So it goes

Tonight we had our second event with iCUE, an entrepreneurship society on campus. This one was an Idea Generation Workshop, led by one of the guys at SIE’s head office (Anthony Ives).

Anthony raised some interesting points, and clued us all in to some current trends in product design. Anthony’s lessons: continue reading »

First things first: British film-making adventurers have discovered the world’s smallest parrot in Papua New Guinea. The buff-faced pygmy parrot is roughly the size of a hummingbird, and substantially smaller than many of the insects it cohabitates with. Brilliant.

In other news, how about this: let’s remove all the heels from sliced bread and donate them to charity. I’m not suggesting some sort of grainy guerrilla act, so don’t barge into your local supermarket and start sorting slices. But what if heels could be separated from the loaves during the packaging process, and re-routed to people in need? continue reading »

My bicycle was stolen on Monday while I was at work. I walked around the corner of the physics building to find my lonely front wheel still locked to the rack with my severed cable lying next to it on the ground.

I was grief-stricken. How long had the poor wheel been sitting there, humiliated and alone? And why had some jerk stolen the rest of the bike? Who doesn’t have better things to do than to deprive me of my uninsured, primary mode of transport? And what was I supposed to do now, standing next to a single wheel in my dorky bicycle outfit? continue reading »

Social Innovation Camp is even nearer now and I’m still thinking about ideas.

One of the themes this year is “distance”. I spend 90 percent of the year communicating with my family via email, Skype and phone, so I can relate to distance as a social problem. On the family level, distance is a tangible barrier to overcome. Some technologies help shrink this distance, but there is a lot of room for development.

I have already mentioned one distance-shrinking technology: Skype. The service is a revolution. Previously, the main alternative was expensive long distance calls. Skype cuts the cost of communicating with my family to almost nothing (I still occasionally have to make calls on my cell phone). It is much easier to stay in touch. continue reading »

Social Innovation Camp is nigh, and I have yet to come up with a single suitable idea to submit. The trouble with most of my ideas is that they don’t require the internet. In fact, I’m having trouble thinking of anything that would benefit from a virtual implementation.

That’s not to say that there aren’t plenty of socially innovative things to be done.

One thing I’ve been thinking about is a “Clean-Up Day.” It’s something I used to do in Anchorage. When the snow melts each spring, heaps of litter suddenly surfaces and the city looks like a dump. So every spring, hundreds (perhaps thousands) of volunteers scour the streets and parks, packing bright orange garbage bags full of rogue cigarette butts, plastic bottles and occasionally other, more novel rubbish (I once found a 2L bottle of K-Y Jelly in a marsh). continue reading »