Category: #OSE Open Source Everything

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Yoda: Functional Beauty and User Experience

Architecture
Got Crowd? BE the Force!
Got Crowd? BE the Force!

Beautiful, force is.

Functional Beauty and User Experience

Beauty is one of the oldest and most powerful concepts in human history—inspiring artists and lighting up cultural movements, philosophical debates, and, in modern times, curious scientific interest. Beauty is a desirable feature of the products we buy, with the power to shape consumer choices and preferences.

Click on Image to Enlarge
Click on Image to Enlarge

While the nature of beauty is still a mystery, the nature of design is unquestionably linked to the beautification of crafts throughout human history.

Designers purposely create beautiful solutions so people can enjoy solving problems, working, or pursuing goals. In recent years, concepts like visual design, aesthetics, information architecture, and usability have helped designers create more ways for people to enjoy using technology. However, when it comes to interaction design, functional beauty outweighs aesthetics—here’s why:

Understanding Functional Beauty   .   Creating Functional Beauty   .   Usability   .   Ingenuity   .   Aesthetics   .   Rhythm   .   Personality

Read full article.

Catalina is a self-taught designer and the co-host of the podcast BrightLounge. She studied Psychology and Marketing, before combining her passions and becoming and interaction designer at Velora Studios. In 2011 she started traveling the world, filming and co-hosting BrightLounge, a podcast featuring interviews with designers and entrepreneurs from around the world. Her motto is “Stay creative, grow curious”.

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Howard Rheingold: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes – Lessons in Mindfulness and Creativity from the Great Detective

Innovation, Knowledge
Howard Rheingold
Howard Rheingold

How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes: Lessons in Mindfulness and Creativity from the Great Detective

by

“A man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose.”

Amazon Page
Amazon Page

“The habit of mind which leads to a search for relationships between facts,” wrote James Webb Young in his famous 1939 5-step technique for creative problem-solving, “becomes of the highest importance in the production of ideas.”But just how does one acquire those vital cognitive customs? That’s precisely what science writer Maria Konnikova explores inMastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes (UK; public library) — an effort to reverse-engineer Holmes’s methodology into actionable insights that help develop “habits of thought that will allow you to engage mindfully with yourself and your world as a matter of course.”

Phi Beta Iota:  Clarity, Diversity, Integrity.

See Also:

INTELLIGENCE with INTEGRITY: Enabling Hybrid Public Governance with Open-Source Decision-Support

THE OPEN SOURCE EVERYTHING MANIFESTO: Transparency, Truth, & Trust

INTELLIGENCE for EARTH: Clarity, Diversity, Integrity, & Sustainability

 

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Journal of #SOCMINT: Inteligencia Colaborativa: Un Recurso para la Innovación Abierta

Architecture, Crowd-Sourcing, Knowledge
Click on Image to Enlarge
Click on Image to Enlarge

#SOCMINT  Use Google Translate at top of middle column.

Si yo sé algo que tú no sabes sobre lo que tú estás trabajando y tú sabes algo que yo no sé, lo lógico sería colaborar. Pero, si yo te lo cuento existe el riesgo de que tú se lo cuentes a otros,  impidiendo o reduciendo el beneficio que yo pudiera obtener por ello, o que revelándote una parte, me des las gracias y completes el resto por tu cuenta. Este es uno de los argumentos que el premio Nobel de Economía de 1972, John Kenneth Arrow, daba para explicar que en la actividad inventiva existe un fallo de mercado y justifica la intervención de los poderes públicos para que no se produzca una escasez de recursos en ella. El modelo de innovación de la “Factoría de Inventos” de Edison, donde todo se cocía internamente, incluso el carácter individualista y la fama de jugador duro atribuidos a éste, responden a un planteamiento cerrado de la innovación, una traducción del dilema presentado por Arrow.

Sin embargo, este planteamiento resulta contradictorio con la naturaleza creativa  propia de la innovación. Crear es fundamentalmente asociar, conectar, explorar, cuestionar y relacionarse. Quizá por eso cada día aparecen más innovaciones y nuevas empresas fruto de procesos colaborativos y asociaciones no siempre evidentes, como pueden ser los casos de BMW y Peugeot-Citröen que están desarrollando un nuevo concepto de vehículo híbrido conjuntamente, Lego, que obtiene propuestas de nuevos diseños de sus clientes más acérrimos y finalmente fabrica los que tienen mayor demanda, o ESMT, una escuela de negocios de Berlín fundada por los propios negocios[1].

¿POR QUE NO DEBEMOS RENUNCIAR A LA INNOVACIÓN ABIERTA?

Continue reading “Journal of #SOCMINT: Inteligencia Colaborativa: Un Recurso para la Innovación Abierta”

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Steve Wheeler: Learning with e’s Series

04 Education, Advanced Cyber/IO, Knowledge, Science
Steve WheelerClick for BIo Page
Steve Wheeler
Click for BIo Page


At the end of each year many of us tend to focus on the future, wondering what it will bring. We wish each other a happy New Year, and hope that life will treat us kindly. We try to shape our own futures by making New Year resolutions, many of which fall by the wayside after a week or two. Much of our future is not ours to shape. But still we persist in trying to predict the future.  Many of our predictions about the future are based on speculation or wishful thinking.


When discussing the future, especially the future of technology, there are some writers who almost always seem to be quoted. Near the top of the list is the futurologist Ray Kurzweil, who has much to say about our technological future, and also about the growth in human intelligence. His views are quite optimistic, especially around computers and the nature of knowledge.


In my previous blog post I examined the debate about whether we are becoming more intelligent or less intelligent as a result of our prolonged and habituated uses of technology.


What will be the future of school classrooms? It is unlikely that we will see the demise of the classroom in the next decade. Those who study the future of education often suggest that the demise of traditional classrooms is not only inevitable, but imminent.

Parts 04-09 Below the Line.

Continue reading “Steve Wheeler: Learning with e's Series”

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Sepp Hasslberger: 3D Design and Print of a Customized Solar Home

Architecture
Sepp Hasslberger
Sepp Hasslberger

Video, 7:53.  Produces 150% of the energy it consumes.  Surplus can go into your car or to a less well-endowed neighbor.

Solar House 2.0, erected this year on Barcelona's waterfront, uses time-tested passive solar techniques, but it takes a high-tech leap forward using digital design and digital fabrication techniques to make it completely optimized for ideal solar gain.

With its jagged cantilevers jutting out at odd angles across most of the facade (except the North corner), Solar House 2.0 looks, and acts, like few other buildings. Thanks to digital design, the building's structure was mathematically adjusted so that every point of the building was adapted to the exact conditions of the exterior.

Software also played a lead role in the building's construction. Relying on 3D milling (for more on 3D printing see our video MakerBot: open source, self-replicating, stuff-making robot)- the Solar House designers employed a CNC (computer numerical control) wood router- the building's individual pieces could be completely customized, creating the totally irregular patterns not possible (or affordable) with older, mass production techniques.

Solar House 2.0 was completely prefabricated so when the pieces arrived at the site, it took the team just 2 weeks to erect the 154-square-meter (1,658 sq ft) building. The building's plans are open source and available to anyone who wants to build their own solar house, solar office or solar tower, but completely-customized to their location.

More info on original video: http://faircompanies.com/videos/view/fully-customized-modular-solar-house-is-…

Music by Paperhand Lincoln: http://www.paperhandlincoln.com/

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Owl: Aaron Swartz — Prosecutors as Persecutors — Call to End All Donations to MIT — Burn MIT to the Ground, Metaphorically Speaking

07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 11 Society, Academia, Commerce, Corruption, Crowd-Sourcing, Culture, Governance, Government, Knowledge, Law Enforcement, Media
Who? Who?
Who? Who?

Following up on the excellent post, Mongoose: Moti Nissani on Who Killed Aaron Swartz? it is now clear MIT refuses to cut any kind of deal, and the prosecutor went nuclear on what should have been a matchbook case.  Now it emerges that the prosecutor going after Swartz went after another young man involved with computers who also died, allegedly from suicide, as supposedly did Swartz. “Prosecutor Stephen Heymann has been blamed for contributing to Swartz's suicide. Back in 2008, young hacker Jonathan James killed himself in the midst of a federal investigation led by the same prosecutor.  James, the first juvenile put into confinement for a federal cybercrime case, was found dead two weeks after the Secret Service raided his house as part of its investigation of the TJX hacker case led by Heymann — the largest personal identity hack in history. He was thought to be “JJ,” the unindicted co-conspirator named in the criminal complaints filed with the US District Court in Massachusetts. In his suicide note, James wrote that he was killing himself in response to the federal investigation and their attempts to tie him to a crime which he did not commit.”

So one scenario is, as mentioned by Nissani, that the government directly killed – by hanging – Swartz. But in light of this newly emergent pattern, perhaps it indicates another scenario equally sinister but more simple: that Heymann mercilessly and severely harasses his victims to death by suicide. No need to send in wet boys (a DOJ slang term for on-the-payroll DOJ  killers specifically) to murder someone, just drive them insane or to self-destruction. The outcome is the same as someone putting a bullet in one's head.  It's about prosecuting by persecuting. A capsule definition of what comprises much of what is called the US legal system.  See this link for more:

Internet Activist's Prosecutor Linked To Another Hacker's Death

It seems like outrage at the official US government persecution-leading-to death of Aaron Swartz is picking up steam. Check out this excellent list of recent links from the Naked Capitalism site:

Berners-Lee Calls Prosecution of Aaron Swartz ‘Travesty’ Bloomberg. Notice how slanted the story is. Calls what he did “hacking” when was not, see here.
How the Legal System Failed Aaron Swartz—And Us New Yorker
TOWARDS LEARNING FROM LOSING AARON SWARTZ Center for Internet and Society
‘Aaron was killed by the government’ – Robert Swartz on his son’s death RT
On humanity, a big failure in Aaron Swartz case Boston Globe. Makes it clear MIT refused to cut a deal. I hope tech donors never give a dime to MIT again.

Continue reading “Owl: Aaron Swartz — Prosecutors as Persecutors — Call to End All Donations to MIT — Burn MIT to the Ground, Metaphorically Speaking”