Designer Embarks On 27-Year Project To Rebrand The 10,000 Lakes

“As tourist destinations, lakes themselves are products,” Nicole Meyer says. “Each has a distinct personality, ecosystem, and specialty."

Designer Nicole Meyer was raised near lakes in the suburbs of Madison, Wisconsin, then studied in Minnesota, another state never lacking for shoreline. “Growing up I was basically surrounded by lakes,” she tells Co.Design. After college, she moved to Phoenix and quickly realized how much she missed the watery landscape of her native Midwest. Fact is, she missed it so much, she decided to pay tribute to it: by designing a logo a day for each of Minnesota’s 10,000 lakes. According to our count, the project will take about 27 years. Twenty-seven years!

“As tourist destinations, lakes themselves are products,” she says. “Each has a distinct personality, ecosystem, and specialty. There's a big opportunity within lakes for differentiation through better branding.” The idea’s that by playing up these unique features (sailing, say, or fishing, or an odd name) the lakes could potentially attract more visitors. Give Dead Coon Lake a logo with a coon that’s got Xes over his eyes, as Meyer did, and you can pretty much guarantee people will never forget the place.

Her process:

I start by browsing a site that lists all of the lakes by county. Some days a name will inspire an idea right away, and I'll run with it. Other days, it takes more digging and deciding what kind of feeling the name elicits. For each lake, I try to research and learn as much about it as possible, so that the mark will come from as strategic a direction as it can.

Meyer’s project is primarily an exercise: a way for her to flex her design skills and build her portfolio. The point isn't to actually convince the lakes--and the assorted bureaucrats who govern them--to adopt her ideas. Though she says she hopes some of them will follow her lead and rejigger their image (“and I would definitely be willing to help them out with that,” she says).

As of September 25, she had completed 73 logos. Just 9,928 left to go!

[Images courtesy of Nicole Meyer]

via fastcodesign.com

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Dozy baby pandas snooze through photoshoot

There a real handful, but these cubs could help ensure the future of the giant panda population in China / AFP Source: AFP

The cubs nap at a nursery in the research base of the Giant Panda Breeding Centre in Chengdu, Sichuan province / AFP Source: AFP

A DOZEN dozy pandas have made their first public appearance since their births - maximising the cuteness factor in a shared cot.

The pandas were caught napping at a nursery at the Giant Panda Breeding Centre at Chengdu, southwest China.

The research base started with just six pandas in 1987 and now has 108, The Sun reports.

China is this year holding its once-a-decade panda census, trying to determine how many of the endangered animals live in the wild amid continued efforts to boost their numbers.

The census - the fourth since it was first launched in the 1970s - is also expected to ascertain pandas' living conditions, ages and any change in habitat.

The count a decade ago found 1596 pandas left in the wild in China, with 1206 of them living in Sichuan province, AFP reports.

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Making People Passionate For Toilet-Bowl Cleaners And Other "Low-Interest" Products

We admit it: We were never passionate about cleaning before we launched Method. But building a belief brand with a social mission taught us that there is no such thing as a low-interest category, just low-interest brands. Anyone can generate excitement about a new cellphone technology or a new beer brand. Attracting attention in a traditionally low-interest category (like soap) takes a bit more thought. This is one of the best benefits of belief brands--they work equally well in crowded high-interest categories and in overlooked categories. Beyond the emotional engagement created by sharing similar beliefs and values with their advocates, belief brands have a philosophy, an attitude, and a story to tell. Their personalities aren't created in some office on Madison Avenue; they're woven into the very fabric of the organization. Below, a few examples of high-interest brands in low-interest categories:

Joe Boxer. By injecting irreverence and controversy into his Joe Boxer brand, Nicholas Graham transformed everyday boxer briefs into a conversation piece.

Dyson. Ten years ago, it would have been difficult to imagine anyone getting excited about a vacuum cleaner. Dyson shook up the dusty category with innovative technology and beautiful design.

Swingline. An unremarkable and ubiquitous tool, staplers were the poster boy of low interest before Mike Judd cast a red Swingline as an object of devotion in his 1999 corporate satire, Office Space.

While we rely primarily on style and substance to inspire interest in cleaning products, we also tap into an often overlooked subset of consumers: people who actually love to clean. You probably even know a few friends whom you consider to be clean freaks. We believe in making the act of cleaning more enjoyable and, if we may say so, aspirational. But virtually every commercial treats cleaning as if it were a huge hassle, virtually screaming promises of convenience and ease. Pandering to women with images of grinning maids in aprons, it was as if taking care of your things was something to be ashamed of, something you'd rather leave to someone else. This is typical problem-solution marketing, in which you set up a problem (mildew in the bathroom) and then present your product as the hero solution (Pow! mildew gone). The problem with this approach is that it forces the consumer to enter through the problem, so your brand will always live in low-interest land. Even if you don't find an ounce of joy in cleaning, virtually everyone loves the end state, a clean home. So we focused on talking about the aspirational end state of cleaning, and we found that, to many people, cleaning is an important part of life. It's the ritual of connecting to their homes and families by putting life back in order. To many, cleaning is a form of caring for their children or pets by providing a safe haven for those they care about most. Seeking to draw out our audience's inner clean freaks, we filled our ad campaigns with young, great-looking naked people in gorgeous, hip homes, using (or maybe just caressing) a rainbow of beautiful Method products. Rather than the "quick and painless" promises in our competitors' ads, we communicated with clever, cheeky messages intended to promote the aspirational idea that cleaning could be cool (gasp!). Flying in the face of decades of traditional cleaning commercials, the ads resonated with people of all ages.

To many people, jogging is a chore. Imagine if Nike ran advertisements featuring unhappy joggers forcing themselves through another grueling early morning routine. Not likely. To the contrary, the brand celebrates every sport it touches, with aspirational imagery. We'd even bet there are some fierce badminton ads out there that would inspire you to Just Do It with a birdie! Nike ties this to its social mission of bringing inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world. As Bill Bowerman, track coach and cofounder of Nike, said, "If you have a body, you are an athlete."

Bottom line: If you're struggling to shift your brand from low to high interest, seek to reframe your communications from presenting the problem to projecting the desired end state and wrap that in a social mission.

Excerpted from The Method Method by Eric Ryan and Adam Lowry by arrangement with Portfolio Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA), Inc., Copyright © 2011 by Eric Ryan and Adam Lowry.

[Image: Flickr user AllStarsYouth]

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How UGG Got Its Y Chromosome Back

UGG boots, the fuzzy-lined sheepskin boots best known for warming the toes of female celebs as they trot around Aspen and college girls as they trudge from class to class, are trying to recapture the interest of their original customer: dudes.

As UGG Australia prepares to introduce its largest assortment ever of men’s styles for fall, the company has enlisted Patriots quarterback Tom Brady as the new face of UGGs for men. The first commercial spot, called “Steps,” with music by Mos Def, follows three-time Super Bowl winner Brady, wearing a variety of UGG men’s footwear, as he runs with a look of smolder-y purpose on his face through a variety of country- and cityscapes. It airs tonight during the NFL's first Monday Night Football game of the season, featuring Brady's Patriots and the Dolphins. 

UGG was originally marketed primarily to the types of outdoorsy, adventure-sports-loving men who shopped in surf and ski shops, though their girlfriends were known to swipe the comfy boots for themselves, or buy them in smaller unisex sizes.

When the UGG Australia was acquired by Deckers Outdoor in 1995, the company shifted its focus to women, who buy more shoes than men and are open to a greater variety of styles. UGG was in the process of repositioning itself from a men’s brand to “men’s, women’s and kids, luxury and comfort,” Constance Rishwain, president of UGG, said, and initially the company's ad dollars were shifted to target women. “When I could only afford one ad, it was Vogue.”

In 2000, after the company introduced women’s and children’s styles, Oprah Winfrey declared the original sheepskin boots as one of her “favorite things,” setting off enormous brand buzz in the way that only Oprah can. UGGs’s subsequent strong female following was cemented after the company introduced pink and baby-blue styles, and made sure Hollywood’s brightest stars--the Sex and the City cast, Kate Hudson, Oprah--were seen in them.

“It was like a bomb went off,” Rishwain said. “That’s where the wait lists started; we couldn’t keep up with it.”

And that’s where the brand’s awareness with men started to lag. While growth in the women’s line has been “explosive,” Rishwain said (2011 will be UGG’s 13th year of double-digit sales growth, she adds), sales of the men’s styles grew more slowly. And public perception of the brand reflected this.

Judging by some of the recent feedback, UGG has a healthy amount of male skepticism to overcome if it wants to reclaim its image as a men’s brand. “I don’t care if he’s Tom Brady, it’s still a dude wearing UGGs,” as one YouTube commenter put it.

But UGG is convinced Brady, a blond California native who you could as easily picture on a surfboard as in the end zone, is the right man to help reposition the UGG name as a brand for men, too. Despite his high-profile marriage to Gisele Bündchen, the fact that he just signed a $72 million contract extension, and his metrosexual crossover appeal to women, UGG says Brady--perhaps because he was an underdog second-to-last-round draft pick who went on to win three Super Bowls--somehow still exudes a “normal guy” vibe that will convince men that UGGs are cool shoes worn by cool guys.

By the end of this year, UGG will have 50 physical store locations worldwide, and despite its recent increases in the number of men’s styles, customers still express some surprise that the offerings aren’t all pink, leopard print, or marketed toward women.

“Men go in with their wives and see men’s products and pick them up; customers are blown away that we have such a large variety of men’s shoes,” Rishwain says. “Going with Tom Brady is going to spread that knowledge that there is a line for men, and to get more of their eyeballs on the brand.”

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Orwellian intrusion

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When Is The Right Time For A Product Redesign?

Looking at how and why Apple rolled out Final Cut Pro X--as well as a few notable failures--provides a few rules of thumb.

This is the first post in a series by Victor Lombardi, excerpted from his forthcoming book Why We Fail: Real Stories and Practical Lessons from Customer Experience Failures.

In June 2011, Apple released the latest version of its professional video editing software, Final Cut Pro X, and close to half the reviews on Apple’s App Store read like this:

“Horrible.”

“A Disaster.”

“Heartbreaking.”

To understand this reaction, we need to look back at the history of the product. Apple released Final Cut Pro in 1999. In a world of difficult-to-use software and awkward hardware configurations, Apple's product streamlined it all. By 2001, it was used to edit major films. In 2002, it won a Primetime Emmy Engineering Award for its impact on the television industry. By 2010, it had almost 50% market share.

But the underlying technology was over a decade old. It seems that Final Cut Pro had experienced what I call a “tech-design shift,” a major shift in technology that makes possible--or necessary--a major overhaul in product design. Products that emerge from a tech-design shift can offer us experiences we didn’t have before. In the case of Final Cut Pro X, harnessing 64-bit computer architecture and other new technologies required a wholesale rewrite of the software, which enabled ground-breaking changes like incredibly fast rendering, an open platform for third-party effects, and the seamless use of dozens of video formats, called “codecs.”

The problem is that Final Cut Pro X doesn’t have some features that professional video editors relied on in previous versions, such as the ability to synchronize and edit footage from multiple cameras. This enraged customers who depended on such capabilities, resulting in a public relations problem that threatened to alienate a portion of the product’s customer base.

Shocking Success
But what can look like failure in the short term is actually a successful long-term approach for Apple. If we look back at the company’s product portfolio, we can see a pattern of major design changes, including the recent transition from MobileMe to iCloud or the older Macintosh transition from PowerPC to Intel processors.

Apple moves quickly to avoid stagnation. While such an approach scares other companies, the aversion to change often results in obsolescence. Apple’s customers have to cope with frequent updates, but that’s less disruptive than the disappearance of an entire platform or company. Many customers understand this: Although many App Store users left scathing 1-star reviews, even more wrote raving 5-star reviews, and by the end of the summer, Final Cut Pro was the second-highest-grossing app in the App Store.

Here are three rules that guide Apple-style change:

1. Embrace Tech-Design Shifts

When technology has advanced to the point of enabling new designs and new experiences, embrace it, even if it means a short-term customer disruption.

Nokia's Symbian mobile operating system is quickly dying because it missed the mobile technology shift from keypad to touchscreen interface, specifically the capacitive touchscreen popularized by the iPhone. Symbian market share plunged from 72.8% in Q3 2006 to 36% in Q3 2010. By the time the new Symbian 3 was ready in 2010, it was too late, and Nokia announced it would transition to using Microsoft's Windows Phone as its primary smartphone platform (Microsoft had embraced this tech-design shift years earlier, leaving behind the Windows Mobile operating system to focus on a new, touchscreen-oriented system, even at the expense of breaking backward compatibility).

Looking back further in time, it’s not hard to find more examples of this trend. WordPerfect dominated the PC word-processing market during the 1980s but fumbled the shift from DOS to Windows. It entered the market two years later than the competition with a buggy, difficult–to-install product. Microsoft Word, which had trailed WordPerfect in market share for over seven years, pounced on the weakened competitor and captured almost the entire market.

Conversely, if you don't have a tech-design shift, a drastic redesign may not be justified. Look at Amazon.com, for example: Since 1999, it has gradually updated its website design as the business evolved, avoiding big redesigns, even as it embraced other kinds of tech-design shifts with mobile apps and the Kindle e-reader.

2. Offer a Clear Customer Benefit

If customers don’t feel there is a clear benefit for them, they may reject the redesign.

That sounds obvious, right? But we release products for other reasons. Earlier this year, Gawker rolled out a redesign of its news websites using unconventional navigation oriented around the type of content published, instead of how people wanted to browse, and subsequently faced a firestorm of criticism and lost viewers. They rolled back the design a few weeks later.

Sometimes you won’t know if a new design benefits customers until you try it, and these cases are best treated as experiments. As one of their Labs experiments, Google launched Wave, a new kind of real-time messaging platform. Wave was too radical for most people, and Google discontinued it after less than a year.

3. Avoid Backlash with an Outstanding Ownership Experience

Customers will overlook flaws if their overall experience is good enough. Apple succeeds despite missing features because its products are “magical.” In more concrete terms, they push the limits of industrial design and software design to achieve unexpectedly high usability and aesthetics. The iPhone was long criticized for lacking features other systems had, such as multitasking, but the experience of using the iPhone is so delightful that customers generally overlook what’s missing. via fastcodesign.com

http://jantervonen.com/when-is-the-right-time-for-a-product-redesign

Tokujin Yoshioka Turns Cartier Watches Into Op Art

Tokujin Yoshioka Turns Cartier Watches Into Op Art

A stunning exhibition at German museum turns the inner workings of the tiny design marvels into short, vivid films.

Watches are a feat of modern engineering--a machine that's precise to the second, and so small you can wear it on your wrist!--yet they're so tiny, most people who wear one probably don't have the faintest idea how it works. In Cartier Time Art, Japanese designer Tokujin Yoshioka uses time and space to explore and explain the craft of watchmaking in a gorgeous installation currently on view at the Bellerive Museum, Ein Haus des Museum für Gestaltung Zürich, in Switzerland.

In collaboration with the French watchmaker, Yoshioka was able to create animations which showcase the tiny faces and innerworkings of the watches. These are projected above the watches using 3-D movie technology, appearing to float on the glass cases. Filming little vignettes that either track a watch's movement or an aspect of fine watchmaking, Yoshioka is able to project the watches at a much larger and more detailed size, allowing the viewer to almost peer inside a watch's tiny technology. It's absolutely mesmerizing to watch the precise ticking of the little cogs, or the minuscule pieces required to assemble a watch.

Among the exhibition's goods are 158 Cartier watches, ranging from a 1874 chatelaine watch in yellow gold, pink foil, enamel, and pearls, to Cartier's newest ID One concept watch, made from super-resilient niobium-titanium and carbon crystal. This newest watch is magnified for public ogling using a rather interesting method: a giant dynamic lens--the same type of glass that covers a watch face, yet a piece that's the size of a human head. It also manages to make a sweet funhouse-type mirror for attendees.

Two years ago, Yoshioka created the installation "Story of..."--Memories of Cartier for the Tokyo National Museum, which gave background to several famous Cartier pieces using a similar projection technique. In a way, this piece is a continuation of that narrative, but it also nods to Cartier's high-tech future. In Yoshioka's own words:

A long history and avant-garde ideas for the future.
Cartier’s unique beauty comes from the merging of these two extremes.
The space, with 3D films depicting the mechanism of the watch, will wrap around the hearts of visitors.
I hope their experience here will implant Cartier’s new timebeat in each life.

Wrapping around the hearts of visitors might be a stretch, but at the very least, people will gaze upon the timekeeper gracing their wrists with newfound admiration. The show is up through November 6. via fastcodesign.com

http://jantervonen.com/tokujin-yoshioka-turns-cartier-watches-into-o

How Tumblr Created A Design Culture With No Design Team

Tumblr's about to grow its design staff to two. How can the company be design-centric, when so few designers work there?

Thanks to the Clients from Hell, the Rules for My Unborn Son, and the Sad Don Drapers, the blogging platform Tumblr is about to hit a major milestone: 10 billion blog posts. Yet as its user base swells, Tumblr itself has miraculously managed to stay relatively petite: Only 45 people are on staff, including a surprisingly tiny product team consisting of five people. And for such a design-savvy, image-driven platform, here's the most surprising fact of all: Tumblr's design department consists of only one designer, Tumblr design director Peter Vidani. "It's really just me right now," he tells Co.Design, laughing. "So I direct myself."

That will change in the near future as Tumblr is hiring a designer and reportedly seeking a big round of funding, at a valuation of $800 million. While Vidani declined to comment on any of the financial aspects of Tumblr, he did provide some insight into the company's design strategy -- and what they're looking for in their #2 designer.

Tumblr's personal dashboard for users

Vidani sits at the table with a five-person product team.

Where more established tech companies like Facebook and Twitter are just recently starting to attract big-name design talent to bulk up their design chops, Vidani thinks that Tumblr already is, and always will be, a design-centric company. He attributes most of this to the fact that he's at the table with that five-person integrated product team, which he says acts like a "hive mind," bouncing ideas off each other, and making decisions as a group. "If marketing needs something designed, it comes through product," he says." Every facet, every feature needs to be looked at in the same regard."

A key tenet of Tumblr's design aesthetic is obvious from looking at its interface: Simplicity. "We really enjoy seeing a small simple page free of clutter," says Vidani. "If we can get rid of anything, we will." While other blogging platforms might hype their range of constantly growing features, Vidani says, his team does everything they can to minimalize them, or, in some cases, remove them. "We think the users are smart, and don't need things 'sold' to them," he says. "Keeping this in mind gets rid of the clutter, like labels and chatty copy."

Another design goal for Tumblr is the idea of taking away the intimidation of blogging -- you know, the dreaded confrontation of an empty page. This is achieved with with smaller text fields and even a range of non-text options. "We don't want to make you feel like you need to write three paragraphs and post a photo," he says. "You can just post a photo." The reason the "Create Post" button to publish a post is so big and shiny? They want you to feel good about pushing posts out in the world, as often as possible.

One of the many themes available for use.

This flexible, friendly format has made it a favorite for designers and other creatives, who have praised Tumblr for its visual focus. Tumblr has found a way to evangelize those designers by showcasing the thousands of themes, or customized skins that change the look and feel of their blogs, that designers have created for the brand. Tumblr curates two galleries of themes for their users: Featured Themes, exceptional free themes which are brought to their attention and promoted through the signup process; and Premium Themes, where Tumblr reaches out to talented designers to contribute themes, and they get paid for their work by users who download them. This is a win-win situation. "It's the best way for a designer to get their names on the web in a short amount of time," says Vidani. "And it's to our advantage to give users the best themes and designers we can."

"If we can get rid of anything, we will."

Vidani himself started his web-design career designing themes, part of his roundabout career before his arrival at Tumblr, working in post-production for reality shows and then at the homepage manager start.io. He values the kind of experience that might come from working outside of or in curious corners of the tech industry. In looking for designers, he's particularly interested in candidates who have some skills in illustrative and print work. "It's a telling sign that they have experience in art and not just making buttons on the web."

Designers joining the team now could have the chance to build a young but established brand that still has a great deal of freedom. For example, the product team doesn't do A-B testing or polls, says Vidani. Tumblr uses its own built-in audience of beta testers -- its own employees. Of course, with Tumblr's incredible growth has also come growing pains. Users have grumbled about the site's excessive service outages, which have caused downtime as long as 36 hours for the platform. While that's not necessarily a design issue, it's a potential challenge for a growing team.

Tumblr's elegant, dead-simple CMS

As Tumblr's traffic skyrockets to over 90 million monthly unique visitors worldwide, according to Quantcast, Vidani has been busy expanding the platform into mobile apps, like the recent release for Android. Several more new features -- top secret, of course -- are on the horizon, but Vidani assures Tumblr fans that even as they continue to grow, design is a prized value for the company, both inside and out. "We always say we're making the best creative tools for the most creative people in the world," he says.

via fastcodesign.com

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China Knows It Must Innovate. But Can It?

The country’s economy is booming, but the ecosystem for creativity has yet to emerge.

In 2003, Goldman Sachs issued a report predicting that by 2041 China would vault over the United States to become the world’s largest economy. Since then, China has been on a tear, with annual growth of 9 to 10%, compared to the U.S.’s recent anemic GDP, which has hovered around 2%. Check the shelves of any Walmart--or the country-of-origin label of most of the goods in your home-- and you can see that China’s ambition to be the world’s low cost manufacturer is already a done deal.

Now, we hear, that China has similar goals with regard to those products’ design as well as their construction. In the past ten years, the Chinese have created more than 1,000 design programs, educating more than a million students. In addition, according to Clive Roux, CEO of IDSA (Industrial Design Society of America), who spent a year talking to over 80 people in government, education, and design consultancies, China is investing in hundreds of industrial design parks and cities throughout the country.

“China’s central government wants to shift the economy from being the world’s factory to a modern services economy, and it has declared that the country needs to promote industrial design to help it get there,” Roux says. Does this mean that it’s only a matter of time before America’s design industry goes the way of its manufacturing base? Designers: don’t delete that CAD software just yet.

The concept of user empathy is in its infancy in China.

Liu Jun, vice president and chief creative officer of Eegoo Cultural Industry Investment Co., Ltd, and one of the “50 Most Creative Individuals in China,” according to China’s New Ad magazine, has a far less rosy picture of the reality of the design industry in his country than the alarmist press might have us believe. “The reason the Chinese don’t have global companies is that we don’t have a global vision,” Liu told me in a recent conversation at the materials consultancy Material Connexion’s offices in New York. “We don’t see what world markets need.”

Liu says the reasons why his country’s designers lag the West are complex. For one thing, he says, the concept of user-centeredness, so central to Western design, is in its infancy in China. “Chinese designers only think about what pleasures them, not the customer,” he says. “It’s a huge problem.” In addition, the notion of sustainable design is equally embryonic. Liu cites a client who heads a top Chinese consumer electronics company who came back from a 20-day trip to the United States stunned by what he had seen.

“When he got back to Guangzhou, he realized how terrible the pollution was,” Liu says. “So he summoned all his department heads and insisted that they find a way to damage the environment less. ‘We are all on the same planet, but the U.S. air is so fresh!’ he told them.” Liu hopes to open 10 Material Connexion libraries and consultancies in China in the next year or so to introduce his countrymen to eco-friendly materials and Western-style design principles.

That’s a good beginning, but probably not enough, says Daniel Altman, director of thought leadership at Dalberg Global Development Advisors and author of Outrageous Fortunes, The Twelve Surprising Trends that Will Reshape the Global Economy.

While it’s likely that Chinese designers will catch up on the sustainability front, and will eventually master the art of targeting customer needs (as Haier, the big appliance manufacturer, has already done), the country’s ability to design and innovate will continue to be hampered by deep cultural forces that are less easy to change. “China still has corporate structures that are extremely hierarchical,” says Altman. “And there’s an intense respect for seniority that derives from Confuscian traditions that date back thousands of years. In addtion, the Communist party is a parallel structure in all these corporations, making it very difficult for young people to follow through on their best ideas.”

New ideas need to percolate up through so many layers of hierarchy that most won’t survive all the way to the top--or others will claim credit for them along the way, he says. In the U.S., talented but frustrated workers in similar situations have a handy escape hatch: they can quit and start their own companies. In China, that’s extremely hard to do. Indeed, China ranks 151st out of 181 countries in the World Bank’s annual survey of environments for entrepreneurs. “China has a long way to go before it will be anything like US in its ability to foster innovation or entrepreneurship,” says Altman.

The country’s ability to innovate will be hampered by deep cultural forces.

Stuart Leslie, president of the New York design firm 4Sight, whose company does a lot of business in the Far East, agrees. “We hyperventilate about a lot of things at 4Sight, but not about China,” he says. As replicators, the Chinese can’t be beat, he says, noting factories he’s toured that were crammed with machines knocked-off from those installed earlier by joint venture partners. A legal system that protects intellectual property is essential for an entrepreneurial culture to develop, he points out, and the Chinese government has been slow to adopt those reforms.

As innovators, Leslie also feels the country’s workforce is constrained by its lack of access to other cultures’ best work. “Creativity requires stimulation,” he says. “You have to fertilize it for it to blossom. Because China makes it difficult for other countries to sell their goods, Chinese designers aren’t being exposed to a wide range of options. The creatives who should be evolving, aren’t.”

Plus, he says, innovation can be messy, non-linear, and not polite. “Innovation is not the path of least resistance,” he says. “It often requires confrontation. Chinese workers have been taught not to confront, to go along as a group. Innovation needs the individual who thinks he’s smarter.”

All these things may change as more Chinese students are allowed to study in the West, or attend Western universities that have set up programs in China. But once these students get into the workforce, they may still find daunting cultural hurdles, says Altman. “These programs might help to bring creative thinking to young Chinese, but there’s still a question mark as to how much they’ll be able to follow through under the current Chinese system, where the best students are mostly groomed for top positions in hierarchical companies or the Communist party. Some of the most dissatisfied students are the ones who have studied outside China and then come back.”

via fastcodesign.com

http://jantervonen.com/china-knows-it-must-innovate-but-can-it

Creating Custom-Made Success

Walk into any 7-Eleven store in Japan, and you'll see shelves and shelves of noodles--much like you would see shelves devoted to soda in a store in the U.S. Noodles are a lucrative business in Japan and they have spawned thousands of well-known brands. Recently, however, a new packaging trend has emerged in noodle marketing, and it might very well redefine the entire fast-moving consumer goods category.

This is what's happening. There are hundreds of thousands of noodle packs on supermarket shelves, each one featuring a portrait. The portrait is not of just anyone, but rather it features a recognizable local chef. What's more, the noodles take their name from the chef's restaurant and the whole pack is styled around the restaurant's identifying colors and typography.

You would be forgiven for thinking that the popular television program Celebrity Chef has taken over the noodle business, but I'm not talking about a handful of cooking maestros. No, what I'm referring to is a very large group of thousands of celebrity chefs. Surprisingly, food corporations are no longer using their own brand names. Instead they have chosen to represent the many different brands of small neighborhood restaurants.

Since noodles are to the East what sandwiches are to the West, thousands of noodle restaurants have over the years developed their own clientele. In addition to the way the noodles taste, the way they are prepared and served also helps create a loyal following amongst the locals. These regular noodle-eaters have no trouble distinguishing noodles from restaurants a few blocks apart. The connoisseurs are equally adept at recognizing a rice noodle from a buckwheat noodle from a potato noodle.

It was this loyalty that a large food manufacturer sought to harness, and affix to their own declining national brand. The company sent out teams to speak to many thousands of local noodle restaurants in Tokyo and Osaka. They convinced the chefs to share their recipes. In exchange, the manufacturer packaged and personally branded the restaurants' noodles with their name and a picture of their chef.

With the help of the manufacturer, many of these small restaurants have now become national brands. They now have their own merchandising line, nationwide distribution, and of course, whatever notoriety that comes with it. Now every restaurateur has potentially millions of customers, even if their 20-seat establishment can't physically serve them. In theory, every consumer has access to even the smallest of restaurants tucked away in the most inaccessible alleyways.

This trend in Japan is at least one step ahead of the most advanced customized brands in the world--names such as Nike, BMW, and Lego. With their concepts DreamtByMe, BuiltByMe, and DesignByMe, Lego has created products that can be individually designed by the customer. Using downloadable Lego software, customers specify their own kit and design the container that will arrive at their front door.

Keeping the Japanese noodle model in mind, it's easy to see how the most popular online Lego designs soon make their way to the retail store. One can only imagine the pride that comes from designing a Lego item online that finds its way into an offline store. You could take this one step further. Why not put an image of the kid who designed it on the box, and name it after them? That would make Lego the first toy company in the world to brand individual kids, and fully embrace them into the Lego family. Imagine how Twitter and Facebook would ignite with the intricate details of such an event.

Perhaps this sounds like I'm getting a little ahead of myself, a bit pie in the sky ... but just possibly you've had a glimpse into a future, a place where the brands of tomorrow will all be personally customized. Let us not forget that there's a whole new generation of consumers emerging who takes it for granted that everyone of a certain age has a personal page on Facebook. This same generation has grown up with brands like Jones Soda who made it possible for kids to have their own label designed for the sodas they'd have at a party. Not to forget NikeID--"You design it. We build it"--was introduced nearly 10 years ago. It allowed the consumer to customize their sports shoe by selecting materials, colors, and peculiarities of fit.

The notion of personally customized brands is beginning to take hold, and the next step along this trajectory seems blindingly obvious. In an environment where the consumer has become more powerful than the brand, and a single consumer disaster can imperil the revenue of an entire company, smart brands out there will systematically align themselves with the consumer.

Companies will embrace their most loyal fans by giving them a real sense of ownership. The Coca-Cola Company did something similar with Vitaminwater. They began by giving ownership to a carefully selected group of celebrities, including Ellen DeGeneres. This ownership is no longer confined to a small group of celebrities. Every Vitaminwater customer has the potential to claim that right.

After all, if a company can enlist the help of its most loyal fans to build their brand, why not introduce payment for the service? It's not likely to ever match the cost of a conventional marketing spend, and the message would be on target to those most receptive. Only one question remains. Who has the courage to take that big step and fully hand over the ownership of the brand to consumers? It's just a matter of time, but once it happens the brand landscape will shift irreversibly.

via fastcompany.com

http://jantervonen.com/creating-custom-made-success

Five Myths About Pro Bono Design

The author of The Power of Pro Bono debunks the common assumptions about this virtuous work, starting with the meaning of the term.

Earlier this year, Co.Design published a provocative, sometimes comical, and overall insightful infographic by Jessica Hische, “Designers, Should You Work for Free?” The dizzyingly intricate flowchart immediately went viral among designers, as it perfectly encapsulated the ambivalence and frustration so many feel about being repeatedly asked to do friends a solid without any compensation, at best, and without any consideration as to how much time and energy good design actually takes, at worst. It also used a common catchphrase that often gets bandied about in the design world (and beyond): pro bono.

What constitutes “good,” much less “the public good”?

The problem is that the pro bono is used without much context and, too often, without real accuracy. That's a shame, since pro bono design is one of the ways practitioners can have a more powerful impact on their communities and abroad. Pro bono shouldn't be viewed as troublesome work that one performs for free but rather an opportunity to channel one's skills into a rewarding project that stands to benefit a whole host of people, even you, the designer.

In order to hone the definition of pro bono, I thought I’d explain what it isn’t. Here, I debunk the five big myths about pro bono design.

Myth #1: Pro bono design means free design.

Contrary to popular perception, pro bono doesn’t mean for free. Its literal Latin translation is “for good,” shorthand for pro bono publico, “for the good of the public.” (The accurate Latin phrase for “free” is gratis.) All that said, pro bono work usually involves professionals reducing or entirely waiving their fees, hence the confusion, but the focus remains on work for the public good.

Of course, it’s worth asking: What constitutes “good,” much less “the public good”? The 501(c)(3) designation conferred on nonprofits is but one reliable baseline to determine worthy pro bono beneficiaries, even if not all nonprofits are equally in need; some boast huge endowments and can easily afford to pay designers. Most nonprofits, however, would never otherwise have access to professional design services, making pro bono appropriate--and even essential. For some, it may just be a cause or social issue that resonates with them. Ultimately, designers get to make the call.

Myth #2: Pro bono design produces sub-par results.

A funny thing happened when I published my book, The Power of Pro Bono. Thumbing through the pages, people would frequently exclaim, “Well, these don’t look like pro bono projects!” as if there was an aesthetic quality they expect of pro bono design projects to lack. In fact, pro bono projects have won, and will no doubt continue to win, many of the same awards that professional designers and firms vie for each year.

The only thing worse than such an expectation of sub-par design is the frequent suggestion or implication in the social sector itself that nonprofits can’t or shouldn’t look good. It’s a worry that I hear from even the most sophisticated of nonprofits--to the effect of ”Funders will think we don’t need their support if we look too good.” It’s hard to imagine any other setting--a library, museum, or even an office building -- that would conjure up the same fear.

Myth #3: Pro bono clients aren’t as sophisticated as paying clients.

There’s a saying that the only thing more important than good designers are good clients. For fee-generating and pro bono clients alike, it can be an entirely new or even a once-in-a-lifetime experience to undertake a design project, so designers are understandably cautious about the clients they take on. In designers’ eyes, pro bono clients have an additional liability: they’re perceived as somehow less sophisticated than “regular” clients.

Payoffs for pro bono projects are not insignificant.

Some architects have gone so far as to suggest that they should be indemnified by pro bono clients, since they’re reducing or waiving their fees. They fail to recognize that their professional standard of care as well as their liability insurance are assets they bring to the table. The point is largely moot, at least among architects, as the biggest insurance companies have clear provisions for pro bono work. They base their premiums on fees, so when there are little or no fees, there’s little or no cost for coverage.

Myth #4: Pro bono clients should take what they can get.

There’s a perception that nonprofits should be happy with student labor, donated office space, furniture, and even old, outdated computers. In some cases, such donations fill a crucial void and go to good use. In other cases, they cause more headaches than they’re worth and hinder organizations.

It raises the question: Shouldn’t nonprofit headquarters that are providing crucial social services to populations in deep need be well-outfitted spaces? It wouldn’t cross our minds to suggest that any other type of business be equipped with inevitably rickety Ikea furniture and mismatched castoffs.

Myth #5: Pro bono work only benefits the clients.

The benefit to clients, communities, and the public aside, the payoffs of such pro bono projects are not insignificant for designers and firms. One well-known architect I interviewed said, “Pro bono projects influence the culture of our office; there’s no way you can put a value on it.” Other architects and designers speak with enthusiasm about the very real and invaluable benefits of their pro bono service.

For some, it’s a creative outlet that’s distinct from their day-to-day work. For others, in boom times and slow times alike, pro bono projects help with recruitment and retention of employees. Still, for others, it’s a sense of purpose and fulfillment that easily outweighs the investment. To that end, the venerable Paula Scher of Pentagram once told me: “My pro bono projects are my favorite projects.”

via fastcodesign.com

http://jantervonen.com/five-myths-about-pro-bono-design

Unofficial Angry Birds theme park in China

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Angry Birds, the popular puzzle video game created by Finnish developers Rovio Mobile, has spawned a somewhat unexpected (and definitely unofficial) theme park. The physical 'real life' Angry Birds attraction, located at the Window of the World public park in Changsha, Hunan province of China. Rumors have swirled for months that a themed Angry Birds offshoot would be announced by Disney or Six Flags, but this is likely not what the makers, and investors, had envisioned.

The game itself, first released exclusively on the Apple mobile line in 2009, has moved on to platforms like Android, Apple and Microsoft Windows desktop environments, and appeared on consoles such as the Playstation 3, Playstation Portable, and Roku 2. There are currently four different versions of Angry Birds available, with others planned on additional platforms such as the Nintendo Wii and Microsoft Xbox 360.

According to the developer, more than 40 million users play a version of Angry Birds every month. The game has been downloaded millions of times from the Apple and Android marketplaces, making the title a 2010 runaway hit and attracting the attention of such monolith video game institutions like Electronic Arts. Additionally, Rovio has raised $42 million in funding with the help of Nicolas Zenstromm (Skype founder) and Accell Partners, the Facebook investor group.

via sandiego.com

http://jantervonen.com/unofficial-angry-birds-theme-park-in-china

Stunning volcanoes seen from space by NASA and the International Space Station

A SERIES of breath-taking aerial shots of some of the world's most famous, and notorious, volcanoes have been captured from space.

The US-operated GeoEye-1 satellite and the International Space Station were able to take the spectacular images.

Cleveland Volcano. Picture: Courtesy NASA Earth Observatory.

Cleveland Volcano, above, situated on the western half of Chuginadak Island, is one of the most active of the volcanoes in the Aleutian Islands, which extend west-south-west from the Alaska mainland. Here it is seen erupting in 2006.

Manam Volcano. Picture: Courtesy NASA Earth Observatory.

Papua New Guinea's Manam Volcano, 13km off the coast of the mainland, was snapped releasing a thin plume of smoke as clouds clustered near the summit in 2006. Both of the volcano's summit craters are active.

The striking image below shows Soufriere Hills Volcano in Montserrat in March 2007. The red areas are vegetated, the clouds are white and the blue/black areas are ocean water. Soufriere Hills erupted again in February 2010.

Soufriere Hills Volcano. Picture: Courtesy NASA Earth Observatory.

The amazing Sarychev Volcano in Russia, below, is snapped here in an early stage of an eruption in 2009. The plume gives the steam a bubble-like mushroom cloud appearance.

Amazing Sarychev Volcano. Picture: Couirtesy NASA Earth Observatory.

Since it began erupting on June 12, 2011, emissions from Eritrea's Nabro Volcano have drifted over much of East Africa and the Middle East. Ash has displaced residents living near the volcano and disrupted flights in the region.

 Nabro Volcano. Picture: Courtesy NASA Earth Observatory.

Despite the volcano's widespread effects, little is known about the eruption. Nabro is located in an isolated region along the border between Eritrea and Ethiopia, and few English-language reports have been published. Satellite remote sensing is currently the only reliable way to monitor the ongoing eruption.

Klyuchevskaya Volcano. Picture: Courtesy NASA Earth Observatory.

Klyuchevskaya Volcano resumed erupting after a respite of less than a month in late November 2010. It is located in the Kamchatka Peninsula of Russia, an area known for its high levels of volcanic activity. 

http://jantervonen.com/stunning-volcanoes-seen-from-space-by-nasa-an

BHUTAN'S SMOKERS FACE HEAVY CRIMINAL CHARGES

http://jantervonen.com/bhutans-smokers-face-heavy-criminal-charges

Carol Bartz: Yahoo Called And Fired Me

Carol Bartz just confirmed she's been fired from her position as CEO of Yahoo over the phone (how cold). The short announcement was sent via email from her iPad:

To all,
I am very sad to tell you that I've just been fired over the phone by Yahoo's Chairman of the Board. It has been my pleasure to work with all of you and I wish you only the best going forward.

Carol
Sent from my iPad

[Techcrunch]

http://jantervonen.com/carol-bartz-yahoo-called-and-fired-me

Jeb Corliss " Grinding The Crack"

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http://jantervonen.com/jeb-corliss-grinding-the-crack

Want To Win The Talent War In Emerging Markets? Start Recruiting Women | Fast Company

In the three years since  Goldman Sachs launched its business in Brazil, growth has exceeded all expectations. Head count in the São Paulo headquarters has grown from 25 to 250, and Valentino Carlotti, president of Goldman Sachs Bank in Brazil, predicts it will double again in the next two to three years. So what concerns him?

"The growth opportunity is huge,” says Carlotti. "We expect Brazil to become a major contributor to the revenue generation of the firm. But we can’t get that done without attracting and retaining great talent." Right now, that’s a challenge for Carlotti, who often finds himself playing musical chairs with other firms for in-demand homegrown high performers. Despite the depth of Goldman’s bench in developed countries, Carlotti doesn’t want to principally rely on expats from the United States or Europe. “Given what has shaped this market, local talent is very sophisticated, very savvy, and, in many ways, more creative and innovative.” A shortage of local talent, he fears, could “impact the growth.”

Carlotti’s concerns are shared by corporate leaders and talent managers throughout the emerging world, where finding, keeping, and maximizing top talent is more than an important issue: for many organizations, it’s now an urgent imperative.

With Western countries already weakened by a deep recession, multinational corporations from all countries are pinning their hopes for future growth on developing markets. The four largest of these—Brazil, Russia, India, and China, the so-called BRIC nations—together represent 40  percent of the world’s population and have accounted for some 45  percent of global growth since 2007, compared with 20 percent from G-7 economies.

Among burgeoning economies, the dynamic BRIC markets stand out for the speed of their growth and their long-term potential. Their increasing prominence on the global stage is beginning to reshape the way the world does business. Even as Western Europe and the United States struggle to emerge from the recession, the BRICs have remained remarkably resilient. Indeed, in the eyes of many economists, the BRIC markets are actually leading the global recovery.

Yet there is a critical obstacle to their continued expansion: a cutthroat war for high-echelon talent. A dearth of top talent is often cited as the biggest single barrier to company growth in emerging markets. To meet the talent shortage, multinational corporations have long followed the same well-trodden path: sending homegrown managers overseas, looking for (mostly male) foreign nationals educated in North American and European universities, or, as Carlotti says, “playing musical chairs” with top-quality local talent. All of these options are problematic given the rapid and sustained growth in these new markets. Corporations know they need to get off the beaten path to find and develop a new wellspring of human capital. But they haven’t known where to look.

In fact, the answer is hiding in plain sight: large numbers of university-educated women pour into the high echelon job market in the BRIC countries every year. In 2008 alone, the most recent year for which figures for all four countries are available, the number of women in tertiary education programs topped 27 million, and the trend has continued upward in every reporting country.

These women are highly ambitious; they want to make the most of their credentials. According to research from the Center for Work-Life Policy, more than 80 percent of educated women in Brazil and India aspire to top jobs; in China, the figure is more than 75 percent. In comparison, a mere 52 percent of highly qualified women in the United States are shooting for top jobs.

What is the implication of these numbers? As we enter the second decade of the new millennium, the face of top talent in emerging economies is most likely to be that of a woman. This is a revolutionary thought that flies in the face of conventional wisdom. Observers in the West tend to see third world women as victims. In their recent best seller Half the Sky, Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, for instance, focus on illiteracy and oppression and point to micro credit as one of the few rays of hope for women in emerging markets.

In a similar vein, business leaders tend not to have women on their radar screen. Almost all multinational companies, whether they be headquartered in the United States or in China or India, hope to reap rich rewards in the BRIC geographies, but few recognize the crucial contributions that educated local women make in these markets. 

Fewer still understand the nature of this rich talent pool or know how to make the most of it. As a result, the brainpower that women from the BRIC countries bring to the workforce has been overlooked and underutilized.

The fact is that no company can afford to ignore highly qualified female talent if it wants to compete in these fast-expanding economies--and win. 

Educated women in emerging markets bring a keen sense of the consumer marketplace to their employers. When translating product development and marketing strategy into emerging markets, the mandate to “think globally and act locally” in pragmatic terms means “hire more women.” Lisandra Ambrozio, Pfizer’s human resources director in Brazil, doesn’t need convincing. “More than fifty percent of doctors here in Brazil are women. Seventy-five percent of the health decisions made in the family are made by women, not by men. We need to understand what is in the mind of a female doctor, or we need to better understand women, because they are the ones who make the health care decisions in a family.” She continues, “Gender diversity is not a social issue. It’s a business issue, not only for Pfizer but for each company in the market.”

Ambrozio’s comments are echoed by Hiroo Mirchandani, business unit director at Pfizer, India: “We know women are good at engaging customers, nurturing relationships, and communicating product features. Tapping in to this talent pool provides a competitive advantage.”

In the entrepreneurial economies of emerging markets, women are key to connecting with the main engine of growth: the small-to-medium business market. “The SMB market in emerging markets is the market,” explains Tracy Ann Curtis, Cisco Systems’ head of inclusion and diversity for Asia-Pacific and Japan. “It’s not the big enterprise market any longer. We’re servicing small entrepreneurial companies, and 33 percent of them in Asia are owned by women. If we want to sell into that market, we’ve got to understand who those women are and how they reflect on the marketplace.”

The diversity of thought, perspective, and experience that educated women add to any organization is multiplied in developing markets. Because of the obstacles they’ve often had to overcome, they bring a determination and a “can do, leave no stone unturned, we’ll find a way” approach to coming up with solutions, says Goldman Sachs’s Carlotti. When they solve problems, it sends a signal of “openness, creativity, forward thinking, and an innovative approach” to potential hires as well as clients. He concludes, “For me, when you look at who’s coming into the workforce and what they can mean for the development of human capital, it’s a no-brainer that women are a competitive advantage.”

Reprinted by permission of Harvard Business Review Press. Excerpted from Winning the War for Talent in Emerging Markets: Why Women are the Solution. Copyright 2011 Sylvia Ann Hewlett and Ripa Rashid. All rights reserved.

[Image: Flickr user liannes ibanez cubanita]

via fastcompany.com

http://jantervonen.com/want-to-win-the-talent-war-in-emerging-market

2011's Top Do-Good Design: Yves Béhar's Glasses For The Poor

For the second time, San Francisco industrial designer Yves Béhar has won the INDEX Award, a 100,000 Euro prize given to five life-improving design projects by a Danish nonprofit. This year, Béhar's program "See Better to Learn Better," a system for delivering attractive, affordable eyeglasses to school-age children, has been presented with one of the awards. Béhar previously won for the One Laptop Per Child XO computer in 2007.

Béhar's team at his firm fuseproject partnered with nonprofit Verbien, Mexican company Augen, and the Mexican government on the eyewear project, which launched in 2010. Due to the high price and social stigma of wearing glasses, many Mexican students were not receiving the eye care they needed, causing them to fall behind at school. With the See Better to Learn Better program, students are given an eye exam, then those who need glasses are encouraged to build their own frames from a library of unique colors, shapes, and sizes, which are manufactured locally. According to Augen, more than 500,000 kids have received optometric care and more than 358,000 kids received donated frames and lenses. In the next school year, they estimate more than 240,000 kids and 20,000 adults will receive glasses.

With the winnings, Béhar plans to expand See Better to Learn Better to other locations, including a pilot program in Indonesia with the Sumba Foundation and another project that will take place in San Francisco in partnership with the nonprofit Tipping Point. Béhar cautions that providing proper eye care to young people is not an issue relegated to impoverished nations. "The need is everywhere, in both developing countries and the developed ones," Béhar tells Co.Design. "Getting over the stigma that kids feel when having to wear glasses is something that design, participation, and choice can do."

Béhar plans to expand See Better to Learn Better to other locations.

In fact, Béhar sees correcting vision as a vital global issue that could radically improve the state of the planet, akin to eradicating a disease. "500,000 new kids entering school every year in Mexico need eyeglasses. Now let’s multiply this number by every country, and the numbers are staggering," he says. "That such a minute investment can change the education level of a population is a no-brainer to governments everywhere. For less than $10 -- the cost of the eye exam, custom lenses, frames, and shipping -- a child’s education level can change radically." In fact, according to a study by the University of Aguascalientes, a child that receives lenses immediately improves their reading and comprehension by 100%.

If Béhar's track record with his last INDEX award is any indication, See Better to Learn Better will be a success. After winning the INDEX award for the One Laptop Per Child Project, OLPC has distributed three million laptops to children -- in some countries like Uruguay, every child between 6 and 18 years is using one.

Like the effect that OLPC has had on education in developing nations, Béhar can see a similar kind of transformation for students who receive glasses. "In one case, there was a girl that was about to be taken out of school due to poor performance," he says. "She had been checked by doctors for extreme headaches, had a CAT scan, as well as other tests. In the end, it turned out all she needed was lenses."

via fastcodesign.com

http://jantervonen.com/2011s-top-do-good-design-yves-behars-glasses

How People Have Visualized The Mind Throughout History

Meta brain freeze alert!

It’s easy to take for granted in our medically enlightened era that once upon a time people had no idea what the mind looked like. We’re not just talking about gray matter and frontal lobes and all that junk. We’re talking about thought. Thanks to technology like fMRIs and electroencephalography, we can actually watch ourselves think. Our predecessors, on the other hand, had to use their good old-fashioned imaginations.

The drawings, paintings, and diagrams they produced as a result form the backbone of a new exhibit at the Deutsches Hygiene-Museum in Dresden, Germany. Images of the Mind in Art and Science zeroes in on how humans have represented all things cerebral throughout more than 400 years of history. It includes everything from medieval manuscripts and anatomical drawings by Leonardo da Vinci to probing psychological portraits by Rembrandt and Max Beckmann to modern-day fMRIs and maps of monkey neurons. The point: To create an immersive environment in which visitors accompany artists and scientists “in their bid to chart and explore the inner continents that lie within the human being.”

Heavy stuff. But also endlessly fascinating, and the exhibit does a good job of covering all the bases: A section dedicated to “metaphors of the mind” shows a 1470 drawing of a nun’s heart represented as a house alongside an excerpt from The Matrix. Another section, “depictions of mental states,” gives us phrenology alongside Evward Munch.

There’s so much variety here, you start to wonder: What are all those slick computer-generated brain scans saying, anyway? They’re biologically accurate, sure, but do they tell us about the fuzzier aspects of the mind any more than, say, one of Munch’s angsty woodcuts?

The answer is right there in the exhibit. One of the pieces, a video (above) by neuroscientist Daniel Margulies and art curator Chris Sharp, features the fMRI of a test subject who's listening to Igor Stravinsky’s "The Rite of Spring." (Moments earlier, he had been asked to reflect on a passage from Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgement.) The kaleidoscopic patterns show his brain activity. It’s fun to watch. And if you know anything about neuroanatomy, maybe you can even try to guess which parts of his noggin were dancing along to the music (or thinking deep thoughts about Kant). But it doesn’t tell us anything about how he felt. It's the difference between looking at a doppler weather map and actually standing in the middle of a storm. As the exhibit catalog points out: “The work playfully underscores the impossibility of modern imaging methods to capture subjective experience.” For that, I guess we still need art.

via fastcodesign.com

http://jantervonen.com/how-people-have-visualized-the-mind-throughou