Stats of the Union tells health stories in America.

Sound Cells – Universal iOS App Creates Generative Music.

Aphonium – App Creates Generative Audio and Visuals.

SunVox – Multiplatform Modular Music Creation Studio.

Surprise Surveillance Theater: An Experimental Drama with Unwitting Stars.

Japanese artist Eiji Watanabe cuts butterflies out of printed field guides and sets them free, covering the walls and ceilings of installation spaces.

15 Shopping Rules of Thumb.

Every individual needs emotional and intellectual support from her creative tribe to sustain a positive, thriving and aspiring practice.

Hidden is an app that lets you spy on the person who may have stolen you laptop.

Urban Quiver camera bag from Blackstone Bags.

David McCandless: The beauty of data visualization (video)

Is it time to change the way we educate?

Ancient Nubians Drank Antibiotic-Laced Beer

Panspermia theorists say India’s red rain contains life not seen on Earth

Desk-It Adhesive Notepads

Do we really desire Google to tell us what we should be doing next? Yes, but with some qualifiers, says William Gibson.

GOOD Guide to Education Innovation

Flaunt: Designing effective, compelling and memorable portfolios of creative work. Buy the book or PDF.

The doormat, the jerk and the lizard brain.

Livid Instruments’ new Builder is a line of DIY parts that make it easy for users to design their own USB MIDI control surfaces and devices using buttons, knobs, faders, and talkback LEDs.

Shifting Identities: From Consumer to Networked Creator.

NOBY NOBY BOY for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad, from the creator of Katamari Damacy.

The Vitesse D7HG is for those who are looking for a great bike for urban commuting at a good value.

Research says users will pay for content online, with a few catches.

Nanoloop For The iPhone.

How did a plastic water bottle, imported from a military dictatorship thousands of miles away, become the epitome of cool?.

Art of the arcade.

How to develop groove in your playing.

12 Greenest colleges and universities in the U.S.

Osmos has a sublime electronic soundtrack by Loscil, Gas/High Skies, Julien Neto, Biosphere, and more.

By refusing to comment on the work you show the work some respect; you allow the work to just be.

Consumers get paid to reduce their emissions.

The fifth edition of The Oblique Strategies by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt is now available.

Michael Bay as Generative Art: Explosion Action Painting with oF.

An essay against Situationism.

Open Atrium is a customizable, open-source team portal.

Music Made from a Tree.

Why We Need a Globally-Recognized Unit of “Green”

Managers Embrace Design Thinking, Designers Reject It.

Starting a Design Studio In a Downturn: Part 1: Taking Leaps, Part 2: The First 15 Weeks, Part 3: When There’s No There There

The Old Solutions Have Become the New Problems: The new rules ask, “Who are you? What do you need? How can I help?”

Dork Yearbook features pictures from yesteryear of geeks and the computers they love.

The Society for Environmental Graphic Design (SEGD) is a global community of people working at the intersection of communication design and the built environment.

Frog Design envisions a smart, multi-function ID card.

We know more about outer space than the planet beneath our feet, but an ambitious plan to scan deep beneath the US will change all that.

Communicate the benefit of the benefit, ie. the emotional well-being the product or service provides.

• How do you solve your client’s business problem?
• Can you articulate how your work helped a client meet key goals?
• Can you present yourself as a strategic thinker?

• Put it in writing
  • What do you provide? For whom? And how do you do it?
  • Define your strategy statement: how and why
• All design briefs should have business objectives as well as design objectives
• What do people want (job satisfaction)?
  1. Positive relationships
  2. Interesting work
  3. Opportunities for learning
  4. others: opportunities for advancement, innovation, meaningful & fulfilling work, participation in decision making
• Complacency
  • Feeling unimportant or uninspired
  • lack of healthy competition and challenge
  • Establish an environment where individuals can compete with themselves and work with each other

[this was a last-minute substitution for another session. I had a mixed reaction to her presentation, because a lot of the concepts seemed basic to me. Also, she kept mentioning how hung-over she was from the "seven gin-and-tonics" she consumed while partying the previous night. Other people seemed to glean value from it, but by the end I wished I had gone to another session.]

1. Allow individuals (including groups of individuals) to act on their own knowledge.
2. Apply to simple, generic units and allow them to combine in many different ways.
3. Permit credible, understandable, enduring, and enforceable commitments.
4. Protect criticism, competition, and feedback.
5. Establish a framework within which people can create nested, competing frameworks of more specific rules.