Tag: Design

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Design Education Milwaukee Reading Technology

Latest read: Beautiful Evidence

The holiday is a perfect time to catch up on reading and must admit Beautiful Evidence from Edward Tufte is a very refreshing look at aspects of visual evidence we simply overlook in everyday life.
Beautiful EvidenceWith so many amazing lessons regarding the presentation of data I found Chapter 6 the best as it addresses PowerPoint.

The issue Corruption in Evidence Presentations: A Consumer’s Guide to Effects Without Causes, Cherry Picking, Overreaching, Chartjunk, and the Rage to Conclude. Considering we all sit through too many PowerPoint presentations that corrupt the truth…this should be mandatory reading.

To maintain standards of quality, relevance, and integrity for evidence, consumers of presentations should insist that presenters be held intellectually and ethically responsible for what they show and tell. Thus consuming a presentation is also an intellectual and moral activity.

So the next time you sit in a presentation – be truthful! I must admit to drifting into Chartjunk myself at times (yikes) before reading The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within last year. This learning forced me to approach communicating via PowerPoint…Keynote more accurately as defined by Tufte. And this began with eliminating all the bullets. His chapter on Sparklines is pretty impressive as well.

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Design Education Globalization Reading Technology

Latest read: A Whole New Mind

Daniel Pink’s second book A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future is a great, easy read for everyone. In today’s very competitive business market, college or non-profit Dan’s new views on tapping creative minds will ensure success moving forward.

There are several examples of how business must change in order to not just compete…but survive in today’s globalized economy.

It was somewhat refreshing to basically see Tom Friedman‘s influence from The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century stitched into Pink’s writing. And he could not be more accurate.

GM’s well publicized struggles continue. But their struggle is not against Japan. They have new competition on the automobile producing block…from India and China.

Why? Well lets start with the fact that both India and China can begin building state of the art robotic assembly plants with cheaper labor resulting in India producing brand new cars for only $2,500.

This actually points to another Friedman reference from The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization where we learned only a small handful of humans produce Lexus cars…robots do the rest. So India and China can move past the hurdle of long standing contract, benefit and retirement costs bogging down GM to win the race to sell their products on the American marketplace.

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Design Education Globalization Reading Technology

Latest read: The Ten Faces of Innovation

This book by IDEO‘s found Tom Kelley is a good, interesting and fairly quick read. In his book The Ten Faces of Innovation Kelley has outlined the opportunity to identify, empower and reward the ten types of employees you may have in your company.
10 Faces of InnovationWho can make your organization think differently and succeed in today’s marketplace or school?

This is a refreshing look at the demands of today’s aggressive business climate — regardless if your in a Fortune 100 company, small non-profit or educational institution.

While some elements are a bit over-hyped (examples are IDEO’s clients — surprise!) the basic message is to look and empower new thinking.

I was surprised to learn his brother knew about .mp3s before Napster….but so did millions already on the internet finding them in newsgroups.

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Design Education Reading

Latest read: Catching the Big Fish

It was great to see David Lynch’s new book Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity with a eye catching cover to match.
As a fan of his work going back to Blue Velvet (Special Edition) and Twin Peaks…I could not get by without mentioning Wild At Heart, Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive and of course Eraserhead.

It was also nice to see a NYTimes article about his latest work, Inland Empire.

The focus is his experience of transcendental meditation and its effect not only on his films, but his paintings too.

He gives artists the opportunity to dig deeper and “catch the bigger fish in the river” — applying those lessons to their work. It was an opportunity to get David’s view of his own creative process including how he came up with the red room in Twin Peaks.  A must for anyone finding David Lynch creative.