Although I’ve not posted many entries lately, I have tried to follow some of the news out there; tough to do with so much going on. One of the things I caught was BusinessWeek‘s coverage of the IDEA competition. You can read their words (Link) and see their gallery (Link), but be sure to do a little background work. One of the winners that intrigued me was the da Vinci S surgical system (Link). From the BW blurb on the device:

The da Vinci S Surgical System is a state-of-the-art tele-operated robotic device used to perform minimally invasive surgery. It consists of an ergonomically designed surgeon’s console, four interactive robotic arms and a vision system that provides a 3D view of the surgical field.

No surprise that got my attention. Some day people may be leveling up to “Surgeon” in a videogame (though don’t expect me to be ready to go under their tele-robotic knife).

I also surfed over to the designer’s website (from where I pulled the above image, btw – not sure exactly to whom the copyright goes). Ricardo Salinas has done much of the work that I’ve enjoyed from design firms like IDEO and Bridge so be sure to take a look at his portfolio of work (Link). Nice stuff.

{Image source: Ricardo Salinas Industrial Design}

Interesting bit of news over on the 3pointD blog. It appears that a group of Amazon employees are attempting to link Second Life to Amazon. From the 3pointD entry (Link):

Well, that was an eye-opener. Amazon.com’s Werner Vogels just told the Supernova conference that the shopping site [well, some of its employees, anyway] is considering a move into the virtual world of Second Life. “There is a group of Amazonians in Second Life,” Vogels said, “and we are building a bridge between Amazon Web services and Second Life so you can go into Second Life and actually try things on there and buy them.

Of all the companies I expected to try linking to SL, Amazon was near the top of the list… just below eBay (the top runner, for obvious reasons). And while this is apparently extracurricular, if it works the experiment could prove extraordinarily interesting.

Y’know, they sell the jar opener on which I did the industrial design on the Amazon site. Wonder if they need an SL model? Mine is rotting in inventory.

There’s a nice post over on Design Observer (Link) that’s very much worth taking the time to read… both for designers and for those who hire them. The pay off is towards the end, so be sure to read the whole thing. At that point, the title for this post will make some sense I hope. And perhaps some of my comments over the past year where I’ve talked about “context” and “framing” will also start to make sense to those who didn’t understand me.

The post also raises the “control” issue; something about which I’ll be posting in the future. It’s most definitely something at the heart of most everything I discuss here.

Also be sure to read the comments over on the Design Observor post. The one comment discussing “Microsoft” as a name made me smile.

There’s a good entry on the Mass Customization blog titled “Open Source Footwear — bringing customer co-design to a traditional industry“(Link). I’ve been trying to make some time to read (and digest) it; I’m glad I found that time (in the middle of the night) as it touches on a few issues I follow here.

I found this small snip particularly noteworthy:

One way to do so is to install internet platforms (innovation toolkits) where users can evaluate new designs, give feedback or even create totally new designs.

While not exactly the best example for doing these things, I couldn’t help but think of Nike’s association with the videogame NBA 2k6 in which players can mod their own shoes in-game similarly to how they customize the shoes on the Nike ID website (I’ve posted several times on it over the past year or so – reLink). I’ve not heard if Nike and the developer have linked the game to the website yet, but if they haven’t either they or someone else will do so very soon. The way in which work is fusing with play is especially interesting to me.
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And they won’t design the products. Or author the books. Or develop significant new ideas. Not when the culture in which they’re living thinks it’s okay to copy. And that’s the cultural issue/problem being reported over on the BBC today (Link) and it’s something about which I’ve also expressed concern. From the short report:

Many of the new generation of students raised on the internet see nothing wrong with copying other people’s work, says Professor Sally Brown.

If I had to guess I’d say we’ll have a creativity peek in the short term as artists/musicians/writers/designers use the tools now available to them to do some interesting things. But after that, if there’s no change in the Copy Culture, I expect a long slide into Boring. So stock up on exciting, innovative stuff now.