Neil Gaiman: Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming – an impassioned and thought-provoking argument for the value to society of reading, libraries, librarians, and how the daydreaming that reading can stimulate leads to imagining a better future and the innovation that our social and economic well-being depends …
Slow Ideas – an article from The New Yorker written by Atul Gawande, tag line is Some innovations spread fast. How do you speed the ones that don’t? Offers great insight into the process of changing behavior, how an idea becomes the new normal, and how the trust to …
My Ideal City / Mi Ciudad Ideal – six-month collaborative urban design project from PSFK and W Radio in Bogota, Columbia is using social media to generate discussion and ideas from around the world. The results will be reviewed by an architect and urban planner as they redevelop a neighborhood in …
Graph Words: online thesaurus – if you’re visually oriented and either enjoy words or want to understand them better, try Graph Words. It maps the various meanings associated with a word and color-codes them as nouns, adjectives, verbs, and adverbs. Shown here is ‘design’ and related nouns and verbs. …
Big data in the age of the telegraph – the original organizational chart developed in 1854 by David McCallum of the New York and Erie Railroad offers surprisingly current lessons for dealing with today’s ‘big data’ issues and the flow of information through an organization. [To read this full McKinsey …
Santiago’s biggest newspaper takes a visual approach to urban issues – the Santiago edition of newspaper El Mercurio started a series, Santiago en 180°, with panoramic photos of sections of the city annotated with information on traffic, nearby changes, history, etc. Though a simple project, by rethinking what’s newsworthy El Mercurio has …
What Twitter Really Looks Like – about Tweetping, a visualization of Twitter activity in real time. Tweetping is a visual reminder of the distribution of Twitter, the flow of it, the scale of it. It tracks straight-from-the-API info like total tweets (and words, and characters) per …
The One Conversational Tool That Will Make You Better At Absolutely Everything | Fast Company – a journalist offers great advice on the art of asking questions. It’s part of a series called Creative Conversations. Good questions can move your business, organization, or career forward. They squeeze incremental value from …
A Writing Life Built on the Power and Joy of Architecture – an appreciation of Ada Louise Huxtable in The New York Times; she died yesterday at the age of 91. The NYTimes is where she started as the “first full-time critic writing on architecture for an American newspaper” in 1963. …
[You don’t need to] understand music – take a break, watch this beautiful short (2:12 min) animation from German design studio finally on enjoying music no matter how complex it is.
Communicating Across Remote Workplaces – offers excellent suggestions for communicating with and maintaining good working relationships with colleagues in remote offices. Be sure to check out the rest of this new blog – The Best Workplace – from Mike McKeown, an always-thoughtful commentator with lots of experience working with …
Check out the free Collective Action Toolkit (CAT) from frog design or read this post from Co.Design. The Collective Action Toolkit (CAT) is a package of resources and activities that enable groups of people anywhere to organize, build trust, and collaboratively create solutions for problems impacting their community. … …
The Secret Life of Plants: Plant Communication – scientists may discover the physiology behind the old adage that talking to your plants makes them grow better. This article gives a brief overview of the different ways plants communicate – autosignaling (within themselves), plant-insect, and plant-plant communication. Though plants do not …
Do Your Slides Pass the Glance Test? – 5 design points that will make your slide presentation more effective. This is part three of a five-part series; links to previous two posts at the bottom.