While I've been gone
Is it really 6 months since I posted anything? I guess it is. And what a 6 months it's been. I suppose I can't be blamed too much.
A quick link roundup is in order of some interesting blog posts that I've seen and events that have happened since I got back. A massive Bloglines purge (14,000 unread: oof) made me feel a bit sad. There's so many smart people writing so much great stuff out there.
So some things that caught my attention since returning.
Daniel Pink on motivation at TED. Not that surprising if you've read Alfie Kohn's book Punished by Rewards, but a passionate presentation nonetheless.
Nokia bought Dopplr. I guess that happened while I was away. Ex-Nokia employees found company that gets bought by Nokia, then assume senior roles at Nokia. One way to climb the corporate ladder, I guess.
And on that Dopplr front, I personally think Matt Jones is one of the most provocative and intelligent writer/designer/thinkers out there. His City as Battlesuit post at io9caught the attention of a few other heavy hitters. Lots of brainpower in those comments.
Leading us to cities and urbanism. And what better example of the modern city than New York City. Sat behind Stephen Rees at the Vancouver talk given by Janette Sadik-Kahn, the Transportation Commissioner for NYC a week ago. His mad typing led to this detailed transcript of the event. The integration of cycling within New York is impressive. I loved being their last fall and would love to go back.
On the work side of things, the Dachis guys have rolled out their Social Business Design "thought piece" in an attempt to define their ideas on how they see the world of collaborative, social workplaces. They've taken a bit of flack on their language, but Peter Kim has taken a run at clarifying the terminology. ThoughtFarmer is a Dachis technology partner and I'm keen to have the opportunity to work with the team, a few of whom I've had the pleasure to meet in the past.
Another great thinker, Dave Snowden posted a definition of Knowledge Management in September. True to form, Dave puts human intuition and experience at the centre of the definition. Dave's Cynefin framework came to mind when I stumbled across a piece about management guru Peter Drucker's 4 types of problems, which reminded me of the four domains espoused by Dave. Dave's work references Peter Drucker for sure, but I was unable to find any other mentions of these two sets of ideas and any influence one had on the other.
And how we recognize and define problems is always interesting for people hired to provide solutions. I wrote a quick ThoughtFarmer blog post about how the intranet is often misunderstood as a "problem" and how that leads to an oversimplification when searching for the solution. Certainly the types of intranets we build at work have more in common with complex social systems (which they afford) than they do with a physically designed object (say a screwdriver or a car engine). Thinking about design, as opposed to Design Thinking, is important (oh great, another book to add to the list!). I wish more professionals had some basic design literacy.
Finished up a quick read of Tom Kelley's book the Ten Faces of Innovation. It's a great collection of IDEO stories, if you're an IDEO buff. The personas are useful, some of the characters are stronger than others. Like the work we do on archetypes for our customers when building design personas, I think Tom could have collapsed a few and made the family smaller. But 10 is a nice round number (5 to 7 Faces of Innovation, plus or minus... not quite the same ring to it). And for anyone who's ever worked with / visited IDEO, there's some familiar stuff in there, like photos of the Palo Alto office and the description of the office tour.
Not to be outdone, I've got Tim Brown's new book on my desk, Change by Design. If there's one thing I love about IDEO it's their visual communication skills. I need to learn how to do that better.
Phew. Well there it is. Link roundup for October 2009.
A quick link roundup is in order of some interesting blog posts that I've seen and events that have happened since I got back. A massive Bloglines purge (14,000 unread: oof) made me feel a bit sad. There's so many smart people writing so much great stuff out there.
So some things that caught my attention since returning.
Daniel Pink on motivation at TED. Not that surprising if you've read Alfie Kohn's book Punished by Rewards, but a passionate presentation nonetheless.
Nokia bought Dopplr. I guess that happened while I was away. Ex-Nokia employees found company that gets bought by Nokia, then assume senior roles at Nokia. One way to climb the corporate ladder, I guess.
And on that Dopplr front, I personally think Matt Jones is one of the most provocative and intelligent writer/designer/thinkers out there. His City as Battlesuit post at io9caught the attention of a few other heavy hitters. Lots of brainpower in those comments.
Leading us to cities and urbanism. And what better example of the modern city than New York City. Sat behind Stephen Rees at the Vancouver talk given by Janette Sadik-Kahn, the Transportation Commissioner for NYC a week ago. His mad typing led to this detailed transcript of the event. The integration of cycling within New York is impressive. I loved being their last fall and would love to go back.
On the work side of things, the Dachis guys have rolled out their Social Business Design "thought piece" in an attempt to define their ideas on how they see the world of collaborative, social workplaces. They've taken a bit of flack on their language, but Peter Kim has taken a run at clarifying the terminology. ThoughtFarmer is a Dachis technology partner and I'm keen to have the opportunity to work with the team, a few of whom I've had the pleasure to meet in the past.
Another great thinker, Dave Snowden posted a definition of Knowledge Management in September. True to form, Dave puts human intuition and experience at the centre of the definition. Dave's Cynefin framework came to mind when I stumbled across a piece about management guru Peter Drucker's 4 types of problems, which reminded me of the four domains espoused by Dave. Dave's work references Peter Drucker for sure, but I was unable to find any other mentions of these two sets of ideas and any influence one had on the other.
And how we recognize and define problems is always interesting for people hired to provide solutions. I wrote a quick ThoughtFarmer blog post about how the intranet is often misunderstood as a "problem" and how that leads to an oversimplification when searching for the solution. Certainly the types of intranets we build at work have more in common with complex social systems (which they afford) than they do with a physically designed object (say a screwdriver or a car engine). Thinking about design, as opposed to Design Thinking, is important (oh great, another book to add to the list!). I wish more professionals had some basic design literacy.
Finished up a quick read of Tom Kelley's book the Ten Faces of Innovation. It's a great collection of IDEO stories, if you're an IDEO buff. The personas are useful, some of the characters are stronger than others. Like the work we do on archetypes for our customers when building design personas, I think Tom could have collapsed a few and made the family smaller. But 10 is a nice round number (5 to 7 Faces of Innovation, plus or minus... not quite the same ring to it). And for anyone who's ever worked with / visited IDEO, there's some familiar stuff in there, like photos of the Palo Alto office and the description of the office tour.
Not to be outdone, I've got Tim Brown's new book on my desk, Change by Design. If there's one thing I love about IDEO it's their visual communication skills. I need to learn how to do that better.
Phew. Well there it is. Link roundup for October 2009.
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