Educating for Evolving Realities

I thought the following quote credited to InSearch’s Tom Hirsch and taken from Peter Lawrence’s Fast Company design column was worth sharing:

“It is really a challenge of translating frames of reference between a designer’s understanding of a problem and opportunity and a business person’s understanding of the same problem and opportunity. This challenge must be better understood and taught in design education, beyond traditional design skills. Design education is woefully behind the curve of what it takes to succeed for a designer in current and fast evolving realities.”

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Nike iD Digging?

Hear’s some news via the Mass Customization blog (Link). It appears that Nike is incorporating a rating system into their Nike iD program; though currently it’ll be limited to the shoe fetishists over on the Sneakerplay social network (no offense folks, but when I think of people who get excited over shoes, that kid – the “Baltimore Stomper” – from the John Waters’ movie Polyester comes to mind). Anyway, hopefully you’ll recall my earlier posts concerning Nike iD (e.g. reLink). This is a program I’ve been watching for years, and have suggested others keep tabs on as well.
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Rebang In Google’s Future? {Update}

Partly amusing and partly curious, earlier today I noticed quite a few hits from a Google-centric blog, Google Blogoscoped (Link). Turns out that Google has added “/rebang” to their robots.txt file indicating they don’t want spiders crawling through whatever it is they’re intending to add. I’ve already told people I’m not connected to Google, but someone posted a quote to something I said elsewhere (Link) that has me thinking maybe what *is* going on is at least related to the things I discuss here. Continue reading

Kaneva’s Dimensionally Hybrid Social Network

A couple of years ago on the Second Life forums a few of us were wondering why Linden Lab wasn’t using Second Life as the core for a bigger social network. I recall key words from one of my own posts in that discussion, but like the “trademark” threads, the thread I’m seeking is apparently unavailable. However, the basic idea resurfaced later in my comments to a post discussing Yahoo!’s branded avatars (reLink). From that comment:

I’ve been wondering why LL doesn’t build a system with SL at the core; everything from hosted e-commerce to blogs. My3DSpace. Given their comments on branded avatars, I have a feeling someone at LL has been thinking along those lines.

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