A boy and his Atom, The world´s smallest movie!!! (dancing atoms)

Ok, This is something we were not waiting for. Usually in technology you can predict with certain accuracy where things are going, either smaller or integrated in most cases. But this time foreseeing a stop motion movie made by moving single atoms around would have been a prove of prophetic talents, and this is not only because it´s a movie recorded with a 100 million times magnifier glass but because there are atoms telling the story of a kind falling in love with one of them, playing, jumping and laughing together. Of course the implications of this technology go far beyond the realm of filmmaking  straight to the data storage industry, promising that in a not so far future we would be able to storage all the movies ever made in one single smartphone.  Now think about this, what a better way to start that story, the story on which knowing something like the back of my hand will mean to know all the information ever produce by man, that with a love story between a young, curious and open mind and the single piece of matter that  builds that mind. That´s is just Poetic.
Cheers on IBM research for this one!!!

To see the making of  click here

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.

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.

The hard side of Opensource

Arduino The Documentary (2010) English HD from gnd on Vimeo.

Opensource is probably the most philosophically relevant idea coming from the computer sciences. Actually the idea of sharing knowledge it's, of course, not new but it the age on which patent and rights have drag the technical knowledge to a exclusive corporate corner sharing information about how things work it's a revolutionary endeavor. In a good metaphor expressed in this documentary the Opensource is compared with Gutenberg's movable type printer. Before Gutenberg the production of books were in hands of a few, mostly cleric,that controlled what could be read, hence what could be know, after him the amount and more important the variety of books explode given the people the chance of build themselves for themselves a body of knowledge to understand the world. Gutenberg's printer was a very important piece of Open hardware that boost society into a new direction.

Today we are confronting a similar scenario. We are surrounding by technological devices like cellphones, computers, consoles, mp-players, etc. That we barely know how to use and we are even less inform about how they actually works. This disinformation has huge consecuenses in a world on which the number of this kind of devices may be even bigger than the actual population. Think on what is lost every time that a computer or a cellphone goes to the trash, maybe the system as a whole doesn't work but, what about all those little parts that give life to that cellphone or that computer? what if we can do something with those parts? what if we can play and tinker with that old low resolution cellphone camera or that screen? what about the spinning wheel of that broken mouse or the optics of that old digital camera? the possibilities are amazingly wide. For doing that we need knowledge and tools, but as we know big part of the knowledge comes from playing with the tools and here is where Arduino comes into scene. this piece of very cheap and non-exclusive piece of hardware is the tool which allow us to start connecting all those little parts and give them a purpose, whatever this purpose would be. Here is the potential of this little device that have been revolutionizing the digital world, and the revolution consist on materialize the digital world itself for sake of fun, what purpose beautiful and productive than that.

Following fun and with the help of Opensource tools as Arduino and Processing amazing things have come to life like 3d printers that cost little more than a thousand dollars or new music instrument and a lot of new robots. Opensource tools like Arduino bring down the technical threshold of electronic devices world to a level that allow not specialized people to start to interact in a expressive and creative way with it, and the best part... in a social way too, because is not about what I can do and how I can make profit out of that (not only at least) but what We can do and how we take this thing into the next level.

Opensource means sharing knowledge, and sharing knowledge means better and faster understanding and develop of communities. It may not be new but as a movement based on the technologies that are changing the face of our daily living surely, is a philosophy to adopt.

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

Sometimes we forget that the environmental issue is not just technological, political and social, but also cultural. Art is one of the stronger cultural tool that we have because its critical sensibility. Some Art connect with us through beautiful aesthetics and other Arts through critical reflexions, and some really good art combine both ways (and other ways too) in multilayer artistics representations. I think this is the case of this animation on wich a very critical view is presented in a delightful visual and sounding experience that tells us not about what is happening but what is supposed to happend with our sensibility regarding the energetical issue. The windmill farmer of Joaquin Baldwin, is talking about the involvement of our felling and hopes in the enviromental issue, saying when we manage to feel deep sandness instead of just neglect what's happening in our sorrounding we'll achieve the point of inner motivation to get involve ourselves in processes of change and not just be simple spectators of what others do. In my own personal way to see it, it's not just a beautiful animation but a calling to feel and act.

Paper towels for oil spills: MIT researchers unveil autonomous oil-absorbing robot

MIT researchers unveil autonomous oil-absorbing robot

see also

from the monkey to the homoEmpathicus

Some weeks ago i came across with the knowledge that we posses some neurons call mirror system-or mirror neurons- wich give us the ability to feel what others are felling, just by see them or by hear them. Well this system is the base of the empathy, but empathy may be the base of another big thing...Society perhaps? but how study empathy can give us insights of how society evolve? -here it gets really good- because studying empathy we can study the history of human social counsiousness or to whom we think -and fell- we are related to. From the blood ties, passing through religion to Nations states and going further, Jeremy Rifkin explain the ideas coming from his six years research on this topic. This video extract, and illustrate in the very clear way of CongnitiveMedia, a part of a talk given by the autor on which he refers to the discovery of the mirror system and how that new insight open a new path for understand history, pass and future.

EN-V: no more cars but movable-containers-points of a mobilitynet

Augmenting Reality | Product Design and Development

this is a sample of the features in the next generation cars, where Augmented reality it's included as a part of driving experienced

Augmenting Reality | Product Design and Development

What we can lean from what we have forgot

The great tragedy of our era will not be ecological, but ethnographical

''...Biologist suggest that perhaps 20 percent of mammals , 11 percent of birds, and 5 percent of fish are threatened, and the botanist anticipate the loss of 10 percent of floristic diversity, linguist and anthropologist today bear witness the imminent disappearance of half the extant languages of the world.'' '' Of the 7000 languages spoken today, fully half...will disappear within our lifetime.''

-Wade Davis. The Wayfinders, Why ancient wisdom matters in the modern world

The Ethnosphere, humanity's greatest legacy is in extintion danger. With the disappearence of the half of our own diversity we will loss also the half of our history, of our spirituality, and the half of our knowledge on wich we can stand upond to face the challenges of the future. Challenges like the climate change and the lost of biodiversity, because when these voices fade out it will fade away too the cultures wich have develop and conserve the most extensive knowledge about how to live in a true and simbiotic relation with nature.

the next video it's a sample of a lecture given by Wade Davis, for the complete lecture clickHERE

Mirror system, or the empathy mechanism in our brains

Recently I came across with a video that introduces the idea that we have a neuronal mechanism that allows us to share the experience of other people just by look at them or heard them. This mechanism it's call the Mirror System. This neuronal device, that don't depend on any specific brain structure, was first found on monkeys as an unexpected neuronal response when some scientific team in Parma were studying the response of some neural groups related with conscious movement. The exercise was grab a piece of food, when the monkey grab it the neurons ''turn on'', the surprise was when the exactly group of neurons also ''turn on'' when the monkey saw one person of the team grab the food.

That found opens a complete new research branch in neuroscience and until now it has been prove that this system has incidence in motor, sensitive and symbolic system. This means that through the ''mirror system'' it can be trigger motion, sensitive and emotional responses in the subject that look or hear an action. This is why we make funny faces when we see a football player get kick by another, or why movies make us cry.

The mirror system it's the only mechanism that has proven to be fundamentally social, that means that it is a specific device to learn and behave socially. The thing that I see as a relevant issue here is that when you are worried about to understand human behaviour (like Design as a discipline it is) you have to be conscious about the importance of firsthand experience and above all, of observation; because this means that through experience and observe the human behavior you can easily address gestures, emotions and comprehensions that can drive conceptually and formally the develop of a project.

The relevance and functions of the mirror system go, of course, far beyond the field of design and can give us a knowledge greater than confirm a fact well know by experience (observation and firsthand experience are our best tool for design) and it can put us in the real and deep understanding of human behaviour.

more info:http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sciencenow/3204/01.html

What are the discussion on Design by these days?

fig 1

Some days ago I read in WYSIWYW a really interesting and visceral post about Design & Art. This relationship has been discussed (above all in design schools, I have never hear an artist say a word about that) since the beginning of the design as a discipline, and to be honest I’m quite tired of hear arguments going in both ways, and I agree when the people from ''Sindicato de la Imagen'' says Art is Art and Design is Design, get over, don't lose more time in nonsense.

But this closure leaves us another question: what is the discussion in design by these days? And, what are the topics of that discussion?

Design, as any other consolidated discipline, has several components that converge to give substance to his theoretical and practical body: Methodology, Ethics, Technical issues, Aesthetics, Relation with the industry, Connection with other disciplines and Cultural relevance, just for say some. All these components can also be analyze by them self to find new areas to debate and to extract polar concept that define the extension of the discussion. For example, if we look the arguments in Methodology we can find ''Design thinking'' as one of the mayor driver of the praxis by these days, but also we can find ''Problem solving'' (coming from engineering) as one of the most common approaches to design. In other areas like Aesthetics polar concepts can be a little more diffuse, and they can go from naturalism (Bouroullec) to new rationalism (Lehanneur), from the nostalgia (Hayon) to the material and structural efficiency (Grcic) (fig 1).

In the same way of analysis we can find polar concept in Ethics. Today in design every day we can contrast the Super luxury -of cars, yachts, interiors, electronics, high-end audio systems, clothes, watches and almost a endless list of product focus on give pleasure and social relevance to his owners- with product and projects focus on solving social issues like education (OLXC), Health (Lifestraw), shelter ( rectionhousingsystem), energy ( ceramic jiko). Social focus has permeated design even further than poverty issues to address health and social behaviors in the developed world (NYC Condom).

The word Design its use today almost as a synonym of innovation, and in this relationship lays the Cultural relevance of design. As material culture dynamo, Design has the responsibility to innovate, but innovation can also be decompose in the polar concepts of Incremental Innovation and Conceptual Innovation. The difference lies in if the innovation comes to improve something that already exists (incremental) or introduces a new way to achieve a desire effect. For example you can design a new washing machine in which you can wash color and white clothes at the same time without worry about the white clothes get stained in the process, which would be a really good improvement in washing. That would be an incremental innovation. But if you make yourself the question: why do we need a big and complex machine to wash our clothes? Or even better, why do we need water to wash our clothes? You can find some new ideas on how to clean the clothes that can drive you to develop new objects and process of cleaning, which would be a conceptual break through, a conceptual innovation. The main difference between this two ways of innovate is the physical product of them. In incremental innovation the most of the cases ends in a new variation of a pre-existing product (like a better washing machine), but the product of conceptual innovation usually is a complete new item, that open a new branch on the technological tree (like self cleaning surfaces).

Another big difference between incremental and conceptual innovation it’s the risk level, improve an existing product it’s a safer road than develop something complete new one. But that is a subject of business rather than design, as it is also the scale of the production. Design is –and this it’s my position- in the solution, not in the repetition or the scale of the production.

The discussion on today Design it is a lot bigger than we just talk here, and we have to be aware that this isn’t a light conversation about taste or how improve the business strategy. This is about what to do in a discipline that every day has a more relevant role in society and culture.

This conversation should continue and I think one good introduction is this video where Tim Brow talk about different aspects of Design and Design thinking.

From Art to Science...and back (Reuben Margolin's kinetic sculptures)

First of all, if it is anyone real follow this blog i would like to apologize me for the big time window between this post and the previous one. Now, i find this excelent example of the crossover between art and science. Reuben Margolin translate the physics of waves into the language of art with amazing results, big and complex instalations waving smoothly as a light water perturbation or as the peculiar gait of the caterpillar.

The crossing between Art and Science it's not new, but it is somehow one of the most interesting and revolutionary paths that the Arts is following these days. In the same field of kinetic sculpture we can find the amazing beach animals by Theo Hansen, but also we can count the phylosophical questioning made through hightech-interfaces by Natalie jeremijenko who put in evidence the nature of our relationships with other people, animals, the cities, and so on.

There is a lot of people working now in this area, bringing the concepts of science and using the new technologys to make some reflections about the world on what we live, and they are making amazing things. But also there is a few who follow the opposite path, from science to art, and they are discovering the big power who lies behind the human expression and how these knowledge -intuitive and irrational as usually is - can hold the keys of one of the most complex structures, the human behaviour.

amazing

Pranav Mistry, the invention sense

Pranav Mistry is one of that people that have the abitlity of play with the technology as if it was the most childish of the games. With a background in Computer Science and Design, Pranav Mistry gather together the understanding of the interaction between the people and the digital interfaces and the comprehension on how technology can improve our lives to give birth to some of the most radical devices and interfaces. This one of the guys who is shaping the future human-computer interaction... and it's going open source!!!

Mathieu Lehanneur, object-ivness and user comprehension

Mathieu Lehanneur -French designer- who claims for a Design informed by Science to understand our real needs -like silence- and develop products with wich we can relate, and even achieve symbiotic dependences (for good, fortunately). It's also a good example of new areas for design and the richness that multidisciplinary work brings to design.

http://www.mathieulehanneur.com/

Martin Puryear, Monomaterial cultural explorations

http://video.pbs.org/video/1237794459#

Recently i've came to know the sculptor Martin Puryear (1941), he catch my atention with his wooden sculptures who resembles in a very subtle way some ''cultural bags'', objects that carry representative shapes and shades of an past moment in history, like a Wooden wheel or a ladder.

Another thing that realy grab me was the austerity of his work. Almost all his pieces are built in only one material, this can be stone or metal but above all wood. This artist fill spaces with objects that are wonderfully crafted in wood in wich ones you can recognize the most traditional techniques of woodworking. The relation with cabinet-making it's obvious in every joint. The cultural explotarion of his work goes through the objects into techniques, and put the ancient knowledge of woodworking into the lenguage of modern Art.

What i like of Puryear? the way he relates deeply with the material, the cultural and simbolic awareness of the comun objects. An also the way that he translate his wooden shapes into other materials.