How to Keep Innovating

Bill Buxton on cultivating your inner learner. Great advice for designers.
1. Always be bad at something that you are passionate about.
2. You can be everything in your life—just not all at once.
3. When you get good at one skill, drop another in which you have achieved competence in order to make room for a new passion at which you are—yet again—bad.
4. Life is too short to waste on bad teachers and inefficient learning.
5. Remember: You can learn from anyone.
via: BusinessWeek

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Posted by at 1:05 PM | 0 comments

Teaching kids about engineering

Michelle Levesque, an engineer at Google, puts together a very nice overview of "what is (security) engineering" for elementary school kids. For most of the presentation, Engineer could be swapped out with Designer.
Thursday and Friday there are hundreds of kids coming to Google for National Engineering Week and somehow I got roped into giving the big tech talk to all of them. (I have to learn to stop doing that whole 'volunteering' thing.) So how do you keep 100 middle school children entertained for an hour while you talk about the ultra-snore topic of What It's Like to Be An Engineer?

via: Catspaw's Guide to the Inevitably Insane

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Posted by at 11:47 AM | 0 comments

Work on Stuff that Matters: First Principles

A good litmus test for your life and work, particularly in the current economic environment.
1. Work on something that matters to you more than money.
2. Create more value than you capture.
3. Take the long view.
via: O'Reilly Radar continued in this Video Interview with Tim O'Reilly.

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Posted by at 6:54 AM | 0 comments

About

I'm John Payne. Generally speaking, I'm interested in the interplay of technology, culture, and human behavior—in particular, the interventions possible via the artifacts and situations that designers create. That's what you'll find here.

I'm a founding partner at Moment. You'll also find me on Tumblr, Twitter, Flickr, Last.fm, Friendfeed and Linkedin.




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