links for 2009-11-04

• The Great Indoors
  The Great Indoors suggests a near future landscape of tarmac fields and breeze block villas populated by an enervated elite who never leave the house.

  Sustained by a diet of uncensored electronic stimulation and takeaway meals provided by swarms of delivery vans and staffed by armies of low paid immigrant labour. Information seeps out through the walls of the house itself, avoiding any requirement for direct physical interaction.

  (tags: architecture Tomas_Klassnik obsession hermit)

links for 2009-11-03

• Interview with Bill Cockayne – Director Stanford Centre for Critical Foresight » IdeaPort : strategic innovation, foresight, and futures thinking.
  I recently got in touch with Bill Cockayne at Stanford. The conversation was wide and varied – as you’d expect – and among other things we discussed the Shell Technology Futures work I’d done with Innovaro. As he lectures at Stanford on foresight and innovation, I was interested in his perspective on some of the issues that I had encountered with various organisations.
  (tags: foresight innovation stanford Bill_Cockayne)

DNA World

A mapping interpretation by designer Niko Vegt, of how DNA knowledge, technology and applications has transformed society. According to his website, ‘The DNA World map represents a conceptual territory of DNA related applications and developments. Its main continents are Science, Medical, Heath, Personal, Social, Justice and Environment – all surrounded by an ocean of Ethics.”

I like how he has decided to try and map out where all the directions of the Genome Empire has evolved over time and included links to each capital DNA city.  However I am not sure why it is actually a physical map with different fields of genetics represented as different countries within different environmental territories. To create more provocation or at least address the implications of this emerging technological development this could go one step further and become a political map that describes what political, social and cultural implications and frictions each DNA development has caused on society; policies that have changed, newspaper headlines it has provoked, debates it has started and laws that have begun.

links for 2009-10-05

• Core Roles | Foresight Canada
  (tags: foresight futures canada)
• Los Angeles – Squid Ink – New KFC Opens In Palms? Sort of…(Instead of Fried Chicken, They Sell Marijuana)
  (tags: california drugs kfc architecture weird)
• EndOfAmerica
  (tags: apocalypse futures forecasting future)

links for 2009-09-18

• Center for Foresight and Innovation – Methods
• 23andMe to offer discounted genome scans to clinicians to boost genomic literacy : Genetic Future
• Personas | Metropath(ologies) | An installation by Aaron Zinman
  Personas is a component of the Metropath(ologies) exhibit, currently on display until Sept 09 at the MIT Museum by the Sociable Media Group from the MIT Media Lab (Please contact us if you want to show it next!). It uses sophisticated natural language processing and the Internet to create a data portrait of one’s aggregated online identity. In short, Personas shows you how the Internet sees you.
• Genetic seamstress uses molecular fingers to tweak DNA – health – 18 September 2009 – New Scientist
  THE genetic equivalent of a tailor who uses molecular “fingers” to grab onto DNA, before snipping it apart and stitching in a new sequence could lead to safer gene therapies.In principle, genetic engineering is simple, but inserting a new gene into the right place in an organism’s genome is fraught with difficulty. For example, in a gene therapy trial for X-SCID – or “bubble-boy” disease – inserting a gene in the wrong place triggered cancer in some of the recipients.One approach for locating and snipping DNA strands involves “zinc fingers” – proteins that bind to DNA and can be linked together to recognise extended stretches of DNA with very high specificity. Zinc fingers are usually attached to enzymes called nucleases, dubbed ZFNs, which cut both strands of DNA.

links for 2009-09-16

• Designers breathe new life into our throwaway world – Times Online
  (tags: timparsons)

Personal Urn Cremation Services and Products

The Personal Family Member Urn

Personal Urn cremation services

links for 2009-07-21

• Evidence in support of UK DNA database is "most unclear and badly presented piece of research" – Boing Boing
  The British Home Office want to keep a huge DNA database of people who've been acquitted of crimes (or arrested and then released with charges dropped), saying that "innocent people who have been arrested are as likely to commit crimes in the future as guilty people." In support of this "controversial assertion" they cite a piece of research that Guardian science columnist Ben Goldacre calls "possibly the most unclear and badly presented piece of research I have ever seen."
  (tags: dna database crime science Ben_Goldacre)
• Calling spiritually prosperous and self-knowing designers everywhere! : Design & Society
  Because Love, Life, Goethe: How to be Happy in an Imperfect World is one of the most marvellous books I have ever read, I was excited to learn that John Armstong, the philosopher, was yesterday’s RSA Thursday speaker. He spoke about a new book , The Promise of Civilisation; about how money and power might be used well, about the power of spiritual prosperity to guide material activity, and about how that spiritual prosperity consists above all in self-knowledge and authenticity.
  (tags: selfknowledge fate_institute rsa)

links for 2009-07-20

• Design Thinking Battle–Managers Embrace Design Thinking, Designers Reject It. – BusinessWeek
  And finally, it is the evolution of design into Design (with or without the “Thinking” term) to redesign large scale social systems in business and civic society that has folks moving to embrace it. In this era of melting models and flaming careers, of economic uncertainty and social volatility, Design has a set of tools and methods that can guide people to new solutions.

  Which is why MIT, Harvard, Rotman, McKinsey and dozens of corporations are moving to Design to help navigate the present and the future. It is why in Britain and the Continental governments are embracing Design to help redesign basic social services.

• Manage By Designing Blog | Fast Company
  I grow more bothered by the week with the phrase “design thinking.” I know full well that I am fighting a losing battle, but I think it is an unfortunate term for describing what designers have to offer to other disciplines, which seems the most common reason for using the term. As is a way of talking about what designers can contribute to areas beyond the domains in which they have traditionally worked, about how they can improve the tasks of structuring interactions, organizations, strategies and societies, it is a weak term. The phrase has gained currency in part because it suggests that there are multiple kinds of thinking. Design thinking serves as a complement to analytic thinking, critical thinking, conceptual thinking, and other forms or modes of thought. Most often it is the first of these “analytic thinking” that is the target concern of design thinking’s advocates. They argue that analysis does not provide everything that is needed to cope with the complexities that face us.
• Public Domain paintings by Don Davis
  These are some of my works commissioned by various NASA facilities. They are offered here to provide something like definitive digital versions of such images, and unfortunately the NASA centers can rarely do this. You paid for them and they’re yours.

links for 2009-07-16

• Creative Review – Playing war
  The campaign comes from Ogilvy & Mather Singapore and has just been uploaded to our Feed section by the agency. The three ads each depict a young boy in charge of some military hardware: a tank (above), fighter jet or helicopter.
  (tags: children toys war military advertising)