Today's catch trawling the net

Hmmm... I fell over some nice and strange things during today's rambling through the internet:

The open design club is a site, where designers can share their creations with everyone interested - there's a few nice things there.

Volkswagen has launched a new way of marketing their newest model, Tiguan. The Tiguan web page contains documentaries, interactive models and more fun - worth a look.

A new way of battling overweight is the Walk While Working-movement, which combines the best from the standing work table and a tread mill. I wonder how it smells in a open office with 20 overweight clerks just walking and sweating...
A British scientific magazine has published this article on the theme.

Inspiring meeting

Yesterday I went to Aabenraa together with Wendy, Marcelle and Mette to attend a lecture given by professor Steen Hildebrandt from Aarhus School of Business. Steen Hildebrandt spoke about the changes our society will be facing the following years and gave his view on, which skills and abilities the future organizations should have to be able to survive.

One of many points was that to share knowledge will be a way to survive in a world where hard manual labor can be done in Asia for the tenth of the salary of Denmark. By sharing knowledge and communicate with other people we can add value to our work and compete on knowledge in stead of prize of work. To be able to do this, Steen Hildebrandt said, organizations need shared values, dialog and a clear vision.

I think that many of his points showed that what we do here at ITPD is pointing in the right direction. We are trying to educate our students to be able to work across professional boundaries and communicate with people with other backgrounds than themselves. I believe that our students will be ready to new organizational forms and the ongoing changes they will bring. Where people with a more traditional single disciplinary education will have problems in adapting to network organizations, the ITPD students will be miles ahead trained to cope with changes as a daily challenge.

Check out Steen Hildebrandt's web page with lots of articles and reviews.

Nice free piece of software

Some people at MIT has developed this program called Schratch that they give away for free. Scratch apparently makes it easy to make small animations and games without having to deal with coding stuff.

See a promotion video here:


...and download it from the Scratch website

Mooger!

We just got the message that once again our move to our new buildning, Alsion, has been postponed. This is truly a mooger (a schottich word for a situation that is worse than a mess)! Half of our stuff is already packed in boxes since we thought we were going to move on monday morning.
I am especially feeling sorry for our students who really are stressed up with exams, presentations and packing stuff in boxes. Now we don't even have a new moving date - we only know that it is at some time after 4 June.

Ethnography exhibition

Yesterday I went to a exhibition made by five students at the Interaktivt Design study programme. They have been exploring different ethnographic work methods and tools and they showed it at this very nice exhibition. Below there's a few pictures from the presentation.

The relationship between design and ethnography

Sebastian sent me this link to a interesting article from AIGA.org on the relations between design and ethnography. Check it out here