The Urbanization Of China

China is pushing ahead with a sweeping plan to move 250 million rural residents into newly constructed towns and cities over the next dozen years — a transformative event that could set off a new wave of growth or saddle the country with problems for generations to come. The government, often by fiat, is replacing small rural homes with high-rises, paving over vast swaths of farmland and drastically altering the lives of rural dwellers. So large is the scale that the number of brand-new Chinese city dwellers will approach the total urban population of the United States — in a country already bursting with megacities.

via China’s Great Uprooting - Moving 250 Million Into Cities - NYTimes.com

China’s motivation is straightforward. Grow the economy. The intended and unintended consequences are inconceivable.

My only hope is that their success metrics position well-being equal to economic indicators. At the end of the day, it’s a design opportunity fraught with unprecedented sociological and anthropological implications. A macro level case study applicable to every effort of the urbanization of 7 billion people on the planet.

The Spaces That Shape Us

It’s comforting to believe that there’s an essential version of each of us — that good people behave well, bad people behave badly, and those tendencies reside within us. But the growing evidence suggests that, on some level, who we are — litterbug or good citizen, for example — changes from moment to moment, depending on where we happen to be.

These environmental cues can shape and reshape us as quickly as we walk from one part of the city to another.

Adam Alter, an assistant professor of marketing at New York University’s Stern School of Business, is the author of “Drunk Tank Pink: And Other Unexpected Forces That Shape How We Think, Feel, and Behave.”

via Where We Are Shapes Who We Are - NYTimes.com

We need to be more intentional about the common spaces we co-create because of the way they engage and disengage us. It’s a call for spaces that connect us in new conversations that make a difference.

Peace, 12 Notes At A Time

After days of being the target of tear gas and police water cannons, protesters in Gezi Park, in Taksim Square here, were tense on Wednesday night, girded for conflict. Instead they got a piano performance. Davide Martello, a German musician in the new age, Paul Winter mold, arrived with a three-man team, hauling a grand piano in a trailer. After unloading the instrument and placing it inside the entry to the park, he began to play.

People stopped to listen. The restless crowd began to calm and organize around Mr. Martello. Soon photos and videos of the performance were zinging around the globe, ending up on blogs, online news sites and Facebook pages.

via The Pianist Davide Martello Calms Istanbul Tensions - NYTimes.com

How is it that a single individual can, for 14 hours straight, transform a revolution with 12 notes?

“Police in the background and this grand piano in the middle,” said Zeynep Turkmen, a 24-year old protester who has been staying in the park for more than a week. “This guy is writing history here.”

Police officers, there to protect the nearby monument bearing the statue of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the secular Turkish Republic, joined the audience, resting on their riot shields.

Small acts, large dreams. That’s the formula for transformation.

The 100-year old company

The product is the current product, the culture is the next hundred products. via Evernote’s Quest To Become A 100-Year-Old Startup | Fast Company | Business + Innovation

This is Evernote CEO Phil Libin talking about their ambition to be a 100-year old startup, given that only a few thousand companies around today have sustained beyond 100 years.

Since its launch, I’ve considered it to be a must-have app that becomes your brain synchronized and organized. It’s truly an amazing tool for remembering, archiving, and sharing.

A startup is a mindset, so yes it can unfold indefinitely. Every company should follow or risk self-imposed irrelevance.

Authentic Customer Engagement

You’re a regular customer to many products and services. In the context of distinctions between regular and loyal customers, in how many of these relationships do you feel engaged as a user? What would invite more engagement beyond being asked for money, feedback, returns, and referrals? What would authentic engagement look like?

Getting Beyond Old Regional Conversations

I live in a region, one of too many, where old conversations of “priorities"continue to keep people stuck together. Aside from the fact that they are usually deficiency rather than abundance based, these debates are marketed as crucial and compelling. Under the veneer of hand-wringing consternation is the desire of institutions and investors to figure out how they can build their kingdoms of wealth and power.

Civic deliberations pay lip service to authentic empathy and engagement. It might take grass roots and networks efforts to introduce these into the culture. We don’t need to divide people by prioritizations. It can be a both-and transformation.

Breathing Buildings

Rather than just being places to work, eat, and be entertained, buildings of the future might be used for “systemic” roles: say, generating power, or reusing garbage. Or, as in the designs here–cleaning up the air.

Over the past few months, five teams at University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate Design School have been imagining buildings that act as “urban lungs,” alongside their traditional functions. The brief asked the students to consider a specific site–an unused plot of land near Manhattan’s Holland Tunnel. The area has heavy traffic–much of it idling for long periods–and the air is thick with pollutants.

“As a research studio, we were interested in the possible future of buildings as large scalable environmental systems, a kind of socio-technical environmental infrastructure,” says Shawn Rickenbacker, who oversaw the project.

via 1 | 5 Imaginative Buildings That Breathe Pollution And Clean The Air | Co.Exist: World changing ideas and innovation

Using methods from mechanical pressure systems and algae photosynthesis ecosystems, new buildings can scrub carbon dense urban environments.

The question is will this inspire or excuse pollution creating vehicle makers?

Making A Difference In Mexico

In recent work with the top new graduates across Mexico in Mexico City, I found exciting receptivity to making social differences in their country. It helps that their school, Tecnologico de Monterrey, has a bias for community-engaged experiential learning. Pedagogy matters.

Meditation For Well-Being

A new study now details the mechanism behind mindfulness meditation, which has previously been unclear, to find that anxiety levels could fall to as much as 39 percent.

via Brain Scans Reveal Modern Meditation Can Stop Everyday Worries; Lowers Anxiety By 39% : Healthy Living : Medical Daily

This from Fadel Zeidan, lead author and postdoctoral research fellow in neurobiology and anatomy at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center.

Think of the implications for well-being indicators. Why should any education context or company not make meditation classes part of its offerings?

@

When Twitter first launched in 2006, the service’s modus operandi was to offer a blogging platform tiny enough that it could be done by mobile (dumb) phones. The 140-character limit Twitter imposes upon tweets to this day is a relic from this time, in which any tweet needed to be short enough that it could squeeze inside a 160-character SMS text message. Consequently, Twitter was much more no-frills back then than it is now. In fact, when the service launched, it didn’t even have a reply mechanism. If you wanted to reply to someone’s tweet, you just sort of responded into the ether in any way you hoped might catch another user’s attention.

The @ symbol’s adoption as Twitter’s accepted reply mechanism happened organically, and took about eight months. The first use of an @ reply can be traced to Thanksgiving Day, 2006, when a couple of Yahoo UK programmers named Ben Darlow and Neil Crosby started using it (as they wrote at the time) as a “pseudo-syntax to let a Follower on twitter know that you’re directing a comment at them.” Just two months later, the @ reply was the universal Twitter reply mechanism, and now, you can type @ and follow it with the name of pretty much anyone on any social network to direct a reply to them.

via The Unlikely Evolution Of The @ Symbol | Co.Design: business + innovation + design

It's interesting how many social innovations have simple origins. It gives hope for more.

The Failure Of Leadership

The way we lead people in America is failing.

That’s the only reasonable conclusion to be drawn from Gallup’s “State of the American Workplace” report being released this month.

Over the past year, Gallup researchers interviewed nearly 150,000 workers–people in all states and industries–and discovered that a stunning number are miserable in their jobs. More specifically, only 30% of the nation’s working population today admits to being fully engaged at work. While Gallup encouragingly notes that there’s been a slight improvement to engagement since the Great Recession, it’s hard to cheer when you realize 52% of Americans admit to being disengaged in their jobs, and another 18% to being actively disengaged.

To fully comprehend these grim stats, imagine a crew team out on the Potomac River where three people are rowing their hearts out, five are taking in the scenery, and two are trying to sink the boat. It’s hard to conceive how businesses can thrive when so few people are working to move it forward.

via Gallup’s Workplace Jedi On How To Fix Our Employee Engagement Problem | Fast Company | Business + Innovation

Most leaders I talk with are illiterate when it comes to how to assess of and build a team and organization of high engagement. The good news: they can learn.

The Empathy Imperative

What’s the crucial career strength that employers everywhere are seeking – even though hardly anyone is talking about it? A great way to find out is by studying this list of fast-growing occupations, as compiled by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Sports coaches and fitness trainers. Massage therapists, registered nurses and physical therapists. School psychologists, music tutors, preschool teachers and speech-language pathologists. Personal financial planners, chauffeurs and private detectives. These are among the fields expected to employ at least 20% more people in the U.S. by 2020.

Did you notice the common thread? Every one of these jobs is all about empathy.

via The Number One Job Skill in 2020 | LinkedIn

So, empathy should be a prime assessment in job hirings and training, performance reviews, and higher education graduation competency requirements. Why not?

Fixing Medicine

It is now largely known that the big pharmas wield irresistible influence over how physicians prescribe. In a system of not so clandestine bribery and “research” validations for pharmaceutical biases, patients are relegated to over-priced and not best practices.

The nation’s $325 billion prescription-drug market offers an enormous incentive to develop and disseminate information lauding the presumed virtues of costly new medications, but there is much less muscle behind efforts to encourage the use of established, off-patent drugs, even when the weight of evidence and experience recommends them.

At the same time, the medical literature is rich with superbly conducted trials and thoughtful, balanced clinical guidelines. For a physician, trying to process this rush of inputs can feel like drinking from a fire hose into which someone occasionally squirts a stream of arsenic. Imagine Stendhal on acid.

To address this problem, which affects the care of every patient in the nation, several groups — including the Institute of Medicine, the American College of Physicians and the Cochrane Collaboration, an international network of experts that evaluates clinical research — serve a “curation” role for medical knowledge. As the evidence base becomes ever larger and more contentious, this honest-broker synthesizing function becomes increasingly important.

via Healing the Overwhelmed Physician - NYTimes.com

Thanks, Jack

The A, B, C's of Creativity

The rock star design firm IDEO’s CEO Tim Brown outlines three success factors in any creative endeavor. Ideo’s 3 Steps To A More Open, Innovative Mind | Fast Company | Business + Innovation He suggests that curiosity, empathy, and beginner’s mind make the difference. These are complements rather than substitutes for subject matter expertise. Interestingly, most innovators are actually not experts in their contexts of innovation.

Socially Smart Cities

In the NY Times this weekend, urban planning and design writer Alec Appelbaum argues that cities need a blended approach of high tech and high touch to address well-being indicators. The Limits of Big Data in the Big City - NYTimes.com

The digitally smart city movement is making significant gains in safety and services and profits to tech companies like IBM and Cisco. In the meantime, socially smart cities are using the accessible free options like emails, Google Drive (docs) and live gatherings for the same purposes, and with the additional benefits of community building.

An important design consideration in the democratization of engaged citizenship.

Thanks, Jack

Digital & Print

No one knows the fate of reading media after more people migrate, or at less attempt to migrate, from print to digital. I suspect some people will circle back to a balance or return to print as prime. Print is still fairly portable if you’re only reading one or two things at a time. Those of us who daily peruse and consume across scores of sources would need a wagon to haul the ever-churning load.

Yogi Berra’s wisdom comes into play: when you get to the fork in the road, take it.

Indeed.

The Art Student Asset

Every year, every community and region graduates more creative students in art, music, dance, writing, photography, film, and design. Every year, people should come together to talk about how the could best engage, support, and access each new year’s harvest of talent, energy, and perspective. Make it a pot luck. Showcase work. How hard is that? How amazing would that be?

Alternative Economies & Peace

I’m doing some writing for the new book on peace. It’s an odd topic interestingly enough, not as straightforward as it sounds. It is a theme punished by lip service especially in political realms. It’s easy for some to idealize and romanticize about peace. The reality is that there are more people than you would imagine who make a lot of money and stay rich from war. They are as cut-throat about it (pun pardoned) as one would expect any Wall Street shark to be: profits over people and planet, and peace.

This is precisely why any chance of each anywhere is in the building of alternative economies. It is far more difficult, strategic and innovation intensive work than the barbaric acts of war. To that, education must be focused.

Sears: Growth as reuse

Sears Holdings is converting old Sears and Kmart properties into much needed data storage centers.

The department store chain owns 25 million square feet of space across 3,200 properties, with a store located within 10 miles of 71 percent of the U.S. population. With the formation of a new subsidiary, Ubiquity Holdings, Sears is seeking to outfit stores with racks of servers, forests of wireless towers on the rooftops leased to cell phone carriers, and in some cases, “business continuity facilities.” This is an emerging industry, providing temporary centers of operations and data recovery services for businesses that are forced out of their offices by a natural disaster or other disruption.

via Sears Turning Old Department Stores Into Data Centers | Fast Company | Business + Innovation

A good example of reuse.

Gender Pay Equality

It continues to be insane that we would still be tracking which US cities are paying women gender equivalent wages. Among the better cities in this category are Napa CA, Chapel Hill NC, Washington DC, San Francisco CA, Austin TX, Madison WI, and Dallas-Ft. Worth TX.

The Best U.S Cities For Working Women | Co.Exist: World changing ideas and innovationwomen)

Ideological and sociopolitical implications aside, the practical reality is that organizations leveling pay would need to reduce profits or workforce numbers to compensate accordingly. That would be the costs of doing business from a position of social integrity.

Organizations with pay equities need to do a better job of building that story into their brands.