My suite-mate Ryan held up this week’s delivery of Businessweek. “Innovation” is the only word in their vocabulary.” I had to laugh. I’m sure a number of their readers, even occasional ones, have thought the same.

“Innovation” has always been a word I’ve struggled with. Long before the innovation-everything frenzy, I got all tripped up when I read a marketing piece from a large consulting firm that espoused design as innovation. I can’t argue with the sentiment. Design is innovative right? Creativity too? Innovation sounds so…good. Who wouldn’t want to be inventive and new?

The problem lies in this mapping of design (still a word that is difficult to define) to innovation (even more difficult to define). This is akin to stating that emotion is spirituality or thought is truth. Such metaphors are the fuel of theoretical exploration, for which admittedly I have a liking, but they are not for making a legitimate and coherent arguments in your firm’s self-promotion or much less in dominant business press.

In Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle he posits, “Innovation is ever present in the production of things. This is not true of consumption, which is never anything but more of the same.”

I’m not sure I get innovation. I get design.

Here’s a clever spin and segmentation to elicit action against global climate change: engage people whose hobbies and recreation preferances will be negatively affected by rising temperature. This is exactly what the Save Hockey and Save Our Slopes campaigns from Global Exchange are doing. Brilliant.

Direct mail for magazine subscriptions has seemed to really pick up lately. All I can figure is that our address got on an extra list from somewhere, and boy are they rolling in.

All the design magazines and professional organizations must share lists in some ways, especially those from the same publishing house. We recieve regular solicitations for subscriptions and renewal offers from Metropolis, Dwell, I.D., Print, How, and Step Inside Design (thoughts on each in an upcomming post).

It’s also typical to recieve the standard business offers like those from Fast Company, Businessweek, Business 2.0, etc. I assume those come along with filing business forms with the state or from subscribing to even a single tangential publication. Membership in the World Futures Society has brought on another wave of mailings. This time, I’m pleasantly disturbed by how well metrics predict my interests. Offers for WSJ and The Economist begin to arrive; it’s a favorites newsstand pick-up of mine.

The strangest piece of all has got to be the one I recieved today from Mother Earth News. First, the title of the publication seems oddly outdated, as if coming from some other decade’s environmental movement. Looking at the publication’s site, I can’t help but feel some sort of tension. The spirit seems right, I want to like this magazine on principle, but in reality it’s all wrong. The site could just as well belong to a low-end outdoor recreation magazine, and the promoted content seems like a naturalist’s answer to Real Simple minus all of the design, beauty, and taste that make that publication so appealing.

Perhaps the worst part of all, for Mother Earth News and otherwise, is the amount of paper wasted in attempting to get me to subscribe. Respect my time, respect materials, and most of all, live by the premise of your publication. Please, stop sending offers, I’m busy reading Worldchanging, Plenty, and Treehugger.

The revised design for the $100 Laptop includes a src or view source key. Quick access to source code, Apple take note.
From The Laws of Simplicity.

I’ve always been a fan of quotes, any and all, and feel that they’re an imprecise yet effective tool for learning. Even if out of context, quotable phrases act as a springboard for internal and external exploration, criticism, and debate. I also find, that the people I admire most often have some of the most eloquent and surprising quotes that help them describe their perspecive on the world.

Bruce Mau is one of these people; this is one of those quotes:

The twentieth century will be chiefly remembered by future generations not as an era of political conflicts or technical inventions, but as an age in which human society dared to think of the welfare of the whole human race as a practical objective.—Arnold Toynbee, British historian

This is quoted in a lecture by Lester B. Pearson, Nobel Peace Prize-winning former foreign minister of Canada who invented peacekeeping, whom Bruce Mau references in some of his presentations and also in the book that accompanies the Massive Change project.

There’s more to be said about Massive Change, but it’s saved for another day.

We want people to realize that they cannot flunk museum-going. Sadly, too many people think that appreciating art is a very esoteric science. On a very basic level it can be a wonderful way for families to engage in a fulfilling experience if they ask themselves three questions: What is going on in this picture? What do you see that makes you say that? And what more do you see?

H. Nicholas B. Clark in an interview with Steven Heller.

what happens to a brand when its tagline becomes so broad that recall is diluted and the call to action becomes meaningless? it seems there’s a current trend where brand names and their tags have a huge, dissociative scale shift. taglines that support the brand name, delight or surprise, become ingrained in the vernacular (e.g., “Where’s the Beef?”), and ultimately suggest how the brand fits into the consumer’s life are great—so long as they’re relevant by scale and integrated into the identity.

here’s a simple sample of three companies with the word life in their tags. see if you can match the appropriate company with its tagline:

1. helping make your life easier
2. ideas for life
3. life takes choices

A. panasonic
B. visa
C. shaws supermarkets

the multiple choice reveals: any one could work. and that’s the point.

WorldChanging reported an alarming change that has taken place at NASA:

NASA’s mission statement used to be “To understand and protect our home planet; to explore the universe and search for life; to inspire the next generation of explorers … as only NASA can.â€?

According to the New York Times article referenced, “to understand and protect our home planet” has been removed!

In order to keep the topic front-of-mind, they’ve charged the community with plastering the message everywhere. In response, we offer this image linking back to the article to anyone willing to support publicity of this disturbing development.

To include this image on your own page copy/paste the following:
<a href="http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/004730.html"><img src="http://static.flickr.com/78/198019773_e153a70c27.jpg?v=0" /></a>

Most who know me personally also know of my interest in and curiosity concerning cultural and business interfacing between China and America. Recently, two videos have been brought to my attention that deserve a look from anyone interested in perspectives on how some Chinese may feel about the situtation and possible future developments.

Baidu v. Google.

Ha Ha Ha America (thanks Josh, for the link)

Anticipation doesn’t make one late or keep one waiting—anticipation is looking around the bend in the road, literally like some car headlights do. It’s about thinking ahead and surmising, based on experience or intuition, what will happen next in the short- and long-term. It acknowledges you’re in a situation with others, actively thinking about what you’re building together.

Clients appreciate it when I anticipate their needs—to continue the car analogy, opening the door for them makes it easier for them to get in for the ride. Collaborators are more efficient when the materials they need to complete a job are prepared for them. It was the first real skill I learned—beyond Quark XPress 1.0—in my first real design job 18 years ago. As a matter of course, it’s difficult to plan everything in advance, but looking ahead is a greater skill than hindsight—you can always look back. History is always there, but opportunity begs to be created.