Winds rustled the trees and chilled me as I walked through the woods. A marsh bordered my path and I was amazed by the volume of white fluffy seeds, swirling and dancing on the winds.
What if ideas were seeds?
I filmed what I saw and wrote a haiku to get myself (and you!) to think about the process of getting ideas implemented, of the powers that need to be present to move an idea to fruition.
Alas, I’m writing too much. Here’s the short 24 second video. Enjoy, and spend some time with the images and thoughts!
I wanted to share this reminder that the CreativeMilwaukee@Work conference will be November 8th, 2013, at the Discovery World Museum in Milwaukee. Sponsored by Creative Alliance Milwaukee, this year’s event promises to be even better than last year’s, and that’s saying a lot.
These folks are the real deal when it comes to design and creativity and I strongly encourage you to check this conference out. It’s an all day event and for $125, between the things you’ll learn and people you’ll meet, this is easily one of the best “bang for your buck” conferences around.
From the historic Third Ward, to the great products and companies that call Milwaukee and southwest Wisconsin home, Milwaukee is establishing itself as a locus of creativity in the Midwest.
Come to Creative Milwaukee at Work and check it out for yourself. You won’t be sorry you did.
If you’d like to learn more about Human-Centered Design, and how it can power your innovation efforts be sure to check out DMI’s seminar, powered by friends over at the LUMA Institute.
…a versatile system for innovating with speed and agility. It is a hands-on workshop featuring an organized framework for Human-Centered Design methods and a corresponding series of collaborative planning exercises.
For Registration info click here. If you can’t make it to Chicago, be sure to check out the LUMA site for other workshops and seminars. They are always busy putting the education into innovation.
Oh, and if you do go, I’d love to hear your thoughts!
Once again the IIT Institute of Design has put on a provocative and stimulating conference.
Mickey McManus of Maya inspired awe. A trillion connected devices is just around the corner. A trillion! Think of what is possible (good and bad) when those devices interact with each other! Think of how nature communicates with itself!
Mel Lim talked about keeping Ego in check. A wonderful challenge to becoming better people to create a better world.
John Doyle gave an amazing talk of the limits of systems, how the same concepts govern phage evolution. Fast and specialized systems or slow and flexible? How to walk the line? What about feedbacks in our systems? How do we design for that? There was also a cautionary bent to his talk, but he emphasized the need for people to adopt new ways of looking at systems in the world. He mentioned to me afterwards how essential it is that the design world gets involved. The research needs to be made accessible to more than just mathematicians to be able to impact the world in its most profound way.
Darlene Damm spoke of her DIYROCKETS project. Open Sourcing the Space Industry. Amazing and disruptive innovation!
John Payne talked skeuomorphs and more, Ultimately it’s about understanding our culture so we can communicate through design more effectively.
Panos Papalambros spoke of optimizing designs using algorithms that are automatic as well as human assisted. Discussed the benefits of crowdsourcing this process as well.
Liz Sanders and co-creation. There truly is power when individuals create together as a communal entity. She’s got a great resource at Maketools.com that I’ve personally used. This is exciting work and it’s only going to mature more.
Matt Jones and Richard The of Google Creative Labs showed the power of video in prototyping. “All design is fiction.” Love that quote because everything starts as an idea – a fiction – and it becomes reality.
Lucy Kimbell talked about the various types of empathy using Star Trek’s Deanna Troi as the research subject.
There was also everyone’s favorite “curmudgeon”, Don Norman. He emphasized the need for design research to be more effectively integrated into corporate product development processes.
Matthew Clark and many others gave amazing talks.
If you’d like to see more from the conference check out #DRC2013 on Twitter. You can also go to Seen for a timeline of twitter posts about the conference.
Lastly, but in no way least, I met old friends and made new ones. When all is said and done, that’s what makes these conferences so valuable.
I’d love to hear other people’s thoughts and looking forward to next year!
We are organizing the world’s free information and liberating the people of the net through dedication to decentralization, creative commons and digital democracy. You are a co-creator of this network.
We want to build an app with every active free and open source project on the Internet in order to create a legitimate universal alternative to closed-source surveillance corporations like Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Apple, Microsoft, Twitter, Amazon and so on. This includes search, social networking, clouds, video, images, docs, maps, video chat, markets, mobile and even alternative currencies. We still want to share and interact with those networks in many cases, but we don’t want to be reliant on them at all.
A great description of their philosophy and everything they’re doing is here.
As of the time of writing, there was 352 days, 6 hours & 20 minutes until the free code would be released.
Until then, head on over to Minds.com, join in the fun and start building the social web that you want.
I’d love to hear your thoughts. How do you envision this being used?