Thoughts and observations from IDEO’s Humanizing Social Media event.

The current issue of Business Week features a special report dedicated to assessing the value that strong design can add to an organization.

IDEO has developed a free guide tailored for NGOs to develop solutions to social programs. The Human Centered Design Process Guide is over 150 pages of case studies and step-by-step instructions on how to develop innovative solutions to pressing problems.
It’s broken down into different phases and comes with a set of Aspiration Cards. What’s interesting about this free-source is how in-depth it is, and how much it reveals about the company’s internal processes.
You can download the complete guide here.

Many hold Star Trek as an inspiration pool for future technologies. IDEO recently got a chance to sample a new 3D immersion technology from EON Reality that gets pretty close to the holodeck from the Next Generation series.
The iCube is a 10′x10′ room with three walls and a floor onto which a high-resolution stereoscopic image is projected onto each surface. The viewer wears polarized 3D glasses and can walk freely around the room to move through the virtual environment. The system tracks the viewers movement with markers on the glasses much like how motion capture is used to record body [...]