something in the way

Our annual MX conference helps managers working to deliver better experiences to the world. And that's right in line with Charles Warren's 10 minutes on how the three little words "How Might We" makes design deliver significantly better results.

Start a project off with this, and I think you can expect significantly better solutions from your team.

Charles leads Google's Social UX team, and before that, the Google Mobile UX team and before that, he was the co-lead of IDEO's Software Experience Design Practice.

If you’re curious what conference I’m talking about, start by visiting http://www.switchconf.com/ . Too busy? Well, in a nutshell, it’s a 2 day event bringing together passionate people with different backgrounds to discuss and share ideas about innovation, entrepreneurship, science and technology.

Ricardo Sousa and his talented young team rolls out the 2011 edition in Oporto (Portugal), the next 16th and 17th of April, and yours truly was kindly invited to speak a few minutes on the subject of advertising, fire and jogging. Now that you’re curious, are you attending SWITCH Conference? If yes, give me a nudge as i’d really love to chat with you. Not networking. Hate that word. See ya in a few days then. Go buy your ticket, now.

This post, by definition, overlaps with the worlds of Create Digital Music and Create Digital Motion, so I’m cross-posting — absolutely not one you want to miss, both because of the event in New York, and because the landscape of works here engages issues about which readers here I know are passionate.

Music and visuals are each themselves endless wells of potential; put them together, and “infinite possibility” probably isn’t an overstatement. This July, label Ghostly International is working with researchers at New York’s Eyebeam research center to do a free, one-week intensive on dynamically-generated visuals for sound. Before you read on, that deadline is the end of today NYC time, via a fairly simple online application form. Check out the full details and application form.

The event is led by artists Aaron Meyers (Flying Lotus’ Fieldlines) and Aaron Koblin (Daisy Bell). I asked Mr. Meyers for a round-up of the kind of work that he’s done…

Read the full story on Create Digital Motion

Google says it's taking "a new approach to China" and will stop censoring search results there, even if it means they have to shut down Google.cn and their China offices. The announcement is a huge deal, and it set off some fantastic insta-commentary from tech writers on Twitter. My favorite, shown above, is courtesy of Joel Johnson. More inside.

Most people's reactions were emotional, proud, celebratory:

Others dug deeper or cracked jokes.

From a friend who shall remain nameless because her/his tweets are protected:

From an obvious Microsoft-lover:

Chinese tech writer Jacqui Cheng had the most insightful bits of the bunch. So you don't have to read her tweets backward, she said:

# The Google/China thing is so much bigger than Google just deciding to stop censoring. That's small beans compared to the big picture.
# Basically, Google thinks the Chinese gov could be behind these attacks, attempting to use Google as a pawn to get info on detractors...
# ...and is saying so without actually saying so.
# The wording is very careful and calculated in that sense. Not to mention that others have suspected the same for a long time.

Finally, Cheng's prediction on how this will play out:

# China will tell Google to suck it and Google will pull out, and America will forget all about it in a week.

If you want more than 140 characters, here's The New York Times' first take on the news.

ExperimentaDesign (EXD) is an international Biennale, taking place in Lisbon, Portugal, dedicated to design, architecture and creativity.

The theme of the 5th edition of EXD launches an in-depth analysis on the subject of time. Focusing primarily on the flows and mechanisms of acceleration and fragmentation, it then surveys its impacts across contemporary society, which manifest themselves at all levels: the development of objects and devices that heighten the capacities of the human being, the growing mobility of both individuals and information, the redesign of the space where collective life unfolds, changes in communication processes and the appearance of new structures and languages, or in other words, innovation.

Speakers include Paola Antonelli, Alice Rawsthorn, Ben Fry, Stefano Boeri and many more.

>> Download the press kit

There's a high concentration of cutting-edge gadgetry here at Interaction09, but more unusually, a high concentration of people who think long and hard about what effects cutting-edge gadgetry will have on the consumers that use it.

Here's a quick demonstration by IIT Institute of Design professor Tom MacTavish, of the Livescribe digital writing system, a pen-and-paper duo that records audio, remembers what was being said while you were taking notes, and affords some basic computing function in a wholly analog format. If that sounds confusing, just check out the video; MacTavish does a great job of showing it off.