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Design Innovation Software

Autodesk’s “Imagine, Design, Create” for iPad just released on the iTunes App Store

The digital version of Autodesk’s Imagine, Design, Create book is now available on the Apple App store. The printed version of the book, released earlier this year, offers compelling stories and rich visuals to show how the worlds of design and technology intersect […]

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Design Economics Information Technology Trend Watching

Information Technology in Brazil: two factories of screens for tablets to be built

The Brazilian Minister of Science and Technology, Aloízio Mercadante said recently that Brazil will have two factories touch screens for tablets. He met at the Presidential Palace with President Rousseff and executive Terry Gou, the chairman of Foxconn, a Taiwanese company that produces the iPhone and iPad from Apple and will be responsible for making the screens […]

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Design Economics Information Technology Innovation Trend Watching

Watch “What we’ve Learned from 5 million Books” talk at TED by Erez Lieberman Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel

Have you played with Google Labs’ NGram Viewer? It’s an addicting tool that lets you search for words and ideas in a database of 5 million books from across centuries. Erez Lieberman Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel show us how it works, and a few of the surprising things we can learn from 500 billion words […]

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China Consumer Behavior Economics Innovation Software Trend Watching

Intellectual Property: Shanzhai Phones’ Declining Popularity in China

The word shanzhai has several meanings. Originally it meant a fortified mountain village, but these days it mainly refers to small, illegal factories that churn out copies of famous-brand mobile phones. In the era of relatively simple 2G phones, the industry was huge, but now everyone wants a fancy 3G smartphone, and they’re a bit too hard to fake, leaving an uncertain future for this hidden industry […]

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China Economics Trend Watching

Living in China: Beijing more expensive than Paris

Beijing is the most expensive city on the Chinese mainland for expatriates, ranking the 20th highest in the world for costs of living, according to an annual report released by Mercer, a US-based consulting company […]

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Design Information Technology Innovation Software Trend Watching

Watch Carlo Ratti’s “Architecture that senses and responds” talk at TED

With his team at SENSEable City Lab, MIT’s Carlo Ratti makes cool things by sensing the data we create. He pulls from passive data sets — like the calls we make, the garbage we throw away — to create surprising visualizations of city life. And he and his team create dazzling interactive environments from moving water and flying light, powered by simple gestures caught through sensors […]

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China Design Innovation Readings Software Trend Watching

Brazil leads the way to a new generation of designers in China

Bruno Porto, Sarah Stutz, and I recently spoke to Claudia Trevisan from Estadão about the status of Design Education in China (in Portuguese). Check some of the highlights […]

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Information Technology Innovation

Watch Damon Horowitz call for a “moral operating system” at TED

At TEDxSiliconValley, Damon Horowitz reviews the enormous new powers that technology gives us: to know more — and more about each other — than ever before. Drawing the audience into a philosophical discussion, Horowitz invites us to pay new attention to the basic philosophy — the ethical principles — behind the burst of invention remaking our world. Where’s the moral operating system that allows us to make sense of it?

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Design Innovation

Watch Bill Verplank’s Opening Keynote on IxDA | Interaction ‘11 Conference

Bill Verplank is a human-factors engineer with a long career in design, research and education. As a fresh ME PhD from MIT he worked eight years at Xerox on the testing and refinement of what we now call the “desktop metaphor”: bit-map graphics, keyboard and mouse, direct manipulation […]

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Design Innovation Software

Autodesk makes to “The 10 Most Innovative Companies in Education” list by Fast Company

The magazine recognized Autodesk’s Sustainability Workshop as a program at the forefront of education. The workshop, offered free to mechanical engineers, teaches the principles behind sustainable design […]