William F. Garrity

If you're not paying attention to TED, I think you really should be.  It's one of the most provocative, inspiring, and informative "channels" I know about.  Be sure to browse the library of recorded talks and presentations.

TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader.

The annual conference now brings together the world's most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes).

This site makes the best talks and performances from TED available to the public, for free. More than 200 talks from our archive are now available, with more added each week. These videos are released under a Creative Commons license, so they can be freely shared and reposted. 

Our mission: Spreading ideas.

We believe passionately in the power of ideas to change attitudes, lives and ultimately, the world. So we're building here a clearinghouse that offers free knowledge and inspiration from the world's most inspired thinkers, and also a community of curious souls to engage with ideas and each other. This site, launched April 2007, is an ever-evolving work in progress, and you're an important part of it. Have an idea? We want to hear from you.

The TED Conference, held annually in Long Beach, is still the heart of TED. More than a thousand people now attend -- indeed, the event sells out a year in advance -- and the content has expanded to include science, business, the arts and the global issues facing our world. Over four days, 50 speakers each take an 18-minute slot, and there are many shorter pieces of content, including music, performance and comedy. There are no breakout groups. Everyone shares the same experience. It shouldn't work, but it does. It works because all of knowledge is connected. Every so often it makes sense to emerge from the trenches we dig for a living, and ascend to a 30,000-foot view, where we see, to our astonishment, an intricately interconnected whole.

The July 28 Business Week / July 17 www.businessweek.com report on design.  Follow the link below for the full story and features. 

IDEA Awards 2008 July 17, 2008

The Best Global Design of 2008

Europeans, Asians, and Latin Americans took more International Design Excellence Awards than ever. And students made a strong showing

by Bruce Nussbaum

The globalization of design achievement is evident in the 2008 International Design Excellence Awards (IDEAs). Europe is surging, with its corporations, consultancies, and schools winning substantial numbers of awards. Asia is rising fast, with Japan back in force, joining China and Korea. And, for the first time, Latin America is making a strong impact. While the U.S. held first place, taking 114 IDEAs, Korea came in second, with 19, and Brazil ranked third, with 12. Run independently by the Industrial Designers Society of America and sponsored by BusinessWeek, the contest features 17 categories ranging from computer equipment to entertainment, and from design strategy to student design.

Ferment in the design field is also reflected in the strong showing by students this year. They captured 33 of the 205 awards given by the jury (16%) and 6 of the 35 gold prizes (17%). At London's Royal College of Art, for example, students designed a low-cost mosquito killer to combat malaria. A student at Parsons the New School for Design in New York developed an idea for a bar of soap shaped like a land mine that could be sold to raise funds to help "cleanse" the globe of land mines. At Croatia's University of Zagreb, a student designed a 3D puzzle, cousin to the Rubik's Cube, for children. And a student at Kookmin University in Seoul designed a Voice Stick, a portable text scanner for the blind. The concept is to convert written information, including e-mail, directly into speech.

A strong sense of social responsibility ran through most of the winning entries. A jury favorite was the Balance Sport Wheelchair. Designed for physically challenged athletes, the wheelchair frees the hands to play basketball. The One Laptop Per Child project won two golds, one silver, and one bronze award. A gold in packaging and graphics went to Design for Democracy: Ballot + Election Design, a book that helps U.S. states design clearer, more useful ballots and polling place signs. And Philips Design took a bronze for a more efficient wood-burning stove that cuts rural villagers' deaths from smoke-inhalation.

The second big trend in 2008 was the return to minimalism and elegance. Apple's (AAPL) gold-winning MacBook Air laptop and iPhone best represented this trend. So did the silver-winning Whirlpool (WHR) Duet front-loading washing machine. Other winners were not beautiful but simply sensible. The Flip video camera by New York's Smart Design and Pure Digital Technologies is a pocket-size, easy-to-use videocam that employs no cables or complex software.

IDEO, based in Palo Alto, Calif., led the innovation/design consultancies by taking seven awards. Fuseproject came in second, with five; and Ziba and Whipsaw tied for third, with four apiece. France's Decathlon came in first among corporations, with six IDEAs to Apple's four. Denmark's Eva Solo and Motorola (MOT) won four awards each. Sony (SNE) and Samsung earned three. Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Calif., dominated among design schools, with three silvers and three bronzes. All other top winners were Asian and European: Hongik University, Seoul National University, Hanyang University, and Samsung Design Membership from Korea, Britain's Royal College of Art, and Germany's University of Wuppertal. The U.S. won just over half of the awards, with Europe taking 23%, Asia 18%, and South America 6%. For more about the winners, read on.

Anne Eisenberg in today's The New York Times writes about flexible displays.  Such would lead to tremendous advances in portable devices. 

Electronic Papyrus: The Digital Book, Unfurled

By ANNE EISENBERG

CONSUMERS like large displays on the mobile devices they use for reading an e-mail message or an e-book, but they also like to tuck those devices into their pockets. But the bigger the screen on a cellphone or an e-reader, the sooner it outgrows pocket size.

Now a hallmark feature of these screens — their rigidity — is changing. New technologies are developing that make displays flexible, foldable or even as rollable as papyrus, so that large screens can be unfurled from small containers.

One new mobile device, the Readius, designed mainly for reading books, magazines, newspapers and mail, is the size of a standard cellphone. Flip it open, though, and a screen tucked within the housing opens to a 5-inch diagonal display. The screen looks just like a liquid crystal display, but can bend so flexibly that it can wrap around a finger.

Because the Readius is pocket-sized, but has a generous, supple screen, people with five minutes to spare in a taxi, bus or subway can use the dead time to open it, read a page or two of a book and then return the device to a shirt pocket, said Karl McGoldrick, the chief executive of Polymer Vision, the company in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, that created the device.

The Readius may even help stop people from obsessing over their e-mail: with the device, spare moments for reading may be put to a possibly better use — say, a novel by Stendhal. But if their good intentions fail, the device has a wireless connection to download e-mail as well as books.

The black-and-white display holds about 22 lines of a book page, depending on the font, all shown in the crisp black type provided by technology from E Ink, also used in Amazon’s Kindle and other e-readers. The screen changes from one page to the next in about half a second, at the touch of a thumb.

The Readius will be introduced in England, Italy and Germany this fall, and in the United States early in 2009, Mr. McGoldrick said. Its battery lasts for about 30 hours of reading — long enough to get through “The Red and the Black,” and possibly a chunk of “War and Peace.” Pages can be read under a variety of lighting conditions, even including full sunlight, he said. The price is not yet set, but Thomas van der Zijden, vice president for marketing and sales, said the Readius would be more expensive than the Kindle, which now is selling for $359.

The Readius is not the only entry in the area of flexible displays. “It’s an exciting example, but there are going to be a slew of other devices coming soon, too,” said Shawn O’Rourke, director of engineering at the Flexible Display Center at Arizona State University at Tempe, which focuses on the technology’s future commercialization.

Mr. O’Rourke defined flexible displays as “different than a BlackBerry or notebook,” with their traditional glass backings. “These displays are thin, lightweight and rugged — and they bend,” he said. The underlying substrates that support the display are typically either plastic or metal foil.

The market for flexible displays is likely to grow rapidly, said Jennifer Colegrove, an analyst at the iSuppli Corporation, a market research firm in El Segundo, Calif. “Flexible displays are the crucial enabling technology for a new generation of portable devices that are mobile, but also have compelling user interfaces,” she said.

Flexible displays offer the advantages of easy, relatively inexpensive and safe shipping and handling, compared with conventional rigid screens, she said. Her firm forecasts that the total market for flexible displays will grow to $2.8 billion by 2013.

Paul Semenza, vice president for display research at iSuppli, says that flexible displays are not entirely new on the market, but that previous ones have been relatively low-resolution applications — like those in smart cards and point-of-purchase signs — “not high-resolution ones that have the kind of image quality that users expect.”

The Readius images have this potential, he said, because the displays are powered by what is called an active matrix — transistors behind each pixel that can potentially provide fast switching and high performance.

“Polymer Vision’s technology is unusual,” Mr. Semenza said. “It’s hard to make an active matrix on something other than glass.”

If Polymer Vision succeeds in “making these transistor arrays,” he said, “you’ll have the ability to make high-performance displays on flexible substrates that look as good as a notebook display on any high-performance L.C.D.”

THE Readius, which so far displays 16 shades of gray on its screen, is not at that state yet, but Polymer Vision is hoping to add color and video capability in the future, Mr. McGoldrick said. A prototype for a color model was demonstrated at a trade show in May.

Mr. O’Rourke of the Flexible Display Center likes the look of the new generation of supple screens, but he also likes their toughness. “Some of them we’ve beaten with hammers, and they still run,” he said. “No one could do that with a BlackBerry.”

I had the good fortune to come across, in the January/February issue of American Libraries, an article by Steve Bell about "design thinking."  Steve has a link to the article on the design-thinking resource page of her personal web site. 

Steve is a former colleague of mine at the University of Pennsylvania, and is now Associate University Librarian at Temple University.

Design thinking, according to Steve, is

... a process, not a set of procedures, that guides the development and implementation of all types of products and services. Design thinking can be used to create a new building or a new library service. Design thinking is the mental approach that designers use to identify problems, understand those affected, prototype possible solutions, and then develop appropriate products and services. In education fields, design thinking is used to develop instructional products.

The Rotman School of Management, one of the epicenters of design thinking, has a good reading/resource list here. 

One of my kids sent this my way--a blog about Bad Photoshops.  Some of these are pretty egregious.