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Red Dot Award for Design Concepts 2009

Mark Ruiz — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 04:00:36 +0000

Inovent got invited to the Red Dot Design Concept Awards last November 25 in Singapore’s Red Dot Museum, and so Chief Inoventor Brian Quebengco, Design Inoventor, and I went to check it out and get ourselves immersed in award-winning concepts. Below are the highlights from our journey :

Standing outside the Red Dot Museum

Upon entering the main awards area, the venue exuded a hip-cool envelop that captured the spirit of Red Dot.

We got prime seats right near the front! In picture is myself with Brian.

Ken Koo – President-Asia Red Dot Awards

Peter Zec – Founder, Red Dot Awards

Winners would walk through the runway …

… to receive their awards

Singaporean performance artist/musician Sonicbrat provided ambiance and mood in between awardings.

Below are some of the cool concepts i particularly liked :

The Red Dot Luminary is the best-of-the-best-of-the-best Award.

“And the Luminary goes to Sirius Breast Cancer.”

I really hope that this concept gets commercialized as it can potentially help so many people.

Brian and Jonas looking forward to come back next year … hopefully to receive awards!

All of the pictures (and a boatload of other design concepts) here :

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TEDx is Coming to Manila

Mark Ruiz — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 01:00:42 +0000

TED, our inspiration behind putting up the WhyNot?Forum, is coming to Manila!

This particular event is called TEDx Manila, and is being organized by Filipino UP Professor and education advocate Rom Feria (himself a TED Fellow).

TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. Our event is call TEDx (place), where x=independently organized TED event. At our TEDx (place) event, TEDTalks video and live speakers will combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group.

TEDxManila is going to be held on December 5, 2009, in UP Diliman’s Malcolm Hall (College of Law). For more details, especially on how to apply — check out their official website here.

Shameless plug, I’ve also been invited to speak

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Did You Know? 4.0

Mark Ruiz — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 23:37:27 +0000

I’m a great fan of Shift Happens, a presentation made by educator Karl Fisch that spread like wildfire around the world – seamlessly blending statistics, infographics, and social media and making it digestible for the 21st Century.

Shift HappensView more presentations from Jeff Brenman.

Of course, it was also largely due to the face that xplane, an information design consultancy, took on his original powerpoint, and jazzed it up with an MTV-meets-the-web vibe coupled with a hollywood-ized cinematic soundtrack.

Recently, xplane has released Did You Know? v 4.0 — this time with a special focus on the sweeping, shifting social media landscape and technology convergence. It’s a concise-enough video, considering all the info they were able to cram inside of it; Definitely ripe with statistics that will either leave you dumbfounded at the rate of change, or give you a tease of the huge waves of opportunities that are emerging in front of our very eyes …

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Why the Leaders of the Future Are Designers

Mark Ruiz — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 23:27:51 +0000

In his new book Leaders Make the Future - Bob Johansen of the Institute for the Future builds a case for the new leadership skills needed for an uncertain world.

Here’s his list :

1. Maker Instinct: The ability to exploit your inner drive to build and grow things, as well as connect with others in the making.

2. Clarity: The ability to see through messes and contradictions to a future that others cannot see. Leaders are very clear about what they are making, but very flexible about how it gets made.

3. Dilemma Flipping: The ability to turn dilemmas – which, unlike problems, cannot be solved – into advantages and opportunities.

4. Immersive Learning Ability: The ability to immerse yourself in unfamiliar environments; to learn from them in a first-person way.

5. Bio-Empathy: The ability to see things from nature’s point of view; to understand, respect, and learn from nature’s patterns.

6. Constructive Depolarizing: The ability to calm tense situations where differences dominate and communication has broken down – and bring people from divergent cultures toward constructive engagement.

7. Quiet Transparency: The ability to be open and authentic about what matters to you – without advertising yourself.

8. Rapid Prototyping: The ability to create quick early versions of innovations, with the expectation that later success will require early failures.

9. Smart Mob Organizing: The ability to create, engage with, and nurture purposeful business or social change networks through intelligent use of electronic and other media.

10. Commons Creating: The ability to seed, nurture, and grow shared assets that can benefit other players – and sometimes allow competition at a higher level.

—

Is it just me, or are most of these skills part of the DNA of Designers (or Design Thinkers, as the new thinking suggests)?

Let’s run through the list :

The Maker Instinct and Rapid Prototyping are no-brainer skills of designers, what with their incessant need to go from concept sketches to getting their hands dirty and building stuff;

Clarity is a perspective that is inherently designer-centric – an abstractive mindset that sees what can be, and not just what is; Whereas Dilemma Flipping brings to mind the designers’ problem-solving nature – they just have a way of reducing complexity into very simple solutions.

On the collaborative front – designers are masters in Constructive Depolarizing; In fact, by their very nature they work across multi-disciplinary teams with extremely varying backgrounds and fields of expertise. From that standpoint, constructive engagement doesn’t get more real than that.

Taking it a step further, crowdsourcing designers enhance this collaboration by utilizing the power of social media in Smart Mob Organizing. Not only that, designers use an arsenal of technology tools – from videos to simulations to prototypes - to convince and influence their clients, bosses, peers, companies, friends, and the general public into their point-of-view.

Immersive Learning Ability then dovetails into designers’ practice of ethnography and computer simulations/prototypes; While bio-empathy draws from designers’ seeking inspiration in unconventional places. In fact, there are numerous designers who are using bio-mimicry as fuel for their work.

Commons creating is the open-source mindset of designers, of how their work contributes to a vocabulary and milieu that others can build upon for the future.

Looking at all these skills, I rest my case.

Want to lead in the future? Learn how to be a designer.

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Is Money Losing Its Currency?

Mark Ruiz — Mon, 18 May 2009 22:03:20 +0000

The cliche’ “Money isn’t everything” has never held as much truth as it does now.

You see, it used to be that we bartered and traded goods and services for other goods and services. Badly put, I’ll give you ten chickens if you build part of my house.

But when this great invention – money – arrived in the world, it became a neutral mediator, a medium for facilitated trade.

Money allowed us to assign specific values to items and services we wanted to either buy or sell. Hence, this shirt is eight hundred pesos. An iPhone is a few hundred dollars. I will work my ass off for you for X amount per month.

But it is no longer that simple. The assignment of value on purely monetary terms is rapidly eroding. The ability of money to be solely the medium of exchange — to live up to its definition as currency — is fading.

Now don’t get me wrong. I don’t think cold hard cash is on its way out. I don’t think it ever will be. But i really believe that an intangible layer is coalescing on top of it. A layer wherein people are assigning value on top of the price tag.

After all, the anecdotal truth is that people are trading goods and services on the basis of more than just money.

Imagine the wide expanse of programmers and resources at Microsoft, spending more than $1b to develop Windows 7.

Then think of the small army of programmers around the world working for free on Linux. For these devoted troops, it’s obviously not about the money.

Think of a celebrity actor who would normally charge millions for a film, but will do it for a pittance if he loves and believes in the movie.

Now this is great news for innovators and entrepreneurs : you can harness resources, goods, and services even if you don’t have cash.

Closer to home — Hapinoy, Rags2Riches, Inovent, and WhyNot?Forum have been able to gain so much momentum with relatively little resources. But all of them were still able to mobilize a lot.

Again, i’m not saying that money was never part of the equation — after all, cash is still the lifeblood of any enterprise.

But it’s not enough to just have a healthy cashflow. Every business nowadays must have a soul.

Call it goodwill. Label it rallying people behind a cause. Or building a movement.

But it’s a clear recognition that people are beginning to devote themselves more and more to things that go beyond the moolah.

You can pay somebody to do a job ahd he will perform it, mechanically. Or you can get somebody on board as a believer, married to a vision, working day in and out incessantly for the dream.

Welcome to a world where the new currency is of values and ideals

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All Bets Are Off

Mark Ruiz — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 04:00:24 +0000

These are amazing times.

And I don’t necessarily mean that in a positive slant.

There’s an ongoing G20 Summit, wherein global leaders are thinking through how to get us out of this intricate financial mess.

But here’s the tricky part.

I really don’t think anybody can accurately predict what the other end of this tunnel will look like. It’s literally a blurred horizon.

Because what has happened this past year has literally rewritten the way the world will be configured from now on.

—

I love thinking about scenarios, of imagining the future.

But how the world will look like after all this – even after the full recovery – is a book that has not yet been written.

The debatable changing role of government. The uncertainty of financial markets. The interlinking thread of globalism.

It”s capitalism truly at the crossroads.

And where all this intersects with my passion is a question : in this new world order, what role will innovation play?

Because no longer will it be the way we’ve thought about it. The way i’ve been thinking, talking, and blogging about it for the longest time.

The scale of innovation has tipped, and now has to be reinvented.

—

Innovation at the micro will continue to be a powerful tool.

But it’s now Innovation at the macro — echoing John Kao’s Institute for Large-Scale Innovation — which will truly reboot everything.

I don’t know about you, but this uncertainty is both scary … and exhilarating.

All bets are off.

Bring it on.

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The Future Just Happened

Mark Ruiz — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 04:00:29 +0000

the first American black president.

touch and gesture-based interface technology.

the internet and cloud computing.

scarcity of basic commodities.

climate change.

nanotechnology.

this is stuff i used to just see in future-themed books or movies.

but they’re now very, very REAL.

i don’t know when it exactly happened, but one day i just woke up and realized – that the future has ALREADY happened. the stuff that fed my adolescent imagination has become my adult reality.

and it has me wondering on what’s next. on what the future future has in store.

what’s the next wave of innovation and opportunity?

—

truth to tell, i can’t help but feel blessed to be my age at this particular point in history.

i’m old enough to have seen the pre-digital era, and still catch it blossom into full swing (life without the web right now is the worst horror movie imaginable): Yet i’m young enough to still see huge dramatic shifts and changes in my lifetime. to whatever new things the future will bring.

And on this note, i’ve joined an interesting yahoogroup talking about the future … the ‘manila future salon‘. Do check it out.

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The Death of Innovation?

Mark Ruiz — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 04:00:22 +0000

I came across a relatively controversial headline from BusinessWeek’s Bruce Nussbaum, one of the foremost influencers of the global innovation conversation :

“INNOVATION IS DEAD. HERALD THE BIRTH OF TRANSFORMATION AS THE KEY CONCEPT OF 2009″

As an innovation junkie who consumes a litany of books, blogs, websites, and videos on said topic, i must say that the past couple of years have indeed been a whirlwind for the innovation movement.

but along with the mainstreaming of the concept came an explosion of commoditization, bandwagonning, and in extreme cases, bastardization.

while Transformation as a new concept sounds controversially interesting as a way forward, i guess the main question on my mind right now is ‘innovating innovation’.

what’s next?

i honestly don’t know the answer.

and so as we enter an unprecedented era of uncertainty, i for one can’t help but be excited with a new whirlwind of opportunities.

new thoughts. new dreams. new ways of moving forward.

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What’s in Spore?

Mark Ruiz — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 04:00:02 +0000

I have a new guilty pleasure.

It’s the new game by Sims ubergamecreator Will Wright called Spore.

It actually passed the wake-up-again test : I played it until i was on the brink of sleep. As i was trying to drift into dreamland, it lingered incessantly and just kept on replaying in my head. I got up, turned on the PC again, and continued playing until 3 am.

People have been calling it the ultimate sim game, mainly because the scope runs the gamut of evolution – you start as a single celled organism that slowly graduates to intelligent life that segues into tribal warfare, all the way to the space age.

And yet despite this ambitious scope, the game still manages to be simple and addictive. The controls are intuitive, the gameplay easy to groove to.

Actually, some people have been criticizing it for it being too simple.

I on the other hand derive zen-like pleasure in its playfulness and customizability. Your creature can literally go into a million different directions and be animated accordingly.

At the very least, it encourages imagination and new thinking; So in that sense it’s a veritable trojan horse for education. And truth to tell that’s more than enough for me.

Here’s Will Wright on TED sharing it with the world

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Is This the Future of the Blackboard

Mark Ruiz — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 04:00:08 +0000

Well, these videos on Hitachi’s multi-touch whiteboard certainly dovetail with our recent WhyNot?Forum focused on Education.

While the whole multi-touch technology phenomenon is worth one whole future blog post in itself, the geek in me just couldn’t help but post this ASAP. Couple that with my educator’s hat and I for one am already thinking of the myriad applications of this to the classroom.

Imagine whole lesson plans taught in entirely new ways. Imagine teachers transitioning from the boring textbook to full-blown multimedia. Imagine students coming to the screen and actively interacting with the lesson material. Imagine learning being appreciated and absorbed in a more engaging manner.

It’s like iPhone coming to school!

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