A recent WSJ headline notes that at 3M, “Innovation Comes in Tweaks and Snips.” Apparently, 3M CEO George Buckley had recently charged staffers to find cheaper ways to make products like respirator masks as a way to improve products and cut costs, suggesting that in hard economic times like these, innovations can be found “at the bottom of the pyramid” rather than in pursuit of a single “grandiose invention.” 

Certainly, innovation can come in many shapes and sizes, but the brand of iterative chicken scratching suggested in this charge raises serious questions about the definition and terms around “innovation.” For example, can any/every iterative maneuver, be it cost cutting, process improvement, or otherwise tweaking and snipping, be considered “innovation”? Where are the lines drawn around an “ah-hah moment” born of the elusive “creative spark,” and simple problem-solving?  Are we wrong to lump the concepts of innovation, invention and creativity into the same category?  Is being “skillful” the same as being “innovative”? What about resourcefulness?  And, where does novelty come into play?

With operations in more than 65 countries, 75,000 employees, and global sales of over $23 billion, 3M leadership must remain engaged on all levels of the innovation pyramid in these tough economic times. No stranger to innovation, Buckley’s training as an electrical engineer combined with a broad knowledge of physics and thermodynamics led to many patented, industry-changing inventions including early prototypes of the front-loading washing machine. In his role as CEO of 3M (current tagline, “Innovative Technology for a Changing World”), Buckley is both an idealist and a realist when it comes to innovation. The cost-cutting exercise around the respirator masks belies the depth of Mr. Buckley’s creative nature. 

In 2007, I had an opportunity to sit down with Mr. Buckley to talk about the dynamic of creativity. An intensely curious and widely read man, he described himself as a life-long-learner, drawing upon ancient history, biographies, classical music and the arts. Buckley is comfortable talking in broad abstract terms or in the vernacular of the pragmatic, Fortune 500 business leader that he is. Introverted and thoughtful, driven to a state of near constant scanning and observation, absorbing, processing and critiquing, Buckley believes that the creative process occurs at the intersection of intuitive vision, specialized “deep” knowledge, and opportunity. He believes that creative discovery is something other than linear processing that “comes on another level of awareness … part genius, part maverick … a willingness to risk, to go out into an unknown realm.”

Always PUSHing the future, Cecily Sommers concurs, citing two categories of innovation: 1) problem-solving through ideation (brainstorming around a challenge or opportunity and then choosing the best option); and 2) leaps in logic (blue-sky dreaming … asking the broad “what if” questions). Sommers suggests that the creative process applies in both approaches, and that moments of insight are found in each. She also notes that iteration is fundamental to the innovation process as a whole.

I suspect that value to society, or “social value,” is also a factor in determining the innovative quotient of a product or process. Resourcefulness, for example, can be a component of innovative behavior, however it does not necessarily deliver social value. If you’re lost on a deserted island, there will be great personal value in being able to forage for food, fashion shelter out of palm fronds, and create an imaginary friend out of found objects …. But, where is the value-add for mankind?

Novelty, toys and games can claim some real estate in the sphere of creativity, innovation and invention as well. Think Nerf ball. Invented by journalist-turned-toy-mogul, Reynolds Guyer, the Nerf was a literal game-changer, challenging the once unbreakable rule that “you can’t throw a ball in the house.”  The invention of the Nerf spawned an industry of fun, neon-colored, foam-based weaponry and continues to score millions in revenue every year.

Finally, in this sampler platter on innovation, we need to consider context. One man’s failure is another man’s innovation. Take the ubiquitous, highly innovative 3M product, the Post-it note. In the context of the 3M research department, inventor Spencer Silver’s attempt to formulate a new super-sticky adhesive was a failure. Years later, however, colleague Arthur Fry conceived the application for Silver’s easily removable glue compound that we celebrate today. 

NOTE: In recent efforts to “make the Post-it brand more relevant and ‘cool and hip’ (their words) with members of Gen X and Y, 3M marketers have launched “Project Things We Forget” into the social media marketplace.  The project website has attracted 770,000 visitors; has 13,000 fans and 700 friends on facebook; 1,500 followers on Twitter; 700 devotees on stumbleupon; feature stories on over 674,000 sites; and a review on Singapore’s largest radio station. Woot!

Post-Note:  As for the challenge to 3M respirator researchers – consumers can breathe a sigh of relief; an ultra-low-cost respirator mask will be released into the marketplace next month.  Aaaachooooot!

How much would you pay for a painting made by a terrorist?

Imagine this: you find yourself in the dusty dry heat of Saudi Arabia, surrounded by some of the most radical and threatening criminals the world has ever seen. Sure, their resumes might be dotted with bomb making expertise and foiled suicide missions, but they tell you that they have out grown that part of their lives. Instead, they complain about the way oil paint gets lodged underneath their fingers when they paint their feelings onto white canvases, and indulge you with a joke that begins something like, ‘So an Arab Sheikh an oil broker and an American walk into a shisha bar…’ and oddly enough, you find yourself laughing along with some of the most feared people in the world against your better judgment.

Sounds crazy?

Not so much. Allow me to introduce ‘jihad rehab’, a fresh take on combating the ever pressing problems of global terrorism and ideologically driven conflict. A pilot program initiated by Saudi Arabia, jihad rehab provides an alternative mode of prisoner reform that attempts to cater to the ‘hearts and minds’ of Saudi citizens who have been found guilty of committing (or attempting to commit) acts of terror. Instead of prisoners, participants are called ‘beneficiaries’ who are enrolled in programs in plush and comfortable ‘centers’ in the Saudi city of Riyadh. Instead of barbed wire, you will see ping pong tables and play station consoles. Instead of cramped and confined spaces, you will find pristine football fields and lush gardens.

The main components of such programs include:

1) Religious reeducation: Participants are enrolled in classes taught by local community leaders and activists, in the religious sect of their choosing. Such programs attempt to redirect religious activism away from violence and towards more democratic and effective methods of expressing ones beliefs.

2) Reintegration: In addition to reconnecting participants with their families and friends, such programs offer ways for participants to begin a socially integrated life from scratch. Some examples of social reintegration techniques include finding participants a wife, an apartment, a job, and in one case funding fertility treatments in order for participants to start their own family.

3) Therapy: Participants are pushed to find healthy ways to express themselves and their feelings. In addition to group and individual therapy sessions, participants are enrolled in art classes and play team sports.

So, is it possible that paint brushes are society’s best modes of crime prevention? Saudi Arabia claims that their method has had a ninety five percent success rate, though that statement comes with a long list of caveats:

1) Change comes from within: students must prove that they are ready to better their lives and sincerely change their ways and viewpoints.

2) Expense: the state must be willing to bear the costs of such programs, which might be easy for Saudi Arabia, but has been difficult for other nations to maintain. As programs that are very resource-heavy, this factor has been pivotal in determining the success or failure of such programs in other countries.

3) Cultural specificity: There can be no reintegration without cultural context; change has to come from within a state in order to be viable and considered as legitimate by participants.

As a program, terrorist rehab is still in its primary stages of conception and execution, but it points to some interesting changes in the way the world is addressing the wider issue of terrorism. Competing with the sense of brotherhood and belonging that terrorist networks provide to their followers, jihad rehab tries to instill alternative sources of value and self esteem for participants in their program. By attempting to reintegrate once marginalized parts of their populations, nations are presenting viable alternatives to the mental and emotional aspects of what makes being a jihadi an emotionally fulfilling experience. If the Saudi model continues to be successful, other nations, if funded appropriately, could implement similar programs that would cater to their specific needs and capabilities. The next step would then be to make funds and infrastructure available to nations that are less rehab ready than Saudi Arabia.

I want people to feel as though this is the most important issue of our time. It is possible to give every kid a great education and they can do something about it. Driving by and worrying is not enough. Unless each one of us takes a step to make change, our schools won’t get any better.

-Davis Guggenheim, director of Waiting for Superman

A much-anticipated documentary premiered January 22^nd at the Sundance Film Festival.  Waiting for Superman (incidentally, the name of a Flaming Lips cover I love, but I digress) examines the crisis of public education in the United States through multiple interlocking stories – from a handful of students and their families whose futures hang in the balance, to the educators and reformers trying to find real and lasting solutions within a dysfunctional system. Directed by Oscar-winning Davis Guggenheim (of An Inconvenient Truth fame) and supported by an impressive cast of characters including Bill Gates, Geoffrey Canada (founder of the fantastic Harlem Children’s Zone), John Legend and Michelle Rhee (the chancellor of the D.C. public schools system), the film is meant to be a call to action for public schools the way An Inconvenient Truth was for global warming.

The film examines efforts by innovative educators to turn around failing school systems in Washington, D.C., Harlem, Los Angeles and other places where many schools have come to be known as “dropout factories” and “academic sinkholes”. It isn’t trying to prove that the public school system of the United States is in crisis – that’s been fairly well-documented, despite increased spending and the promise of politicians that no child will be left behind. We spend more money per student than any other nation in the world, but the test scores of American students have fallen from near the top to rock bottom among developed nations. Sure, money is always a problem, but by no means is it the only one. Waiting for Superman argues that teachers are the solution to our country’s education problem. Decades of research and test data indicate that the primary factor determining a school performance is not its budget, physical plant, curriculum, student population or income level of its district. It is teaching.

The main premise of Waiting for Superman is that improvement in our school systems requires major improvement in both our teachers themselves and in the way they are treated. It “requires demanding our teachers get deep in the trenches, be allowed to be flexible and innovative, persist, and to be held accountable.” Some of the main culprits identified as holding schools back are self-interested education bureaucracies and teachers unions, and the ways they prevent administrators from getting rid of poor instructors. One particularly irritating practice brought up is the $65 million-a-year “Rubber Room” in which bad New York teachers draw full salaries while waiting idly for the school district to prove misconduct charges. The film proposes a teacher compensation model based off what Michelle Rhee is already working on in Washington D.C. – a system that evaluates teachers based on a combination of their students’ test scores, academic gains, and classroom observations from third-party evaluators. The system would reward successful teachers with a higher salary while flushing out ineffective ones and weakening tenure. Charter schools (schools that receive public funding but are free from many of the rules and regulations that apply to regular public schools) are identified as the future of our education system. Guggenheim offers hope by looking at education reformers and schools that are already reshaping the culture and refusing to leave children behind.

No matter what your political beliefs, this movie is important because it brings the issue of our country’s education system to a level that everyone can understand — telling them how it works and why they should care. When values become shared, when an issue becomes personal, when a large group of people starts to get it — this is the catalyst for innovative solutions and changes to actually occur.  Not having seen the documentary yet (Paramount plans to distribute it in the fall), I can’t offer my opinion on the exact changes that these educators want to make to the system. I can, however, offer my opinion that things need to change and that it needs to be a group movement; it’s impossible for a few revolutionary teachers to change a system on their own that’s been around forever. There are thousands of children in our country who, despite promises that they won’t be, are being left behind and are desperately in need of a Superman (or two or fifty). Hopefully this documentary stirs the souls and the hearts of the people in this country and makes them believe that it is possible to give every kid a great education.

Corporate Bloom Boxes

Innovations in alternative energy, always exciting and unpredictable, are certain bets for the future. But which technology is the biggest gamble – and pays off the most? The latest and most promising one, the Bloom Box, was unveiled this past Sunday. This “little power plant-in-a-box,” which can literally sit in your basement, potentially provides independent and clean energy for home and small businesses alike. Within five to ten years, Bloom Energy hopes to make its Box available to individual residences for below $3,000, quite affordable given the price of a furnace ($3,000+) or installing a central heating heating system (up to $10,000!). Great, right?

But let’s bring this to scale. The Bloom Box won’t be available for at least five years. What do we do until then? In the energy lottery, certainly there are solar, biofuel, natural gas and wind resources, among others. We use everything from algae to manure to moon rocks – but instead of producing new technologies and new sources of energy, why don’t we use what’s right under our noses? Are overlooking the most obvious source of energy – movement?

The great thing about capturing free energy is that it really is everywhere: from crashing (or lapping!) ocean waves to a busy thoroughfare, there are plenty of sources of kinetic movement. The only questions we face are what technologies we need (to develop) to harness kinetic force, and how to scale out these technologies for wide – and so more efficient – use. Even in the most unexpected places possibilities are waiting to be tapped.

Its own powerhouse: the Dynamo

What caught my eye is a new keyboard on the market. Researchers have found a way to return the kinetic energy generated while typing to local utility providers through nanotechnology connecting the keyboard to any standard 110-volt outlet. At $30, and considering Americans, especially young ones, spend increasingly more time on the computer, keyboards like the Dynamo are both cost-efficient and accessible.

Another variation on this theme is a keyboard that recharges the computer’s battery the more you type. The goal one day is to develop a keyboard that will be fully powered with the speedy clicks of a laptop’s keys. We could reduce external energy consumption while prolonging battery life – a pretty perfect situation.

Where else might we be able to capture free energy? In big, high-pedestrian traffic cities like New York and Chicago, design company Fluxxlab wants to harvest the movement created each time a revolving door spins to power that same building. Likewise, the movement generated by city walkers as they rush to their next destination can be harnessed to power traffic lights, street lamps, and other electrical needs. Private company M2E Powerhas designed a microgenerator for troops that replaces the 10-30 pounds of batteries a soldier typically carries: clipped onto the wearer, walking or shaking for two hours powers mobile devices for an hour and a half, an incredible prospect

Where we might install these MotionPower plates in roads to capture free energy from vehicles

Capturing kinetic energy avails us of innumerable opportunities. Yet, we also face challenges in cost-efficiency and scale. While engineers at Free Energy Technologies have developed plates installed onto streets that capture the energy of decelerating cars, and this might generate a great deal of electricity, it perhaps isn’t enough to offset the costs of retrofitting old roads. Likewise, the Revolution Door only makes sense in big cities with high human traffic. We need to strategically and systematically make use of new technologies, and imagine more cost-efficient means of implementing them throughout our lives.

While all technological innovations push us toward a more progressive future, developing them takes time, funding, and determination. We certainly hope that the Bloom Box will bloom into our own (green) power plants, but at the same time, let’s keep in mind that the safest bet for the future is that portfolio of mixed energy-capturing conservation measures. We need to rely on multiple sources of energy for maximal efficiency. And right now, it looks like the kinetic energy from flying fingertips and cooling brakes is our greatest untapped natural resource.

In response to a variety of system failures in all directions, this year’s World Economic Forum focused on the themes of: Rethink, Redesign and Rebuild. World leaders and business titans had explored new options to ensure a brighter future for global communities.

Commenting on the happenings at the World Economic Forum, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman noted there was a significant shift in tone, particularly regarding the United States as a role model in how we think, design and build. With the United States at the center of the global economic crisis and eight years and counting in Iraq and Afghanistan, the American way of getting things done seem less seductive than it once was.

In recent years, nations such as China, India and Brazil have proved themselves as able competitors in the free market system, which has resulted in a more diverse trading environment. In addition to that, the world has become more pluralistic in its consumption of the arts; movies like Slumdog Millionaire and musicians like Juanez and Jay Sean have made the world pay attention to nations that until recently were only known for their booming birth rates and low standards of living. For the first time, the world is looking beyond Western Europe and North America for new ideas and innovations, and perhaps most strikingly, for solutions.

This remarkable shift in the way the world works has stimulated a debate regarding strategies for third world development. For the last 20 years, development policy has been dominated by the Washington Consensus; a post cold war doctrine that stresses the principles of macroeconomic discipline, a market economy, and free trade. However, there has been growing concern about the efficacy and prescriptive nature of this model. Such criticism has resulted in the development of an alternative model by China: the Beijing Consensus.

When compared, some striking contrasts become apparent:

• Accused of being too specific, the Washington consensus is more prescriptive and comprehensive in its policy recommendations. In comparison, the Beijing consensus is deliberately brief and vague; its proponents claim that it leaves more room for innovation and creativity.
• The Beijing consensus claims to tailor make development policies to the needs of a country, so that all the resources of a state are maximized with considerations for potential hurdles taken into account. In contrast, the Washington consensus does not offer the same room for tweaking policies to fit the particularities of a specific nation and shifting conditions.
• One of the guiding principles of the Beijing consensus is that of self determinism, in which a state is empowered to solve its own problems in order to ensure long-term sustainability of policies and programs. Such a policy challenges the notion of super power hegemony with an aim to make development an expression of self determination.

The cracks in the Washington consensus reflect a worldview that is dated. The nature of this document doesn’t support a world that is far more fluid and volatile than such policies allow for. In contrast, the Beijing consensus seems to capture some of the mercurial conditions and demands of economic development, and offers a customized set of policy recommendations in response.

Given the simmering challenges presented by climate change, political instability, resource shortages and conflict it is clear that every path taken needs to be facile and tailored to the needs of a people, culture and region. For now, the international community will have to wait to test out the first batch of Beijing inspired development in order to really get a taste of what is in store for development policy in 2010!

They say, “A picture is worth a thousand words … “  Nowhere is that more true than in the case of the following chalk-talk with renown designer and illustrator Milton Glazer. Here, Glazer, Fulbright Scholar and founding partner of the celebrated Push Pin Studios, discusses the codependent relationship between drawing and thinking while sketching a portrait of William Shakespeare.

In his book, “Drawing is Thinking,” Glaser suggests that all art is a form of meditation and that drawing is “a primary way of encountering reality.” He addresses societal reticence around the arts and the individual’s resistance to drawing (“Oh, I can’t draw … my drawings look like they were done by a 3^rd grader … “) as missing the point, asserting that the value in drawing is not about “making things look accurate,” but rather drawing is a way of “becoming more conscious of what one is looking at” and “expressively interpreting the world. “

Comments on Glaser’s theory hearken back to the cave drawings of primitive man,

“ … art started as a way of noticing things, focusing on them, fixing them in our minds, … that when our ancestors drew animals on the walls of caves, it was a kind of sympathetic magic … If they could draw them, they knew them, and they could control them. “

Fast forward to the digital age, where Michale Sankey discusses the effects of changing nature of “visual literacy” as it applies to education and curriculum design,

“In contemporary western culture, particularly the youth culture, visual mediums and genres are becoming increasingly popular at the expense of other mediums, in particular the written word (schirato & Yell 1996). Others suggest that the constant bombardment by visual images from so many quarters is already shaping [the youths] lives, influencing their attitudes and tuning their responses. As media simulations become more popular and persuasive they will increasingly encroach upon life experience to the extent that new senses of reality will be formed and media representations will in fact become our first order reality (Walker & Chaplin, 1997).”

New York Times Weekend columnist Brad Stone (1/10/2010, p. 5) observes that his three-year-old daughter’s world view and life will be shaped by myriad technological advances and gadgets, “ … digital books, Skype video chats, … toddler-friendly video games on the iPhone … she’ll see the world a lot differently from her parents.”

Stone goes on to discuss current research which suggests that “the ever-accelerating pace of technological change may be minting a series of mini-generation gaps, with each group of children uniquely influenced by the tech tools available in their formative stages of development.”

This phenomenon could only raise questions around Glaser‘s dynamics of drawing and foster an increased impact on what our own Cecily Sommers describes as our “associative fluency” – taking in information in multiple ways (seeing, hearing, moving) – a mechanism which serves as the foundation of creativity and innovation. The act of drawing or dancing or interacting with digital media (?) opens new pathways in the brain, shaking things up and creating opportunities for new connections to form. Until the age of eight or so, children are able to learn and absorb large quantities of information, forging extensive neural networks to handle the massive influx.

Conversely, over time, under-trafficked neural connections, thought processes and information that see little action, are unceremoniously closed down. Eventually the adult brain winds up using only the most well-trodden neural pathways as a short-cut default system (read: old people stuck in their ways). It continues to be our challenge then, to maintain ample neural capacity such that we are able to “encounter our reality” with resolution and vigor… lest we find ourselves in the cross-hairs of a virtual Wooly Mammoth with only a sharpened pencil to our name.

We’re on the cusp of a battery revolution. On Thursday, General Motors will begin battery pack assembly at its plant in Brownstown Township, Michigan. It will be the first plant of its kind in the United States and, one can hope, start a trend rather than a flash in the pan.

Remember the stimulus package – that controversial, Titanic piece of legislation? Well you can thank our government, at least in part, for this leap forward on the part of GM. Way back in March, the president announced plans to reward advances in battery technology for the support of electric vehicle proliferation in the states.

General Motors was one of many companies that applied for some of the $2 billion+ in federal funding under the Electric Drive Vehicle Battery and Component Manufacturing Initiative.

The money wasn’t just to boost hybrid vehicles in the United States, but to boost our competitiveness in the “battery wars.” Most of the batteries that power your phone, laptop, and various mobile devices and pending tablets come from overseas. Companies like LG, in South Korea, currently hold a rather large market share. While General Motors will be using cells from LG, the actual manufacturing of the battery packs will be going on right here – or in Michigan, rather.

Just as the United States has a role to play in battery production, GM, and the Obama administration, is hoping that there are also gains to be made in the area of more efficient automobile. Having grown up on a steady diet of Buick Leasers, Oldsmobile 98s and Cadillac DeVilles, I can say without reservation that I do not equate U.S. automobiles with either efficiency or the future of driving.

That’s not to say that I don’t love Buicks – just drop by and I’ll take you for a ride in mine.

But when I think compact efficiency, I think Honda, Toyota, Hyundai, etc. However, with the exception of the Prius, most of the models rely on fuel efficiency. Battery-powered cars, while not new in concept, have yet to reach any sort of critical mass. So, cars like the Chevy Volt enter into a race that is still very much anyone’s game.

The Volt’s lithium-ion battery pack will be able to charge both on board, by way of an internal combustion engine, and externally, from a plain, old household current. This means that, just as we now plug our phones in overnight, so too may we, in the future, charge our cars while we sleep. According to Discover Magazine, that’s a good 40 miles out of 80 cents of electricity. Not too shabby!

Learn more about the Chevy Volt below.

[via earth2tech]

Last week, MIT’s Technology Review published a piece on the development of new, nanotechnology-based drug delivery techniques for the treatment of cancer. Specifically, the studies focused on pancreatic cancer, which kills about 35,000 people every year.

These “nanotechnology-based drug delivery techniques” constitute a major breakthrough in the War on Cancer which, since it was first declared in 1971, could use a boost (*If you’re interested, a quick review of the biological mechanisms in cancer can be found at the end of this post).

Currently, cancer therapy includes surgery to remove affected tissue, and chemotherapy and/or radiation to kill cancer cells. The problem with chemotherapy and radiation is that it exposes all cells to their toxic load. An analogy: It’s kind of like having a poisonous snake problem in a certain section of the woods behind your house. Radiation, in this example, would be much like burning down that section of woods to combat said snakes. The Result: You get rid of a lot of snakes, but you also kill many natural, non-obtrusive, animals.

Now, imagine that you have a special beetle (just go with me) that can infiltrate the snake’s defenses and infect them with an anti-drug, nullifying their poisonous bite. Not only would you be taking care of your snake problem, but you’d be doing so with minimal impact on the other species present.

This is kind of how nanotechnology works. In a nutshell, the drugs are contained in tiny, engineered particles which, when injected, fight the cancerous cells from the inside. Since nanotechnology works at an atomic level, teeny-tiny agents of destruction can be customized for the particularities of a  type of cancer. This is what they accomplished in the research labs at Massachusetts General Hospital where they’ve designed two new types of agents  to treat human pancreatic cells.

Each cell fights the cancerous pancreatic tumor in a unique way.

• The first cuts off blood supply to the cancerous tumor, starving it. The drugs used are already approved by the FDA, but had much more success within the nanocell, as they are able to deliver the drugs directly, from inside the cancer cells.
• The second nanocell is designed to prevent cancer cells from developing resistance to chemotherapy. They do this by targeting two specific proteins, which promote cancer growth, and blocking them.

Such advances in biotechnology (at the nano scale) open doors to all kind possibilities, from curing cancer to manufacturing new tissue. The latter has the potential to repair damaged tissue, such as exists in Parkinson’s, diabetes, heart disease, or spinal cord injuries, among other things.

Strides toward such a future are already being made: In early 2008, researchers at the University of Minnesota Center for Cardiovascular Repair, created a functioning heart from a dead rat heart and new cells from baby rats. Sure, humans aren’t going to benefit much from an engineered rat heart – pig, maybe – but the point is that it’s possible. And what’s possible on a small scale, usually, can be adapted to work on a larger scale.

Like the researchers in the video below say, there’s no reason to stop at hearts – why not any organ?

*Every cell in our body has the same strands of DNA, the complete blueprint for every type of cell in the body. Nearly all of the sequence will be covered except for the genes related to its particular function (i.e. nerve function, if it’s a nerve cell, or gut function if it’s a gut cell).
The unexpressed part of the DNA is blocked by “repressor proteins” that help coordinate the on/off switch to accelerate or slow cell division at different stages of development. If the protein fails, it can uncover the growth gene and kick the cell back in to a rapid multiplication state again, which is what cancer is. “Carcinogens” are named as such because they have the capacity to break down repressor proteins (among other things), a process that also happens as a normal part of aging.  - CS

“I believe in technology, but I think we need to make it more human. I believe that the internet is becoming a planetary meta-organism, but that it is up to us to guide its evolution, and to shape it into a space we actually want to inhabit—one that can understand and honor both the individual human and the human collective, just like real life does.” – Jonathan Harris

Four years ago, Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar set out with a lofty goal – to create a database of human emotions on the Internet. Twelve million feelings later, the two have put together the We Feel Fine project, which includes one of the coolest Web sites I’ve seen in awhile and an extraordinarily beautiful book that was recently released. (Most of which is available to read online!)

The two artists and computer scientists wrote an algorithm that scrobbles the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling,” essentially harvesting human emotion by recording the full sentence and context in which the phrase occurs and identifying the polarity (happy, sad, giddy, etc.) of the specific “feeling” expressed. Because the blogosphere is full of metadata, it is possible for them to extract rich information about the posts and their authors, from age and gender to geolocation and local weather conditions, adding a new layer of meaning to the feelings. Exploring this huge stockpile of information from the viewpoint of 6 different movements — Madness, Murmurs, Montage, Mobs, Metrics and Mounds — has resulted in an ever growing portrait of our culture’s collective emotional landscape.

Some of the fascinating results? Moods hit rock bottom on the day that Michael Jackson died. The high-water mark was the day President Obama was elected, when the word “proud” was all over the blogosphere. People in New South Wales consistently feel far more awful than the rest of the world. Women are far more likely than men to verbalize their feelings. Human beings get happier as they get older. The most frequently expressed emotion on the Internet is feeling better.

We Feel Fine does a dazzling job of turning the big, bad, cold-feeling World Wide Web into a warm, passionate portrait of the individual human and the human collective. I browsed through the book for approximately 30 seconds before mentally adding it to my Christmas list. It’s beautiful. So here’s to exploring the ups and downs of everyday life in all its color, chaos and candor, and here’s to human beings feeling better than fine.

Design thinking – Designers solve problems and create new possibilities by asking questions. On a new project, designers will invariably ask what designer Bruce Mau calls “stupid questions,” … “the kinds of queries that challenge assumptions in such a fundamental way they can make the questioner seem naïve.”

As in a medical examination or a structural audit on a construction site, the function of the stupid question is to thump around in the context of a product or issue to uncover, understand and test underlying assumptions.  Designer Paula Scher talks to Mau about the value of approaching a problem from the perspective of an outsider,

“When I’m totally unqualified for a job, that’s when I do my best work … If you have too much expertise—if you think you know the answers already—you won’t be as open to offbeat possibilities. But if you’re a neophyte, you’ll ask what would seem to be obvious … From ignorance, you can come up with something that is so out of left field that it has been ignored or was never considered a possibility.”

Mau points out that, “The fear for so many people is that, in asking these kinds of questions, they will seem naïve. But naïve is a valuable commodity in this context. Naïve is what allows you to try to do what the experts say can’t be done.”

Outside of the realm of design (which I believe is a debatable distinction, since most problem solving activities can legitimately stake claim in the category of “design”), this approach can facilitate reconsideration of the foundations of a situation, provide a different perspective on the world, and help us “regain focus and retackle old, entrenched problems.”

Cut to the White House Situation Room – In what has been described as a “head-snapping” moment, high ranking members of President Obama’s Afghanistan review team realized that his approach to emerging military issues in the region was not simply a matter of “updating” his previous strategy, but essentially “starting over from scratch.”

Over a three month period, President Obama engaged U.S. military experts in an “intense, methodical, rigorous, earnest and at times deeply frustrating process for nearly all involved.”  The decision-making exercise became a “virtual seminar” driven by the President’s “insatiable demand for information.” Not only did he invite new perspectives and challenge competing view points to debate, he also listened and asked probing questions a la “college professor/cross-examiner.”

Taking a page from Gordon M. Goldstein’s book on the Vietnam War, “Lessons in Disaster,” President Obama concluded that “both President John F. Kennedy and President Lyndon B. Johnson failed to question the underlying assumption about monolithic Communism and the domino theory – clearly driving the Obama advisors to rethink the nature of Al Qaeda and the Taliban.”

Over the course of the analysis, Obama challenged the veracity of long-held assumptions about nearly every aspect of the Middle East scenario. By adopting the open, imaginative mind-set of the naive outsider/learner, President Obama engaged the U.S. military advisors in a rigorous design thinking exercise.

National security advisor, General James L. Jones spoke to the exhaustive inquiry, “From the very first meeting, everyone started with set opinions. And no opinion was the same by the end of the process.”