It was probably the third month of the lockdown in 2020 when an old friend reached out to say hello again. This connection was one of many I was making at the time so it felt natural to talk about…
Why Online Practitioner Communities Are a Valuable Professional Resource
Insights and resources for learning managers and educators on creating and nurturing communities. Arthur Grau and Eva Ponce The dramatic growth in online professional education owes much to the convenience and flexibility of the virtual classroom. However, a less recognized…
How might we make mindfulness the new ‘bio-break’?
Taking even just a few minutes of quiet reflection time each day has been cited to reduce stress, increase immune response, and even change brain structures to help mitigate the “reptilian” responses our physiology uses to react to a changing world.
Four insights from 250 days of MIT@2:50 — ten-minute daily reflection
Early in March 2020, the edginess began. This was just before the closures and disruptions in the U.S. Tension and uncertainty were rising among MIT colleagues and the network at large. Inspired by endurance performance artists, and the psychology of…
Begin the End of Analog
Sunday 1970 Minolta X-300 and a roll of Kodak Tri-X Pan 400 A Beach Street sign two blocks from a room in a two-room apartment. Mini kitchen, shared closet. “Change” and a small arrow pointing. A photo on the hour…
@2:50 – ten minutes of daily reflection
At the beginning of March 2020, just before the closures and disruptions, tension and uncertainty were rising among my friends and colleagues. People seemed to be on edge. They were agitated. On March 11, I went to sleep with a…
Telling time for slow communication
At this time of #remotelife when it appears all relationships are mitigated through screens, it feels appropriate to republish. Slow Communication Manifesto – Because communication technologies continue to supply more ways to rapidly connect people, – Because the complexity, speed,…
A Mindful Business Model Canvas
Iterating on a startup innovation classic to accommodate for vision, mission, and so-called “externalities”. While facilitating entrepreneurs to build social benefit apps with Applications for Good, and again completing a Design Innovation masters, I worked on several occasions with the…
Question order bias exists. How you can use it.
What if I told you that by just asking you questions in a different order I could influence your survey response by nearly 40 percentage points. As a logical and intelligent person, you might laugh this off as trickery. There…
Gratitude_x – How gift economy influences learner attitudes in a massive open online course
Abstract Massive Open Online Courses or MOOCs have grown in membership and influence since their introduction at the beginning of the 21st century. Research on these courses and their communities has focused primarily on learning outcomes for participants and economic…
Designers see the future – to find insights
Originally published at MassArt Design Innovation (updated here) Designers see the future, specifically when surfacing insights. Seeing the future is a multi-step process for the designer, with the forming of insights from the body of research about midway. It’s hard.…
Cucumber Zoo
The design challenge How might we bring food consumption and production to be individually approachable and locally sustainable? This was the question I set out to answer. Fourteen weeks, three design sprints, and countless variations later, I land on the…
Sears Generations
“Because no one else can outfit you for life.” Concept for Sears reinvention. Objective: Improve Sears retail experience, sales experience, and generational relevance. Innovate on empty assets, with new values, promoting generational engagement. Discover your working brand promise and why statement; Enable you to identify and influence all key Sears Holdings brand promise stakeholders; Provide red team methods to…
Prototypical gifting
The following essay is an excerpt from the work in progress “Gratitude_X”. The full paper seeks to document multiple modes of gift giving within the context of a massive open online course. This excerpt prototypes the gift as a concept.…
EdX — MOOC with a Mission and a Profit Motive
Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs first began to gain popular attention and market penetration in 2012. Several for-profit and nonprofit entities began packaging college-level learning materials delivered by leading universities onto their proprietary learning management platforms. EdX is one…
Giving it All Away
There is a recognized need for good design strategy and good business insight combined to create innovation. There is a library of articles on the subject. From the DMI’s oft-cited Value of Design, to designer Joshua Taylor’s claim that designers should study…
More Human – Help for Homeless
Challenge: Discover opportunities for elevated user experiences, threats to existing services, markets for early adoption, and ways to redefine the use of autonomous vehicles. Solution: More Human: Media production company supporting autonomous services for un-sheltered people.
Gentlemen of Chance -Executive Instigation
Gentlemen of Chance is a slow communication experiment in social hacktivism and “spiritual bureaucracy”. The art/action/communication consists of mailing 108 letters to prominent public figures from the Forbes 400 list. These are people who may influence fortunes or multitudes. Each letter…
The Type Bar Slow Communication
Public Art. Typewriters, stationery, stamps, multi-media, found objects The Type Bar is a portable public art service. Participants engage in the simple activity of writing a letter, but do so semi-publicly, out loud, and out of time, based on the Type…
Kinetic Umbra Exploration of Space
Long Exposure Photography Having practiced many styles of breath and movement, I want to explore what shapes the practices leave in space. My intention is to record the full range of a flow in one exposure to discover what that might reveal…
Hope Community Engagement
Hope events engaged the study and practice in managing human motivations, group dynamics, and institution engagement. This work enlisted local arts and cultural practitioners to convey tangible and emotional stories of the Society’s mission through public service, performance and compassionate…