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In the 1970s my colleague Judith Rodin and I conducted an experiment with nursing home residents.1 We encouraged one group of participants to find ways to make more decisions for themselves. For example, they were allowed to choose where to receive visitors, and if and when to watch the movies that were shown at the home. Each also chose a houseplant to care for, and they were to decide where to place the plant in their room, as well as when and how much to water it. Our intent was to make the nursing home residents more mindful, to help them engage with the world and live their lives more fully.

A second, control group received no such instructions to make their own decisions; they were given houseplants but told that the nursing staff would care for them. A year and a half later, we found that members of the first group were more cheerful, active, and alert, based on a variety of tests we had administered both before and after the experiment. Allowing for the fact that they were all elderly and quite frail at the start, we were pleased that they were also much healthier: we were surprised, however, that less than half as many of the more engaged group had died than had those in the control group.

Tim Brown of IDEO has written that design thinking is “a discipline that uses the designer’s sensibility and methods to match people’s needs with what is technologically feasible and what a viable business strategy can convert into customer value and market opportunity.”

The design-thinking organization applies the designer’s most crucial tool to the problems of business. That tool is abductive reasoning.

said Sir Godfrey, "you have the honor of seeing the two greatest men in the
world." "I don't know how great men you may be," said the Guinea man,
"but I don't like your looks. I have often bought a man much better than both of you,
all muscles and bones, for ten guineas." Thus the men of the senses revenge
themselves on the professors and repay scorn for scorn.

The abstractionist and the materialist thus mutually exasperating each other, and the
scoffer expressing the worst of materialism, there arises a third party to occupy the
middle ground between these two, the skeptic, namely. He finds both wrong by being in
extremes. He labors to plant his feet, to be the beam of the balance. He will not go
beyond his card. He sees the one-sidedness of these men of the street; he will not be a
Gibeonite; he stands for the intellectual faculties, a cool head and whatever serves to
keep it cool; no unadvised industry, no unrewarded self-devotion, no loss of the brains in
toil. Am I an ox, or a dray?- You are both in extremes, he says. You that will have all
solid, and a world of pig-lead, deceive yourselves grossly. You believe yourselves rooted
and grounded on adamant; and yet, if we uncover the last facts of our knowledge, you are
spinning like bubbles in a river, you know not whither or whence, and you are bottomed and
capped and wrapped in delusions. Neither will he be betrayed to a book and wrapped in a
gown. The studious class are their own victims; they are thin and pale, their feet are
cold, their heads are hot, the night is without sleep, the day a fear of interruption,-
pallor, squalor, hunger and egotism. If you come near them and see what conceits they
entertain,- they are abstractionists, and spend their days and nights in dreaming some
dream; in expecting the homage of society to some precious scheme, built on a truth, but
destitute of proportion in its presentment, of justness in its application, and of all
energy of will in the schemer to embody and vitalize it.

But the attitudes of today's travel writers are hardly those of the Brideshead generation, and as Colin Thubron has pointed out, it is ridiculously simplistic to see all attempts at studying, observing and empathising with another culture necessarily "as an act of domination".

Also, travellers tend by their very natures to be rebels and outcasts and misfits: far from being an act of cultural imperialism, setting out alone and vulnerable on the road is often an expression of rejection of home and an embrace of the other. The history of travel is full of individuals who have fallen in love with other cultures and other parts of the world in this way. Then there are those whose views have changed dramatically as they travelled, and have had their horizons widened: see how the prejudices against Islamic culture and civilisation expressed by the young Robert Byron in his first letters from India disappear as he sets off on the Road to Oxiana. As the great French traveller Nicolas Bouvier wrote in The Way of the World, the experience of being on the road, "deprived of one's usual setting, the customary routine stripped away like so much wrapping paper" reduces you, yet makes you at the same time more "open to curiosity, to intuition, to love at first sight ... You think you are making a trip, but soon it is making you - or unmaking you."

Seeking. You can't stop doing it. Sometimes it feels as if the basic drives for food, sex, and sleep have been overridden by a new need for endless nuggets of electronic information. We are so insatiably curious that we gather data even if it gets us in trouble.

We reach the point that we wonder about our sanity. Virginia Heffernan in the New York Times said she became so obsessed with Twitter posts about the Henry Louis Gates Jr. arrest that she spent days "refreshing my search like a drugged monkey."

but a comprehensive and reliable database that could track the daily rhythm of the news cycle over time and was available for public use didn’t exist. So Mr. Zuckerman and others at Berkman decided to create one.

The result is Media Cloud, a system that tracks hundreds of newspapers and thousands of Web sites and blogs, and archives the information in a searchable form. The database, at mediacloud.org, will eventually enable researchers to search for key people, places and events — from Michael Jackson to the Iranian elections — and find out precisely when, where and how frequently they are covered

Bownass, A.D. (2001). Building Services Design Methodology: A Practical Guide. 2nd ed. London: Spon.

Busch, A. (2004). Geography of Home: Writings on Where We Live. Princeton: Architectural Press.

a plan to increase the whiteness of clouds using a fleet of remote-control sailing ships spraying a fine mist of seawater into the air. But anyone tempted to dismiss his plan as the product of a crank who has spent too much time in the shed would do well to note that Salter was the man behind the Edinburgh Duck, a pioneering 1970s design for harnessing wave energy.

Another variation on the marine theme came from former management consultant Tim Kruger who proposed tipping large amounts of lime into the ocean. This, he claimed, would increase the sea's ability to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as well as reduce the dangerous acidity which has also been a byproduct of decades of emissions.

Modern day user experience research methods can now answer a wide range of questions. Knowing when to use each method can be understood by mapping them in 3 key dimensions and across typical product development phases.