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Always focused on walking the walk, one of our very best thinkers and doers, Perry Klebahn will be heading up Timbuk2 in the very near future. We'd go on and on, but Bob Sutton has already said it better. We're looking forward to reaping the knowledge rewards of Perry's latest endeavor.
The d.school had a fantastic group of vistors from Aravind Eye Hospitals, based in Madurai, India, this morning. An amazingly ambitious and successful non-profit whose mission is to eliminate unnecessary blindness, Aravind has achieved a measure of efficiency in opthalmic surgery unheard of in more resource-rich nations. With no outside funding, they have innovated the process and products involved in cataract surgery to such a degree that they have reduced the cost of cataract surgery to $10 per patient, and they perform 5% of all these surgeries in India with less than 1% of all the opthalmic resources there.
They are also adept at exporting and sharing their unique knowledge of efficient and innovative surgical techniques and hospital management processes with residencies, workshops, partnerships, and publications.
We at the d.school were so excited to be able to meet with them and share ideas about how human-centered approaches to important problems can produce tremendous innovations with a positive and lasting global impact.
Check out Pavithra Mehta's film "Infinite Vision" as well, which tells the story of this amazing institution and it's founder.
Designers of digital technology products no longer regard their job as designing a physical object—beautiful or utilitarian—but as designing our interactions with it. In Designing Interactions, Bill Moggridge, designer of the first laptop computer (the GRiD Compass, 1981) and a founder of the design firm IDEO, tells us stories from an industry insider’s viewpoint, tracing the evolution of ideas from inspiration to outcome.
Moggridge and his interviewees discuss why a personal computers have windows in desktops, what made Palm’s handheld organizers so successful, what turns a game into a hobby, why Google is the search engine of choice, and why 30 million people in Japan choose the i-mode service for their cell phones. And Moggridge tells the story of his own design process and explains the focus on people and prototypes that has been successful at IDEO—how the needs and desires of people can inspire innovative designs and how prototyping methods are evolving for the design of digital technology.
The entire book is available as dowloadable chapters online, but the printed copy is a beauty.
Roger L. Martin, Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, and one of the best writers on design thinking today is the guest on November 2, for the David H. Liu Memorial Lecture Series in Design. Please join!
November 2nd 2006
8:00pm
Building 260 - Room 113.
Stanford University
The closest visitor parking lot to the lecture rooms is beside Landau Economics building. Here is the link for the map:
Google's map
Stanford's visitor parking map
