Connecting the Dots

“You can’t con­nect the dots look­ing for­ward; you can only con­nect them look­ing back­wards. So you have to trust that the dots will some­how con­nect in your future. You have to trust in some­thing — your gut, des­tiny, life, kar­ma, what­ev­er. This approach has nev­er let me down, and it has made all the dif­fer­ence in my life.”

– Steve Jobs (Stan­ford com­mence­ment speech, June 2005)

Synectics & Pughsion™

As I’m fin­ish­ing up with an online Finan­cial Man­age­ment class that is all num­bers, I was just think­ing how I’d rather be facil­i­tat­ing cre­ative think­ing right now. Then I start­ed think­ing back about a pre­sen­ta­tion my for­mer class­mate Rebec­ca Mahl and I did on the prob­lem solv­ing method­ol­o­gy synec­tics, as well as a new method­ol­o­gy she cre­at­ed called Pugh­sion™. Read More

Marco Tempest: The magic of truth and lies and iPods

This is very enter­tain­ing to watch. In this TED Talk, magi­cian Mar­co Tem­pest uses three iPods as props to dis­cuss truth and lies, art and emo­tion. I can’t imag­ine how long it took to exe­cute this per­fect­ly!

Designing A Difference: Part 2

Design­ing A Dif­fer­ence — Small­bean Part 2 on Vimeo

Almost one year ago, I wrote about a col­lab­o­ra­tion between Design Muse­um Boston and Small­bean to devel­op the next gen­er­a­tion of Smallbean’s solar suit­case in a post titled Design­ing A Dif­fer­ence: Smallbean’s Solar Suit­case.

Here is phase two of the project, which focused on refin­ing con­cepts and pro­to­typ­ing the new solu­tion.

Ethnographic Study of Art Supply Buying Habits

Overview

The pur­pose of this study was to exam­ine the habits of dorm-dwelling stu­dents in search of art/design sup­plies in order to under­stand how impor­tant loca­tion is in rela­tion to price and oth­er con­trib­u­tors to the idea of val­ue. We explored oppor­tu­ni­ties that one store in Savan­nah may have in over­com­ing the dis­ad­van­tage of prox­im­i­ty to under­grad­u­ate dorms. The insights uncov­ered by this research allowed us to rec­om­mend some small changes that could make a big dif­fer­ence for our client. The busi­ness is already see­ing pos­i­tive results. Read More