The empathy economy [Business Week]
“Design thinking” can create rewarding experiences for consumers — the key to earnings growth and an edge that outsourcing can’t beat. Read full story
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Wearable computers you can slip into [Business Week]
The latest generation of these ever-smarter garments look like ordinary clothes, not something only a cyborg would don. Read full story
Investment bank sees blogging as way to find ‘stars of tomorrow’ [The New York Times]
Blogging has transformed political commentary, rattled the media business and inundated the Internet. Does it have a place on Wall Street? ThinkEquity Partners, a boutique investment bank in San Francisco, was going to find out on Thursday by introducing a Web log. The firm, which…
Artful making: what managers need to know about how artists work
Artful Making offers the first proven, research-based framework for engineering ingenuity and innovation. This book is the result of a multi-year collaboration between Harvard Business School professor Robert Austin and leading theatre director and playwright Lee Devin. Together, they demonstrate striking structural similarities between theatre…
U.S. companies rethinking their marketing in Europe [The New York Times]
For years, American corporations and the European companies that do business with them have faced anti-American sentiments from Europeans. But with the war continuing in Iraq and discomfort growing over United States dominance, the companies have been forced to further adjust how they do…
Blogging at the Davos World Economic Forum
Even the Davos World Economic Forum now has its own weblog. Go to the Davos blog
Microsoft’s chief humanising officer [The Economist]
Does Robert Scoble, a celebrity blogger on Microsoft’s payroll, herald the death of traditional public relations? Read full story
Technology gets the creative bug [BBC]
The hi-tech and the arts worlds have for some time danced around each other and offered creative and technical help when required. Read full story
Wolves in shops’ clothing [Fortune]
“Lifestyle centres” make big-box retailers look and feel like small-town shops. How can entrepreneurs compete? Read full story
Institute without Boundaries
Change the world. Go to website
Sottsass’s ‘Architecture for People’ [Metropolis Magazine]
> Ettore Sottsass — one of the post-war architects who literally invented the idea of Italian Design — is today eighty-seven years old: a true éminence grise. Recently, I talked to the designer/writer and cultural provocateur at the Barry Friedman Gallery, which was staging his…
Social entrepreneurs and Davos [BBC]
“Davos diary: This is not about money” by Jim Fruchterman, President, The Benetech Initiative. Read full story
Eternal optimist [Metropolis Magazine]
Architect William McDonough has witnessed China’s rapid modernisation and sees hope for sustainable development. He is working to bring his cradle-to-cradle protocol to China, where old buildings are being demolished as quickly as new ones are constructed. Read full story
Experience experiment [Fast Company]
Sporting Puma sneakers and a downtown hipster haircut or two, a team from the design firm Imagination USA shuffles into a fourth-floor loft in New York’s SoHo district. They’re met by David Polinchock, who offers Blow Pops and ushers them into a big space…
The good company [The Economist]
Corporate social responsibility as the tribute that capitalism pays to virtue. Read full story
Microsoft Project Seeks ‘A PC in Every Village’ [Seattle Post – Intelligencer]
Microsoft Corp.’s research unit is turning to social scientists in a new effort to understand the long-term possibilities for computer technology in developing countries. A Microsoft Research lab, to be inaugurated tomorrow in Bangalore, India, plans to employ anthropologists, ethnographers and others to observe and…
E-culture advisory
“Digital media have not only made in-roads in the way visual artists, musicians, designers, film makers and other cultural practitioners work – they have created a new context”. Michiel Schwarz’s insightful Dutch policy paper on “e-culture”, that has just been published in English, says…
Creative Capital conference
Culture and creativity are the latest “buzzwords” in the debate on innovation strategies for the knowledge economy. But what is the cultural dimension of the knowledge economy? And what does this imply for the public domain? These were the central questions of the Amsterdam Creative…
Is America losing its edge [Foreign Affairs]
The long-standing pre-eminence of US technology and innovation worldwide may now face a challenge, as the changing face of the global marketplace takes its toll. As US trade and development has expanded overseas, partner nations have taken advantage of this access. Particularly in Asia,…
Corporate anthropology: dissecting consumer appetites [NPR]
NPR’s Eric Weiner reports on the emerging field of corporate anthropology, where researchers dissect consumer appetites and help engineers build user-friendly products. Listen
Museum mania in China
The Chinese government intends to build 1,000 new museums across the country by 2015. A scary piece by Elizabeth Casale in The Platform, an e-zine on cultural policy, says that China’s “place-based cultural strategy” is leading to a glut of buildings meant to symbolise cultural…
The Persuaders [PBS]
Now and then you find something truly interesting on the field of marketing and communications, like this in-depth web site on the future of the field developed by America’s top investigative journalism public TV programme Frontline. Go to website
Art fuses with urbanity in an aesthetically pure redesign of the Modern [New York Times]
The Museum of Modern Art is back. And just in time. The city has grown up since the Modern shut its doors to build its new home two and a half years ago. The hole left by the twin towers. A war in Iraq. A…
Design, key factor for success [Philips]
Speech by Dr. Stefano Marzano, CEO & Chief Creative Director of Philips Design at the German Marketing Association Conference in Hamburg. Read the full speech
2015, a special feature [BBC]
2015 – Where will we be? is the title of a special feature on development issues around the world by the BBC World Trust. Go to the BBC’s 2015 website
Interview with Genevieve Bell, cultural anthropologist at Intel
Genevieve Bell, a cultural anthropologist at Intel, has fundamentally changed the way we think about design, technology and culture. Through research and observation, Bell brought to our awareness how concepts of ‘home’, ‘family’ and ‘individual’ vary from one culture to another. Bell’s research has taken…
New WWF freshwater site
Over the last few months I have been working at an overhaul of the WWF Freshwater site. It was more of a content and editing job than a technical challenge and I am very pleased with the result. Go to WWF freshwater site
New WWF climate change site
Over the last few months I have been working at an overhaul of the WWF Climate Change site. It was more of a content and editing job than a technical challenge and I am very pleased with the result. Go to WWF climate change site
Technology’s gender balancing act [BBC]
Technology has come a long way since the washing machine, but somewhere along the line it lost relevance to women. Now gadget makers are striving to win back the female market. Read full story
Anthropologists dig into business with ideas for easier living [San Jose Mercury News]
For a summer, Dev Patnaik and his team of researchers hung out with teens preparing to go away to college. Trained in anthropology and sociology, they observed while the teens and their parents shopped for the essentials of college life. Read full story
The future of weblogging [The Register]
The rise of weblogging has been a cold shower for the complacent mass communication industries. Although the weblogging pioneers are due much praise, their own rhetoric deserves examination, and they could also raise their sights higher. Nico Macdonald (blog) reports, and concludes with a radical…
We’re all cyberlab rats [Time|CNN]
Anthropologists have deserted the bush to study modern techno-man and how he’s adapting to a world of wild gadgets. Read full story
Design for Future Needs
Designers look into the future to meet people’s needs. Design for Future Needs is a research project that discovered how their methods can help policy makers do the same. The 2002 project, run for the EC by a group of European design organisations, researched how…
Bill’s excellent adventure [Inc.com]
Suddenly, Microsoft cares. If you run a small business, this may be just what you’ve been waiting for. Many companies talk about getting close to the customer, but Microsoft pushed this idea to the extreme when it hired Nelle Steele to show up at…