The critique can sound like “he didn’t earn it”, but I think the valuable criticism is that “he didn’t learn it”. As we make things more convenient, we risk circumventing learning experiences that can make our knowledge more whole and our output better.

There are/were real benefits to apprentice-like systems. It’s great that ideas can rise easier these days, but what might we have learned if we weren’t so antsy to get past the student phase? I know I worry about this.

Anyway, here’s the story...

And as good as Kanye’s music is, none of it compares to MJ and Jones’s Don’t Stop TIll You Get Enough. Click the link and let your desk chair dance begin.

Any time spent with the work of Charles and Ray Eames is time well spent. Especially their films. No one brought human warmth into cold Modernism like the Eames. I really can’t recommend The Films of Charles & Ray Eames enough. Goods (my favorite). Day of the Dead. House: After Five Years of Living. And of course, Powers of Ten. 

A recent post by Jamer Hunt does a nice job of discussing how the ideas embodied in Powers of Ten can be applied to design problem solving on a practical level.

Radiolab co-host Robert Krulwich (also NPR Science Correspondent and Special Correspondent for ABC News) was asked to give the commencement speech at California Institute of Technology in 2008. When the science journalist addressed the graduates of science-related programs, he chose to speak to them not about science, exactly, but about the value of storytellng.

While Krulwich specifically talks about the reasons scientists need to tell their stories well—they must compete with anti-Science proponents—his lessons can be broadly applied. Good ideas can fail because they are poorly explained, while bad ideas can win because they their explanation is convincingly told.

The process of reforming health care has been a decades-long undertaking. Recently we’ve come very close to passage of some legislation. The various plans that have been floated contain ideas pulled from years of discussion and thinking from across the political landscape. But still, the conversation at times seems to be more abstract than the reality of the reforms. Without examples that are easy for people to understand, it is difficult for people to see the benefits of the reforms and it introduces an opportunity for manipulation.