I am excited to announce the release of my 8th book, The Stories that Connect Us, an exploration into the power of stories in the possibilities of our connections. Visit the book’s website to browse the book’s themes, topics, and order information.
This is my longest book (240p) and the first time that I include my newest literary genre: fiction short stories. Looking forward to your thoughts from it and experience with it.
If we get doctors and nurses and patients seamlessly aligned in email, think about how they could partner and collaborate in things like: a shared personalized and dynamic definition of health, early signs of getting off the path, and quick interventions to get back on track.
Think of the huge tangible and intangible implications.
Investigate. Design. Experiment. Adjust.
This the secret sauce at design firm IDEO, the home of countless amazing design innovations.
What kind of world will be this when we spend more time educating leaders in design than statistics?
Why should hotels be known for single guest isolation, especially guests who are looking for new connections and accidental conversations? What if hotels instead host virtual spaces where people of like minds and interests can tweet each other with that hotel’s hashtags to convene and connect? How hard is that?!
What if every company is publically incentivised for a 10by3 program. This is where they dedicate 10% of their space, and 10% of each person’s time to the creation of new businesses, and the emerging entrepreneurs give back 10% of their revenues to the company?
My idea of the printer of the future is this. Every device - think smart phone & laptop - has built in projection capabilities, like a reverse built in camera, that can project anything onto any surface that can hold an image clear and steady, like a wall or table or piece of paper or board.
It’s the zen printer of no-printer; the zen paper of no-paper.
The original new focus at jackzen on “zen and the future of everything” was and continues to be clearly not a definitive expose on “futurist” speculations and pinings. As worthy as these domains may be, this is not close to the purpose here.
The purpose here is to inspire your own inquiry into the future, to inspire your own thinking about how it could be, how it should be, and how you want it to be. It is an intention to free us from thinking of the future as an extension of the past, as an invitation to possibilities that we dare to speak only in circles where the impossible is our favorite teacher.
I’m somewhat unhopeful about sports madness here in the States going away any time soon. Incredible numbers of children will spend incredible numbers of hours weekly during the year being driven from sport to sport, so much so that new minivan lines have started offering small clothes washer/dryer units to keep up with the obsessiveness.
So could we redesign sports so they integrate music, reading, journaling - of course all sports specific - so learning can continue and who knows, maybe take the edge off of the useless performance anxiety they are taught in sports that continue to be needlessly “competitive”?
Should Web 2.0 media be “mandatory” core competencies in school, and if so by what grade level? We’re talking about intelligent use of blogs, wiki’s social media (Facebook), micro-blogging (Twitter) and all of the shared media (shared docs, videos). And while we’re at it, should we make them core competencies for everyone in every company or organization?
What if furniture and clothes designers made a collective commitment to use materials and components that were completely renewable and re-usable? What amazing new enterprises could pop up that provide nextgen methods for repurposing and redistributing in ways that adds value to “original” designers and producers?
