on design

"90% of the people who work on design try to solve the issues of the richest 5 to 10% of their customers." 1.2 billion live on less than a dollar a day. 3 billion live on less than two dollars a day.

Polak's precursors to good design: 1. Go to where the problem is. 2. Listen to what they have to say. 3. Understand the context. [boingboing gadgets]

education vs creativity

This is so brilliant, it makes me want to cry: Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity?; special thanks to cartoon_goblin's primary blog:

IN THE FUTCHAR, YOU WILL USE YOUR CELLPHONE TO KILL TREES

KDDI and Japan Post Service offer SMS to snail mail for holidays - Engadget Mobile:

Japan Post Service Co. and KDDI are dumping tech into the snail mail world with an SMS to paper mail service. KDDI customers will have the option to create a New Year's cards on their mobile, then send them to the Holiday partnership for printing and mailing. Japan Post Service is said to be planning on using all of its 24,000 offices in the country to print and get the cards out for the expected 10 million customers. The opportunity for gag cards here boggles, we're wishing we see something like this over here someday.

pirate booty

Free? Steal It Anyway - Forbes.com:

Piracy, it seems, is about more than price.

That's one of the surprising discoveries to come out of an experiment by the British band Radiohead last week. On Thursday, the group made its latest album, In Rainbows, available for direct downloading from the Web at an unusual price: whatever fans feel like paying. Downloaders who want to pay nothing can enter "zero" in the site's price field and download the album for free.

Well, another reason might be that, even if one enters 00.00 on the site, it still requests a VISA/MASTERCARD payment information before providing a download link. Is anyone else seeing this screen.