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According to an article in the most recent issue of The Economist titled A New Twist for Offshore Wind, deep sea turbines, which tend to be significantly more productive than the land-based counterparts due to stronger winds, are suddenly becoming increasingly feasible. Several companies based out of Europe including SWAY (Norway) and Blue H Technologies (the Netherlands) are actively developing the technology necessary to bring these products to life.

After doing a bit of investigation, I discovered that the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) website. They have a Wind Energy Fast Facts (.pdf) document that states:

• U.S. wind energy potential: Estimated at 10,777 billion kWh annually--more than twice the electricity generated in the U.S. today
• Industry growth rate, U.S.: 29% average over last five years (year-end 2002 - 2007).
• Four out of the top five wind farms operating in the United States are located in Texas (Horse Hollow, Sweetwater, Capricorn Ridge and Buffalo Gap
• Operating characteristics of a wind turbine: A wind turbine runs 60% to 80% of the time, and operates at its full rated power output level 10% of the time. On an average day, it generates 30% to 35% of what it would generate if it ran at full power all the time.

According to the Global Wind Energy Council, the countries with the highest total installed capacity are Germany, the United states, Spain, India, China and Denmark. Wikipedia has a list of wind farms operating or under construction. It's amazing to me that we still live in an era where the vast majority of the world's power is produced by fossil fuels. Hopefully the collective brain power of green technology companies can begin to erode that dependency.

Posted by Rob at 11:37 AM | Permalink

In the December 6th issue, The Economist published an article titled Reality, only better that explores the futuristic world of "augmented reality" (AR). AR is, in a sense, the opposite of virtual reality (VR). Whereas virtual reality requires an individual to view a computer generated landscape using a screen such as a monitor or special glasses, augmented reality involves superimposing digital imagery onto objects in the real world. As the article states, "For some things, it turns out, computer graphics can be much more effective when viewed not on screens, but superimposed on the real world."

The article details several examples of this is being applied today including locating veins for surgery. Though the article does not mention the relationship between holographic technologies and AR, these two seem to go hand in hand.

Not surprisingly, there is a Wikipedia article on augmented reality. For other interesting futuristic use cases, see the "future applications". One such application that stood is the following:

Virtual gadgetry becomes possible. Any physical device currently produced to assist in data-oriented tasks (such as the clock, radio, PC, arrival/departure board at an airport, stock ticker, PDA, PMP, informational posters/fliers/billboards, in-car navigation systems, etc. could be replaced by virtual devices that cost nothing to produce aside from the cost of writing the software. Examples might be a virtual wall clock, a to-do list for the day docked by your bed for you to look at first thing in the morning, etc.

While still certainly decades away, it seems likely that some future incarnation of an iPod like device might be nothing more than a virtual gadget powered by AR technology.

Posted by Rob at 12:07 AM | Permalink

BusinessWeek has posted an article that's worth reading titled "Wanted: VPs of Design". In the past couple of years, I've personally witnessed numerous designers that I've worked with move on to more business-oriented roles such as product management. This may very well be a pattern forming at other organizations as well.

Posted by Rob at 4:24 PM | Permalink

Today's San Francisco Chronicle featured a fascinating story on several designs for the proposed Transbay Terminal. Soaring 1,225 feet, the proposed tower will replace the Transamerica Pyramid as the tallest building in San Francisco and will likely influence architecture in the city for the next 30 years. The concept designs range from awe-inspiring (see Skidmore Owings and Merrill's design ) to rather soulless (see Rogers Stirk Harbour's design) -- at least, in my view.

Posted by Rob at 3:33 PM | Permalink

Recorded in February of 2002, David Kelley, founder of IDEO, presented a session at TED concerning some of the products his company had been designing from Prada's high-tech dressing rooms to a remote controlled submarine called Spyfish. Though becoming a more widely practiced approach, in large part due to the influences of a handful of companies such as IDEO, Kelley emphasized the increasingly important pattern of applying a human-centered approach to design and how designers were beginning to incorporate personalities and behaviors into the design process.

"Something has happened in the last 18 years since Richard started TED... for us, we've kind of like climbed Maslow's Hierarchy a little bit. We're now focused more and more on human-centered design as an approach to design. That really involves designing personality and behaviors into products and I think you're beginning to see that -- it's making our job more enjoyable."

Posted by Rob at 11:47 AM | Permalink

Scott Berkun, best-selling author of the Art of Project Management and former program manager on Internet Explorer at Microsoft, posted a great observation on the underuse of imagination.

In it, he criticizes how the term vision has managed to become accepted -- even embraced -- in the business world whereas imagination isn't used often enough.

Scott writes:

That tragedy is how we forget that a vision is the product of someone’s imagination. Someone makes it up, writes it down, and only then does it become something that other people can follow. Even people who earn the label “visionary” or “genius” use their imagination, doodles, crazy ideas and all, to create their visions. Yet somehow despite people’s interest in visions, they’re unlikely to encourage the create force, in the form of people’s imagination, required to create them.

It's a smart catch and one that I completely agree with. The one exception might have been Walt Disney who cleverly branded his design teams Imagineering.

Since April of 2005, during his original book tour for the Art of Project Management, I've had the chance to meet Scott several times now. When I first met him, I hadn't yet read his book and I remember thinking after his talk "wow, this guy is a really impressive speaker." It wasn't until I read his book that I realized he was quite brilliant. Last year he was invited to participate in a program manager's summit at Adobe. He hinted to me that his next book would be about innovation. Needless to say, I felt like an insider as my right eyebrow inched up. Again I would run into Scott at the MX Conference I attended earlier this year.

A very rare trait to have, Scott, as anyone that has seen him speak can attest, is imminently quotable. A few memorable quotes that resonated with me that I took down:

"Sales is such a crucial part of design... in-house, we don't do a good enough job to make sure people are trained and empowered to do this. [Designers think that] the work speaks for itself... 'I shouldn't have to sell.' It's a failure on how designers are taught. There's a portfolio and that's it... some schools are getting better at this."

One other classic Scott quote:

"What I love about design is that it's not repeatable. There are too many variables."

His next book, The Myths of Innovation from O'Reilly, is due out next week on May 15th and I'm looking forward to picking it up. I've offered to help sponsor Scott on his San Francisco Bay Area book tour where he'll speak at a private event at Adobe's San Francisco and San Jose offices. Though most of his speaking engagements are at private offices, he will be speaking at a public event at Adaptive Path on May 16th.

Posted by Rob at 12:52 AM | Permalink

Bill Moggridge, cofounder of IDEO and father of the "interaction design" movement, was recently interviewed by MIT's Technology Review. It's a short interview, but Moggridge covers everything from how he feels American design was lost until 15 years ago to how tech companies can better understand the needs of customers.

Moggridge and the team he has built at IDEO are a constant inspiration to me. Something I learned recently at the Adaptive Path MX Conference is that IDEO is no longer just doing traditional design work but moving into new areas such as designing new business models and marketing campaigns. These approaches are still founded on the application of design thinking. For example, they helped introduce the "Keep the Change" service for Bank of America.

From the interview:

TR: How can tech companies better understand the needs of customers?

Bill Moggridge: What we're looking for is the latent user needs in a ­situation where, at least at the beginning, you don't know what you're going to be making. So you have to have insights about people driven from their psychology, their desires, their interests, and then apply that to the context where you might be inventing or coming up with a solution for a new product or service or space, or whatever the context may be. Once you've got to a first prototype, build it quick and try it out. As soon as possible--even a small attribute of it--try it out, because you're likely to be wrong.

I particularly liked his final comment -- it's something I've come to learn, appreciate and apply in my current role.

TR: Parting advice?

BM: Put together a team with a great engineer, a crazy designer, a good businessperson, and a good human-factors scientist or psychologist of some kind, and put them in a room and get them to try to work together. It's a big challenge, but they come to a point, surprisingly quickly, where they realize that what they can achieve together is much more than they could do individually.

Great minds may think alike, but minds that think differently, originating from different, unique backgrounds and skillsets, create the disruptive ideas that change the world.

Posted by Rob at 10:03 AM | Permalink

There are no two ways about it: Google has created a couple of tools that has had a major impact on the way I collect, sort and read information. One is the ability to create custom RSS feeds using Google Blog Search and the other is Google Reader which allows you to subscribe to them. This turns out to be a very effective way to monitor particular topics or conversations that I'm interested in.

For example, I'm particularly interested in the topic of "design thinking" and I've had the pleasure of discovering some brilliant posts on the subject through my custom feed (if you're interested, you can also subscribe to the same feed). Just recently I discovered a terrific post by Luke Wroblewski where he provides notes he took at a talk given by Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO. Though high-level, it's well worth a read.

If you're looking to go deeper, I'm just wrapping up The Ten Faces of Innovation by Thomas Kelley which dives into specific examples, across a wide array of industries, of how companies large and small are applying design techniques to innovative their products and services. It's a very inspiring read.

By the way, in the event that you're interested in the photo above, I did not take it myself. I discovered and purchased it on iStockPhoto, far and away the best stock photo site, and was just looking for a way to incorporate it into my blog. <grin>

Posted by Rob at 10:28 PM | Permalink

Bob Sutton recently announced that the Stanford d.school launched their new blog. If the current content is any indication of things to come, I'm looking forward to learning more from these designer thinkers.

Admittedly, I am somewhat puzzled, however, as the blog appears to have entries dating back to January 1st, 2006. It's unclear whether it simply wasn't publicly accessible before or if they didn't want to launch the site without a backlog of real content. Either way, I'm just glad that it's available as I've already uncovered a few engaging references.

For example, though I've seen quite a few of the TED talks through video archives, I missed this highly entertaining lecture from Sir Ken Robinson about the future of education recorded at TED 2006. While attending a TED conference in-person is incredibly expensive ($4400 per ticket) and very exclusive (tickets sold out on February 14th of this year for TED 2007!), I am very appreciate the organizers of this event release most/all of these inspiring lectures online for free. Also see Burt Rutan and Ray Kurzwell.

Posted by Rob at 11:54 PM | Permalink

Fortune Magazine's Peter Schwartz and Rita Koselka authored a fascinating article titled Quantum Leap that examines the implications of quantum computing, its affects on Moore's Law, how software engineers of the future will be limited not by processing power, but their own imagination and how "network-enabled telepathy" will impact the social dynamics of future generations.

Is it all merely science-fiction or a prelude to some shade of technological singularity?

Selected quote:

Traditional computing, with its ever more microscopic circuitry etched in silicon, can take us only so far: Moore's law, which dictates that the amount of computing power you can squeeze into the same space will double every 18 months, is set to run into a silicon wall by 2015. (The chief culprit is overheating, caused by electrical charges running through ever more tightly packed circuits.)

If we want to keep computer progress on track after that and be able to do all the amazing things in Sharon's life, we have to figure out how to manipulate the brain-bending rules of the quantum realm - an Alice in Wonderland world of subatomic particles that can be in two places at once.

Luckily some of the world's leading research agencies and technology companies are on the case. Single electrons have been made to adjust their spin. Subatomic circuitry is within our grasp. But because the breakthroughs are hidden in esoteric journals and described in language that can give even today's savviest computer users headaches, it is easy to miss the significance of what is going on.

Tangible evidence of the quantum revolution hit the market in July, when Freescale Semiconductor, a Motorola (Charts) spinoff, began commercial shipments of magnetic random-access memory (MRAM) chips. You'll probably notice MRAM first when you buy a digital camera that doesn't take any time to store a picture. Within a matter of years, your new laptop will switch on like a light.

MRAM gets its speed from something called the giant magnetoresistive effect, or GMR. Although it sounds like something out of an X-Men film, GMR has to do with the fact that if you place layers of ultrathin magnetic film on top of one another and alternate their polarity, you get resistance. That is, the electrons can be spun in one direction or the other. Electrons spin like a top or a billiard ball in some direction relative to a magnetic field. Flip the direction of the field, and the electron flips the direction of its spin. This very basic quantum effect can be used like a binary bit, its direction labeled "0" or "1" and employed to store digital information.

In conventional computing these zeroes and ones are created by switching an electric current on and off. Spins are less affected by the environment than electric charges and take longer to decay. Also, keeping an electric charge in position requires continuous power; when computers lose power, the charge goes away. With a magnetic device the memory stays put when the power shuts off.

As a bonus - and it's a fairly major bonus - if you take electricity out of the equation, you get rid of the overheating problem that is undercutting Moore's law.

Posted by Rob at 12:10 AM | Permalink