YakShaving

• The Story of Stuff with Annie Leonard
  (tags: environment sustainability stuff)

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 ones.) Rather, the single most critical element of a restaurant’s success, Parsa says, is the presence of a distinctive, well-researched concept. This insight is, admittedly, a bit of an anticlimax. The importance of a concept seems like it would be obvious to anyone prepared to invest thousands of dollars in said concept. As it turns out? Not so much.

design, innovation

It’s a phone, thus, a mic to capture audio.

It’s got a pretty swift safari browser that’s AJAX compatible.

Why haven’t people made voice activated web apps yet? It confounds me.

The only thing I’ve found that’s remotely close is this inelegant solution by Ask.com that seems cobbled together. (SMS + Web + Voice?)

(Actually, I wonder why the phone doesn’t have voice activated calling out of the box either… ?)

– UPDATE –
Just found something. Nice. Wonder why AAPL didnt come up with it as an add’l revenue stream. I might be willing to pay a little for it, depending on what stations they had.

design, iPhone, technology

“Our enormously productive economy … demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption…. we need things consumed, burned up, replaced, and discarded at an ever-accelerating rate.”
– Victor Lebow, 1955

Someone just sent me this link- It’s great!

• PSDTuts – Photoshop Tutorials and Links – Advanced Glow Effects
  (tags: photoshop effect design)
• Advancing Advanced Search – Boxes and Arrows: The design behind the design
  (tags: search findability)

Why don’t you believe in “Deleting” an email and going to the next one? Why launch users back to the Inbox? Why can I archive and go to the next message, but not DELETE and go to the next message?

I realize it “looks” the same, but there’s some psychological neurosis some of us have developed that still makes archived mails somewhere that are completely superfluous annoying. I like having the confidence that I can find what I want to find WHEN I NEED IT, not search through mountains of stuff. I was a pretty early user of GMail, using it the first week it came out. I have a lot of stuff that I just DONT NEED anymore but its such a pain for me to delete it in any efficient way.

Consider this a warning. I’m about-to greasemonkey you if you don’t watch out.

Random thought: What if you could hire someone to clean out your inbox on a regular basis? I’ve tried unsubscribing to lists, adding crazy spam filters, etc. It just isn’t enough. I’m a victim of the EEEMP workweek, as CC would say.

For regular readers who aren’t ID students, I wanted to give you a reminder and heads up that this year’s Strategy Conference is coming up in May. I am already extremely excited about the speakers coming this year.

I am working with several esteemed colleagues here at the Institute of Design in putting together a publication that will be available at the conference this year.

If you have particular topics of interest regarding the intersection of the innovation planning discipline and corporate strategy, please email me a tip or post a comment here. Are there burning questions you’d love to have answered by thought leaders in a public forum about using discipline in customer anthropology? or how to combine the right set of design methodology with traditional engineering and marketing processes? If so, fire away, and we’ll try to make it happen.

design, innovation, strategy, conference, publication

Well boys and girls, it’s going to be a busy semester again here at ID, but meh, might as well be, this spring break will be all the more restful and relaxing. Maybe I’ll even skip taking an intersession and go on a two week vacation?

• Cultural Human Factors
• Social Human Factors
• Design Analysis
• Design Synthesis
• Design Languages
• Advanced Design Planning
• Problem Framing
• Workshop: Prototyping
• Workshop: Design Entrepreneurship
• Workshop: Emerging Markets
• B-school class: Something easy, like marketing!

Sure seems like a lot, but it’s not that bad and I’m definitely dropping out of something after the first week.

flickr cred: Fib

Ok, okay. After pretty much a month long hiatus in Philadelphia, I am back to yakshaving. Well, I have always been performing the act of yak shaving, but I am back to blogging I mean. To tell the truth, I kinda missed writing for the heck of it. I’m not a graphomaniac like my little brother, but putting thoughts down about ideas is undoubtedly a clarity-yielding, fruitful endeavor.

So what have I been up to? As mentioned in earlier post, a recent obsession of mine has been decluttering and crusading for utter minimalism. I realize how much better I feel in an empty/clean space devoid of random pieces of paper and old junk that I just don’t need or ever use. Once I understood that “stuff” is not just about some value that is stored in tangible form, but also that “stuff” requires mental processing cycles each time you look at it and think about it, I was on board.

I know, I know.. I haven’t uncovered the secret to simplicity or happiness or anything like that, David Allen and his armies of index card toting GTDers still have a leg up on me.

Once I started doing this, I realized there were tons of people on the interweb with the same problems as I do. In fact, I’d suggest that the trend towards minimalism and declutter — not just personal organization (Think “The Container Store“), but just all out infatuation with purging of material possessions deemed superfluous is on the rise.

As a matter of fact, a quick search engine trip yields armies of consultants available at your beck and call to help you organize and rid yourself of stuff. When my mom told one of her yoga students about my declutter mission, the woman seemed convinced that a mass purging would give her great pleasure in her life right now. Not only that, but she was willing to pay (what’d I’d consider) top dollar for this service. Seems to be lots of ebay-drop-shop-type potential here.

By the way, if you’re interested, this is how I got started with the desk-declutter project and it turned into a whole-room affair.

design, declutter, minimalism, organization

• Education‽Blog List
  (tags: education technorati)
• Begley: Mind Reading Is Now Possible | Newsweek Voices – Sharon Begley | Newsweek.com
  (tags: cognition mind neuroscience)