Last month I wrote about crowdfunding. And I’m now into three projects, all of which succeeded (two books and a movie). When they show up, I’ll blog about them over at my site.
This month, I was questing around for a good topic when the household fourteen-year-old asked us both to watch a video. The speech happened at least fifteen years ago, but it is exactly relevant today. I found myself blinking back tears as I listened, both because the speech was so good, and because it could be delivered to the very same people today. I highly recommend that you stop for a minute and watch/listen to the talk by Severn Suzuki, which will provide some background for the rest of this column. The You Tube video of the talk is called “The girl who silenced the world for five minutes.” Continue reading The Talks We Remember→
Last month I wrote about good design. Some of my research for developing world designs took me to a crowdfunding site called “The Unreasonable Institute” where I found One Earth Designs and Cal Sol Agua. That intrigued me. In the manner of synchronous events, I saw a tweet from Neil Gaiman that day about a project on the crowdfunded art site Kickstarter. Which is how I started down the path of the changing (and growing) power of the crowd for this month’s column. Continue reading Crowd Power→
Last month, I talked about what the future needs from us. One of the things I mentioned was better governance. I suspect there’s no actual link, but people seem to be arguing for better governance, not only in Tahrir square but other places as well. This month I decided to focus on one frontier of the brave innovation theme I also think we need: sense-of-wonder design. I’m a science fiction reader, and a lot of the stories I remember best have excellent and fascinating design ideas. Rama. Ringworld. Stillsuits. Continue reading Design for the Soul→
I just finished doing my predictions for 2011 over on my website. I find them a little depressing because even though some of them are good, we are not giving the future the things it needs most from us. For example, I’m not predicting great strides in alternative energy or kindness to the climate in the next year. Nor am I predicting great strides forward in government, at least not here in the US. Maybe the shooting of Rep. Giffords will calm down our nasty rhetoric. I suspect that time will erase the horror and we will keep on talking entrenched sound bites instead of actually listening. I hope not; see Paul’s excellent post. If anything, the tragedy illustrates why I decided to devote this month’s columns to a few of the things the future needs us to focus on now:
Last month, I talked about what the future needs from us. One of the things I mentioned was better governance. I suspect there’s no actual link, but people seem to be arguing for better governance, not only in Tahrir square but other places as well. This month I decided to focus on one frontier of the brave innovation theme I also think we need: sense-of-wonder design. I’m a science fiction reader, and a lot of the stories I remember best have excellent and fascinating design ideas. Rama. Ringworld. Stillsuits.