November 2009
80 posts
Can India “Jugaad” Its Way To More Angel... →
The truth is India’s dream of building the next big fast-growing powerhouses will have less to do with angel money or Western venture money and more to do with getting around that ingrained fear of risk-taking. There’s still a strong cultural stigma to failure in India. Walking away from a prestigious and high-paying multinational job when you don’t have an angel to catch you isn’t easy,...
artist draws 18ft picture of New York skyline from...
volume-control:
Autistic artist Stephan Wiltshire drew a spellbinding 18’ long picture of the New York skyline completely from memory, after only a 20 minute helicopter ride over the city
This astonishing 18ft drawing of the world’s most famous skyline was created by autistic artist Stephen Wiltshire after he spent just 20 minutes in a helicopter gazing at the panorama.
The unbelievably...
Jobs at Apple- Job description, iPhone Software... →
The iPhone has revolutionized the mobile industry and has changed people’s lives and we want to continue to do so. We want to take Maps to the next level, rethink how users use Maps and change the way people find things. We want to do this in a seamless, highly interactive and enjoyable way. We’ve only just started.
“The map is not the territory”
– Alfred Korzybski
“ individual people in fact do not in general have access to absolute knowledge of reality, but in fact only have access to a set of beliefs they have built up over time, about reality. So it is considered important to be aware that people’s beliefs about reality and...
“I have no desire to scale up or get bigger. My desire is to produce the best...”
– Joel Salatin, Polyface Farms Owner (via jayparkinsonmd)
Food Inc. is a must watch.
“[In politics] good things will happen, big changes will happen not because they...”
– JP Narayan, Indian Politician / Social Rebel.
“Indians are the last living englishmen.”
– JP Narayan, Indian politician/ social rebel.
“I find that curiosity, open-mindedness, and imagination are important. It helps...”
– Jane Fulton Suri, on what type of personality makes the best observer. I like how a lot of these traits are actually something you can control with your mindset. (via ninakix)
while i agree with jane, i feel its also necessary for people to be educated in observation and their skills to be...
WatchRoger Martin at BIF-5 | Business Innovation Factory
How to not be a “jargon-spewing economic vandal” coming out of business school and likewise how to not be a “i have cool ideas, but i hate business” type of designer.
“The design of more and better is the way Asian designers make a living by...”
– Innovation & Design Blog - BusinessWeek
“Women and cats will do as they please, and men and dogs should relax and get...”
– Robert A. Heinlein
“what are you afraid of regarding the future?
people who are thinking only of...”
– naoto fukasawa
WatchFRONTLINE: the card game: watch the full program | PBS
Naoto Fukasawa: Intuiting function from form
“In Japan, the relationship between the object and its environment is more important than the object itself. A fork is good for a particular situation, not for everything. It isn’t just an object, it’s part of a harmony. My work stopped being about making interesting shapes, and more about the relationship with the object
What makes a design modern?
Over the past month, I have been reading vigorously about designs of naoto fukasawa, dieter rams, kenya hara and jonathan ive. I was interested in understanding what their way of thinking is and..what makes their products sticky ?
Instead what I learnt, is a rationale for designing and developing systems and really understanding what makes a design modern/ what should modern designs have?
...
thoughts to chew on.
systems
scalability
normal
simple
generic
off the shelf
plural
robust
reduce
make one thing do many things.
Fukasawa's design for convergence and reduction in...
Getting rid of products now seems as exciting a design challenge to Fukasawa as inventing new ones. His studio is conducting a research project, called Intelligent Walls, to redesign the home by replacing existing objects with modular wall panels, each of which will fulfill the same function as, say, a sound system, radiator or TV screen. “The air conditioner attached to your wall right now...
Fukasawa and America
Looking back, Fukasawa says that his time in the United States taught him how to think commercially and to work in multidisciplinary teams alongside engineers and software designers. It also prompted him to reassess his approach to design. Until then, like most product designers, his chief concern had been to create new products that looked and worked better than their predecessors; then he...
WatchDieter Rams in conversation with Deyan Sudjic on Vimeo (via Vimeo)
Monthly Fuel Cost VS. MPG →
the coming plug-in hybrids, which run a significant distance on electricity alone, or pure electrics, which run entirely on energy drawn from a wall socket. There are no gallons of anything to measure.
“If you interact with things in your life, everything is constantly changing. And...”
– Umberto Eco (via melissacullens)
Pranav Mistry: The thrilling potential of... →
Bridging the physical and the digital …
fascinating.
this is the future. its low tech and its intuitive.
“I used to think that being creative means to start from zero and build up...”
– Kenya Hara.
Theme | Human/Object Relations: Naoto Fukasawa
“I think so many of us, we get caught up with wanting to make money for ourselves...”
– Barack Obama
Full transcript of Obama’s town hall meeting with Shanghai students
“Existing search engines (which thought of themselves as portals) believed that...”
– Paul Buchheit, Applied Philosophy, a.k.a. “Hacking” (via betaworks) (via ninakix)
“Important new businesses are usually some kind of hack. The established...”
– Paul Buchheit: Applied Philosophy, a.k.a. “Hacking”
sketching = hacking = prototyping = applied philosophy
“In our zeal for ‘modernizing’ craft, we make the grave mistake of...”
– Sasi Menon, Product designer ,India
No help from govt, handmade paper instt faces hard grind
I found this comment by Sasi on the internet to an article describing the troubles of a government run craft institute (that makes handmade paper) in india.
This is one of the troubles of Indian craft...
