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.

Seth Priebatsch, Chief Ninja and CEO of SCVNGR, a mobile start-up looking to build a game layer on top of the real world. In this TEDx Boston talk, Seth talks about the fact that the social layer (think Facebook) is now complete, and that the next step is creating a game layer. Games already exist in today’s world, be it credit card and frequent flyer miles, or the happy hour at your local bar, but they are not very well designed. Seth believes we can do better. Seth advocates using game dynamics for good, be it getting people to take their medicine on time, reconsidering the grading systems in schools, and organizing communities around common goals.

Ji Lee, Creative Director at Google, speaks at the 99% conference about his personal endeavor in 2002 to break out of the creative constraints of his advertising job by creating his own art project. Ji’s ad-spoofing Bubble Project entailed printing out stickers in the shape of word bubbles and sticking them on advertisements all around New York City. Ji would return later to document what people would write into the bubbles. Amusing, political, and esoteric, the bubbles were a hit and spawned campaigns by others. Ji now advocates for using personal projects to provide an outlet for personal creative freedom, create platforms for others to collaborate, meet new people, and to learn new skills.

David McCandless, award winning designer, writer, and author, speaks at TED on his passion for exploring data and creating meaningful visualizations that convey information in the form of a story. With a plethora of examples from his latest book, Information Is Beautiful, the talk is both facinating and inspiring. In one example he displays the carbon output from the Icelandic volcano that grounded thousands of flights over Europe in 2010. By comparing the carbon output that those flights would have produced themselves, the eruption was the first carbon-neutral volcanic event the world has seen. David posts his visualizations on his website and it is worth diving in to take a look.

James Archer, Managing Director at Forty (a design and marketing consultancy), posted a great webcast explaining how people make purchasing decisions and gives some very practical advice for designing websites seeking new users and customers. Potential customers fall into four different categories (called Decision Modes): spontaneous, competitive, humanistic, and methodical. The categorization depends on two scales. The first, fast or slow, and the second, logical or emotional. By taking into account the information each of these consumer types look for, you can ensure success in communicating the value proposition and convert more customers.

Tan Le, head of Emotiv Systems talks at TED about their creation of the EPOC, a brainwave reading headset. The EPOC has won a 2010 Red Dot Award for design, and uses new algorithms to read the brainwaves of any individual. Unlike previous brainwave reading headsets which take a long time to set up and cost on the order of tens of thousands of dollars, the EPOC is available now for $299 on the Emotiv website. The applications for the device are incredibly diverse and endless as it provides the ability to control any digital device with one’s mind. Emotiv is currently seeking developers and researchers to expand upon the platform and come up with new applications for the device to usher in all new and exciting human computer interactions.

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

Philip Zimbardo, the man behind the famous Stanford Prison Experiment, talks at RSA ( Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce) about how people perceive time differently. This perception is sometimes faith based, geographically based, or may be indicative of one’s age. The result of which directs one’s behavior in the world. The presentation is fascinating to say the least and Philip recommends first recognizing how other’s perceive time and then take that into account to better understand where they are coming from. RSA has posted a brilliant 10 minute animated featurette, and the full 41 minute talk can be found after the break as well.

Time perspective is one of the most powerful influences on all of human behavior. We’re trying to show how people become biased to being exclusively past-, present- or future-oriented.
- Philip Zimbardo

Photo Credit: Manolis Thr

Genius of Design, a TV series appearing on BBC2 in the UK, focuses on all thing industrial design. Episode 1 of the five part series focuses on the evolution of industrial design throughout history and the move from craftsmanship to industrialization and consumerism. Guest appearances include Ford’s global head of design J Mays, and legendary designer Dieter Rams.

If you look at the customer… go into the customer’s home as an example, and you will see who they are. See that same customer driving around in their car, and that is who they want to be.
- J Mays, Global Head of Design at Ford

In an effort to counter the frequent aggression and violence against public service employees in the Netherlands, an interactive billboard has been created to inform otherwise casual onlookers on how to take action. The interactive billboard uses a pre-recorded clip of an aggressive act happening and combines it with a live camera pointed at those in view of the billboard. The final composition is both striking and effective at conveying the problem at hand and moving onlookers to take action.