Lee Vinsel and Andrew Russell are leading voices in arguing for a bigger place for maintaining things in this world in our culture, not just for creating or innovating. In The Innovation Delusion what could have been a powerful charge to embrace maintainer culture and thinking is drown out by a poorly organized and researched …
Aesthetics and beauty are often dismissed, but they can be enormous catalysts and supports for innovation.
How do we design for attention in a distracted world? Nir Eyal has some answers to provide the focus we need. Behavioural designer Nir Eyal has spent the last decade looking at how we can draw attention. His first book, Hooked, was all about how to capture attention and keep people engaged. Suffice to say, …
Is what you do, where you work, or how you organize, beautiful? Among the many words used to describe our work lives the most neglected and maybe necessary might be described that one word: it’s time to take it seriously. For those working in design one of the biggest challenges is getting people to understand that …
Beautiful answers require beautiful (and better) questions and Warren Berger’s new book looks at this very phenomenon of inquiry and asks: What does it mean to ask better questions and what does that mean for the answers we seek and receive?  Warren Berger recently published  A More Beautiful Question, a book looking at something we …
The term evaluation has at its root the term value and to evaluate innovation means to assess the value that it brings in its product or process of development. It’s remarkable how much discourse there is on the topic of innovation that is devoid of discussion of evaluation, which begs the question: Do we value …
Giga OM founder and prolific reader Om Malik posted a reflection on his reading habits on his blog that got me thinking about the way we consume, rate and appreciate content online. In this post, Malik shares some of the dialogue he has with the CEO of Pocket, a read-it-later service that allows you to …
If design is everywhere humans are and shapes our interactions in the built environment, which dictates how we interact with the world around us should it not be considered important enough to be a part of public health? I recently picked up a copy of the architecturally-inspired Arcade Magazine because of its theme on Science, …
A brilliant and comprehensive new book has been launched that brings together the best scholars working in the area of systems thinking and complexity and applying it to health. The book description can be found here along with a link to the abstract for a chapter I co-authored with Andrea Yip looking at the overlap …
John Maeda’s 4th Law of Simplicity states: “knowledge makes everything simpler”. In this post I lay out why this might be only partly correct, suggest that there are problems where this works better than other and illustrate how knowledge can also make things more complex, rather than simple.
