Posts related to working and business.
“Once you’ve seen a pattern, you can’t un-see it,” says Brené Brown in her book, The Gifts of Imperfection. One pattern I see time and again is how loading people up with multiple simultaneous projects can dramatically reduce the quality … [read more]
John Perry Barlow is an activist, writer, former lyricist for the Grateful Dead and co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He’s also an engaging Twitter-er who gets my attention with concise, insightful original tweets and great quotations. In the last … [read more]
Nerds get a bad rap. We are being made fun of for our love of, and intimate ways with, our gear. When I say ‘gear,’ I mean computers, musical instruments, stereo equipment, cameras… anything that only reveals its depth … [read more]
Johanna Blakley‘s research concerns itself with the impact of intellectual property rights on cultural production (she also researches the entertainment industry and celebrity culture). In this really interesting TED talk, she looks at how the fashion industry has been affected … [read more]
Barack Obama’s former BlackBerry, and the highly secure clunker it was allegedly replaced with, seem like an apt encapsulation of what enterprises are facing with the glut of new smartphones their users are connecting to corporate networks everywhere. As we … [read more]
I like some of Don Norman‘s (now slightly older) theses about complexity and emotion in design. In an online essay entitled Emotional Design: People and Things he writes, Products differ in their appeal on the three design dimensions, but … [read more]
Richard Sennett is a sociologist at New York University and the London School of Economics. In the January/February 2010 issue of Utne Reader, an interview with him is reprinted from American Craft. I found these passages particularly resonant: The most … [read more]
It’s been more than a month since I last blogged here. I took some well-deserved time off during December. Since last time, I’ve bought an Apple iPhone (more hipster stuff) and Google launched its Nexus One phone. Coincidentally, both happened … [read more]