Yule Heibel's Library tagged fast_company →  View Popular, Search in Google

"By taking lists of potential side effects out of the hands of the drug makers, the startup is letting people know what their pills might be doing to them in a more open way than big pharmaceutical companies ever have. "

crowdsourcing pharmaceuticals drugs opendata fast_company

Brilliant article by Paula Scher on the current craze for info-graphics. Conclusion:
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All of the charts, graphs, diagrams, and maps look interesting and involving. They are designed to appear scientific and very believable. They are immediate, even urgent, and you have the sense that you are about to learn something. They are all part of an increasing trend away from reading, reflection, and understanding the world in a broader context. Information becomes style. Information is an end in and of itself: it exists by itself, with no over view, no history, no context, and demonstrates that almost anything can be measured. It is faux info.

Ask a designer to make a diagram of your clothes closet and how many white and black articles of clothing you have worn and on what days and see if there is a pattern. There probably is one. It will make a sensational chart. Compare the amount of homeless people in relationship to the amount of trees in various neighborhoods. It sounds important, doesn't it? A diagram with those statistics might really look significant.

Faux info is seductive because it looks like a computer program has gathered all the data, put it in the proper order, quantified it, made all of the appropriate comparisons and links, and fed it to you in a scientific style that demonstrates authority and infallibility. The information does your thinking for you, and you don't have to think at all. Buyer beware.
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This, from a designer. Take heed, people.

design information_design graphics chart paula_scher fast_company huffington_post

Excellent developments - blow some of the energy our way (to Victoria Canada) please...
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Pahlka thinks she can change what it means to work at city hall. "Right now, if you're a talented developer or designer, government is what you go into if you can't get a better job," she says. (...)

If the geeks do take over city hall, the result may be something like what's happening in the tiny town of Manor, Texas. (...)

"Manor has triggered a movement of municipal innovation," says Margarita Quihuis, a researcher at Stanford University, who worked with Haisler to cocreate Manor Labs. "It's changing the way citizens and government behave toward each other, from the adversarial atmosphere of a typical city-council meeting to the kind of friendly constructive brainstorming that might go on at a design firm like Ideo. We launched this with essentially no money. We're not talking about a New York City that has millions of dollars. If we can do it in Manor, that means 90% of America could do it as well." (...)

"One of my criticisms of gov 2.0 thus far is that there tend to be a lot of transit apps -- Where's My Bus," says Nigel Jacob of Boston's Office of New Urban Mechanics, a city-hall incubator for tech initiatives. "Those are good things, but we have a huge demographic of our city for whom their major challenge is getting access to high-quality food, or getting their kids into school. It's not so much that the developer community doesn't want to tackle hard issues, they just don't know about them." Entrepreneurs, he points out, are understandably used to solving problems for people like themselves, the largely upper-middle-class and educated. That's why Jacob's office is working to connect citizens who need help to the laptops of developers who can fix their problems, both online and through face-to-face meetings.
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gov2.0 fast_company city_halls local_government

Fascinating:
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A new attempt to answer the digital age's most burning question--whether social media drives sales--has also revealed an atonishing fact about Facebook and Twitter posts.

Sharing on Facebook is five times more valuable than sharing on Twitter, according to a new study.
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facebook twitter value fast_company

David Harvey derides the NYC for being suburbanized:
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"New York? The whole damn place has been turned into a suburb," sneered David Harvey, startling a roomful of New Yorkers who prided themselves on the same things he derided: the makeover of the city's parks; the new network of bike lanes; the pedestrian malls along Broadway. "The feel of the city is losing its urbanity and being made okay for suburbanites to enjoy Times Square," he continued, going on to condemn New York's gentrification not on aesthetic or nostalgic grounds, but for being at the root of the financial crisis.
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This is definitely a very familiar argument straight out of Deleuze, the Situationists, TJ Clark, et al. (Heck, I used to teach this wrt Haussmann's Paris and Impressionist painting...):
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Cities like New York "are increasing being constructed around spectacle," Harvey argued Tuesday night. "One aspect of capital is that it wants to move faster and faster; capital cannot abide a long period without change." In cities like Beijing, Shanghai and Mumbai, this change is being brought about by land grabs and slum clearance. In New York and other financial capitals, it's gentrification "making cities a spectacle that is instantly consumed." In other words, we're blinded by the lights to our Matrix-like existence. "We're all suburbanites now, without knowing it," he said. "We're all neoliberals now, without knowing it."
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fast_company david_harvey cities economics neomarxism suburbs

Inspired by John Seabrook's description of Zaha Hadid's lunch (which included potato chips), Alissa Walker compares Hadid's buildings to fast food snacks (hence Snack-itecture). Lots of images - that work, incindentally. Not sure if this is just funny, very insightful, or nasty, ...or what.

fast_company alissa_walker zaha_hadid starchitecture architecture

A bit of a fluff piece (this is the "printable" page - FastCompany has so much annoying flash & crud on its front pages), but there's an interesting thought about *im*permanent architecture here.
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One of Ma's core ideas -- the impermanence of architecture -- has particular appeal for anyone who would be happy to see Los Angeles' relentless sprawl bulldozed. Ma, 43, views today's Western architecture as a descendant of the Greco-Roman tradition, which is all about building in stone and erecting things that are intended to last forever. (Which makes it all the more amusing that he's an occasional collaborator of Koolhaas, creating mind-bending buildings, such as Beijing's CCTV headquarters, that look as if they might fall down.) Clearly a son of modern China, he questions the West's preservationist reflex. "Everything has a life cycle, as should buildings," he says. "Preservation is an action in sacrifice of future possibilities. The future needs its own space."
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fast_company architecture los_angeles asia

Article by FC's Clive Thompson on the latest work by Duncan Watts, who argues against the idea the trends are created by "influentials" who bring matters to a tipping point.

business duncan_watts economic_anthropology fast_company influentials malcolm_gladwell network_theory tipping_point trendsetting