“Look at this,” Khosla says, pulling out what looks like an iPhone with an ordinary protective case. He taps an app. Instantly, his phone is an EKG, thanks to the case, which takes readings from his fingertips. Technology like this will revolutionize medical practice, he says. Then he giggles. Khosla giggles a lot. His giggles burble out whenever he talks about some amazingly cool new thing. They are the verbal exclamation marks of a man who can’t wait to see tomorrow.”

Greedy for good works

Giggles!

“In the nineteen-thirties, two wealthy Americans, Charles William Beebe and Otis Barton, used twelve thousand dollars of their own money to design a hollow steel ball with two quartz peepholes, which they called a “bathysphere,” named after the Greek word for “deep.” The vessel, which was four and a half feet in diameter, was tethered to a ship with a cable; if it snapped, the men inside would die at the bottom of the sea.
In 1934, near Bermuda, Beebe and Barton went down five hundred feet, then a thousand feet more, as greater and greater pressure pushed against the steel walls; they stopped at three thousand and twenty-eight feet. It was far deeper than anyone had ever gone. At one point, Beebe peered out, and spotted something that was at least twenty feet long. Later, in his autobiography, “Half Mile Down,” he wrote, “Whatever it was, it appeared and vanished so unexpectedly and showed so dimly that it was quite unidentifiable except as a large, living creature.”

A Reporter at Large: The Squid Hunter : The New Yorker — this article is just full of all sorts of goodness. Just stop everything you are doing and go and read it right now. 

“Often one feels like beginning with a sketch or description of what the final design will be like. Common sense may suggest beginning with a study of what the problem really is. Both impulses are correct! A good way to start is: Expect both problem P and solution S to evolve during the design process:
P1 evolves into P2, P3, P4 etc. S1 evolves into S2, S3, S4, etc.”

design methods for everyone — www.softopia.demon.co.uk — Readability

“The researchers gave pairs of friends separate questionnaires on their lifestyles (how often they drank, exercised, etc.) and opinions (on topics such as abortion) and found that the bigger the school, the more similar friends were to one another. In follow-up research, not yet published, Ms. Bahns and her team found similar results comparing big cities like New York and Chicago to smaller ones like Iowa City and Lawrence, Kan. How can more people and more diversity lead to less diverse friendships? It’s simple, really: We like people who are like us. Social scientists call it the “similarity-attraction effect,” and it influences everything from whom we date and hire to where we choose to live. The bigger the pond, the more likely we are—consciously or not—to swim around until we find a group of like and like-minded people.”

The Tribes of Androids and iPhones - WSJ.com
  • Source: The Wall Street Journal

“Of course, for most people, asking questions is usually not just about coming up with innovative ideas—it’s about extracting information from others. But even seemingly factual questions can be deployed tactically: In their new book from Harvard Education Press, “Make Just One Change,” Rothstein and Santana from the Right Question Institute outline a basic classification system, dividing questions into ones that can be answered with a single word (like “yes” or “no”) and ones that require a more discursive response. Choosing the right question is in part a matter of making the right trade-off between clarity and depth: “Does the president support gay marriage?” versus “How have the president’s views on gay marriage evolved?” As part of their “Question Formulation Technique,” which is what the kids at Cambridge Rindge and Latin were engaged in that Friday morning, they ask people to transform one type of question into the other, in order to demonstrate that the way a question is structured can determine the range of possible answers it can inspire.”

Are we asking the right questions? — www.bostonglobe.com — Readability

This is the most exciting thing I’ve read in a while. I recommend you click through and view the entire article. We ask questions of ourselves and the world around us: asking the question is how we begin to make sense of the world around us, so asking the right one makes us better thinkers.

It’s just one shop, in a marketplace. « CriticalSpeak

I’m not exactly sure how to react to this piece, but I can’t help but be a little annoyed: Yes, there is a problem in that there are many design researchers whose work is impossible to find outside of an academic situation. but, the other half of it is, that most designers are simply not looking to engage with real, critical discussion around design. 

It’s not just designers — the fact of the matter is, for any given profession, 90% of people will work with material that’s not really cutting edge or all that interesting. The people on the bleeding edge, however, make a practice of engaging with deeper thought around their profession.

But I also think design is one of the only professions where we would expect that this research be presented in a way that it would reach out to a mainstream audience. The fact of the matter is, if you don’t think like these academics think, if you don’t follow their research and understand what sorts of work has been done, you really aren’t going to follow their work. 

Also: Berg has a blog, follow Jon Kolko, subscribe to Interactions Magazine. It’s really not that hard.