Dashboards, simplified

DETROIT — The engineers working on Honda’s new Acura MDX luxury sport utility vehicle were obsessed with giving customers more — more space in the rear seat, more fuel economy from a high-tech engine, and above, all, more apps, maps and connectivity.

In an effort to simplify the newest Honda vehicle, which went on sale in June, the product team was determined to streamline the instrument panel. For the new MDX model, more than 30 buttons have been eliminated. The change was emblematic of the challenge confronting automakers in the age of the connected car. How does a car company give customers the technology they crave without overwhelming them with complicated controls that can impair their ability to drive safely?

via Designing Dashboards With Fewer Distractions - NYTimes.com

Two of the key design features are voice activated commands and stationary position functionality where driver-initiated actions can only occur when the car is in park.

Expect that the next generation will have features that are more automated like the new versions of instant speed adjustments relative to cars in front of drivers. Between better sensors and intelligence systems, drivers should have fewer decisions to distract them.

Mega To Meta Churches

In this era of hyperbolic mega churches, a humble and innovative congregation intends to reinvent how Christian communities grow. For the Pan-African Orthodox Christian Church, growth is creating an engaging culture of spirituality and justice that replaces hierarchy with empowerment. It is creating a metachurch of continuous creativity in how it organizes, inspires and involves people. This is a community of people who identify themselves more as contributors than consumers. It’s metrics are more about narratives than numbers.

Facebook Requests, A Suggestion

Now that Facebook gives us a large array of status options from emotions to activities, how about if friends can request more of specific post categories. You could request of old classmates living in other countries specific kinds of pictures, stories, event coverages, cooking recipes and the like. It’s a friendly and proactive way of requesting things other than what they’re now posting like fairly unengaging pictures of pets and sunsets.

Founding Mothers

Today I posted a Tweet suggesting we honor the Founding Mothers on the US Independence Day. Institutional history emphasizes the Founding Fathers who were rich white guys, a third of whom were slave owners and all of whom signed off on a constitutional bias against voting citizenship for women.

It’s another amazing example of how institutionalized history of any country is never an accurate reflection of reality. In this case, we cannot understand these men outside the context of their women.

The Protege Effect

We tend to think of thinking as something super solitary–but as Annie Murphy Paul observes in the Brilliant Report, cognition is a two-way street.

How so?

“Students enlisted to tutor others,” Paul reports, “work harder to understand the material, recall it more accurately and apply it more effectively.”

The result is a phenomenon called the protege effect: students who teach their study material to others perform better on tests than kids learning for the sake of learning.

Realizing that, innovative educators are setting up situation where students can teach young students, the most awesome of which may be happening at the University of Pennsylvania–a “cascading mentoring program” in which college undergrads teach computer science to high schoolers who teach CS to middle schoolers.

via Why Teaching Makes You Smarter | Fast Company | Business + Innovation

This is why it makes sense for students to learn in the morning and teach in the afternoon.

The 20 Year Mouse

While 1950’s computers were building size and took hours to perform functions that now seem instantaneous on a coin sized device, the mouse inventor Douglas Engelbart was entertaining complete dreams of the future of personal and collaborative computing. Following his invention of the mouse for screen navigation, it took a generation of 20 years for it to show up in the consumer markets via Macintosh. We are now celebrating his rich life of being a founding inventor behind the birth of the technology we now know as the Internet.

It’s a great story and example validating the power of 20 year dreams which continues to be the core of the Agile Planning I use in every local and global planning context.

People unfamiliar with these kinds of stories are initially shocked by the invitation of a one generation dreaming timeframe but as we see again and again it’s a powerful lens that reveals amazing and actionable possibilities in the present.

A Company Of Owners

When Todd Defren pondered his founder options with the fast growing, award winning PR firm, Shift Communications, he landed on the unreasonable idea of giving employees ownership in the company. Why You Should Give (Part Of) Your Company To Your Employees | Fast Company | Business + Innovation

With a durable distinction of maximum and optimum wealth, Defren wisely returned more than his modest investment in rewarding his people for their part in the startup’s growth and success. Today his people are walking around and sitting up in meetings thinking, feeling and acting as owners. Talk about engagement.

This is in direct contrast to the typical firm founders whose narcissism is only outdone by their illusion that they built the business. Reality is, no one builds a business. We all do or it doesn’t get built.

Look to more enlightened founders getting it and reaping the returns.

The New Visual Imperative

Photos, once slices of a moment in the past — sunsets, cappuccinos, the family vacation — are fast becoming an entirely new type of dialogue. The cutting-edge crowd is learning that communicating with a simple image, be it a picture of what’s for dinner or a street sign that slyly indicates to a friend, “Hey, I’m waiting for you,” is easier than bothering with words, even in a world of hyper-abbreviated tweets and texts. “This is a watershed time where we are moving away from photography as a way of recording and storing a past moment,” said Robin Kelsey, a professor of photography at Harvard University, and we are “turning photography into a communication medium.”

Disruptions: Social Media Images Form a New Language Online - NYTimes.com

In a time of possibly unnecessary hand-wringing about the demise of language literacies at the hands of social media, instant photos and short videos are fast replacing text for all manner of announcing our status and even subtle social messaging through visuals.

It’s unclear whether greater literacy in visual communication will be a threat or healthy complement to written communication. Adolescent competition between the two could ultimately hurt both. The trend might make dogmatists irrelevant anyway.

Mass Tech Simplifiction

We are finally fast approaching a world with no keys, wallets, credit cards, security badges, parking meters, watches, remotes or dials of any kind. All we need is a charged and linked smart phone. All of the requisite technology already exists. It’s a matter of time before we can finally purchase and activate everything in our world. We can finally leave home with nothing but our phone.

And the tech exists so it’s not even a phone. It’s any voice activated and/or touch sensitive display on any worn material.

The other climate conversation

I was recently an observer to a lively and inconclusive debate on the validity of climate data as indicative of human contributions. My attention shifted instead to more actionable questions about how weather and climate at risk communities everywhere should move forward. What are the conversations they should be having that have perhaps more immediacy whatever side of the climate debate you claim.

Growing careers

Have none of the booming career alternatives above caught your eye? You might want to check out these occupations, which are among the list of jobs the U.S. Department of Labor predicts will expand the fastest between 2010 and 2020.*

Software developer - 30% projected growth; 270,900 new jobs Market research analyst - 41% projected growth; 116,600 new jobs Medical assistant - 31% projected growth; 162,900 new jobs Personal financial advisor - 32% projected growth; 66,400 new jobs Pharmacy technician - 32% projected growth; 108,300 new jobs

via Careers On Their Way Out (And What’s Here to Stay) - Yahoo! Education

Urban Navigation

New York City is installing scores of digital direction devices. This will be especially useful since a third of New Yorkers cannot help visitors locate north. Lost? New York Pedestrian Maps Are Coming - NYTimes.com

Every major metro area would be wise to do the same especially when city treasures are not intuitively locatable, even in an age of ubiquitous smart phones.

The Democracy Solution

In his TED talk, former Prime Minister George Papandreou wonders if it’s just a preview of what’s to come. “Our democracies,“ he says, "are trapped by systems that are too big to fail, or more accurately, too big to control” – while "politicians like me have lost the trust of their peoples.” How to solve it? Have citizens re-engage more directly in a new democratic bargain.

via George Papandreou: Imagine a European democracy without borders | Video on TED.com

With recent European economic crises as backdrop, Papandreou suggests that civic engagement across national boundaries is what it will take to create the kind of meaningful change that large corporations shun and politicians lack imagination and will to achieve.

I would argue that yes, he is correct.

Home Schooling 2.0

In earlier iterations, home schooling was considered by many as an inferior and isolating experience, unworthy of serious academic accreditations. In fact many US parents seeking religious, psychological and social segregation found home schooling to be a viable strategy. The possibilities of home schools now extend far beyond segregationist motivations.

Look for more parents creating learning cooperatives that integrate learning into the community, provide a more whole person and multiple intelligence approach to learning, and synthesize onsite and online blended options. Most importantly, community based learning, as it could be termed, foster self-directed learning.

These leapfrog many public and private schools.

Social Media, Again

According to Tom Standage, digital editor at The Economist and author of the forthcoming book “Writing on the Wall: Social Media — The First 2,000 Years,“ social media isn’t a decade-old fashion. via Social Networking in the 1600s - NYTimes.com

It’s a 4+ century trend, launching in Middle Eastern and British coffee houses, many of which incubated new businesses, universities, and economic institutions like the London Stock Exchange. Classics like The Wealth of Nations" were penned in these original social media venues.

What we’re seeing on Twitter is a lively replication of an already proven model, including the same arrogant ridicule of the original coffee houses as the ruin of youth and the greatest bane to society. It’s good to honor magnificent traditions as never before.

Measuring Intelligence

These are brilliant snippets from an HBR interview with Scott Barry Kaufman, adjunct assistant professor of psychology at New York University and author of Ungifted: Intelligence Redefined. He talks about the way standardized tests and personality assessments deny the unique intelligences of people, demanding compliance rather than nurturing inspiration.

I notice when they are allowed to engage in something that is personally meaningful to them, they come alive. And they can demonstrate intense brilliance.

What I argue for is the shift to the personal developmental level. We stop this obsessive need to compare people to each other. And we take people’s dreams seriously.

In a way, I’ve expanded intelligence, I think, beyond multiple intelligence where you have a couple intelligences. I actually believe there are an infinite amount of intelligences. And I think we should be open to that possibility, and constantly open to every person’s unique brand of intelligence.

via Why We Need to Redefine Intelligence - HBR IdeaCast - Harvard Business Review

Ghetto Fresh

In a community gathering last night featuring a walking tour of an older urban neighborhood, a woman attending commented that she noticed the fresh fragrances of the many gardens along the way. Her remarks casually represented the palpable quality of the air in urban core neighborhoods as normative, citing comparisons to the sanitized air in suburban neighborhoods.

The same is certainly true in my thriving urban core neighborhood. I counted scores of unique smells and scents on a recent half-hour sidewalk spring stroll.

It was an interesting insider observation that people in this diverse group agreed with. The power of her statements smacks of the perceptions otherwise that suburbanites often have of their geourban counterparts.

The whole experience speaks to how we design neighborhoods for the most basic aesthetics like the palpability of scents and smells from walkways.

Compassionate Cities

Recently, Louisville committed to become a Compassionate City, with all manner of metrics, media, and methods to design compassion into the city’s experience.

A few months later, Seattle rose to Louisville’s challenge! Their 2012 Compassion Games lasted 30 days and Seattle contributed more than 150,000 hours of community service. Seattle had more than 40 sponsors and partner organizations with 38 planned action projects and events over the month. Volunteers handed out thousands of “Compassion Cards” that led to an unknown number of random acts of kindness ranging from park cleanup to donating blood, adopting an animal, reading to a child, saying “thank you” to a mentor, and visiting someone who is lonely.

Jon Ramer and other Seattle organizers are proposing that they consider this first year a draw and leave the 2012 Compassion Games tied, undecided – and to be continued. However, the promising results have inspired them to explore forming a “league of compassionate communities” that will compete with kindness to discover the most compassionate places to live.

via Duane Elgin: Compassion Games – Survival of the Kindest

And why not. Without the intention to be compassionate, any urban area pays lip service to quality of life. It’s that profoundly important.

Hacking Community Transformation

Walk into the mural-covered 14,000-square-foot space in San Francisco’s Central market district and you’ll see a flurry of seemingly organized activity: people manning desks in the front, a day-by-day schedule scribbled in chalk on the wall, someone sweeping the floor, a family examining the makings of a slide (soon to be set up, but no one yet knows where) a cake being cut in the kitchen, and people tending the large garden out back. This isn’t some quirky new startup: it’s Freespace, a monthlong experiment in civic hacking. Mike Zuckerman, the director of sustainability for the Zen Compound, secured a $1 monthlong lease for June in the warehouse-like space, with a little help from ReAllocate and the Mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development. He didn’t have specific agenda for the space, which was inspired by the National Day of Civic Hacking (June 1 and 2)–an event that asks participants to us technology to solve pressing civic issues.

via 1 | This Is What Happens When You Give A Creative Community An Empty 14,000-Square-Foot Building | Co.Exist: World changing ideas and innovation

One of the real innovations here is that this is a temporary self-organized effort whose metrics favor creating inspiration incubators and new connection possibilities in the community.

The design is stark contrast to the old school approach of top-down institution building. A whole different approach to sustainability.

The Art & Power Of Engagement Artisan

I posted an article on the importance of engagement artisan. It is the core of my work. In this piece I argue that engagement will change the world. This is inviting conversations that move people from compliance to contribution and from entitlement to empowerment wherever they learn, work and live.

We need a planet of engagement artisans. These are the people who design and facilitate authentic engagement. The good new is that everyone has the essential strengths to do so. It’s a matter of inviting them into new conversations that make it more possible.

A sustainable planet is an engaged planet.