Sun’s Project Blackbox

It’s a wonderful example of modular design thinking at work.

The next Design 2.0 discussion will be held in Boston on November 15.  The speakers include  "Dr. Simplicity" John Maeda, Natalie Jeremijenko, Bill Cockayne, Jason Pearson, and the always interesting Allan Chochinov of Core 77.

Plus, there’s robots shooting lasers and stuff.  Boston is one of my favorite cities, a veritable foaming cauldron of intellectual ferment.  Wish I could go.

Tom Peters on what works.  Nice d.school mention.

Thanks, Tom!

“The Scottish are a nation of engineers. But they are
very creative engineers. They seem dour, but underneath they are quite
romantic. It gets back to a sense of
creating order out of chaos. Producing something very controlled is
very Scottish.”
– Ian Callum

(in honor of all the great design thinkers who have come from Scotland, including my good friend David, who remains one of the most uniquely creative persons I’ve ever met)

When people send me emails or text messages containing the word "ISO" (which I believe stands for "in search of", as in that wierd Leonard Nimoy show which used to air on TV), I get confused, because I’m a believer in the idea of Italo-American hybrids by the name of Iso.  No, no that kind of hybrid.  This kind of hybrid:

The Iso Rivolta.  Corvette horsies meet Italian tailoring.  Accept no substitutes.

Props to my man Zeh for the guerilla street photography

Here’s some spectacularly neato design thinking stuff to take a look at.  Definitely worth spending more than a few hours on, with the added bonus that it’s all in video and podcast form.  If you’re anything like me, and your eyes hurt from reading so much, it’s a pleasure to be able to sit back, relax, and imbibe words of wisdom from great design thinkers the world round.

• My colleague Bill Moggridge of IDEO is coming out with a wonderful book called Designing Interactions.  I suggest you buy it!  It’s on my Xmas list. But also take some time to watch Bill’s video interviews with an amazing group of design thinkers (for free) on the companion website to the book.  There are a bunch of my pals from IDEO on there, and also a blogger friend in the form of John Maeda, and a Stanford d.school colleague in Terry Winograd, and many other interesting people.  Fantastic.
• One the great things about teaching is that you get to hang out with people who remind you how much you can really get done in life when you stop worrying about doing it and just do it.  These people are called students.  Perhaps you know some.  I’ve been happy in the past year to get to know Matt Wyndowe, a student at the Stanford Graduate School of Business who was part of the Creating Infectious Action class I taught this past Spring.  Matt and his classmate Julio Vasconcellos are building an impressive collection of podcasts on the subject of innovation called, quite appropriately, iinnovate.  There you’ll find podcasts with such luminaries as Mike Ramsay, David Kelley, and Andy Rachleff.  And remember, these guys are full time grad students, which has to be the equivalent of having at least three "real" jobs, even if they do go play golf on Wednesdays.

Enjoy!

Today marks the start of the first-ever National Design Week

And remember, 2006 is the Year of Total Design.  There’s still plenty of time left get some important work done this year. 

Just do it!

The Alfa Romeo 8C Competizione