Adaptive Path Blog

What’s an industrial designer to do in the midst of economic chaos? Bruce Sterling offers some career advice.

We’ve been checking out the interesting ideas on alternative economies at KashKlash, a space to share thoughts on the future of sharing, exchange, and monetary value systems. (via the smart folks at Putting People First)

What coolness does the future hold now that barcodes can hold entire videos and games? Uber-geeks can even create barcodes of themselves here.

Shoes, clothing, makeup… and buildings? Why not? The Prada Transformer looks to be a functional, inventive and stylish piece of architecture for the city of Seoul. (via City of Sound)

AP’s Brandon Schauer facilitated a great discussion on service design Thursday night. Special thanks to Jeff Howard who captured many of the highlights as well as audience participants via Twitter.

Cisco is planning to buy Pure Digital, the company behind popular Flip Video camcorder. We hope this means the world will see more mashups like this because deep down inside, everybody wants to be a star.

We all got a dose of our favorite Institute of Design professor, Larry Keeley of the Doblin Group, this week via a podcast on the Lunar web site. The first half is about design education and the Institute of Design, and the second half is how Larry thinks about innovation during the recession. Larry’s rhetoric is always an interesting listen, as he’s talented at talking design to business.

Torrent Droid looks to be a cool service: Scan Barcodes, Get Torrents

From the hills of Wales, this is an amazing video of extreme sheep LED Art.

We found the most exciting part of this week’s Apple iPhone announcement to be the presentation on a mobile-attached blood glucose monitor for diabetics. Looks like our vision of Charmr is slowly becoming a reality.

We’ll leave you with an excerpt from one of our favorite posts this week by Clay Shirky about newspapers and thinking the unthinkable.

… Round and round this goes, with the people committed to saving newspapers demanding to know “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.

With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 22nd, 2009 at 5:04 pm and is filed under Signposts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.