market for ideas... (Also posted at HBR)
There are a couple of key lessons every business can glean from the Netflix Prize. The first is that if you have a data driven problem it is possible to tap...
Thoughts on 9/11: How can we design resiliency?
I am enough of a utilitarian that when I think of tragedy -- like the sorrowful events of eight years ago -- I always ask: Did we learn anything from the...
Why the Apple iPhone 4 May Change Communication
All true breakthroughs in an art form come when there is a change in perspective. Some say that Italian Renaissance painter Masaccio (1401-1428)...