There’s an opinion piece over on BusinessWeek penned by Geoff Vuleta that got my attention a few days back. In “One Vision for the Future of Chrysler” (Link), Vuleta discusses how embracing sustainability initiatives could be good for Chrysler. So far so good. It’s easy to buy into cost-reducing initiatives that also happen to promote sustainability, and eliminating (or, at least, thoroughly scrutinizing) the painting processes in vehicle manufacturing is something worth investigating (after all, most designers love bare metal aesthetics; Nick Pugh for example). But what galled me was this comment: Continue reading →

Something recently made me aware that there seems to be a dearth of Industrial Designers involved in online communities centered around intangible media and discussing the issues they’re currently facing. I suspect there are plenty of designers huddled around car websites, sneaker sites or other tangible product-centric communities, but there don’t appear to be very many elsewhere. I didn’t realize this until Bruce Nussbaum posted an entry, “Xbox, Wii, PS3–Gamers of the World, Unite!” (Link), that effectively amounted to him quoting a comment I’d made and then associating me with the “gaming community”.
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By now I assume that those of you with an interest in the virtual world topics I cover here have read about the announcement made at the opening of last week’s Virtual World Conference and Expo; Fall 2007: Linden Lab and IBM have joined forces to push “avatar portability”. Those of you surprised by this move either haven’t generally been paying attention or haven’t been reading my posts (e.g. “Standards of Avatar Portability” – reLink). Shame on you.

More importantly, this news takes me back to an earlier post, “The Innovation of Insecurity” (reLink), where I suggested what level of interoperability we might see. Continue reading →

I’ve been in a few online conversations over the past week or so and wanted to call out two of them in particular because they operate on either end of the current “user-generated content” meme.

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The first convo developed – of all places – on Nussbaum’s blog. The entry, “Xbox Against Wii And PS3–Who Has The Strongest Community?” (Link) got a little off-track when the topic turned to the impact user-generated content could have on developing brand communities.
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There are a couple of interesting items floating around the virtual community.

First up is a report by the Yankee Group I first read about on the Virtual World News blog (Link). From the Yankee Group Press Release:

According to the recently published Yankee Group Note, Wither Second Life?, the growth rate of Second Life users has slowed since its peak in October 2006, while user engagement (as measured by average time spent per user) has leveled off at just 12 minutes per month.

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