http://www.steinbock.org/blog futures grow from seeds of thought Wed, 13 Aug 2008 21:32:49 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Helpful in times of doubt or procrastination: What would the hero version me do right now? http://www.steinbock.org/blog/2008/08/13/what-would-the-hero-you-do/ In a recent post, I introduced Kluster, a new web startup that is trying to build a community for democratized design, i.e. crowdsourcing. As an experiment, I recently sponsored my own design challenge on Kluster (you'll need a Kluster account to see it). I offered $50 of my own money and ... http://www.steinbock.org/blog/2008/04/28/human-centered-crowdsourcing-not-yet/ Another stirring video ethnography of the Web from Michael Wesch, anthropologist of mediated cultures and creator of The Machine is Us/ing Us. This one looks at the material redefinition of information in the digital participatory age. http://www.steinbock.org/blog/2008/04/27/information-revolution/ Ben Cerveny uses metaphors from biological development to conjecture about the future of ubiquitous computing and pervasive information. From the LIFT07 conference. http://www.steinbock.org/blog/2008/03/03/the-luminous-bath/ A site just went live today, that aims to do for product design what Wikipedia did for encyclopedia authoring. Kluster is a platform for crowdsourcing, which means harnessing the collective creativity of an online community to co-design something. I'd say it's the piece of the participatory Web that has the ... http://www.steinbock.org/blog/2008/02/20/kluster/ Hydrogen Dream by Daniel Steinbock My dreams are made of stars and stars are made of hydrogen. And though I dream out loud, I hardly know where to begin, when dreams are made of hydrogen. And you carried away the stone. From my broken back, you lift the heavy load. And you carried away the stone... These arms were made ... http://www.steinbock.org/blog/2008/02/18/hydrogen-dream/ http://www.steinbock.org/blog/2008/02/10/put-things-in-perspective/ Today I found some very old writings of mine -- going all the way back to sixth grade -- and was pretty floored by what I read. This all came about because my mother is moving out of the house I grew up in and was ready to toss my ... http://www.steinbock.org/blog/2007/12/29/personal-archaeology/ An interesting and effortless opportunity to practice personal sustainability, care of EcoIron and Rising Phoenix Design. Consider a simple calculation: According to the U.S. Dept. of Energy, an all white web page uses about 74 watts to display, while an all black page uses only 59 watts. At 200 million queries per day, ... http://www.steinbock.org/blog/2007/11/08/black-google-saves-energy/ Here are a couple of adjacent images from Google's new 'Street View' in GoogleMaps. As of this writing, you can walk the streets of New York City, San Francisco, Palo Alto, Las Vegas, Denver and Miami--maybe more. The automated stitching of panoramas from different days and times makes for some high-tech ... http://www.steinbock.org/blog/2007/05/29/google-hits-the-streets/