Alexis vs Klinker

A fascinating article contrasting the ID "sellout" viewpoint of design with the Cranbook "artsy-fartsy" viewpoint: http://www.cranbrookdesign.com/index.php/topics/more/design_versus_innovation_the_cranbrook_iit_debate/

I'm pleased and surprised how little Apple came up in this discussion, but I find it amusing that Jobs and Ivy have purposefully kept their methods and viewpoint about design hidden (of course, other than that it's important - which we can all agree on). I can't imagine Apple doesn't do extensive user research, but they obviously cultivate a certain flair or spirit. This opacity is probably just another strategic move to keep us all buying their products.
While Alexis, Owen, and our other professors are successfully infusing method, clarity, and rigor into our thinking here at ID, they also - subtly and implicitly - call upon us to follow our intuition and let a strong viewpoint show itself in our work.
As a student of the humanities, I like to think that not only does a designer need both the spirit and the method, but that we won't be human at all if we give up either the form or the function of our work.

Official google.org Blog: How to assess entrepreneurial potential? A new tool for SME lenders

Official google.org Blog: How to assess entrepreneurial potential? A new tool for SME lenders

Bottom, Middle, Top of the pyramid

A project I worked on last semester parallels work that is being done at google.org - my project for Larry Keeley's class (dqe1.com/files/juncture-proposal.pdf) focused on creating an 'opportunity engine' that connects various NGOs like Kiva, Grammeen Bank, and Heifer Intl. to let them share data and get better coverage of their customers. The Google project (http://blog.google.org/2008/09/how-to-assess-entrepreneurial-potential.html) is more than a proposal - they of course have funding. They are aiming for a much higher spot on the small-business ladder, funding in the half-million dollar and up range. But the perspective and the goals are closely aligned: scaling down our immediate ambitions to reach out to a larger number of potential customers.

This is also the case in a new class I'm very excited about with Patrick Whitney this semester. We're examining why CK Prahalad's "Bottom of the Pyramid' theory isn't working out. He proposed in his 2006 book that large multinationals should consider serving people who make less than a few dollars a day - there are so many of them that even if we sell them a product for $.01 every day, we can make a killing over the course of a year with 4 billion customers. While this has worked out in a few isolated cases (Hindustan Lever, Mo Ibrahim's cell phone networks), in general it's taking longer than expected and companies are having a rough time with it. So my classmates and I are going to contact some of the leaders of organizations which have attempted and failed to try to develop a framework to help make this effort more reliably successful.

At this point in the process, we're still looking for organizations with experience reaching out to the BOP market and leaders to contact who might give us some perspective on the problem at hand.

Official google.org Blog: How to assess entrepreneurial potential? A new tool for SME lenders

vonnegut's lobotomy

In Galopogos, Vonnegut suggests that in a million years humans will have evolved much smaller brains (and turned into dolphin-like creatures), laughing and crying about the ridiculous machinations and complexities of our current society. Indeed, it's doubtless that much of what our culture produces is tangent - if not downright opposed - to our long-term survival (not useless, however, as nobody can really say right now which part is wheat and which is chaff).
It occurred to me last night - at a particularly lucid point in the last few weeks' dream of simple being unencumbered by the worry and existential pain that usually haunts me - that maybe giving up some of this ambition, responsibility, and sense of loss in the shadow of my imagined genius is evolutionarily beneficial. Of course I've realized before (thanks to help from Lao Tzu and sakyamuni) that it could be helpful for me, but I was still chased by spectres of Marx who wanted me to suffer an hour so my children would live in a paradise for ten.

constitutional celebration

Time for a constitutional amendment party!!!
Maybe it's just that I've had my first cup of coffee from a clover machine, but I'm swayed and convinced by this article that it's time and ready for change:

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200901/founders-mistake/3

superficiality

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. -Martin Luther King, Jr., civil-rights leader (1929-1968)

Some day i'll write a computer program to come up with new analogies and it will tell me, "I have a dream that my four offspring will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the material of their bodies but by the content of their character."

I'm just saying - they're not really conscious if they've just copied it off this blog...

acting

maybe actors are born by never learning, intuitively, to act. These simplest of people always show what they are feeling with direct, un-second-guessed earnestness. When somebody puts them into a situation, they baldly display their reaction to it. When a director says, "now you're in love," they know what that feels like and don't worry too much about the meta-level motivations, ironies, hidden information, etc, which people (me, at at least) take into account to help their position in social situations.

Of course, then there's the other way, where actors have an intuitive grasp of how to manipulate people by showing them certain feelings and information as opposed to others, and then they hone that skill through practice. This kind of actor would probably be more flexible, though it would take them many more years before they were ready to give a really convincing presentation.