Archives > Monthly

October 2005

Design

The season's best buyer's guide

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Leave it to Mark Hurst to not only write an extraordinary buyer’s guide, but also provide a comprehensive theoretical framework for doing so. Mark (founder of Good Experience) is a long-time advocate of the user experience, broadly defined. And lately he’s been troubled by twin themes: complexity and choice. Complexity in consumer products (It’s a []

Design

National Design Awards

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The 2005 U.S. National Design Awards were announced last week, with several of our TED friends among them. Congratulations to Burt Rutan (Product design), Stefan Sagmeister (Communication design), and Eva Zeisel (lifetime achievement). Well done!

Biology

On Communicating

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A special report from Forbes.com covers the broad topic of Communicating in some interesting ways: from the origins of language in chimps to alien contact to the latest computer interfaces (including the SUI, or Straw-like User Interface, which lets you experience the sensations of drinking). Many TED voices here (Steven Pinker, Jane Goodall, Ray Kurzweil, []

Metaphor of the month

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In November’s Natural History Magazine: “And what comedian designer configured the region between our legs — an entertainment complex built around a sewage system?” — Neil deGrasse Tyson, “Universe” column

Confidence in numbers

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Here’s a brilliant new website, pledgebank.  The idea’s simple. Make a pledge, any pledge, conditional on a number of other people joining in. Pledges can be symmetrical (everyone does the same thing)…     "I will march on the White House in protest at X, if 1,000 people will join me."     "I will []

Business

Are we inside Bubble 2.0?

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Something truly significant is happening right now in the world of web creation. Engineers, entrepreneurs, and investors are buzzing with the possibilities of web 2.0 technologies, and the interactive applications they enable. There’s an energy — even a joyfulness — pervading the industry that this former web gal hasn’t seen since perhaps 1999. The web []

Huge story… largely ignored

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Given that everyone’s top wish, politicians and bimbos alike, is supposed to be “world peace,” you’d think that when a detailed, intensely-researched, highly credible report is published suggesting spectacular progress in that direction, it would be front-page news in the media. You’d be wrong. The Human Security Report 2005 published last week included the following []

Design

A design space to watch

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TEDster Diego Rodriguez, who works with IDEO, teaches at the Stanford d. School, and writes the influential blog metacool, debuts his BusinessWeek Online column today. We’ll be watching that space …

Business

The Daily Jurvetson

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Many TEDsters have their own blogs, and one of the coolest is Steve Jurvetson’s. Steve (pictured here test-driving Graham Hawkes’ gorgeous Deep Flight Aviator)  is currently in China, and I followed a discussion on his ‘BMW style‘ Chinese SUVs to this not-very-confidence-inspiring crash-test video. Perhaps Detroit still has a few years to run… Check out []

Design

Trend-spotting with Murray Moss

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Whether you’re surveying a new season of design offerings, or simply considering a new set of spoons, you might find yourself wondering: WWMMD? What would Murray Moss Do? Moss (TED2002) curates one of the world’s great collections of inspired objets in his eponymous SoHo store. You’ll get a sense of where he’s heading from this []

Design

MUJI @ MoMA

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Got MUJI? If not, you will soon. The opening last week of a MUJI store-within-a-store at the Museum of Modern Art was a great day for great design. Discerning design geeks already adore MUJI, the “brand-free” Japanese brand that creates elegant, streamlined, delightfully practical products, ranging from scissors to CD players to concept cars. Their []

Some strange choices on this list…

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Here’s a quirky line-up of "the world’s top 20 public intellectuals" published by a couple of magazines after a widely-promoted internet vote. 1 Noam Chomsky 2 Umberto Eco 3 Richard Dawkins 4 Václav Havel 5 Christopher Hitchens 6 Paul Krugman 7 Jürgen Habermas 8 Amartya Sen 9 Jared Diamond 10 Salman Rushdie 11 Naomi Klein []

Honorary TEDster: August Wilson, 1945 – 2005

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When Radio Golf opened this year at the Yale Repertory Theater, we knew it was the right moment to invite August Wilson to TED. Who better to talk about creating the future than the charismatic Wilson, who set out in 1985 to write a series of ground-breaking plays, chronicling the lives of African Americans in []

Colbert's debut

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I don’t watch much TV, but Jon Stewart gets regular TiVo-time (even if his terrible Bush impressions are getting a little tired), and now his sidekick Stephen Colbert follows with his own half-hour of satire. A pretty good start last night, I thought,  especially his line that the great divide in America is no longer []