smh...

Currently based in Detroit, I'm a strategist who has worked for ad agencies, publishers and academics continually seeking to decipher shifts in human behaviors and human value. Some things I find interesting...

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GOOD QUESTIONS

The White House’s newly appointed Chief Digital Officer recently put a call out for submissions to answer the following question: “How can we — our government and you and your communities — better connect online to make America better?” Here is my response. But it’s even better investigated below:

How do we enable people to work in a way that facilitates knowledge sharing, while also empowering people to take action without waiting for approval or asking for permission? How do we balance collaboration with independence? How do we create an empowered network instead of a controlling hierarchy?

— The Most Interesting Questions in Business, Medium

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BEING CLEAR

Being clear about things that are normally muddy seems like a potential competitive advantage...The big opportunity though seems to be to find things that are murky and confusing and to redesign them so that they're clear. There are some obvious candidates - phone tarrifs, loan payments, energy bills, EULAs - but the interesting ones will be where we don't even notice things are murky any more. Keep reading.

— Clarity as a Business Model, Russell Davies

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LEARN-SEE DATA

The most important question when dealing with reams of digital data is not whether perceptual skills will be centrally important. The question is when, and in what domain, analysts will be able to build a reliable catalog of digital patterns that provide meaningful “clues” to the underlying reality, whether it’s the effect of a genetic glitch, a low-pressure zone or a drop in the yen. Keep reading.

— Learning to See Data, New York Times

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Spaceship Canopy creative workspace

[via Swiss Miss]

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EMOTIONAL ATTACHMENT

When we are asked to care for an object when an object thrives under our care, we experience that object as intelligent, but more importantly, we feel ourselves to be in a relationship with it. The attachments I describe do not follow from whether computational objects really have emotion or intelligence, because they do not. The attachments follow from what they evoke in their users. Keep reading.

— Unrequited Love in the Time of Technology, Medium

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COMPLICATED SOFTWARE

Let’s start with the most difficult thing about designing in the enterprise space: in most cases, the people who buy the software and the people who use the software are completely different, and therefore have completely different needs. Keep reading.

— Why Enterprise Software is So Bad, Elezea

[via Deathbeard]

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Taking a break for some fresh air and green landscapes may help to boost your productivity, see evidence from Artist Dave Kinsey in the video above. 

[via Hypebeast]

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NEW GRITTY GREEN

Like Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim museum in Spain, it has spread a dream, albeit largely a pipe dream, around the world: how one exceptional design — in this case, a work of landscape architecture — might miraculously alter a whole neighborhood, even a whole city’s fortunes. Keep reading.

— The High Line Opens Its Third and Final Phase, The New York Times

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SWISS ARE IN TROUBLE

When cheap, accurate quartz watches started pouring out of Asia in the 1970s, many Swiss watchmakers went bust. But the survivors recovered their sangfroid and went on to prosper as crafters of stylish timepieces that proclaim the wearer’s taste and status better than any electronic gizmo could. Keep reading.

— It's Not About Time, The Economist

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What is a Demolition School? According to Space Caviar, a design research collaborative operating at the intersection of architecture, technology, politics and public realm, it's a chance for some to take the paths less traveled.

Set in a derelict school building condemned to demolition after the workshop has ended, the project aims to 'construct alternative routes into and through the building, most significantly a new staircase,' and to explore new forms of improvisatory navigation through architectural space by way of 'inventive deletions or modifications.'

— Demolition School, BLDG BLOG

The workshop will run September 23-28 in Kortrijk, Belgium.

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SURVIVAL AND LONGTIME BRANDS

'Just being old doesn’t mean much. I would say that to survive for a hundred years you have to be nimble and flexible and relevant. And being relevant in 1950 is different from being relevant in 1980 or relevant in 2014.” Keep reading.

— Comfort of Longtime Brands Inspire Campaigns, The New York Times

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THE WORST BEHAVIOR

Some people will do what you want anyway, for personal reasons, but effective leaders create cultures that inspire and motivate people to do the right things. Effective leaders don’t sit idly by while hoping their people will behave ethically and perform competently. Keep reading.

— Does Your Company's Incentives Reward Bad Behavior?, Harvard Business Review

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IPAD OF PAPER

In the race for the future of drawing, there exists new hope for print in collaboration. Moleskine and Livescribe smartpen have teamed up to allow your brainstorming scribbles to back up automatically to a mobile app. While, as one writer notes, it's hardly a new idea, "the cleverness here is that Moleskine and Livescribe are both thinking beyond their own brands, and designed the book and pen to work in tandem." 

[via CoDesign] 

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CUPCAKE CRUMBLES

'[Even] successful product specialists are no longer truly specialists.' Starbucks—which started out serving just coffee—now offers sandwiches, salads and breakfast items. Dunkin Donuts' menu board is heavy with meals that have nothing to do with donuts. And Krispy Kreme—which rebounded in 2013 after 14 quarters of red ink—has survived in large part by focusing on its coffee offerings. Keep reading

— Are the Salad Days Over..., AdWeek

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LISTENING TO THE STREAM

When people mourn an inability to have 'meaningful conversations,' what they are saying is, 'I have not learned to talk to you and don’t feel I should have to.'

— Attacking the Stream, Dissent Magazine

[via Deathbeard]

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Behomm, the home exchange community for designers and visual artists.

[via The Cool Hunter]

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MISFIT TOYS

A former "change agent" discusses the realities of hiring outsiders and allowing them to make a change within primordial companies.

The web sooner or later eats everyone’s lunch. Entrenched players usually have a bag of tricks to delay the inevitable (farewell, Blockbuster), but when push comes to shove, they’re either leading the charge or being charged upon. Hence the need for some heretics within our walls rather than solely outside of those walls wielding flaming arrows. Keep reading.

— How to Disrupt Yourself, Co.Create