When I went to Stanford for their annual entrepreneurship conference, I wished that I could have cloned myself and gone to more sessions. So many of the topics and panelists were relevant to the things I’m interested in right now. I was excited to hear that many of the sessions would be filmed and posted online. The best one I’ve found so far is Jim Goetz, a partner at Sequoia Capital, speaking about writing business plans and pitching VCs. The video isn’t embedable, but is available here.
I watched the video twice, once to listen and once to take notes. My notes are after the break. Read the rest of this entry »
During my last quarter at UC Davis, I worked on an independent study project to build a wiki focused on sustainable exhibit design – it’s now called the Green Design Wiki. I put it up on the web during the project and have updated it periodically since then. I checked the analytics for the site recently, and found it’s getting more traffic than expected. On March 22, Paul Orselli mentioned the wiki in his interview with Tim McNeil, the professor at UC Davis who was my advisor on the project. In the interview, Tim describes the wiki the we created:
Above and beyond the Design Museum website and exhibitions, the wiki is the most practical resource we can provide to the museum community. It is intended to provide a basic grounding in sustainable design concepts and initiate an ongoing dialogue about greening the exhibition design field. The array of materials and products is rapidly evolving, a wiki based platform is the best model for having others contribute and for keeping it current.
I hope the wiki has become a valuable resource to those that have stumbled upon it. Related to this goal, I recently came across the Huddler GreenHome site, a new community based around sustainable living products. After joining the site I realized that they might be interested in the Green Design Wiki – it turns out that the products used in exhibit design overlap in many areas with products required for the home (lighting, heating and cooling, paints and finishes, flooring, furniture…). After some quick work from their community manager, much of the content of the Green Design Wiki is now mirrored at GreenHome. Hopefully this will help spread the ideas on the wiki to as many people as possible.
I’ve been reading Emotional Design by Don Norman on and off for the last few weeks. Here’s some choice ideas from it that I thought were worth remembering:
Norman quotes Sergio Zyman, former CMO for Coca Cola:
“Emotional branding is about building relationships; it is about giving a brand and a product long-term value… Emotional branding is based on that unique trust that is established with an audience. It elevates purchases based on need to the realm of desire. The commitment to a product or an institution, the pride we feel upon receiving a wonderful gift of a brand we love or having a positive shopping experience in an inspiring environment where someone knows our name or brings an unexpected gift of coffee – these feelings are at the core of Emotional Branding.” (pg 60)
This is the most interesting sentence of the book so far:
“The principles for designing pleasurable, effective interaction between people and products are the very same ones that support pleasurable and effective interaction between individuals.”
There’s some wide-ranging implications in that sentence, particularly for someone like me who’s doing quite a bit of interaction design lately. Duly noted, Mr. Norman. More tidbits to come as I work my way through the book.
After reading “Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative” by Ken Robinson on and off for the last year, I finally finished the book on a plane flight home from San Diego tonight. Since I’ve spent so long finishing the book, my thoughts on it are biased toward the last few chapters:
“Creativity often comes about by making unusual connections, seeing, analogies, identifying relationships between ideas and processes that were previously not related. This is precisely why some of the most effective creative teams are interdisciplinary.” (pg 188)
This bit comes to me at an interesting time, as two weeks ago I was reading a post on Futuristic Play that discussed models of viral growth in Facebook applications. I was surprised to find graphs and models that were similar to those I worked with when I studied ecology. One important component of the post I was reading about viral growth discussed the difference between growth in an unlimited vs limited market – when growth models account for the 60 million or so user population of Facebook, they change from looking very healthy to showing a scary looking crash. Interesting to me, as these look eerily similar to the concept in ecology known as carrying capacity, and the crash idea similar to what happens when a species or ecosystem surpasses the carrying capacity of it’s environment. The similarities between these two ideas lead me to believe that there might be some useful overlap in models I studied in school as an ecology major and my current interest in social networks and web apps. Hopefully more to come on this in the near future (by hopefully I mean two things: 1) hopefully I’ll make more interesting connections and 2) that I’ll be able to write them down and post the them here).
One more bit from Out of Our Minds, this time a bit that is applicable to challenges I’m working with at Affinity Labs as we grow from a small startup into a bigger division of Monster Worldwide:
“The most creative periods in the lives of organizations are often in the early stages of its work where there is a rush of excitement about the possibilities to be explored and before the organization itself has settled into fixed institutional structures and routines. Stimulating or reviving the creative impulse in organizations often requires that existing borders be perforated or dissolved so that ides can flow freely between different specialists who are too often kept apart from each other. The point of these collaborations is not for different specialists to impose their own ways of working on each other. It is to benefit from the stimulation of each other’s expertise” (pg 188)
It’s also worth noting that the reason that I started reading this book in the first place was because I watched Ken Robinson’s TEDtalk, which I found to be both entertaining and thought provoking. I include it here for convenience, but I recommend downloading the higher quality MP4 file from TED.
