The Centrality of Design

Josh Brewer, Former Principal Designer at Twitter, explains the inherent benefits of designing your meetings, using prototyping, the value of design in leadership positions, infusing a company with design and sketching together.

Design in Tech Report 2016

Summary of the report is:
– Design isn’t just about beauty; it’s about market relevance and meaningful results.
– M&A activity continues in the design space, and it’s increased.
– Increasing the designers needed in the tech industry requires rethinking education.
– The adoption of design by public companies is only growing.
– Designers bring needed critical thinking/making in the economic case for inclusion.
– Work in the research labs from decades ago drives today’s startups. Be aware.

Imagining the Physical Web

“Some people say the web is dying, but I believe it’s just getting started. And what will kick it into overdrive is the Physical Web: the ability to discover, engage, and interact with smart devices (or that “dumb” tree over there) using nothing more than a browser.” – Stephanie Rieger

Blind Self Portrait

Crazy! FITC speaker Kyle MacDonald along with Matt Mets created a project called Blind Self Portrait which uses computer vision algorithms to build a contour drawing of the visitor, and a moving platform guides their hand to execute the drawing while their eyes are closed.

The Myth of Mobile Context!

Recent discussion at Mobile Portland on the importance of considering “context” in designing mobile products and services. (The Panelists includes Josh Clark, Daniel Davis, Ty Hatch, Rachel Hinman and Tim Kadlec).

“Pick up most books about building web sites or products for mobile and you’ll hear a common refrain extolling you to pay attention to the mobile context. Usually this means paying attention to the fact that people using mobile phones are likely to be on the go, have limited attention, and slow Internet connections. This may have been true in the past, but data suggests that this behavior is changing: 93% of smartphone owners use their smartphones while at home, 62% of people use their mobile phone while watching television, 69% use mobile while shopping, 39% of smartphone owners use their devices in the bathroom.”

Via mobileportland

John Jay of Wieden+Kennedy Talks Creativity

In this Video John Jay talks about his creative process and why you should never adhere to someone’s particular terms or be put into a specific silo.

“Inspiration is about feeling the personal vibe of people who live a way you don’t, do things that you can’t and share what you don’t know, For any creative person, it is our job to be inspired.”

Simon Sinek: If You Don’t Understand People, You Don’t Understand Business

Simon Sinek’s recent talk discusses the importance of trust, authenticity, and meaning. Sinek argues that as individuals and companies, everything that we say and do is a symbol of who we are. And it is only when we communicate our beliefs authentically that we can attract others to our cause, and form the bonds that will empower us to achieve truly great things.

“We’re not good at everything, we’re not good by ourselves,” says Simon Sinek. Our ability to build trust and relationships is the key to our survival as a race, and to thriving as ideamakers.

A first look at the new “Windows 8” user interface.

The new Windows 8 touch-based UI, revealed earlier today at the D9 Conference, looks good. And it’s clearly drawn from the same inspiration as Windows Phone 7.

The demo showed some of the ways to reimagined the interface for a new generation of touch-centric hardware. Fast, fluid and dynamic, the experience has been transformed while keeping the power, flexibility and connectivity of Windows intact.

A few aspects of the new interface are:

  • Fast launching of apps from a tile-based Start screen, which replaces the Windows Start menu with a customizable, scalable full-screen view of apps.
  • Live tiles with notifications, showing always up-to-date information from your apps.
  • Fluid, natural switching between running apps.
  • Convenient ability to snap and resize an app to the side of the screen, so you can really multitask using the capabilities of Windows.
  • Web-connected and Web-powered apps built using HTML5 and JavaScript that have access to the full power of the PC.
  • Fully touch-optimized browsing, with all the power of hardware-accelerated Internet Explorer 10.

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