June 3rd, 2007 by mdSeveral students in Creating Infectious Action (MSE288) at Stanford came up with a very cool way to explain design thinking to others by executing, and documenting by video, a rapid design process. The four students, Mada, Ana, Dot, and Mannan are masters students in the class which I co-teach. They captured a totally authentic look […]
May 23rd, 2007 by mdRecently we had a good discussion of an interesting topic in Creating Infectious Action — a course I co-teach at Stanford. The conversation was about widgets and the unbundling of cool content from the url where it originated. Widgets — small, portable units that are essentially mini-windows onto an application or pieces of content — […]
May 19th, 2007 by mdMy colleagues Bob, Perry, and I went for a week to the Higher College of Technology in UAE to teach a short seminar on Innovation and Product Design to a group of students and executives. It was a long, but really fun trip. The students were about 80% nationals, the remainder from elsewhere in the […]
April 1st, 2007 by mdI went to the Body Art Expo today at the Cow Palace in San Francisco. Wow.
Body Art is apparently the umbrella under which you find tattoos, piercings, and body modifications such as (I don’t know what the official names are) boring large holes in your ears, installing spikes under your skin that poke out […]
March 24th, 2007 by mdThis is one of the coolest things I have seen in a while. A friend recently told me about this as a way to gather feedback quickly and economically from real people.
Mechanical turk.
This platform allows a researcher (say a company, a product designer, an academic, even a computer etc.) to post a question or task […]
February 11th, 2007 by mdThis is certainly worth reading. It’s a piece in today’s NYT by G. Pascal Zachary who teaches Journalism at Stanford. In it he addresses the question of why so much innovative company- and tech-building happens here in Silicon Valley.
Read the article here.
January 22nd, 2007 by mdSomeone recently asked me to describe some of the broad themes / opportunities in consumer technology, specifically online. As I thought about it, four buckets came to mind — three verticals and one horizontal point.
Commerce. Household penetration of the Internet has reached mass market levels and is holding steady in the high-70s or low-80s percent […]
December 17th, 2006 by mdI am reading an interesting book called, Orbiting the Giant Hairball. It compares large company culture to a hairball in the sense that the company is a tangle of formal and informal relationships that make clear navigation and creative processes difficult. I think that this combined with the fact that many times the hairball obscures […]
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