DESIGN, BUSINESS & INNOVATION: How PowerPoint is killing critical thought

Photo via The Guardian.

Andrew Smith shares his impressions on PowerPoint as the equivalent of a sleeping pill for the eager mind while enforces "a rigidly hierarchical authority, which has not necessarily been earned. He recalls listening to a debate, on Radio 4’s Today show, about lecturing standards at British universities. He says: "I have two children at uni who have both have found lectures frustrating, so the contention of the education minister Jo Johnson that quality in this area was “highly variable” came as no surprise to me. What’s more, during sample orations on open days, I had the same experience of being bored to tears by things I felt I should have enjoyed. So when my daughter reported an exception to this rule, I knew what my first question would be.

“Did the lecturer use PowerPoint?”

“Hm. No, he just spoke,” she said.

PowerPoint is so ubiquitous that Lotte hadn’t made the connection. But the lectures I attended had left me in no doubt that Microsoft’s wildly successful “presentation” program is not just inimical to, but destructive of, deep thought, and could have been scientifically designed to put the most eager mind to sleep. The more I inquired into why this might be, the more I began to see its somnolent reflection everywhere." Read the full article in The Guardian. No PowerPoint visual resources guaranteed. E.T.P. 4'

DESIGN, BUSINESS & INNOVATION: The Little Known Story of British Road Signs

JOCK KINNEIR AND MARGARET CALVERT, COURTESY OF LONDON DESIGN MUSeum via wired

"If you think about it, traffic signs should be invisible. Not see-through invisible, but intuitively invisible; if they work like they’re supposed to, you won’t even realize you’re using them.

That was the challenge put to Lock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert in 1958, when the British government hired the London designers to devise a new signage system for the country’s roads. Up until then, traffic wayfinding in the UK had been aided through a slapdash series of roadside posts, cobbled together in various colors, fonts, and type sizes. The system was so bad that the design magazine Typographica published two photo essays condemning its terrible usability. If longevity is any measure, the Kinneir-Calvert signage system worked: It’s still in place today, and has informed a number of other similar projects around the world." Read full article in Wired. E.T.P. 4' 

DESIGN, BUSINESS & INNOVATION: The Perfect Résumé

Image via HBR.

"How long will recruiters spend on your résumé before deciding to toss it in the recycle bin? Six seconds, says online job search site The Ladders. That’s about 20 to 30 words.
So how do you write those first few lines of your resume—the summary section—to compel the recruiter to keep reading? How do you make sure you get the call—and not the toss? How do you make your summary memorable?" Read all the tips in the Harvard Business Review. E.T.P. 4'

DESIGN, BUSINESS & INNOVATION: Feeding Forward

Photo via The Independent.

"A Californian woman, who developed an innovative phone app, has since helped to feed almost 600,000 homeless people – after she became tired of America’s growing food-waste problem.
Three years ago – when she was a student at the University of California, Berkeley –Komal Ahmad – now aged 25 – was walking near campus when a homeless man approached her and asked her for money to buy food." Read full story in The Independent. E.T.P. 4'

DESIGN, BUSINESS & INNOVATION: Beyond the narcissism

Photo via Marketing Magazine.

Nicola Kemp in Marketing Magazine define the sixtrends that will define next decade social media, beyond narcissism. "Consumers and brands must both become less self-absorbed if they are to thrive in the next decade of social media.
Speaking at the Cannes Lions advertising festival, Peter Kim, chief digital officer at Cheil Worldwide, warned that narcissism has overtaken altruism as the driving force behind social connection.
"Popular culture fuels this behaviour, reinforcing the idea that being social is actually about self-promotion," he explains. This shift, he believes, has driven the social-media landscape to the point of self-obsessed absurdity. " Prepare for a shift from global narcissism to real empowerment. Read full article in Marketing Magazine. E.T.P. 5'

DESIGN, BUSINESS & INNOVATION: Why Open Platform is the future of the Internet of Things

Video still via INC.

In a video from INC, Valerie Casey, CPO of Samsung's Global Innovation Center, describes the benefits of an open platform where the best products are celebrated as the Internet of Things will become a dominant part of our lives. Watch video in INC. E.T.P. 2'

DESIGN, BUSINESS & INNOVATION: Facebook’s Instant Articles

Photo via The Drum.

"Facebook’s direct publishing deal to get publishers to create native content for its audiences begins in earnest its transformation into a media owner but publishers are wary of the lack of early clarity on its impact on data and the social media fate of those who don’t get with the program.
The content management system (CMS) essentially allows publishers to upload their articles directly to Facebook, which then manages the transition of it people. It hands the social network more control over editorial than ever before and, while a controversial prospect, is being sold to publishers as a way to boost the reach and value of their content." Read full article in The Drum. E.T.P. 7'

DESIGN, BUSINESS & INNOVATION: Expat's Utopia

Photo via BBC.

"Imagine a major metropolis where traffic flows quickly on green highways; where streets are sparkling clean and restoration is nearly as vigilant as sanitation; where four main ethnicities (Chinese, Malay, Indian and Eurasian) co-exist in tropical tolerance with a large community of foreigners who live and raise kids without fear of crime or the slightest impolite slight. Parks, museums, art spaces and architectural icons are world class.

There’s a reason — actually a multitude of them — why Singapore ranks high on surveys of places to live and work."  Discover the reasons and plan your next travel destination after reading the full article in the BBC. E.T.P. 4'

Also, there is a quick but interesting article about the chewing-gum ban in Singapore, via BBC. Have a look. E.T.P 3'

DESIGN, BUSINESS & INNOVATION: Googledome or temple of doom?

Image via The Economist.

Interesting short article in The Economist about the Sillicon Valley compulsion of building massive HQs that increasingly look less like office buildings and more like monuments to the ego of the new tech pharaohs. "Marc Andreessen knows a thing or two about Silicon Valley’s penchant for status symbols and its braggadocio. As a venture capitalist and serial entrepreneur, he has helped turn more than a few minnows into high-tech giants. As an investor, he serves these days on the boards of Facebook and Hewlett-Packard, among others. Along with avoiding such cardinal sins as going public too soon and being too eager to cash out, Mr Andreessen is adamant that his charges must refrain, at all cost, from pouring huge sums into glamorous new headquarters.The compulsion to build monuments to a ruler’s power and prestige has existed since history began. But flush with cash and with interest rates near zero, Silicon Valley’s leading lights are now competing with each other over who can build the most lavish digs, to feed their corporate egos as well as to attract and retain talent." Read full article in The Economist. E.T.P. 3'

DESIGN, BUSINESS & INNOVATION

Photo via Fast Company.

This is a nice Fast Company article sent by our friend Jorge in which Jane Porter talks about Piers Steel's book The Procrastination Equation, a book that we mention in our small manifesto. It is always nice to read people that is trying to rescue the term and the practice of procrastination, for Piers is all about taking a structured approach to achieve productive procrastination, for us, as you well know, is all about meaningfulness.

"Every time you decide to work, the payoff gets evaluated twice: once by the limbic system and a second time by the prefrontal cortex," according to Steel. In other words, it's a battle of impulse against rationality. But while the term "productive procrastination" used by Steel, is a contentious one amongst scholars in the field, some of whom strongly believe there can be nothing productive about procrastination. But there's no question that of the many ways we can waste time, some are far better for us than others." Read the full article in Fast Company and find out the 5 best ways to procrastinate according to Steel, the 6th best, you already know it ;) . E.T.P. 4'

Photo via Vice.

Michael Grothaus of Vice asked a privacy lawyer what facebook's new Term and Conditions will mean for you. The article is concerned "not only with new additions to the Facebook Terms of Service, but the complete Terms of Service, which include some old terms unchanged by Facebook at this time. One new feature is the ability for Facebook to track your location. This ability is contingent on a user's consent." Read full article in Vice. E.T.P. 5'

 

Image via Wired.

Following the new avant garde design of the new Norwegian notes Travis Purrington, student at the Basel School of Design in Switzerland wants to use money to celebrate science instead of presidents. "What if we used money “as an educational tool?” Purrington wonders. “And not to reinforce such a patriotic bond with the country, but more of a global bond with mankind.” For his master’s thesis, Purrington (who is an American, from Idaho) gave US currency a top-to-bottom, front-to-back overhaul." Purrington proposes to celebrate science, I think that we should also celebrate art, but in any case we are heading in a good direction. Read full article in Wired. E.T.P. 3'

DESIGN, BUSINESS & INNOVATION

This section's Estimated Time of Procrastination is: 3' 

Illustration via Quartz.

According to a new paper from NBER, the high points of the careers of both great inventors and Nobel-Prize winning scientists, and they found that the late 30s were the sweet spot for strokes of genius; while innovators have been peaking slightly later in life as the 20th century has progressed, in part because today’s scientists have more to learn than their predecessors. Read full article in Quartz. E.T.P. 3'

DESIGN, BUSINESS & INNOVATION

Image via Wired.

Marcus Wohlsen's Wired article explicitly called "How Facebook Could End Up Controlling Everything You Watch and Read Online" would have been quoted so many times in a second part of my dissertation about information on the move... but since that imaginary second part is not happening (anytime soon, at least), at least I get to share it here. Anyone interested in the future of news, journalism, publishing, content creation and marketing, and well, the Internet in general, should have a look. Here's a fragment of the article: "Given that links appear to be more clickable when shared on Facebook, online publishers have scrambled to become savvy gamers of Facebook’s News Feed, seeking to divine the secret rules that push some stories higher than others. But all this genuflection at the altar of Facebook’s algorithms may be but a prelude to a more fundamental shift in how content is produced, shared, and consumed online. Instead of going to all this trouble to get people to click a link on Facebook that takes them somewhere else, the future of Internet content may be a world in which no video, article, or cat GIF gallery lives outside of Facebook at all." Read full article in Wired. E.T.P. 5'

Image via The Economist.

And obviously related to the previous article, Alexandra Suich writes for The Economist print edition a nice piece about how technology is profoundly changing the advertising business. This is fragment of Little Brother: "In 1963 David Ogilvy . . . wrote: 'An advertisement is like a radar sweep, constantly hunting new prospects as they come into the market. Get a good radar, and keep it sweeping.' Half a century later advertisers are at last taking him at his word. Behavioural profiling has gone viral across the internet, enabling firms to reach users with specific messages based on their location, interests, browsing history and demographic group. Ads can now follow users from site to site: a customer who looks online for flights to Frankfurt will be inundated with German holiday offers. Conversant, a digital-marketing firm, uses an algorithm to deliver around 800,000 variations of an ad to its big clients’ prospective customers to make it as irresistible as possible. . . Extreme personalisation in advertising has been slow to come, except in search advertising, where Google, Yahoo and other engines have been serving up ads tailored to users’ interests for years. But now it has arrived in earnest. According to one poll by Adobe, a software company, most marketers say they have seen more change in the past two years than in the previous 50." Read full article in The Economist. E.T.P. 6'

DESIGN, BUSINESS & INNOVATION

Photo via Mashable.

T.L. Stanley describes in Mashable how the ad industry has finally made peace with crowdsourcing and how mass collaboration continues to blossom nowadays as consumers prefer authentic, quirky or unvarnished brand messages. "James DeJulio, co-founder and chief executive of Santa Monica-based ad tech firm Tongal, says crowdsourced advertising is the Uber of the marketing world. There’s tremendous demand for a service – in this case, original content with a fresh voice for digital, social media and other platforms. And lucky for brand marketers, he says, there’s a passionate and motivated labor pool ready to step up for quick turnaround, low-cost projects." Read full article in Mashable. E.T.P. 7'

Photo via PSFK.

Super interesting article by Sophie Maxwell, Pearlfisher's Futures Director in PSFK: "It is increasingly hard to switch off from a world that is always on. Our new and infinitely connected world has enabled us to exercise endless choice. And keen to optimize every aspect of our lifestyle, we have bought into the fact that the digital and the physical need to work in synergy. But now, there is a growing realization that we are struggling to find the head space for it all. As a result, we are seeking to restore some sort of balance – in terms of how we connect with each other and with our surroundings – by taking shelter, slowing down and switching off.
It may seem counter-intuitive but we are looking to brands to guide us. We want brands to help us schedule time for contemplation, create new space for significant moments and connect with us in more creatively controlled ways." Read full article in PSFK. E.T.P. 3'

DESIGN, BUSINESS & INNOVATION

Illustration: Snøhetta: Beauty of Boundaries (detail) via It's Nice That.

Rebecca Fulleylove writes in It's Nice That: "Norway’s Norges Bank have just announced new designs that will make their way into circulation in 2017 and boy are they beautiful. Two designers have been selected for each side of the notes with The Metric System’s design providing a starting point for the front and Oslo-based Snøhetta for the reverse.
It’s the reverse designs that have got us really excited, not just because they look fab but because of the concept behind them. Titled Beauty of Boundaries, Snøhetta’s notes use images from Norway’s costal landscape and translates them into pixellated, colour-blocked snapshots." Read full articles and watch the rest of the notes in It's Nice That. E.T.P. 3'

DESIGN, BUSINESS & INNOVATION

Poster by François Caspar via The New York Times.

Interesting article by Rob Walker in The New York Times about how design has moved from aesthetic to the strategic and participatory. "The golden age of design has been heralded many times over the past couple of decades — four, by my count. Now, this previous momentum paired with technology, community and big business has fueled something new: an unprecedented belief in the power of design to not only elevate an idea, but be the idea." Read full article in The New York Times. E.T.P. 4'

Alibaba CEO Jack Ma outside the New York Stock Exchange prior to his company’s initial public offering Friday.        Photo: Jason DeCrow / AP via WIRED.

"Amazon, Facebook, IBM, Intel. As of midday on Friday, Alibaba is now worth more than all of them. On its first day as a publicly traded company on the New York Stock Exchange, shares in the Chinese e-commerce giant shot up by nearly one-third above their initial asking price. The surge put the value of the company at around $228 billion. The only U.S. tech companies worth more by market cap are Apple ($609 billion), Google ($400 billion), and Microsoft ($387 billion).
And even those giants may see Alibaba closing in." Read full article by Marcus Wohlsen in WIRED. E.T.P. 3'

Photo via Design Milk.

Post-it fan? Yes, we too. This is kind of a big deal for you then: Post-it is taking the analog collaboration experience and digitizing it with Post-it Plus App. "The app captures physical brainstorm sessions, storyboards, project plans, and other projects and makes them digital, so you and your team can easily work faster and smarter. With the ability to capture up to 50 Post-it Notes at once, the Post-it Plus App can keep your brains working from anywhere to keep the momentum going, even outside of the office." Read all about it in Design Milk. E.T.P. 3'

DESIGN, BUSINESS & INNOVATION

Image via Yahoo!

You might not have noticed yet, but if you have an iPhone the new U2 album is sitting there in your Music Library. Thanks to Daniel Bean now you can learn how to get rid of it. "During the company’s iPhone and Apple Watch event Tuesday, Cook was joined on stage by the band and explained that the collection of 11 songs, which you know by now is titled Songs of Innocence, would be “going out for free” on iTunes. What wasn’t explained at the time was that it would be gifted to us whether we liked it or not and be a son of a gun to get rid of if we didn’t feel like looking at it on our iPhones." Read it in Yahoo! E.T.P. 3' (absolutely worth it, of course).

PS. BTW, apparently Apple spent US$ 100 million to buy you that U2 album... and they say that musicians don't sell albums anymore. 

Photo via WIRED.

And since we are on it, let's have a look at Wired's article: The Disappointing Design of Apple's New Gadgets by Gadi Amit. "Apple’s software environment is innovative and clearly superior in cohesion and experience, but its industrial design is what we were all watching for this week at the launch of the iPhone 6, 6 Plus and Apple Watch. The centrality of Apple’s industrial design is Steve Jobs’ legacy; it is what dictates Apple’s brand dominance, its marketing storyline and its strong effect on every one of us. And it is here where Apple went slightly wrong." Read full article in Wired. E.T.P. 6'

Great selection of New York Fashion Week SS15 collections made GIFs: From Proenza Schouler's country club vixen to Wang's love letter to sneakerheads. Links to photos of the collections included. Have a look in Dazed Magazine. E.T.P. 7' 

Photo: BBC's Sherlock via Quartz.

Leo Mirani writes an intersting article in Quartz: Why people love paying for Netflix but hate paying for the BBC. The key might be as having the choice. " It is the voluntary nature of Netflix that makes subscribers feel like they’re getting value. If they spend hours browsing, they conclude it is they who are indecisive, not the service that is lacking in choice. If they don’t like it, they can stop paying. Perception of the BBC is tainted by its compulsory nature. Despite the tremendous news-gathering, Sherlock, Planet Earth, and all the other flagship shows, the British public resents not having a choice in the matter. Yet that is what makes the BBC what it is; without the mandatory fee, it would slowly crumble. It is this dichotomy that both the network and the public must live with." Read full article in Quartz. E.T.P. 3'

DESIGN, BUSINESS & INNOVATION

Photo: Luke MacGregor/Reuters via The Atlantic.

Here a very interesting article on the virtues of working less, which for us of course means worrying less about occupying your time with meaningful procrastination activities like visiting galleries, picnicking outdoors when the sun is shining, exercising or simply clicking on another tab and devoting 5 minutes to reading an inspiring article, instead of engaging into a starting contest with your computer screen just for cultural inertia.

"Even though the amount of time you work tends to match how productive you are as if on a sliding scale, length of work and quality of work at a certain point become inversely related. At some point, in other words, the more you work, the less productive you become. 

For example, working long hours often leads to productivity-killing distractions. Such is an instance of the saying known as Parkinson’s law, which states that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. Work less, and you’ll tend to work better.

Many people are still stuck on the fundamental importance of work compared to free time: the structure it gives, the purpose it affords, the morality it signifies. But what if we viewed leisure time not as goofing off, but as necessary time for reflecting, for inspiring creativity, and for saving up brainpower and energy for future work?" Read full article in The Atlantic. E.T.P. 7'

Illustration via Wired.

Mat Honan liked everything he came across in Facebook for 48 hours, here's what he has to say about his experiment: "The like and the favorite are the new metrics of success—very literally. Not only are they ego-feeders for the stuff we put online as individuals, but advertisers track their campaigns on Facebook by how often they are liked. A recent New York Times story on a krill oil ad campaign lays bare how much the like matters to advertisers. Liking is an economic act.

I like everything. Or at least I did, for 48 hours. Literally everything Facebook sent my way, I liked—even if I hated it. I decided to embark on a campaign of conscious liking, to see how it would affect what Facebook showed me. I know this sounds like a stunt (and it was) but it was also genuinely just an open-ended experiment." Read full article in Wired. E.T.P. 7'

DESIGN, BUSINESS & INNOVATION

Photo via The Guardian.

In the Comment is Free section of The Guardian H.R. Hennessy share his thoughts on how we are being dragged towards a tech-utopia that nobody wants. This is an extract of the article: "A divide is growing between the people who wholeheartedly embrace a radically new, radically self-centred vision of human life, and the people who do not. The internal lives of the tech elite, centred on the labour-saving innovations of Silicon Valley, are at odds with semi-atavistic conceptions of how people interact. Traditions and shared values are redundant, inefficient, and must be optimised out of existence.
The backlash against this world is democracy manifesting itself; a tacit rejection of the ideological assumptions underpinning the personal tech revolution. People want to define the structure of their own lives, and Silicon Valley's myriad product lines are an unwelcome intrusion into the way we live and interact with one another – and even the way we eat, sleep and procreate." Read full article in The Guardian. E.T.P. 6'

Image via The New York Times.

To accompany our new section we are sharing with you this little test in The New York Times that tests your fluency in emoji, given that seems to be a necessary skill these days, especially if you consider that over 200 new emojis were introduced by the Unicode Consortium last month. Give it a try! E.T.P. 3'

DESIGN, BUSINESS & INNOVATION

Photo via Fast Company.

Great article by Eric Jaffe in Fast Cmpany about what makes one consumer design cool and others meh: The Science of Cool. "Take a look at the two water bottles above. The one on the left is pretty much your standard water bottle design: tall, clear, probably crinkly. The one on the right feels a bit less conventional, with its sleek aluminum shell shaped like an Erlenmeyer flask. In a survey of which is cooler, the bottle on the right would win right away, though both bottles serve the very same function. So what is it, exactly, that makes one design cooler than another? The difference is surprisingly tough to articulate. You might say it's because the bottle on the right is unconventional. But a water bottle shaped like a kangaroo would be unconventional, too, and you wouldn't necessarily consider it cool. There's more to it than just being different." Read full article in Fast Company. E.T.P. 5'

Photo via Fast Company.

And of course, our anniversary edition had to have an Internet celebrity cat news: "Tabatha Bundesen was a waitress at Red Lobster when her brother first posted a photo of her cat, Tarder Sauce, on Reddit. Soon the cat had become a meme. A couple of months later, she had an agent. Then she had a book deal, a beverage brand, a line of merchandise, and a Christmas movie on Lifetime.. “I am Grumpy Cat’s human,” Bundesen says when I ask her if she owns the cat." Read full article in Fast Company. E.T.P. 4'

DESIGN, BUSINESS & INNOVATION

Photo: Reuters/Jim Young via Quartz.

The title of this article written by Jeremy Eden and Terri Long in Quartz is "The talent that your company needs may already be on the payroll", but I honestly prefer the accurate caption of the photo as a title: Meaning. Employees want meaning. "In that classic of management science, The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy gives the secret to finding a talented team of people who have intellect, passion, and courage when she says: “if I ever go looking for my heart’s desire again, I won’t look any further than my own backyard.”Read full article in Quartz. E.T.P. 6'