"Prototyping is valuable, and you can prototype almost anything today and make it look real. Once you’ve prototyped your idea, you don’t have to persuade people to like it — they can judge it themselves."
– Seth Godin

Continuing the "World of Warcraft is a great place to learn about the future of work" idea thread that I’ve been exploring here and here, John Seely Brown and Douglas Thomas have written tasty little article in Wired called You Play World of Warcraft?  You’re Hired!.  Here’s an excerpt:

It’s learning to be – a natural byproduct of adjusting to a new culture – as opposed to learning about.
Where traditional learning is based on the execution of carefully
graded challenges, accidental learning relies on failure. Virtual
environments are safe platforms for trial and error. The chance of
failure is high, but the cost is low and the lessons learned are
immediate.

Want to live a more innovative existence?  Continue to push yourself to be a more proficient design thinker?  Well — where are you living an experiment that exposes you to new modes of being, new ways of thinking, new behaviors and people?

As Tom Kelley said a few weeks ago in the  NYT, "One thing I’ve learned is that it is important to surround yourself with the kind
of people you aspire to be."  The cool part about the web is that you don’t necessarily have to hang out physically with the kind of people you aspire to be in order to get the desired effect. 

I believe wholeheartedly in Tom’s assertion, and that’s why I spend time hanging out online with Joi Ito.  I read his blog.  We chat.  We quest together.  As William Gibson once wrote, the "…future is already here – it’s just unevenly distributed."  I’d say the same, with the modifier of "… it’s just unevenly distributed, so save yourself some time and check out whatever new thing Joi is up to."

To wit:

• Buying virtual property in order to support "real world" non-profits: Buying an island on Second Life
• Expanding on the "New Golf" meme we’ve been spreading about World of Warcraft as a way to model new approaches to creative work:  Leadership in World of Warcraft

What Joi does really well is to learn by doing.  He doesn’t sit around and pontificate about the future of being online. He lives it.  There’s no difference between knowing and doing in his world.

If you are a graduate student with masters standing at Stanford, you should think about signing up for Creating Infectious Action, a course to be taught by Bob Sutton and yours truly at the Stanford d.school starting in April.  We’ll use design thinking to explore how to turn ideas into more than action — into infectious action!

There’s an application involved, of course:

Creating Infectious Action Application 

Not everyone who signs up will be accepted, but it’s worth a try.  Why not be one of The 24?

Please follow the directions in the application, particularly when it comes to turning the application in.  If you email it to me instead of to the appropriate destination, it will get lost in the ether and you and I will be severely bummed.

Not many speakers yet, but those that are there are notable; this could get interesting.  Relative to the traditional model of conferences and speakers, this is certainly a disruptive approach.

Bruno Giussani is doing an incredible job of blogging the TED conference in Monterey.

So far, I’ve found the presentations by Hans Rosling, Bill Joy, Al Gore, Neil Gershenfeld, Mena Trott, Richard Baraniuk, and Peter Gabriel to be more or less mind blowing.

Plus, as he did at Davos, Loic Le Meur is recording podcasts, including this one of Al Gore’s TED presentation.

Feb 26 update: Loic removed the Gore speech podcast, as it wasn’t in keeping with TED conference norms.  But you’ll be able to see and hear an even more compelling version when the movie comes out in May. )

I’m curious to know what the 2.0 part is all about (surely the rev number is closer to 9.0 by now?), and the topic and crew will definitely be interesting.  link

Apophenia

definition (from Wikipedia):

The experience of seeing patterns or connections in random or meaningless data… defined it as the "unmotivated seeing of connections" accompanied
by a "specific experience of an abnormal meaningfulness".

… originally described this phenomenon in relation to the distortion of reality present in psychosis,
but it has become more widely used to describe this tendency in healthy
individuals without necessarily implying the presence of neurological or mental illness.

If we can downplay the association with psychotic behavior, and also make it more about dealing with meaningful data, then apophenia is a pretty cool word to describe what I consider a critical aspect of design thinking.  Making connections between seemingly disparate things or ideas is a key step toward creating breakthough innovations.  And, as we discussed earlier on metacool, it’s how the brain works (if we let it).

From the point of view of creating innovative organizations, one really needs to consider how the identification, care, and feeding of apopheniacs will be carried out.  Who are these people?  What makes them click?  What makes them thrive?  What keeps them from apopheniacking?

Thanks to Bob Giampietro, a truly innovative thinker and doer, for introducing me to this term. 

Students from the Stanford d.school catalyzed a Flashmob yesterday.  They had an assignment to design a manifestation of positive infectious behavior, and this is one result.  Not a typical design assignment, but we’re not running your average design school, either.

By the way, this Spring I’ll be co-teaching an entire d.school course titled Creating Positive Infectious Behavior with Bob Sutton.

Who knows what cool stuff will come out of it!