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They’re still “seeking”:
- an oceanographer
- a chemist
- a marine engineer
- and at least one expert on the problem
(yeah, might need at least one of each of these…)
but a group of Dutch architects and engineers has started up a research project to explore the idea of creating a sustainable island nation out of the trash floating in the Pacific. The project has been heralded “Recycled Island,” and the goal is a livable and scalable habitation the size of Hawaii’s big island.
The early mock-ups bring Venice, Dubai, and science fiction to mind, but the project is still very much in the early R&D stages and far from a reality. People love Dutch design for architecture and urban planning, not to mention their credibility in environmental solutions, so despite the distance from the potential island, this idea has sparked in the Netherlands. And why not beckon the world’s greatest minds through online publishing and networking? The project has been spreading across magazine websites, blogs, and press releases this week (I saw it here), and the group networks through Facebook to various other sustainable design groups.
Some virtual ships, machines, and robots and things building Recycled Island in Waterworld, er, the Pacific
In her new book “I Had the Strangest Dream…The Dreamer’s Dictionary For the 21st Century”, Kelly Sullivan Walden has updated the old list of dream meanings to include 21st-century elements such as Oprah and iPods. Even in the spirit of fun, most of us wouldn’t admit these are the topics of our mid-night mental movies. Whether Walden’s new dream meanings register as true or false, what is worth mentioning is that enough people reported dreaming about spam, texting, cell phones, and hybrid cars to warrant writing a book on the topic. This may be an indicator of the power of persuasion companies have over consumers. Today, consumers are bombarded with several types of stimulation and, according to Walden’s surveys, there are a total of ten most subconsciously remembered elements ranging from the purely functional (e-mail) to more pleasurable experiences like shopping on eBay. In some small way these new “dream items” could serve as a window into the minds of consumers.
Dreams are usually just a series of nerve-ending explosions, but some also see them as our mind’s way of sorting out, in the night, what we couldn’t get to during the day. Our dreams occasionally reveal solutions for problems of every scale, such as when Descartes claimed to have dreamt up the basis for the scientific method. Companies who are “in the know” could delve deeper into this possibility and glean solutions for (capitalize on) these lucid dreamers. One possible solution could be making email less stressful by adding soothing shapes and colors. Another solution could include adding cell towers so bad reception won’t manifest into confusing nightmares for your valued customers. The goal here is building positive brand association. Along this line, ensuring consumers are seeing your brand instead of the competitors at night could mean a sale in the morning. Note to retailers: Be recognizable and memorable, and then maybe you’ll be seeing dollar signs in your dreams!
I gave up reading books that can be found in the business/advertising/marketing section of the bookstore a while back. Most of the books you find in that section should have never been written in the first place: authors rehashing their previous work, self-help for the cubicle crowd, and whatever flavor of behavioral psychology is cool this month. I also posit that the original, interesting books in this section are likely to be rambling, 300 page tomes that would work better as 8 page articles in the New Yorker.
So, with few exceptions, the New York Times Business Bestseller List is dead to me. One of those exceptions is Rework, from the founders of 37signals (and the masterminds behind the best blog in the world, signal vs. noise).
Rework is essentially a collection of a hundred or so brief essays on how they do business. Anyone who has read their blog knows that they are feisty, irreverent, critical, and, in the end, brutally honest and usually right. The essays are no different. From advice on how to nurture office culture, to their thoughts on the futility of meeting and conference calls, they lay it all out there for the reader to do with as they please.
I have a strong suspicion that anyone who read this book and tried to follow their lead word for word would fail – miserably. Taken with a level head and grain of salt, however, the book is filled with provocations that will change the way they go about their life at work.
Here is a brief PDF excerpt from the book. Enjoy.
It cannot be disputed that the technological advancements in the last decade have made life easier for a lot of people. We no longer have to wait for dial-up internet, and the thought of waiting more than five seconds for a web page to load enrages us. At the drop of a hat, we can use our cell phones to check what our friends are up to, check our email, search for the nearest gas station, or Google how big blue whales can grow. Ironically, our use of cell phones for email and text messaging has rendered the actual phone call obsolete.
As a child of the 90s, I should be used to all of this “new-fangled” technology. My earliest experience with technology was waiting for my mom to get off the house phone before I could use the dial-up internet on our only household computer to chat to my friends after school for approximately ten minutes. I realize that in the grand scheme of technological advancement, this is not an “early” memory. Yes, I should be used to this, but over the years technology has only made me more anxious and nostalgic for the days of face-to-face, or at least voice-to-voice communication.
A recent study discussed in Seattle Times suggests I may be the only one of my generation who feels this way. The study, conducted at the University of Maryland, required a group of college students to give up all technology for 24 hours. The students reported feeling anxious and withdrawn in the absence of technology; shockingly, one participant’s feedback described typically sending a text message every minute or so and being unable to go 24 hours without a cell phone.
The purpose of these two technologies begs the question – is it the technology themselves that is addictive, or is it the ‘ambient presence’ that they enable. (Ambient presence is a term coined in reference to the consistent, low-level awareness of our social connections enabled by the surge in communication-oriented technology.)
I for one love that these technologies can keep me integrated in the lives of my loved ones, even when we are separated by time and space. But, like the students studied at the University of Maryland, I can literally feel the drawbacks.
We are, by nature, a social species who find pleasure in communing…Having tools on hand that allow us to fulfill this desire in increasingly efficient ways, though, has elevated expectations of my connectedness to a level that I’m not sure I can keep up with. And so what are the costs of fulfilling these expectations? Constant communication pushes out opportunities for reflection and introspection – those vehicles for internal growth with which self-actualization is impossible.
And when these expectations turn into needs what then? I have found myself in an almost panic state on realizing that I didn’t have my phone with me. And what did I do? I went home, got my phone and immediately called my companion why I was running late for our date. He understood, naturally. The irony of the situation being, of course, that the very vehicle that is supposed to facilitate our coming together had actually kept us apart. So while I love the iPhone, too, it scares me a little to know that my relationship with it is somewhere between owning it and being owned.
Apple is letting go of their famous “Get a Mac” campaign, which featured Justin Long and John Hodgman in a verbal battle (Mac vs. PC).
I must admit that I always enjoyed the commercials because they were often spot on about the problems that a PC would have, and a Mac didn’t. It was a clever and quiet way of introducing the Mac to ‘regular’ people that doesn’t really know what a Macintosh is all about. People are now speculating about what’s next in the Apple era of advertising. The actual ‘Get a Mac’ campaign and all the TV ads has been removed from the Apple website, and now there’s only facts and reasons about the world of Macs and why you should get one.
So, what’s next? The problem hereafter for Apple will not be to tell people how good they really are – it will be to create a new, successful, interesting and fun campaign that can bring the essence of the brand further into the future. In two weeks Apple and Steve Jobs will open this years ‘Apple Worldwide Developers Conference’ in San Francisco, which will probably reveal many interesting stories. That tells me that we shouldn’t have to wait too long before the new introduction of Mac takes place. The question is; how creative will they be? In the meantime, you can check out this mash-up clip from all the ‘Get a Mac’ videos we’ve been seeing throughout the years. Enjoy!
According to a new survey conducted by Britain’s Tesco Mobile, the Apple smart phone is considered to be a more important invention than the toilet, combustion engine, and even birth control by British consumers.
The survey interviewed 4,000 consumers between the ages of 18-65, cataloging the one hundred top inventions in order of their reported level of importance. Inventions included everything from the technologically sophisticated-the satellite disk-to the functionally simplistic-the clothes peg.
Clearly, cell phones play a monumental role in our ability to communicate with others, organize and even entertain ourselves. But is slotting the iPhone above the steam engine and the car a realistic view of it’s importance? Brits certainly think so but I wonder how the same survey would fare across the pond.
I just read that as of March 2011, Sony will stop manufacturing floppy disks. As they are the only company left making them, this will mean a world without the clicking and whirring of those little plastics disks. I won’t miss the days of installing programs and searching for disk six of ten. For those of you who don’t remember them or who are feeling a bit of nostalgia, go check out Mashable’s retrospective on Flickr.
So we’ve now seen the death of the vinyl record, 8-track, cassette tape, Polaroid Film (and likely film in general for mass market use), and the floppy disk. Likely next (at least as far as PCs go) is the Compact Disc. With more and more information entering the cloud, are we nearing the end of holding our own permanent physical storage? I guess the advocates of client-server computing are being somewhat vindicated.
There’s an interesting infographic put together by Focus.com that highlights the state of the Internet across a number of different screens. It’s so big that I invite you to go check it out at the source here.
