11 November 2014
One of the joys of being out in the wild is that I meet a wider variety of people and learn more – and from a different perspective. Several recent conversations have caused a number of ideas I have run into over my career to converge. The final trigger was a presentation on “subtractive” manufacturing – it was about advanced machine tools. That we have to rename the past to accommodate a potential future struck me as worth thinking about.
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15 September 2014
I was speaking at the Ambient Assisted Living Forum in Bucharest recently and was wondering how add an extra 10 or so minutes to the Epidemiology of Innovation talk that I had been invited to present to fill my allotted time slot. A quick conversation with my 87-year-old Mother gave me all the information I needed, but I had to reach back to one of my first encounters I had with the dark arts of marketing to give her story a framework. The challenge as I understand it was of layered customers and choice editing.
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06 November 2013
It’s one of those issues that seem to have come up again and again recently. People using the same word to mean different things. The meaning each of us imbeds in a word is a product of our education and experience. At the #ScienceMeetsDesign event the other evening, we had several attempts at defining some important words in our own way. That left me thinking about what the actual definitions are. So I looked them up:-
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31 July 2013
I should get the declaration of interests out of the way first. I am a physical sciences geek. As a child I took things to pieces – and occasionally put them back together again. I read science books. I was given endless “science project” birthday and Christmas presents. I trained as a scientist and got my first job as a scientist in industry. Over time, I have added a veneer of being a businessman, but I cannot walk past a cool piece of technology without trying to work out how it works – although the impulse to exploit it comes a close second.
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15 February 2009
For some time now, we have been working with the Design Council to try to find a way to build a greater element of “design thinking” into the front end of our programmes and projects. It is not that design is left out of many of the activities we support, but the systematic evaluation of the whole process before things happen was not encouraged by the timescales we used to use, and the expedient behaviour of many business technologists (and I include me in my previous life here) meant that often design got left until the back end of the process and failed to realise its potential contribution. The challenge for us is to get those on the scientific and technological side of the house see what the more creative side can do for them by involving them earlier in their thoughts.
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06 July 2008
It must be that time of year, but I have spent 2 evenings at the Royal College of Art. They set other events in the context of their end of year SHOW – I say that because it says SHOW in 20 ft high letters outside the RCA as you turn up.
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