2018:44 What I learned this week

It's interesting to see how we went from a technology all-in approach to education as a positive thing to a more tempered approach. The idea here that intrigues me is that human interaction is becoming a luxury.

This "digital divide" can be seen in the possibility that poorer and middle-class children will be raised by screens, while the children of Silicon Valley’s elite will be going back to wooden toys and the luxury of human interaction.

Also! Currently, lower income teenagers spend more hours on a screen than their higher income counterparts.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/26/style/digital-divide-screens-schools.html

Kids in Utah are doing online learning before kindergarten. They're making a bet that kids can learn what they need to learn before kindergarten
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/preschool-is-good-for-poor-kids-but-its-expensive-so-utah-is-offering-it-online/2015/10/09/27665e52-5e1d-11e5-b38e-06883aacba64_story.html

A neat chrome extension, and great for UX and empathy building. Experience the web through the eyes of users with different abilities!

https://www.funkify.org/

2018:34 What I learned this week

This is a fun watch about animal experiments that show their understanding of fairness, empathy, and reciprocity --Changing beliefs that animals once were only capable and motivated by competition.
https://www.npr.org/2014/08/15/338936897/do-animals-have-morals

I've been doing some light research on hospitals from the point of view of service designers, and came across two "tours"! These are interesting because you can see some of the space, logistics, and technology choices they make for patients and staff. There are two, one is a community hospital in the US, and the other is a dutch teaching hospital with an internal innovation center (like Mayo CFI)
Community hospital https://medium.com/hsxd-healthcare-systems-by-design/field-trip-a-us-community-hospital-4834eec8a16f
Dutch hospital: https://medium.com/hsxd-healthcare-systems-by-design/first-impressions-a-dutch-hospital-ab8a70c898e3

2018:26 What I learned this week

In the past 15 years, demand has increased but our trade routes have not changed and what successfully been used to transport food and goods to cities, is becoming more strained. An interesting look at "chokepoints" in our global food system.
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-food-trade-chokepoints/

A digital platform in Barcelona enables citizens to participate in government and takes back public data ownership from companies, to government. This is an interesting strategy and one that can turn out hopeful! (or harmful)
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/barcelona-decidim-ada-colau-francesca-bria-decode

2018:01 What I learned this week

Effective methods and small solutions to dealing with stress as a designer
https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2017/12/dealing-with-stress-designer-what-research-says

The Instant-pot! A few of my friends got this for Christmas, whereas I have never even heard of it until now. If you don't feel like reading, scroll past all the text and pause at the image of the oven being boarded up and replaced by a cooking gadget 1/10th its size. Is that what kitchens will evolve into as we run out of real estate?
https://www.theringer.com/tech/2017/12/27/16822948/year-of-the-instant-pot-amazon-fandom

2017:22 What I learned this week

Reversing the lies of the sharing economy.
An interesting read that takes you back to why the sharing economy exists and how it began to what it has become today, a monetized platform.

Give a startup minimal capital to hire developers and run media campaigns, and then watch as the network effects ripple over the infrastructure of the internet. If it works, you’re suddenly in control of a corporation built with digital tools, but extracting value from real-world, physical assets like cars and buildings. The entity holds itself together not via employment contracts, but rather by self-employed workers’ dependence on it to access the market they rely on for their survival.

https://howwegettonext.com/reversing-the-lies-of-the-sharing-economy-a85501d14be8

2017:21 What I learned this week

Fitbit based research
Fitbit released their research library which references all the research that's being done using the data captured by your Fitbit.
https://www.fitabase.com/research-library/

How Amazon is disrupting retail
Scott Galloway gives an interesting lecture on how retail is dying and how Amazon is going to replace them all, through voice!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MOwRTTq1bY


What service design is, and isn't
For all those confused about Service design (is it the same as design thinking? Is it strategic?), here's a nice response to common assumptions.
http://www.meldstudios.com.au/2016/08/31/what-service-design-is-and-what-it-is-not/

2017:18 What I learned this week

Barbie's Vlog
I watched a Barbie vlog and was really impressed at how real Barbie and Ken felt... it's strange to have children's dolls act like a real life vlogger you would watch on youtube. Uncanny valley-ish maybe? I don't have the same issue watching the LEGO movie, but I suppose the LEGO characters are not acknowledging me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpyq7n_O4ZY

A planner's guide to reading:
If you are looking for some reading inspiration, this person organized the types of books to read by a framework in which she identify the specific things she is learning about.  The seven types of books are:
1. That which expands our capacity for empathy
2. That which grounds us in the basics of strategy
3. That which grounds us in the basics of how brands are built
4. That which illuminates the present state of things
5. That which lets us peer into the near-future
6. That which deepens our appreciation for creative instinct and craft
7. That which expands our capacity for persuasive expression

https://martinweigel.org/2016/05/25/a-planners-guide-to-reading/

The architecture of work
I originally did not entirely agree with this article, but I've been thinking about it over the past few days and it has intrigued me. Maybe he is onto something afterall..
This is Esko Kilpi's commentary on what the next management paradigm looks like and why traditional management thinking is no longer very effective. His argument is that industrial management was about hierarchy and fragmentation so each item/task could be measured and managed whereas today, the technology has created a networked and interdependent environment that reflects a shift towards a need regarding understanding the participative, self-organizing responsibility and the equality of peers. The example he provided is below:

...Organizational outcomes are first chosen by a few top executives and then implemented by the rest. Here, planning and enactment of the plans are two separate domains that follow a linear causality from plans to actions. From the perspective of open source development, organizational outcomes emerge in a way that is never just determined by a few people, but arises in the ongoing local interaction of all the people taking part. For example GitHub encourages individuals to fix things and own those fixes just as much as they own the projects they start [..] and ten million people working together for ten minutes may be the model in the future.

https://workfutures.io/esko-kilpi-on-the-architecture-of-work-1b35f9fb4bc0

2016:39 What I learned this week

Did a lot of reading this week guys. Here's my hitlist:

User onboarding methods
https://current.innovatemap.com/5-delightful-ways-to-onboard-new-users-4c0496b30b6a#.tn4z10cvs


More UX stuff - Patterns for navigating in mobile
http://babich.biz/basic-patterns-for-mobile-navigation/


How Netflix restructured their API in 2012
http://techblog.netflix.com/2012/07/embracing-differences-inside-netflix.html


Netflix AB testing - I think it is great to see that the architecture behind being able to conduct AB testing in a robust manner requires more than just an analytics machine. Rather it's an entire platform that is leveraged by the rest of the company via an API frontdoor
http://techblog.netflix.com/2016/04/its-all-about-testing-netflix.html


Watching the presdiential debate in VR:

Yet even being so so laser-focused on the five candidates (and the bald head of the guy in front of the camera in the back), I feel like I missed a lot. I missed Donald Trump live-tweeting the debate, and Mike Huckabee saying insane things. I missed the conversation on Facebook, and all the funny things my friends were saying. I missed the real-time fact-checking some publications do. A debate is about so much more than the show; it’s about how we all experience it and interact with it, together.

https://www.wired.com/2015/10/dnc-debate-virtual-reality-gear-vr/


Spend 5 hours each day actively learning and retaining new information.
https://medium.com/@neocody/what-mr-robot-can-teach-you-about-the-five-hour-rule-388b11f75707

2016:38 What I learned this week

A new term I learned coined by Intuit "Follow you home" as an 'ethnography' method where you observe an individual in their own environment. It's different from watching a user use a specific product/usability studies, and broadens out to the contextual space around it. There's lots of looking for new insights and not so much rigid interviews.
http://www.businessinsider.com/intuits-cfo-wants-to-follow-you-home-and-watch-you-work-2015-12

A funny comic about what service design is and what their tasks are.
http://linkis.com/com/nraWt

An MIT game about the human perspective on artificial intelligence making moral decisions. Vhoose who gets to live. This is harder than you think.
http://moralmachine.mit.edu/

Really cool candy!
http://www.sweetsaba.com/

2016:31 What I learned this week

This is hilarious and weird. Make a stuffed version of your pet.
http://www.cuddleclones.com/

This makes me sad that from the media, we humans have been primed to think of a shooting when there are loud noises and large crowds.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/30/us/shooting-scares-show-a-nation-quick-to-fear-the-worst.html

A metaphor for data as a human second skin.
http://blog.castac.org/2015/10/destination-you/