Michael Colletto

John Maeda argues that great design and design thinking are no longer enough to set a company or a product apart. Innovation needs to occur elsewhere and to progress beyond finding elegant solutions into creating meaningful questions and promoting human values. The conversation needs to move outside the design. “Into, quite frankly,” he says, “the world of art.” Worth a read.

How pervasive ratings and reviews undermine our ability to think for ourselves:

Our ever more sophisticated arsenal of stars and thumbs will eventually serve to curtail serendipity, adventure, and idiotic floundering. But more immediate is the simple problem of contamination. When the voices of hundreds of strangers, or even just three shrill ones, enter our heads, a tiny but vital part of ourselves is diminished. Suddenly we’re breached, denied the pleasure of articulating our own judgment on this professor, or that meal, or this city… 

Sure, it’s entirely possible to arrive at one’s own opinion amidst a cacophony of others. But it’s also possible to bend, unknowingly and imperceptibly, toward a position not naturally our own. —Chris Colin

Dan Ariely, professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University, writes for Wired about the vulnerabilities of the human mind and how often—and easily—we allow ourselves to be subtly played. Interesting stuff.