If you want to understand the future, don’t pay attention to how technology is changing, pay attention to how childhood is changing.
[Steve Jobs’] role isn’t that of a designer, but rather Chief Design Advocate. This means:
- he makes it clear that products should be “insanely great”
- he recruits a top design team, and protects them from competing goals
- he is willing to spend money, adjust technology processes, all for the goal of highly desirable products
- he convinces financial analysts, industry pundits, etc. that product design is very important.To me, the amazing part about this is: Any company can do it. Maybe not as good as Jobs, but they can decide to make it a priority – but few companies do. With the pressure of quarterly earnings, what competitors are doing, and employee aspirational desires, the focus moves off of killer experiences for customers – that’s no good.
Does every startup need a Steve Jobs? | Andrew Chen (@andrew_chen)
Interesting point by Andrew. I also love the IDEO framework he talks about earlier in the post.
(via tylerhwillis)
“Keep Your Blood Vessels Young”
Advertising Agency: Draftfcb Hong Kong
Creative Directors: Raymond Chau, Sammy Law, Valeria Auyang,
Art Director / Illustrator: Wong Sum Foon
Copywriter: Calvin Chan
Published: September 2009
Absolutely awesome infographic produced by GE about the actual costs of common chronic diseases at various ages. This is the kind of information you as consumers need in order to understand how to best spend your healthcare dollars. Should you get a high deductible or a traditional plan? Is it better to pay more for a faceless entity to manage my healthcare usage or should I go out on my own and spend more out of pocket? Good questions…
Urban sprawl is not mindless at all. There is nothing inevitable about its development. Sprawl is the result of zoning laws designed by legislators, low-density buildings designed by developers, marketing strategies designed by ad agencies, tax breaks designed by economists, credit lines designed by banks, geomatics designed by retailers, data-mining software designed by hamburger chains, and automobiles designed by car designers. The interactions between all these systems and human behavior are complicated and hard to understand— but the policies themselves are not the result of chance. “Out of control” is an ideology, not a fact.
John Thackara, from In the Bubble: Designing in a Complex World
Owen, a staff writer for The New Yorker, makes a convincing case that Manhattan, Hong Kong and large, old European cities are inherently greener than less densely populated places because a higher percentage of their inhabitants walk, bike and use mass transit than drive; they share infrastructure and civic services more efficiently; they live in smaller spaces and use less energy to heat their homes (because those homes tend to share walls); and they’re less likely to accumulate a lot of large, energy-sucking appliances. People in cities use about half as much electricity as people who don’t, Owen reports, and the average New Yorker generates fewer greenhouse gases annually than “residents of any other American city, and less than 30 percent of the national average.”
We think of the environment in terms of sustainability. We need to also think about health and healthcare in terms of sustainability. If it is our social duty to protect the environment for future humans, isn’t it also our social duty to maximize our health given the excessively high cost of healthcare and the devastating effects expensive illnesses have on our economy and the financial livelihood of future generations?
The green movement is about environmental sustainability. The “healthcare movement” should be about financial sustainability.
