11.30.12 | Transblog
Beep! Beep! Beep!
According to Professor Birgit Mager, who runs the Cologne-based Service Design Network, “Service design addresses the functionality and form of services from the perspective of clients. It aims to ensure that service interfaces are useful, usable, and desirable from the client’s point of view and effective, efficient, and distinctive from the supplier’s point of view.” No one can [...]
11.30.12 | Transblog
How May I Help You? (A Two-Way Question)
“I’ll know my song well before I start singin’”, Bob Dylan proclaimed in his 1962 song “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”, warning that something big or heavy was going to happen as a result of ours and other countries priorities. He prophetically debuted the song just before the news broke that the Soviet Union had [...]
11.30.12 | Transblog
Groupthink, Citythink, Contact
A mariachi band enters your subway car. As the band strums its first notes, you can almost feel the annoyance of the people around you looking down, opening books, turning on phones or e-readers, anything to avoid eye contact with the musicians. But as the musicians play off each other’s energy, you notice a shift. [...]
11.16.12 | Ideas, Opportunities, Transblog
A Cross-Sectional Design Approach
How the illustrated cross-sections of a building, and the assemblage of debris from a violent accident, exemplify the emergent practices of designing for complex problems.
When I was a kid I was a faux-vegetarian for about 6 months. I absolutely refused to dissect that darned frog in biology class, and knew that the only way I [...]
11.16.12 | Transblog
Food for Thought
“Look, this isn’t fast food,” our waitress barked at us.
“No. I get that but it’s been over an hour since we finished appetizers. I’m just . . . could you check on our food?”
Our waitress looked at us exhausted then turned a lazy eye over the empty dining room. “Look the kitchen is three flights [...]
11.16.12 | Transblog
γνῶθι σεαυτόν
Teamwork. Collaboration. Cooperation. Cahoots. Call it what you will. It’s a difficult thing. It’s a delicate traversal of personalities, circumstances, power dynamics, energy, and context. What’s more, every situation proves itself unique and every day brings different challenges. Creating a once-size-fits-all toolkit is a hefty proposition; crafting a modus operandi that works for each individual [...]
11.16.12 | Transblog
Republicans – designing for emergence
Judging by a quick survey of the Transdisciplinary Design class and Jamer’s colourful Obama T-shirt worn on November 6th, most people seemed to vote for the Democratic candidate in the recent election. Putting aside issues of abortion, AK-47s and “binders of women,” one of the crucial differences between the donkeys and the elephants is their [...]
11.16.12 | Projects
Do you like my lover shoes “The Overlord and His Beloved”?
I believe the best way to learn about the customs of a place is neither searching in the Internet nor joining a group tour to have a cursory glance. But only if you calm down yourself and live with local residences. To wait the first flush of dawn at the beach, to roam around freely [...]
11.15.12 | Transblog
Scalable Localized Innovation
Photo: Design with the Other 90%: Cities
Beginning last year, my interest in social innovation and using design to help raise standards of living around the world grew tremendously. My interest sparked when I attended the Design with the Other 90%: CITIES exhibit held at the United Nations Headquarters in New York City. Many ideas presented [...]
11.15.12 | Transblog
Tis’ the Season
“‘Invented tradition’ is taken to mean a set of practices, normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a ritual or symbolic nature, which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behaviour by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past.” (Hobsbawm, 1).
Steven Weber’s book The Success of Open Source, motivated me [...]
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