Hasta La Ideas

To help mark their 10 year anniversary, San Francisco’s Method (the design firm) have launched a new initiative under the name 10×10. The series will include essays, salons and speaking engagements focusing on a variety of topics impacting brands as they search for new revenue streams today and in the future.

The first entry is Cable’s Lost Generation, a white paper looking at how young adults in the US are sourcing their media content – choosing broadband favorites such as Hulu and Boxee over traditional cable services. Does this mean it goes without saying that broadcast is dead?

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It looks like the future of high-speed rail lies in China, which has both the geographical footprint to warrant it and the political will to embrace it. According to an article in The Economist, in the massive track-laying project China is currently undertaking, they’ll have 8,000 miles of high-speed track ready by 2012–three years ahead of schedule.

I love high-speed rail, but have cynically given up on the U.S. ever embracing it.

Two men that have not given up on it are Ron Kemnitzer and Bill Green, ID chair and ID associate prof, respectively, at Virginia Tech’s School of Architecture & Design, College of Architecture and Urban Studies. Kemnitzer and Green tasked four senior ID lab teams to come up with designs for high-speed passenger trains, in hopes of boosting U.S. interest; they presented their designs to the American Public Transportation Association’s annual meeting.

Click here for the PDF of the presentation, or click here to see web-based descriptions and images of the concepts.

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In the USA, cities that shelled out big bucks to learn Richard Florida’s prescription for vibrant urbanism are now hearing they may be beyond help.

While in Hamburg, Germany, the local administration been trying to woo the much-coveted “creative class” for years in a bid to secure its future. Now the city has become the front line in a bitter conflict over gentrification, with artists squatting buildings in protest against investment plans and members of the far-left scene attacking private property — and even police.

Photo: Flickr/Phillip Jeffrey

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One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) is dispatching specially “ruggedized” versions of its low-cost, low-power, Linux-running XO laptops to aid and reconstruction groups working to aid the victims of the earthquake in Haiti. The nonprofit organization, whose laptops are in the hands more than 1.4 million children in 35 countries, is working with several groups and is looking for many more that can leverage its work. “Genuinely committed groups” are invited to submit requests and explain their need for XO laptops by e-mailing help@laptop.org or better yet, by submitting a full application to the OLPC Contributors Program.

In other world-changing laptop news, the January 18 issue of Forbes features a profile of OLPC director and MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte (“The Prophet of Cheap“). Writer Andy Greenberg also provides details on OLPC’s latest initiative: to build a $75 touchscreen tablet PC for poor schoolchildren that uses less power than a lightbulb and is unbreakable, waterproof, and half the thickness of an iPhone. “Essentially, we want it to be a single sheet of plastic. No holes, no moving parts,” Negroponte tells Greenberg. “We want it to be so simple that it hardly has a design.” Hmm…genius design that doesn’t feel designed? Sounds like a job for Yves Behar, who designed the original XO, and indeed, he’s masterminding the new tablet, known as the XO-3. Here’s a sneak peek at the new device, slated for launch in 2012. Behar says that he has taken away the XO’s visual complexity and added “tactility and friendliness, touch and color.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

It was 1996 when Kun-hee Lee, then-CEO of Samsung, launched the “Year of Design Revolution” initiative. Now, 14 long years later, Samsung and other Korean companies are reaping the benefits.

As Iconoculture trend forecaster Jeff Yang explains in his meaty and informative “Passing the torch: The gadget world’s balance of power has shifted from Japan to Korea” article, it was a host of factors in addition to the design initiative that has led to Korea’s current gadget dominance and world-class design, which has had a staggering financial influence–while Sony, Panasonic, and Toshiba lost a record $10.8 billion in fiscal year 2008, Samsung alone earned $9.6 billion in 2009.

The article is a must-read, and contains one of the best-articulated summations of the current gadget landscape, by Newsweek’s N’Gai Croal:

“The strengths of Japanese companies like Sony were suited to the analog era,” says Croal. “Back then, it was all about building the best product. But in a digital era, it’s all about the network effect — it’s not as important to consumers that any individual product is superior, so much as that all of your different products work well together.”

After examining what has led to Korea’s product design ascendancy, Yang also takes a good look and what’s looming in Korea’s rearview mirror–China. Read all about it here.

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