A More Resilient Species “A playful brain is a more adaptive brain,” writes ethologist Sergio Pellis in The Playful Brain: Venturing to the Limits of Neuroscience. In his studies, he found that play-deprived rats fared worse in stressful situations. In our own world filled with challenges ranging from cyber-warfare to infrastructure failure, could self-directed play be the best way to prepare ourselves to face them? In self-directed play, one structures and drives one’s own play. Self-directed play is experiential, voluntary, and guided by one’s curiosity. This is different from play that is guided by an adult or otherwise externally directed. A MacArthur Fellow told me that, when he was a teenager, his single mother would drop him off at an industrial supply store on Saturdays while she ran errands. Photo: Linda Stone. Play researchers’ findings indicate that self-directed play, for both children and adults, nourishes the human spirit and helps develop resilience, independence, and resourcefulness.
From Google And Berg, A Superb Concept For Better Video Chatting In early 2011, the world was a slightly different place. Google+ and Google Hangouts weren’t out yet. And during this brief window of time, Google Creative Lab brought on creative studio Berg to work on a device--a physical product “encapsulating Google voice/video chat services.” They called it the Connection Box, or Connbox for short. The entire story, diligently documented on Berg’s site, is a prolonged glimpse into the logical process behind cutting-edge industrial design. Berg started by asking “what materials make up video.” Around this time, Berg began challenging video-conferencing convention. Finally, they began prototyping the Connbox itself in a series of prototypes. The shame is, the project was scrapped before Berg finished.
The 12 Trends That Will Rule Products In 2013 Near the end of 2012, a group of us at Ziba got together to review what we’d learned over the course of the year. Working with dozens of clients who serve customers around the world, we designers spend a lot of time observing people as they interact with technology, services, and experiences, noticing how they seek solutions to everyday problems and make decisions. In the process, certain patterns emerge so forcefully that they’re practically unavoidable. Meeting over three sessions spread out over a week, 23 Zibites (designers, researchers, and creative directors) discussed the patterns we’d seen, and distilled them down to the 12 insights we thought were most current and useful, to us and to our clients. 1. Our understanding of how we decide has evolved dramatically over the past 20 years, and it paints a messy picture. Be okay with the chaos. 2. The crucial element in any customer experience is still people, no matter how much technology has transformed the landscape. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.
How To Tell If You're Creative (Hint: You Might Be A Bit Of A Jerk) Forget Myers-Briggs. A study out of BI Norwegian Business School has determined the signposts of a "creative" personality. Conducted by Professor Øyvind L. There are seven elements of a creative personality, so if you’re thinking about quitting your job as a lawyer or stock analyst to go on tour with your band or finally write that novel, you might want to consider the list below. You’re Creative If: Your Mind Has an Associative Orientation. You Hunger for Originality. You’re Highly Motivated. You’re Ambitious. You’re Flexible. You’re Emotionally Volatile. You’re a Pain in the Butt. Creativity Training Martinsen says that our personalities become fixed around the age of 25 or 30; if you’re inherently creative, you should know it--and display at least some of the seven tendencies-- by then. Environment can have a particularly strong influence on a person’s creative prowess. [Images Flickr users: Andy, Theilr, Patrick Denker, and Omer Wazir]
A scientific guide to saying "no": How to avoid temptation and distraction 2K Flares Filament.io 2K Flares × Learning how to say no is one of the most useful skills you can develop I found, especially when it comes to living a more productive and healthy life. Saying no to unnecessary commitments can give you the time you need to recover and rejuvenate. Saying no to daily distractions can give you the space you need to focus on what is important to you. And saying no to temptation can help you stay on track and achieve your health goals. In fact not being able to say no, is one of the most biggest downfalls that successful entrepreneurs claim as their own key mistakes. But how do we actually get past the urgencies of everyday life and avoid distraction, so that we can focus the things that are really important to us? It seems like a big task, I wholeheartedly agree. How to Say No: Research Reveals the Best Way In a research study published in the Journal of Consumer Research, 120 students were split into two different groups. Here’s what happened:
Why Innovation By Brainstorming Doesn't Work Eleven men and women file into a conference room and take their places around a large table. Coffee cups and pastries are assembled in front of them. George, the leader, steps up to a large whiteboard and scrawls across the top “SOAP STORM SESSION 9/18/12.” “Okay, let’s begin,” he tells the group. The meeting continues for about an hour, with more words and thoughts added. This scenario takes place every day in office suites around the world. The conventional wisdom that innovation can be institutionalized or done in a formal group is simply wrong. You can see this clearly from the responses to “clean laundry” in my example. As I said earlier, the team should have been given the day off to do laundry. This was a mega consumer insight. “The technology actually existed for the dissolvable laundry detergent package,” says Dropps’s Remy Wildrick, who calls herself the pragmatic side of Propper’s creative mind.
Free Desk Here: Connecting Creatives with Free Desk Space One of the best things about freelancing is the freedom of mobility it allows. Many freelancers can work wherever there is wi-fi and a desk. As this mobile freelance community grows, so to do the methods of connecting its members to workspaces around the world. Free Desk Here is an initiative that connects creatives with studios that can offer them free desk space. An offshoot of Open Studio Club, a platform for artists and designers to find interesting and affordable studio space, Free Desk Here fosters a spirit of collaboration by providing creatives a space to work on their own projects and by bringing fresh energy into studios. There are no strings attached; no expectations of creatives doing work for the studio. Get involved: Find a Free Desk Offer a Free Desk Find out More About Free Desk Here
A scientific guide to saying "no": How to avoid temptation and distraction 9.9K Flares Filament.io 9.9K Flares × Learning how to say no is one of the most useful skills you can develop I found, especially when it comes to living a more productive and healthy life. Saying no to unnecessary commitments can give you the time you need to recover and rejuvenate. But how do we actually get past the urgencies of everyday life and avoid distraction, so that we can focus the things that are really important to us? It seems like a big task, I wholeheartedly agree. How to Say No: Research Reveals the Best Way In a research study published in the Journal of Consumer Research, 120 students were split into two different groups. The difference between these two groups was saying “I can’t” compared to “I don’t.” One group was told that each time they were faced with a temptation, they would tell themselves “I can’t do X.” When the second group was faced with a temptation, they were told to say “I don’t do X.” Here’s what happened: Makes sense right?
3 outils pour mieux gérer ses données personnelles sur Facebook Entre les applications, le journal/timeline, la photo de couverture, le graph search, la localisation, les messages privés et les publicités ; les mises à jours officielles de Facebook s’enchainent et ne se ressemblent pas, à un détail près : toutes concernent l’accès à nos données personnelles. Evidemment, lors de toute mise à jour, le réseau social réadapte sa charte de confidentialité en conséquence, limitant ainsi toute réclamation des utilisateurs quant à la diffusion des données fournies par nos soins lors des inscriptions, publications, identifications et autres. Sauf qu’en 2007, apparaissait une problématique majeure qui ne cesse de hanter les utilisateurs: Facebook s’ouvre aux applications diverses ce qui augmente la notoriété du réseau social, et décuple en parallèle l’accès aux données personnelles. L’exemple le plus signifiant est l’application Take This Lollipop qui en 2011 a fait couler une certaine quantité d’encre numérique. App Advisor Et les applications dans tout ça ?
Creativity and Connectivity Key to Productive Workplace Kevin Kuske, Skipper and Chief Brand Anthropologist, turnstone , contributed this article to BusinessNewsDaily's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. Dare we finally say — 'the cubicle is dead?' Many have wanted to, but in the world of the entrepreneur it has finally met its match. Work is changing. The information age is giving away to what we like to call 'the networked age of distributed work'. Technology is fueling the ability to work anywhere. Co-creation is ascending as the new dominant model of innovation, creativity and differentiation. Coming together is important. As always, we see these societal, technological and cultural changes playing out faster in the world of entrepreneurs. It is also a critical part of how they fight for talent. As we studied highly effective and desirable entrepreneurial firms who are succeeding, we see them focusing on some common elements: Their personality comes through. This has led to the death of the working in a box.
How Serious Play Leads To Breakthrough Innovation The following is an excerpt from Creative Intelligence by Bruce Nussbaum (HarperBusiness), out March 5th. It took several hours, but Harry West and his team eventually reached a conclusion about their current challenge: Drinking was weird. West, the CEO of the Boston-based consultancy Continuum, had brought together a diverse group of his top people--collectively, they had degrees in packaging, design, business, engineering, human factors, and technology policy--to help redesign one of the greatest innovations in Swedish commercial history: the tetrahedron-shaped Tetra Paks now so common in Europe, Asia, and much of the world. Dr. After years of trying to fix the problem on their own, Tetra Pak’s executives contacted West for help. So West gathered together a team that had worked together before and trusted one another to be, well, a little nutty. The original Tetra Pak design from the 1950s. Play That Doesn’t Work When we play, we try things on and try things out. Planning For Play