Arthur Grau
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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.…
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…
“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…
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.…
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…
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…
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 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…
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…
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 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…
Apps for Good, a recent contest produced by Applications for Good challenged developers to create apps for low-income Americans to help them get educated, find jobs, get healthy, manage their finances, and so on. The contest was organized by One…