BusinessWeek has an interview discussing design at GE Healthcare Technologies. Overall there isn’t anything amazing revealed in the piece, but CEO Joseph Hogan made a comment I thought might be of interest to those of you who have read my posts on PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) software and how it will be increasingly used. From the interview:

Our Global Design Group is headed by Seth Banks, who manages a worldwide staff of some 35 industrial and interactive designers. They are linked by collaborative software. With our design studios in different cultures and continents, we get a tremendous variety of concepts at the brainstorming level.

It may be designers and engineers and corporations today, but it’ll be a whole lot more people before you know it. Too bad there wasn’t more in the interview about this global coordination.

Wired is carrying an interesting update on MIT’s Counter Intelligence group in an article called “Machine Makes Dishes on Demand“. Last time I heard about them in the MSM, I think everyone was all excited about “smart appliances”, so it’s been relatively quiet on that front. But this one goes more to some of the technology in which I’m interested – specifically fab-on-demand. Worth reading in that regard (and since the MIT project site doesn’t seem to have any additional info, it may be all that’s available for now).

{Image Source: MIT Media Lab}

Fast Company is carrying an interesting if rambling piece penned by Tom Kelley (of IDEO fame) and friend. It’s a book excerpt though, and as such it feels incomplete. Makes sense I suppose. The idea is I should now go out and buy the book. What ever happened to the Idea Virus? Reading the last line:

Adapted with permission from The Ten Faces of Innovation, by Tom Kelley with Jonathan Littman, to be published October 18 by Currency Books, a division of Random House Inc.

gives me the impression that we won’t be reading a free downloadable PDF on the 18th. There’s a disconnect here to which I need to give some more thought.

Wired has a story, “Cuban to Launch DVD Label?“, that isn’t such a big deal as it contains a comment made by a Hollywood industry big-wig (at least it’s not a big deal to me). Newly-appointed Disney CEO Robert Iger apparently made the following comment to a group of analysts:

All the old rules should be called into question because the rules of consumption have changed so dramatically.

He is of course referring to movies and how they’re distributed via “windows”, but in general I think that quote is becoming increasingly relevant to a broader range of industries. I’m documenting it now so we can find it in a few years when some other industry CEO finally comes round and makes the exact same comment.

According to an article on BusinessWeek, the still young videogame industry is growing. Bigtime. From the article:

Interestingly, and perhaps not surprisingly, it’s the video game industry that is expected to be the fastest-growing component of the media sector worldwide. Double-digit growth is expected to be propelled by sales of the upcoming next-generation consoles, online and wireless Internet access spending and online advertising.

Most of those expected gains appear to be in China and India, with the U.S. showing the slowest average annual growth rate. And of course to be expected with the new wave of console platform releases, the PriceWaterhouseCoopers report also predicts PC games to continue declining.