Tis the season to think, design, test, make and break things

Gary Hustwit's Objectified has a trailer. Should be good. (Via fimoculous)

Objectified is a feature-length independent documentary about industrial design. It’s a look at the creativity at work behind everything from toothbrushes to tech gadgets. It’s about the people who re-examine, re-evaluate and re-invent our manufactured environment on a daily basis. It’s about personal expression, identity, consumerism, and sustainability. It’s about our relationship to mass-produced objects and, by extension, the people who design them.

We Think - a video of the concepts in Charlie Leadbetter's book of the same name (Chapters here.) (link via Karl Fisch, I think)

mass innovation, not mass production

We Think explores how the web is changing our world, creating a culture in which more people than ever can participate, share and collaborate, ideas and information.

Ideas take life when they are shared. That is why the web is such a potent platform for creativity and innovation.

It's also at the heart of why the web should be good for : democracy, by giving more people a voice and the ability to organise themselves; freedom, by giving more people the opportunity to be creative and equality, by allowing knowledge to be set free.

But sharing also brings with it dilemmas.

It leaves us more open to abuse and invasions of privacy.

Participation is not always a good thing: it can just create a cacophony.

Collaboration is sustained and reliable only under conditions which allow for self organisation.

Makers - the Do-It-Yourself Counterculture. (We're gonna ask the question later this week: Why do San Mateo and Austin have Maker Faires but the birthplace of Temple's Toggle, home of Frank Sprague and Giles Jackson, Tredegar and the Manchester Old and Historic District does not?)



Manifesto: If you can't open it, you don't own it. Makers have a tv channel too

Speaking of teevee, the Godfather...



And a less oldie from Kathy Sierra's Creating Passionate Users: T-shirt-first development

Guy Kawasaki (the original Mac evangelist for Apple) said it in his 1992 book Selling the Dream: make the t-shirt before you make the product.

If you're a team lead, project manager, open source evangelist... make the t-shirt. If you're promoting a business, service, supporting a cause... make the t-shirt. And the more subversive, the better. If the t-shirt is for internal use only, see how far you can push before marketing or legal steps in. The more maverick the shirt, the more valued it becomes. At Sun, for example, there was always somebody trying to make an underground, unapproved shirt featuring the Java mascot Duke. If you were lucky enough to get one, that meant something.

I know...it's just a frickin' shirt. How can a t-shirt mean something? Think about it. Go look in your closet. Go look in your garage. How many special t-shirts are you holding onto for sentimental reasons? Be honest. How often have you lusted after someone else's limited edition shirt? If you're really honest, you'll remember the time you "borrowed" someone else's special t-shirt and "forgot" to give it back.

What's with all the design links? Just getting in the mood. Thursday begins coaching the 2009 Richmond Public Schools Mind Games season. Umm, We are Fisher!


Photo/slideshow: Mark Gormus/Richmond Times-Dispatch

And yes, we make the t-shirts first.