keeping a diary makes you creative

In this talk Teresa Amabile, author of the excellent book: Creativity in context, present her studies on how keeping a diary help to improve your inner work life. What she actually says -and I guess she also writes in her last book: The progress principle- is that giving your self 15 minutes a day to write about the emotions and motivations that you experience during the day (which is the meaning of inner working life) can help you to improve your creative performance, that is, having ideas that work.

The benefits of keeping a work diary would be first of all, celebrate small wins, which is actually the cornerstone of what she named ''the progress principle''. State and recognize small wins will keep your motivation up, your emotions on the bright side and your perspective focus on the relevant aspects of the work that you are doing. The second benefit will be that, based on that small wins, you will be able to plan the next steps in order to keep that small wins coming and building up a better and more fulfilling way to the completion of the project you're working on. The third benefit will be within the personal area; keeping a diary will help you to visualize and nurture your personal growth. You will be able to see in clearer way for example how you behave with you team mates and colleagues, what makes the teams interact in more efficient and creative ways or what are the consequences of your decision process. The last benefit that Amabile states may sound kind of irrelevant but anyone who has worked in a long term project will recognize the importance of it: cultivate patience. One of the most definitive factors in the success of every project  is the emotional attitude to it. If is negative the project will suffer enormously of disdain and lack of interest and if it is positive usually the anticipation and the anxiety of make the whole thing work will play against the decision making process pushing forwards steps that are not yet mature enough to lead way to the next ones.

Amabile is surely one of the most relevant figures in the study of creativity. Her systematic psychological studies on how creativity affects the life of individuals and organizations is widely recognize as huge source of insights in the understanding, improvement and management of creativity processes.

Teresa Amabile is the Edsel Bryant Ford Professor of Business Administration and a Director of Research at Harvard Business School and lately the ranked number 18 on the Thinkers 50, the definitive listing of the world's top 50 business thinkers.

source: 99U.com

The personal mobility turning point

This video is a quite interesting trip through the personal mobility history focused on describing how we found ourselves in the turning point of this industry. The arguments for this claim are the upcoming electrical technologies and material that are now being introduce in the develop of personal mobility devices, the longer performance of electrical batteries and the reduction of their sizes as well as the incorporation of high sensitive capabilities have opened broadly the spectrum of possibilities for imagining and realize new ways of interacting with the vehicles, new uses for them and, the most relevant issue, new categories of vehicles. Since the foundation of this industry both the morphology and the configuration of personal mobility vehicles has remain pretty much the same until recently devices like the SEGWAY and the Honda's U3-X (the main character of this video) have overlook the the idea that a personal vehicle has to be a car or a bike or, if you are an eccentric driver, a tricycle to bring a new category of self-balancing vehicles, and altogether opening a hole new branch in the mobility industry.

The proliferation of new devices in this area has already begun, and we can count now with transitional hybrids like one-wheeled motorcycles or Segway like devices for off road but the disruption of personal mobility it is far from being exhausted and I guess we will witness the arise of other new categories on which the power storage technology and the active sensitive capacity as well as the new ways of human vehicle interaction will have a main role.

From the Design point of view, being involved in this turning point means a bit more than just to make these new devices more aesthetically appealing or user friendly; it means also to imagine, research and prototype new ways to communicate the human will to an electromechanical device so the relationship between them can become more intuitive and responsive.

That's it for now, by the way, this video is produced by Gizmag and you can read the hole article here.

Enjoy

Work vs. Play

Yet another talk about how IDEO work. This time related to the value of Play at work, with good examples of how a relaxed but focused environment where failure is tolerated can drive design teams to a successful delivery of solutions in complex situations.

RIP: A Remix Manifesto (or the left side of the rights)

This is a documentary about how we choose to experience culture. It is a tricky issue because we can either say that is a consumer good and feel free to consume it or we can just take it and use it as we please. the thing is, if we call it a consumer good means that is a product being offer to us, the one we trade so we earn the right to use its inscripted functions (the functions intended by the creator of that cultural good) until its life cycle, a close cycle, is over. by the other hand if is available to be taken and use, so it is public domain, means that it has an open life cycle and with this comes two different implications. first, the trade is open, which means that that cultural good is traded not anymore between the creator -or the mediator-and and individual, but the social space (the community within the scope culturally influenced by that ''good''). Second, the functions of the good itself are open; this means that in this case not only the intended functions are available but also any function that the good, by its properties, allows and also the functions that the user of the good can imagine.

All this becomes meaningful when we understand that one of the functions of any cultural good is to be a building brick for whatever comes next. Every cultural object, in the broader sense of the word, is a functional part of the future of that culture. This movie-manifesto is about what happens when we overprotect the cultural goods on which the innovation, which enriches the future, is fed.

the creators project: Stefan Sagmeister

The Creators Project its an initiative that put together people whose work is connected with the use of new media in their creative processes and/or products. It's a really interesting sample of works and visions from different areas of the creative practice such as Design, Music, Film and Art just for name a few, but also is a tasteful gathering of different culture flavors that show us the singularities of every culture in the approach to creative work.
Between the featured personalities are big names like Spike Jones, MOS Architects, Peaches, and Phoenix, but my personal selection is one of my favorites graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister, who is also a big fish, but never the less, always fun.

By the way, check:http://www.thecreatorsproject.com/en-uk/

James Dyson:Design what it should be

James Dyson, founder of Dyson corporation and responsible for the world famous machine looking vacuum cleaners, share his achievements and inspirations in a relaxed show-and-tell talk called ''the art of engineering'' at MIT. Dyson, graduated from the Royal College of Art, tell the story of how he went into engineering and how important it is not to be only a Designer or a Engineer, but to be a Designer/Engineer, and inventor as he said, and the relevance to make mistakes: ''...I think the schools got all wrong, they should be giving good grades to the ones that makes mistakes and learn from them.'' something that himself take to the limit, for his first cyclone vacuum cleaner he spend almost 5 years and did 5,126 prototypes!

The British inventor also criticized the definition of Design as a marketing tool arguing a more meaningful and systemic view that he inherit from one of his heroes, Buckminster Fuller, from whom also borrow the beautiful advice: ''...you see what needs to be done and do it.''

At he end of the talk, in Q&A, he discuss how he manage the creative processes within his organization and how he see the future regarding the rising of the new Asian productive power. Surely an invigorating example of how to make you way through with a huge accent on innovation.

Disruptive innovation techniques: DeBono's last child

Edward De Bono in his ''Lateral thinking'' said, ''the whole purpose of lateral thinking is to restructure the mind patterns, to disrupt them, to be able to see the things in a different way''. When I watched this presentation it gave me the idea of being reading a really good summary of De Bono's book. Here Luke Williams apply the notion of disruptiveness to three main areas: strategies, thinking and expectations and explain how the introduction of this concept can leverage innovation, hence success, in your company.

This talk is full with real business cases of Frog design (where the speaker is a fellow) and other business leader that relate this theoretical process with real successful innovations. One thing that I personally found really interesting is that the organizational processes to innovate are shifting their focus from efficiency and system theory to a more anthropological area, actually they are going into the psychology of the people involve in these processes. What DeBono wrote thinking in the improvement of the creative performance of individuals now is been taken as a way to improve organizational performance on innovation, in other words, how we can make innovation part of our organization process? or how we can build an organization centered on innovation? well...improving the creative performance of each person involved in the organization. But it is still a gap of going from the individual to the organizational level, and it is how we translate an mind process in a collective process. Again De Bono give us a hand in his book the "Six thinking hats'', but even when he manage to describe how to deal with the collective addressing of problem there is still an environmental issues to solve in order to empowered the creative processes in collective work settings, but that's another post.

For now it's good to enjoy a very dynamic talk, full of nice examples, of how to address the innovation through disruptiveness, a concept cast almost forty years ago that still remain fresh.

For more information of the speaker go here

and for his book in disrupt innovation go here

Designer! which kind? ....mm...Designer

Design is a common noun for a big amount of different occupations. As people who have a degree on design sometimes we feel a rather disappointed with common notion of Design that able to almost everybody to become a designer just by personal statement, and because of this we usually try to separate ourselves from the crowd saying that we are Industrial, Graphic, Product, Information, Interaction, Car, Yacht, Fashion, Furniture, Interior, Stage, Green, Red, Blue or else Designer; we are good on that.

In contrast with this recently a group of Design researchers has publish a paper on Design Issues that try to find common places in diverse disciplines of the design though a very simple methodology, conversation. They realize a series of workshops with a handfull of expert Designers (more than 10 years of practice) from different fields. From the fashion design to jet engine design and from furniture design to TV documentary. The first thing they found was that, although with some nuances, all the Designers talk the same language. When an engine Designer was put into conversation with a graphic one the only idea that needed an explanation was ''thumbnail'' and it was quickly grasped... by the engine designer. So language, I mean technical language, even through heavy specialization is a common tool.

Other interesting finding of the study was that we relate the idea of good design mainly with the acceptance and recognition coming from our peers, and only then with the user acceptance, sintitutional recognition or commercial success.

One big resemblance in all the stories told by the designers is the creative relationship with the material. Great deal of the time expended in the projects and the actual search -and find- of solutions goes through the hands and the direct contact with the material. Though the ''conversations'' with the material can be more or less physically attended, the direct experience and experimentation seems to be extremely relevant. In this way the lamp designer play with the glass to find out new shapes, properties and effects that can be use in the design as the engine designer, as well as the graphic one, includes the properties and qualities of the steel or the typography as constrains and capabilities that drives de design process.

The research unveils that in the communication area the main tool is by far the Sketching. Even when the computer techniques allow us to render projects more accurately (and more convincingly for the clients) than the hand, the sketching still prevail when it comes to capture and develop ideas.

The study also goes through the relationship with the final user and the big amount of energy spent in every design project on managing the uncertainty of collaborations with people and policies and as a conclusion stress the wide range of commonalities that bring designers together rather than split them around different technical, cultural and business context; and how much we need tools that make us aware of this and foster respect across the design world.

Even though this research found some really important insight of the design praxis, there are still some questions that should be address in order to bring about information on how designers are connected to each other further than the common places of the practice, which can also be found in others disciplines. We need to ask us about, how designers work out the difficult relationship between creation of new things (or stuffs as R.Gold said) and the renovation of the already existent things? Also, which are (if there are) the commonalities of our generative process in contrast with other creative areas? Learn about this can drive us to a more deep understanding of our discipline and its practical values.

Biomimética aplicada al desarrollo de modelos de negocios

Gunter Pauli on Biomimetism (Lift France 09, EN) from Lift Conference on Vimeo.

En este blog la verdad creo que nunca he publicado nada acerca de negocios, mas bien esta dedicado a temas de diseño, tecnología, ciencia y una que otra disvariación acerca de como desarrollamos y trabajamos en base a procesos creativos. Pero aunque a veces no nos guste el negocio es una actividad transversal a casi todas las otras.

En el diseño el negocio...bueno casi se podría decir que el diseño es negocio. Desde el diseño como la venerable herramienta de marketing, que permite a las compañias dar una expresión formal, percibible, disfrutable y por que no deseable a los idolatrados estudios de mercado, hasta el diseño de debate plantea conceptos radicales y exploraciones filosóficas y éticas que nos llevan a cuestionarnos importantes elementos de nuestra cultura y sociedad y aunque por lo general no llegan a ser consumidos por las masas, llegan a ser apreciados por las masas en los museos los cuales pagan grandes sumas de dinero por estos objetos y así permiten a seguir generando dinero y nuevos debates con nuevos objetos, es decir continuar con el negocio.

En cuanto a la Tecnología se podría decir que desde sus inicios ha sido parte de la estructura fundamental de el negocio. Cada avance tecnológico implica primero un esfuerzo por desarrollarlo, lo que conlleva -sino una industria- un negocio en sí, pero además producto de la innovación tecnológica (desde la incremental hasta la profundamente disruptiva) se abren nuevos espacios ya sea para profundizar un negocio ya existente o para generar nuevos negocios o incluso nuevas industrias.

Cuando se trata de Ciencia el negocio permite generar y suplir la infraestructura necesaria para desarrollar el trabajo científico. Y el resultado de ese trabajo científico, el nuevo conocimiento, sustenta el negocio de su divulgación, y por cierto los negocios que se surten de ese conocimiento como el desarrollo tecnológico.

¿Pero por que tratar de encontrar el negocio en todas estas áreas cuando el objetivo de este blog nunca han sido los negocios? Y es aquí donde el vídeo posteado se justifica. De hace tiempo ya es de mi interés la idea de estudiar y aplicar los conceptos extraídos de la naturaleza en los diversos campos del conocimiento humano, la biomimética. Y en función de eso me he dejado asombrar por como la ciencia y sus nuevas técnicas nos permiten conocer los secretos microscopios de las estructuras naturales o por la tecnología cada ves se acerca mas a la eficiencia en materiales y recursos del modelo natural y por como el diseño se nutre de la inteligencia geométrica de los organismos vivos para desarrollar nuevos elementos de nuestro mundo material. Pero hasta el día de hoy jamas me había topado con la idea -bastante lógica por lo demás- de que nuestro ecosistema podría enseñarnos como estructurar una metodología para llevar a cabo algo tan propiamente humano como el negocio. Hasta hoy hemos aprendido de las estructuras de lo más pequeño y lo más grande de nuestro universo, desde las partículas elementales que componen la masa hasta los procesos siderales que dan forma al universo. Pero resulta ser que hemos pasado en alto el equilibrio base que da sustento a todos esos procesos. Podemos saber como las plantas son capaces de levantar agua hasta más de 100 metros sin la necesidad de poderosas bombas de succión pero si no sabemos por que han decidido acarrearla tan arriba y cual es la función sistémica dentro de su entorno perdemos las nociones que nos permitirían aplicar de manera coherente ese conocimiento. En una ciudad donde viven millones de personas la cantidad de desperdicio producido puede llegar a ocupar un volumen peligrosamente cercano al de la ciudad misma, en un bosque o selva donde la cantidad de habitantes -seres vivos- puede ser significativamente superior al de una ciudad los desperdicios simplemente no existen. El producto de cada proceso es alimento del siguiente.

En el sobre gerrificado lenguaje de los negocios siempre se ha de contar con ''daños colaterales'' que simplemente no entran en la ecuación. Así el fantástico negocio del biodiesel por ejemplo a costado cientos y cientos de hectáreas en el amazonas para plantar soya para hacer combustible. Pero que pasaría si en vez de buscar ser ''el mas fuerte'' en los negocios "bioficaramos" su lenguaje para hacerlo mas equilibrado, para balancear la cadena de suministros con la de desperdicios. Si en vez de pensar del todo en la etapa como desperdicio de la vida útil de los objetos habláramos de su segundo estado como suministro. En el bosque el cuerpo del animal muerto es suministro del los demás vivos y del suelo donde cae.

Esta es la impresión que me deja Gunter Paulin en esta charla, en este mundo tenemos la capacidad para convertir casi todo en objeto de negocio, quizás sea tiempo de convertir el negocio en parte de nuestro mundo.

The Plenitude of Rich Gold

Some weeks ago I went in a local bookstore just to kill some time , and after take a quick look into the shelves a small green spine cath my attention in the design theorie area (after that I notice that theorie books even when it comes to design, are usually graphically bored). I take it from the shelf and just there another two things call my interest. First, all the cover was illustrated with doodles that looks like made by a school kid -a thing that I found clever in a bookshelf full of elaborated computer renderings- very warm and very beautiful. The second thing was ''foreword by John Maeda'' writen under the autors name, Rich Gold. Then when I went into the book, to my surprise I didn't found any pictures, any renders, any oversimplify diagrams, nothing but words..and CARTOONS! yes cartoons. Every chapter or section starts with a cartoon, and also every main idea on the book is stressed with a cartoon. There is a cartoon to explain the overstuffed enviroment in wich we live that Gold calls ''the plenitude'', there is also a cartoon that show clearly the four disciplines (and professions pursuit by the autor) that have the responsability of around 97% of the plenitude, there is a cartoons to explain the seven path of innovation, the five problems of the Plenitude and the seven solutions for that; and even for explain how the Plenitude of ones is based in the poverty of others.

After been exposed to that amount of quality information two thoughts came to my mind, cartoons rules and I have to reed this book.

The book is about thing, or better say Stuff. What it is, from where it comes, where it goes, how we can deal with it and why we need to be sorrounded by this thing call ''the plenitude'' (after write this post I'm not sure anymore if this book it's really about ''stuff'')

The Plenitude, Creativity, Innovation and Making Stuff

autor: Rich Gold (foreword by John Maeda)

pages:111

the MIT press

Building organs block by block

Building organs block by block
Analogy can go a little bit further than a create a juicer looking like a tin-tin spaceship, and a little bit useful too.
When everybody is thinking in cell printers to do 3D tissues structures -with everybody I don't mean you, me or the next door neighbour, but the biotechnology research community- a guy came with the idea of making bricks out of cells, like legos! and then he call this technique with the awesome name of ''micromasonry''. With this new concept Javier Gomez Fernandez (who has to be someones neighbour)put in every lab the the chance to build this kind of structures without depend on advance motion control technology. Big point for creative thinking in science.