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Design Information Technology Software

Watch Peter Morville’s “The Future of Search” talk at IxDA | Interaction ‘10 Conference

In this talk, Peter Morvile defines a pattern language for search that embraces user psychology and behavior, multisensory interaction, and emerging technology […]

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Design Innovation

Watch Paola Antonelli’s “Talk to Me” talk at IxDA | Interaction ‘10 Conference

Whether openly and actively, or in subtle, subliminal ways, things talk to us, and designers write the initial script that will let us develop and improvise the dialogue […]

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Design

Watch George Whitesides’ “Toward a science of simplicity” talk at TED

Simplicity: We know it when we see it — but what is it, exactly? In this funny, philosophical talk, George Whitesides chisels out an answer. Someday Harvard chemistry professor George Whitesides will take the time to look back on the 950 scientific articles he’s coauthored, the dozen companies he’s co-founded or the 50-plus patents on […]

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China Economics Trend Watching

Education in China: Reverse Brain Drain

China is experiencing some reverse brain drain, by attracting Chinese scientists and mathematicians in the U.S. back to the mainland […]

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Design Innovation Inspiration

Listen to Ed Catmull’s “Pixar’s Collective Genius” talk, for Harvard Business Review

Pixar cofounder Ed Catmull exemplifies the greatest form of leadership: empowering others to achieve the extraordinary. People tend to think of creativity as a mysterious solo act, and they typically reduce products to a single idea: This is a movie about toys, or dinosaurs, or love, they’ll say. However, in filmmaking and many other kinds of complex product development, creativity involves a large number of people from different disciplines working effectively together to solve a great many problems. Ed Catmul is an unpretentious man. He doesn’t like to talk about how he performs his job as president of Pixar and (since a 2006 merger) Disney Animation Studios. But the article and accompanying podcast shed light on his exceptional leadership qualities […]

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China Consumer Behavior Economics Trend Watching

China, Socialism & Consumer Behavior: The End of “Chimerica”

For the better part of the past decade, the world economy has been dominated by a unique geoeconomic constellation that the authors call “Chimerica”: a world economic order that combined Chinese export-led development with U.S. overconsumption on the basis of a financial marriage between the world’s sole superpower and its most likely future rival. In this paper, economic historians Niall Ferguson of Havard Business School and Moritz Schularick of Freie Universität Berlin consider the problem of global imbalances and try to set events in a longer-term perspective […]

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Design Information Technology

Listen to Mary Newsom’s “The information Superhighway: Urban Renewal or Neighborhood Destruction?” talk at IDEA 2009

As a long-time practitioner of daily newspaper journalism who sees the economic model of the newspaper industry sinking (and broadcast journalism isn’t in much better shape), Mary looks into what will happen to cities if/when the mass media splinter. With all of the “new media” journalism: the emerging trends of crowd-sourcing, blogging, YouTube, Twitter and the general explosion of information available to people, this makes virtually anyone, a potential journalist. What are the implications for information, and for the dependability of that information?

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Design Trend Watching

Watch Steven Pinker’s “Language and Thought” talk at TED

In an exclusive preview of his book The Stuff of Thought, Steven Pinker looks at language and how it expresses what goes on in our minds — and how the words we choose communicate much more than we realize […]

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Trend Watching

Steven Pinker’s “A brief history of violence” talk at TED

Steven Pinker charts the decline of violence from Biblical times to the present, and argues that, though it may seem illogical and even obscene, given Iraq and Darfur, we are living in the most peaceful time in our species’ existence […]

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Design Innovation

Autodesk Makes “BusinessWeek 50”, A Ranking of the Best Performers in S&P 500 Index

Described as a disruptor, innovator, and key to helping our customers compete, Autodesk is featured in the 13th annual ranking of the BusinessWeek 50 […]