Innovation requires a fascination with wonder
“Whenever we initiate change, even a positive one, we activate fear in our emotional brain. If the fear is big enough, the fight-or-flight response will go off and we’ll run from what we’re trying to do. The small steps in kaizen don’t set off fight or flight, but rather keep us in the thinking brain, where we have access to our creativity and playfulness.”
Larger design businesses don’t allow good design to happen
“The problem is that the structures of most larger design businesses cannot effectively facilitate the transmittal of ideas. They don’t allow good design to happen, because they are overburdened with the organizational overhead of running a business: org charts, jurisdictions, inconsistency, poor communications, etc. All the complications that large groups of humans create for one another when they work together, complications that are not about doing design.”
Pixar’s Brad Bird on fostering innovation
“Steve Jobs basically designed this building. In the center, he created this big atrium area, which seems initially like a waste of space. The reason he did it was that everybody goes off and works in their individual areas. People who work on software code are here, people who animate are there, and people who do designs are over there. Steve put the mailboxes, the meetings rooms, the cafeteria, and, most insidiously and brilliantly, the bathrooms in the center—which initially drove us crazy—so that you run into everybody during the course of a day. [Jobs] realized that when people run into each other, when they make eye contact, things happen. So he made it impossible for you not to run into the rest of the company.” [via JK]
Must-see photo project examines death and dying
“This exhibition features people whose lives are coming to an end. It explores the experiences, hopes and fears of the terminally ill. All of them agreed to be photographed shortly before and immediately after death.”
A new spin on the RSS reader
“Instead of treating news like email (as most RSS readers do), Times presents you with headlines and photos from a variety of sources all in one place, letting you more easily discover the news you want to read. Like your own personal newspaper, you can put feeds into separate areas, create pages for different subjects, and more.”
Success = sustainable execution
“I’m not suggesting that scale equates success. A business that can do a million in revenue per year and live comfortably in that range to me is just as successful as Google is. The scope of execution is unimportant. The sustainability of that execution is what I consider success.”
Turn your $60 router into a user-friendly super-router with Tomato
“There’s a lot you can do now that you’re running Tomato on your router, but let’s go straight to one of the sexiest tweaks supported by Tomato: Wi-Fi signal boosting. Just click on Advanced -> Wireless in the Tomato sidebar and find the entry labeled Transmit Power. The default transmit power is 42mW, but it’s capable of transmitting at up to 251mW.”
Fear and America
“Fear, in other words, is a tax, and al-Qaeda and its ilk have done better at extracting it from Americans than the Internal Revenue Service…Never before have so few terrorized so many with so little.”
Art exhibit: “Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy”
“Through fashion and the superhero, we gain the freedom to fantasize, to escape the banal, the ordinary, and the quotidian. The fashionable body and the superhero body are sites upon which we can project our fantasies, offering a virtuosic transcendence beyond the moribund and utilitarian.”
Louise Fili design
Specialists in the design of restaurants & food packaging. Beautiful typography.