May 31st to June 6th. 

• Designing the Design Problem by David Sherwin. Frog is always doing some interesting stuff, and I would highly recommend this power point. A really fascinating tear-down of what design problems look like, and one way of going through and solving them. 
• Metrics-Driven Design by Joshua Porter. This is a “hot” area right now, especially as designers start to try to figure out what to do with all this new data. Joshua has some pretty good insights here. 
• Can Pets Improve Your Relationship? by Suzanne Phillips. Just kind of a fun, cute read. (:
• What Brain Scans Can Tell Us About Marriage by Tara Parker-Pope. Another relationship article, but the neurology of love is interesting, and I didn’t know quite a few of the things they covered in this article.
• The Shallows by Jonah Lehrer. Lehrer and Nicholas Carr take to debating Carr’s latest book on the internet, and it’s an interesting debate to follow. I’m not a big fan of Carr, in fact I just downright disagree with him, but these debates are interesting to have. 
• High Stakes Innovation, also by Jonah Lehrer. This article goes into some things we can do to help ourselves think better, but the first two paragraphs really grabbed my attention:
  
  This oil spill sure is getting depressing. We’ve become extremely talented at hiding away the ill effects of our consumption decisions. We don’t see the inhumane chicken farms behind our chicken McNuggets, or the Chinese factories that produce our shoes, or the offshore oil rigs that extract our oil from the center of the earth. The end result is that, when we’re finally forced to confront the ugliness that makes our civilized life possible, we’re shocked and appalled. My cheap ground beef comes from that feedlot? My gas station depends on that infrastructure?
  The danger of this lifestyle is that we become blind to potential problems. Because we don’t think about feedlots, we don’t worry (enough) about antibiotic resistance in cattle. Because those rigs are so far offshore - outta sight outta mind - we haven’t prepared for the possibility of this epic disaster. As a result, the unlikely event becomes inconceivable - this is the availability heuristic at work - and the inherent riskiness of a situation is underestimated.