New Social Tapestries Website

I just got an email that Social Tapestries has a new website. Social Tapestries is a research program which focuses on "the potential benefits and costs of local knowledge mapping and sharing." The program is run by Proboscis, which is headed by Giles Lane. I met Giles a couple of years ago at the People Inspired Innovation conference in Essex, where he gave an interesting talk on the Urban Tapestries project--lots of interesting stuff on how people experience cities communally (London in particular) and some neat methods that they use. Lots of cool stuff on both websites. Check out the Diffusion ebook generator.

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Killer innovations

I just go this link from Anand Chhatpar , who was a co-op in the Concept Studio for a couple of summers while he was an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin. Anand wrote: "The VP and CTO of HP, Phil McKinney, is an innovation guru and runs an insightful Podcast called Killer Innovations that you may want to check out: http://www.killerinnovations.com ." His most recent podcast includes reflections on the Role of Scifi in innovation, with a focus on Philip K. Dick. Of course Anand also sent the link to advertise himself--his compay BrainReactions was the subject of a recent podcast . BrainReactions brings together students to brainstorm on behalf of clients, bring in points of view that perhaps we oldsters (I'm not that old)! don't have. Although we work in interdisciplinary teams, and also include our customers in product development, I think it is interesting to think about being innovative in how we bring in new perspectives that force us to shift our para...

Storytelling

A couple of years ago I organized a conference session on storytelling as a means to communicate anthropological findings in non-academic environments. Storytelling is central to anthropology as a discipline—not only do we all study some aspect of human story, the stories of the cultures we study are key to our understanding of them. Stories become mechanisms for collaboration and change, as well as carriers of history. But we don’t always stop to think about the stories we tell, even though anthropologists regularly use storytelling as a communication device. In order to be relevant in settings dominated by non-anthropologists, we must not only pass on the data we have gathered, but convey its importance and convince decision makers in business, design, development, public policy, environment, and a myriad of other fields. Constructing these stories involves editing and carefully choosing what to relay to our audience. Delivering the stories involves performance on many scal...

Flat World

One of the next books on my list is Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat: A Brief History of the 21st Century . Friedman is a columnist with the New York Times who spent a lot of time last year in Bangalore. I read his columns while he was there, and some excerpts from the book. His overall thesis seems to be that since there are intelligent, skilled people throughout the world, and broadband has made global interconnectedness real, the skills needed to do almost any work can be found anywhere, and employed from anywhere. There is a message for those of us in the US about education and skill training, but I also think there are some exciting possibilities. Rather than worry about how jobs might go overseas, I like thinking about how we work collaboratively with colleagues around the world. For the last year, I have been working on a project with Dina Mehta of Explore Research and Consultancy in India. The flatness of the world has enabled my company to conduct a long term resear...

A Visible City

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