Tom Wujec studies team dynamics and puts on workshops around team building and prepares groups to solve large and complex problems. During his workshops he gives teams The Marshmallow Challenge, an 18 minute challenge to build the tallest structure from a few items including spaghetti and marshmallows. Interestingly, kindergarteners produce some of the tallest structures. Tom chalks up their success to iterative prototyping and trying lots of ideas. On the contrary, business school students do the worst.

Don Norman, one of the fathers of user experience (now 75 years old), gives an excellent talk at Business of Software 2009 on the ten rules for successful products. Throughout the talk, Don stresses the importance of creating positive experiences with many anecdotes and provides many tips along the way. For example, make sure to have a strong beginning and strong ending to an experience, because that is what people remember. By placing the undesirable or painful parts in the middle, even if that requires creating a false beginning or ending, people will come away with a more positive memory of the experience. And it is that memory that they will share with others and remember long after the actual experience.

The 10 Rules:
1. It is all about the experience
2. Design systems
3. Everything is a service
4. Everything is a product
5. Don’t be too logical
6. Memory is more important than actuality
7. Complexity is okay
8. Design for the real world
9. Design for people
10. It is all about the experience

Kathy Sierra, famous for curating the website Creating Passionate Users, talks at Business of Software 2009. In the past companies have been able to out-spend each other to gain new customers. In today’s social media culture, Kathy is seeking to reveal a more algorithmic approach for gaining product adoption (‘Step 2: magic happens’ isn’t appealing to her). To do so, Kathy says to stop focusing on selling users upgrades and features, but rather focus on making users better in the overarching area your products exist within. Ultimately it is about getting users to say “I’m Awesome”. It is at that point, users will upgrade, and non-users will desire to be like the ‘Awesome Users’ and sell themselves on purchasing the product.

Johanna Blakley studies the impact of the fashion industry’s lack of copyright and imparts many lesson on how other creative industries could flourish with a similar regard for copyright. Johanna discusses how the fashion industry is forced to constantly innovate to keep ahead of trends, obsolescence, and build brands. The fashion industry is only one of many industries who’s work is not copyright eligible. Other industries include food, furniture, magic, jokes, cars, databases, etc… The talk is thought provoking to say the least and will provide some fodder for your next discussion on issues of copyright.

ABC’s Nightline goes behind the scenes at Zappos to see why they have become the leading example in customer satisfaction and expose the company’s enviable corporate culture. By making investments in company moral, and customer satisfaction, their long-term vision has returned huge dividends. Zappos offers newly trained workers $2000 to quit and gives customers 365 days to return purchases with free shipping both ways. CEO Tony Hsieh has kept the call centers based in the US and says their number one focus is building the company’s culture. Whether they teach the practice in business schools or not, the proof is in the pudding. Also check out Zappos’ 10 Core Values.

At GDC 2009 in San Francisco, OnLive founder Steve Perlman and COO Mike McGarvey publicly introduced their company and the technology they have been working on the past many years. Taking cloud computing to a new level, their video compression technology has enabled them to compress video at speeds imperceptible to even the most hard-core video game enthusiasts. The compression speeds have allowed them to create a new delivery model for video games which now marks the advent of the seamless cloud computing experience.

Thomas Friedman, New York Times columnist and author of The World is Flat, speaks at MIT. Friedman discusses his experience of being inspired to write the original book, the fundamental ideas mentioned in his later edition The World is Flat 3.0, and how shares how that has lead to his latest book Hot, Flat, and Crowded.

Alex Lee, president of OXO, speaks at Gel 2008 on the company’s commitment to good design. Alex stresses how good ideas can come from anywhere and shares several stories of designs which have come from outside inventors.

In a well executed short, Jonathan Jarvis explains today’s credit crisis through excellent visuals and a poignant narrative. At a time when so many are learning for the first time how various aspects of the economy work, Jonathan’s video is a welcome surprise. Jonathan Jarvis is a Masters of Fine Arts Candidate at Art Center.

In “Deep Dive”, a now legendary episode, ABC’s Nightline goes inside IDEO and follows their design methodology while having them design a shopping cart from the ground up. Filmed in 1998, the video is still shown in design and business schools around the world. Although the IDEO Shopping Cart was never built as is, stores such as Whole Foods now utilize aspects of the design in their own modular mini-carts.