The latest in personal urban transport looks like something between a segway and a folding bike… http://www.yikebike.com/
Promising - but not sure how stable it’ll be - or how practical for schlepping around town with bags and stuff. I’d love to test one out.
Love it!
“[The Fixers] are a Brooklyn based group that gets together once a week to repair and repurpose all kinds of broken things – shoes, radios, lamps, clocks – anything is game.”
http://www.psfk.com/2009/10/repair-and-repurpose-the-fixers-collective.html
http://fixerscollective.org/main/
If you want to go fast, go alone.
If you want to go far, go together.
- African proverb
I recently read Innovation to the Core: A blueprint for transforming the way your company innovates by Peter Skarzynski and Rowan Gibson. It is probably the best book I’ve read about managing innovation. When folks ask me what I do at Jump, it usually takes some explaining. This book is a really good primer in a lot of the work I find myself doing on a daily basis - and attempts to answer many of the questions I find myself wrestling with.
The book provides good examples (primarily from Strategos’ work with Whirlpool) as well as concrete advice/tools. Their basic premise is that successful innovation can be made repeatable by making it more “core” to a company’s DNA and distributing innovation capacity throughout the organization. They are trying to do for innovation what Six Sigma did for quality…putting a flexible process around it, institutionalizing an innovation training program and job architecture, and making innovation a core value that everyone feels empowered to participate in.
The book is also a great example of affordance in design. Affordance is when an object’s form really conveys its function and method of use. A handle that begs to be gripped in a certain way. A latch that is in exactly the right spot and snaps open and shut intuitively. In this case, the book has wide margins on the edges of the page that invite note-taking and mark-ups. In addition to just being handy, this also messages that the book is meant to be engaged with, absorbed, and referenced back-to.
Check out this website: http://greatfirewallofchina.org/. It tests any URL to see if it is blocked in China. For example, http://www.dalailama.com/ - blocked. I was surprised to see that GreenerMind.com did not show up as blocked. We had a lot of trouble viewing it in China. To update it we had to use a Falun Gong mini-ap that rerouted the data through Europe.
An interesting site - and an interesting social evolution. I can’t think of any other time in history where it has been possible to have such transparent visibility into censorship. The world is SO interconnected and information flows so easily that, in my opinion, it is just a matter of time until this Great FireWall of China falls. But maybe that’s all the time the CPC needs to ease it’s population into the information age.
After studying my blogging options, I have decided to use WordPress as my blogging engine. I hope to use this blog to tell anecdotes about my life, share photos, and express my thoughts.
