Every culture has its totemic objects that define and reify what people believe to be valuable and important. Nothing is more totemic, of course, than the tablets that Moses brought down from the mountain that contained the Ten Commandments. The tablets structured society and life. They were an ordering device that embodied the top-down, hierarchical movement of message and information of the day
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The Tablet as Totem: Is Steve Jobs Our Moses?
If my years in grad school at the University of Michigan in political science and anthropology taught me anything, it was that the passage of legislation is a collaborative social process, much like the process of innovation. New bills can be innovative “products” that have huge socio-economic impacts on people’s lives. Even the rituals of the legislative process have their parallels in the rituals of the innovative process. Which is why so many independent voters are furious at Washington for its failure to pass needed legislation in health care, jobs, and finance. They are angry at the breakdown in the process of innovation and well they should be
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If Legislation Is Really Innovation, Then Congress Has To Resdesign Its Innovation Process
I’m about to go to my first Design-At-The Edge class for 2010 at the Parsons School for Design in NYC. Here’s the preliminary syllabus and list of presenters. We’re spending more time on Ethnography and Innovation this year. It’s going to be a blast. Parsons is hot, hot, from fashion to strategy. ULEC: Design at the Edge—From The City Street To The Rural Village, Ethnography Unlocks Culture And Creativity. Bruce Nussbaum 2010. This course is one curatorial view of the current state of design. It focuses on the forces of demographic, technological, cultural, economic and political change that are disrupting our social organizations and personal lives. The course will analyze key trends shaping US, Asian, European, Latin American and other societies and discuss the tools of design thinking that we can use to operate, innovate and succeed.
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My Design-At-The Edge Class At Parsons. Ethnography & Innovation
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s speech on the universality of Internet Freedom is a wonderful speech that I personally applaud but it is seriously flawed when applied to China and to Google in China. Absolute internet freedom is a value widely shared among hundreds of millions of North Americans, Latin Americans and Europeans but not among the vast, vast, vast majority of Chinese
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Internet Freedom Is Not a Universal Value, Secretary of State Clinton
The 5 to 4 vote by the Supreme Court to allow corporations and unions to use their general funds to directly support political candidates is really a vote against innovation and economic growth. It is a vote for Old Technology Against New Technology, the Big against the Small, the Established against the Entrepreneurial, the Well-Connected against the Insurgent. Big corporations,in particular, will now have the means to game the legislative as well as regulatory systems in their favor. They will be able to focus the flows of tax-payer money to their industries and have the government subsidize their companies. The US government has already become a pay-to-play pit of corruption. The only difference between what happens in Washington and every state capital and what happens in Asia or the Middle East is that America has legalized corruption in the form of lobbying while other countries have not
The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission is meeting today in Washington to hold hearings on the recent financial crisis and economic meltdown. The Commission will ask Wall Street’s top brass–Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs, Jamie Dimon of JP MorganChase, John Mack of Morgan Stanley and Brian Moynihan of Bank of America–questions about what went wrong. What the Commission really needs to do is ask what is wrong with Wall Street’s entire culture of finance. The populist rage, from both left and right, at Wall Street is not due to specific actions taken by banks and bankers but at the rise of a speculative, short-term, transactional, culture that rewards individuals with enormous bonuses. This trading culture, over the past 15 years, has replaced a different financial culture which was relational, focussed on the long-term, investment, and, most importantly, aimed at economic growth for many stakeholders–corporations, employees, and the nation as a whole. The goal of the Commission, and of Congress, should be to replace Wall Street’s short-term, transactional, trading culture of finance with a long-term, relational, investment culture. This isn’t difficult
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The Culture of Finance–Why Financial Innovation Failed
I’ve been tracking a few alums from IDEO recently and it’s clear they are starting to lead major institutions around the world. Bill Moggridge, of course, co-founder of IDEO, is about to take over as director of the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum. And Mat Hunter, a former partner at IDEO, has just been appointed Chief Design Officer for the British Design Council. Jeneanne Rae, founder of Peer Insight, a major services innovation consultancy, is an IDEO alum. And so is Alex Kazaks,whom I met in Singapore recently at a Design Thinking symposium. Alex is now at–guess–McKinsey! He’s helping with their innovation and customer insights practice. Let’s graph the movement of IDEO alums out into the world. If you know of other IDEOers who have left the sanctuary of creativity, let me know and we’ll plot their movement.
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IDEO Alumni Begin To Lead. Move Over McKinsey
It looks like the co-founder of IDEO, the pioneer in interraction design (like he pioneered the discipline), the guy who designed the first laptop (in the Museum of Modern Art), the greatest person to share a walk in a gallery with, the most helpful person, the tallest designer ever (OK, after Fred Dust)–THAT guy, Bill Moggridge is going to be the next head of the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum. I first heard about it at the wake for ID magazine in NYC last night and people are buzzing with the news this morning. It’s a masterful choice– a real designer to head the country’s national design museum. Here’s the NYT’s on the announcement . But I tweeted it first last night. Hah.
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IDEO’s Bill Moggridge to Lead The Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum–Wow
I’m a big fan of Hello Health , which provides a new social media platform for delivering health care in Brooklyn and its founder Jay Parkinson. Jay has recently launched a health innovation consulting firm and a blog . In one item, he criticizes the health care reform package moving through Congress as. basically, an atavistic antique. It solidifies corporate control over individual health care rather than empower people to design their own. I totally agree. Here is what Jay says about the structure of Hello Health. It’s a Gen Y, social media approach to getting health care. “I started a practice in NYC on September 24, 2007: patients would visit my website see my Google calendar choose a time and input their symptoms my iphone would alert me I would make a house call they’d pay me via paypal we’d follow up by email, IM, or videochat This concept became Hello Health via a partnership with Myca so other doctors could practice this way. Hello Health is a mixture of secure social network and electronic medical record that enables doctors and patients to connect both in their office and online via email, IM, and video chat.” Does this sound good to you, as it does to me
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Health Care Innovation: Did Any Gen Yer Shape The Proposed Health Care Reform Legislation?
I was once nearly thrown out of a brainstorming session at IDEO and it marked me for life. No kidding. I behaved the way I always behave at a meeting–agreeing and disagreeing with the participants. So, in reaction to a comment, I said “yes, but….” and was pummeled by the IDEOers for my transgression. My sin was not knowing the ritual of social engagement that generated new ideas.
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The Ritualization of Creation–The Role of Ritual In Innovation
On my way back from Beijing in December, I sat in front of a corporate guy who was returning to the US after pitching a deal to sell tens of thousands of electric car charging stations in China. He was talking to a California software guy, also returning after pitching after pitching a deal. Their exchange was all about the polite fiction that US companies are selling products to China when they are really selling their best technologies–for the lower price and profits of products.
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Selling China Long-Term Innovation Assets For Short-Term Profits: Not a Good Strategy
If you loved Avatar, as I did, and want to see a real-life narrative of a similar conflict, take out Geronimo. West Studi, who lends his voice to the village chief in Avatar, stars in Geronimo. Matt Damon, Robert Duvall, Gene Hackman and Jason Patrick also star in this beautiful, amazing movie about a remarkable leader of the Apache people. Here is the synopsi s: “In 1885, the United States, under the policy of “manifest destiny,” had nearly finished conquering the west and its native peoples. The next step, the government believed, was to resettle the Apaches, but the powerful, rebellious warrior Geronimo threatened their plans. So Cavalry troops rode out to arrest him — but they failed in their mission and he escaped. Thus began a campaign in which the army deployed more than a quarter of its men to track down the Indian leader. Although the soldiers greatly outnumbered Geronimo’s small band of followers, he eluded capture for more than five years, as the cavalry chased him through Arizona, New Mexico, and all the way down to Mexico. This 1993 ‘revisionist’ Western tells the story of the white army who came to remove Apache warrior Geronimo (Wes Studi) from his land and the struggles the Indians put up in order to keep their land.
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Two Great Movies–Avatar and Geronimo
What lies ahead, now that America’s Lost Decade and Asia’s Best Decade are behind us? I just returned from a month in Singapore, China and Korea and, for the first time in a dozen years, I’m not going to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. So you can tell what frame of mind I am in. I believe 5 Big Trends will shape the future decade. The 5 trends are: 1- Rise and Fall of Nations (US and Europe falling, Asia rising). 2- Rise and Fall of Generations (Boomers falling, Gen Y rising)
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5 Forecasts and 7 Predictions For 2010-2020 That Shape Innovation And Economic Growth
Don Norman’s provocative statement that technology drives human needs and hence, innovation, is, in turn, driving a fantastic intellectual conversation about the interplay of invention and culture. In his comment on my blog and in his own cool and provocative essay, Don challenges anyone to come up with a piece of design research that led to a game-changing technology. I’d like to take up that challenge, Don. Here goes: I’m old enough to remember starvation. When I was a kid, I remember the annual or semi-annual starvation that wracked Asia (I bet you also remember your mother telling you to eat all the food on your plate because there were starving children in China, right?) When I joined the Peace Corps and went to the Philippines in the late sixties, starvation still loomed. The Philippines itself was constantly troubled by having to import rice to feed its growing population. I went to Pampanga and other provinces in central Luzon and saw this for myself. So did many researchers from the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations who were studying how rice and wheat farmers in Asia were growing their crops. They took this research, this ethnographic/scientific research, back to their labs in Los Banos and developed hybrid rice varieties that doubled and tripled the yields
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Technology Vs. Design–Part Two
Don Norman, a rare intellect and a major godfather of Design, has launched a provocative broadside against Design that has enormous implications for building an innovative society . Norman tells designers to get over themselves. It is science and technology that drive truly disruptive innovation, not Design’s focus on the needs and wants of people. Ethnographic research, Norman says, can generate small, incremental innovations but the blockbuster game-changing stuff, comes from the lab, not the village or the mall. Norman states: “I’ve come to a disconcerting conclusion: design research is great when it comes to improving existing product categories but essentially useless when it comes to new, innovative breakthroughs.” In short, tech trumps culture. New technology comes first. Inventing new products comes second. Finding new needs for those products comes third
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Technology Vs. Design–What is the Source of Innovation?
The real failure in Copenhagen to get firm, legal commitments to cut greenhouse gases to slow global warming is a failure of paradigm and process. It is time to end the guilt-tripping, finger-wagging, top-down, United Nations-based regulation-and-punishment paradigm and shift to a more positive, bottoms-up, individual-behavior, incentive-based model. It is time to design a positive, glowing picture of a better possible life for Asians, Americans, Europeans, poor and rich alike by presenting positive pathways of behavior to a sustainable future. Innovation to create incentives to change individual and CEO behaviors will ultimately prove better than negotiations among 197 national politicians. If ever there was a job for innovators and design thinkers, this is it. I just came back from an international design conference in Singapore that basically had European and American post-consumerist innovation/design consultants presenting to a pro-consumerist Asian audience
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Is "Green" The "New Imperialism" Or The "New Communism?
I just came back from a month in Singapore, Korea and China where mayors, Presidents, CEOs, advertisers and university provosts are all promoting design to build more creative societies to see ID Magazine fold. It just breaks my heart and boils my blood. ID is a five-time National Magazine Award winner (under then editor-in-chief Chee Pearlman) that has covered the evolution of design for decades. Along with the IDEA awards from the IDSA, the ID annual design awards are among the best in the US (it will now go online).
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ID Magazine Closes–A Huge Loss for Innovation and Design
The Bank of America has notified someone I know that their floating rate mortgage will go from 4.50% in 2009 down to 3.125% starting February 2010. That’s a whopping drop of 1.375% and will result in big monthly savings. I haven’t seen much about this in the financial press but I’m guessing that this magnitude of mortgage rate cut will have a significant impact the US economy, since there are so many floaters out there. That should mean money available to families, to either save or spend. Saving is good, since the federal government needs all the bucks it can borrow next year and it would be nice to cut its dependence on China
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Floating Mortgage Rates Set to Fall Sharply in 2010
Here is the speech I gave at the Design Korea 2009 International Conference from December 3-4 in Incheon. There were some great talks by Continuum’s co-founder Gianfranco Zaccai, SeymourPowell’s Nick Talbot, Frog’s President, Doreen Lorenzo, Core77′s Stu Constantine and others. The Mayor of Incheon, Ang-soo AHN, showed us his plans for a 20-million person new city, that included a Central Park and a Milano Design City. Here goes the speech– “Designomics: How Design Navigates A World In Change And Creates Global Economic Growth And Prosperity Bruce Nussbaum 2009 Thank you very much for inviting me to Korea. This is my first visit and I have been waiting a very long time to come here. My fascination with Korea began long ago when I was a young man in college in New York City studying Political Science. There I was shocked to learn about the Pottery Wars of the late 16th Century, when Korea was invaded and its potters taken away. Now, we all know that human history is full of wars over land, gold, oil, slaves, and food but the Pottery Wars is the only conflict I know of based on the high economic value of artists, design and design technology. At that time, in the 1590’s, much of Korea’s prosperity was based on its design and production of the highest quality ceramics in Asia, and probably the world
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Designomics
I’ve been in China for about two weeks (one in Shanghai, the other in Beijing). I keep seeing totally electric two-wheel scooters everywhere. China has had all-electric scooters for years. You plug them in. Or you pull out the battery and take it inside to juice it up. It’s so obvious a solution, why doesn’t the US and Europe have them? Yes, of course, China uses soft coal to generate most of its electricity so it’s cleaning up its cities at a cost. But it is also putting big efforts in solar, wind, nuclear and hydro. Combine clean generation of electricity with all-electric vehicles like the scooters and you have….Yep
