name Georges Grinstein or g³
email grinstein@cs.uml.edu
status faculty

Tuesday February 13, 2012

Helen Lyons:

NPR Story and slides. http://www.npr.org/2012/02/14/146585160/building-better-houses-for-wounded-soldiers

The story is about wounded military personnel who want to remain in the military. This is apparently an increasing population. I wonder if we could approach the military to support the ADA work. Personnel who were injured but wished to remain in the military could still benefit from info presented in visual form.

Tim Brown and design (he doesn't actually use the word radical).

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/tim_brown_urges_designers_to_think_big.html

Monday February 12, 2012

Individual projects will be presented on Wednesday and groups will be formed.

Sunday February 11, 2012

Naiem found a short interesting article about Anthropomorphism (URL below) and wanted to share it with the class.

One interesting statement from the article: "Anthropomorphism helps us to simplify and make more sense of complicated entities."

http://psychcentral.com/news/2010/03/01/why-do-we-anthropomorphize/11766.html

Friday February 27, 2009

Groups are moving well and are becoming very cohesive as is class. Some great homeworks.

Something to think about: how do we protect IP for the students while still making this wiki public?

Kareem sent the following well worth noting:

We talked yesterday about how long it would take to bring the flexible display to the consumer. Here is a timely article about the Kindle 2 screen taking 11 years.

After all, E Ink was launched in 1997, and has had to raise more than $150 million�mostly from big industry players like Intel, Motorola, Philips, Hearst Interactive Media, and Japan�s TOPPAN Printing�to transform e-paper from a drawing-board concept into a manufacturable product.

http://www.xconomy.com/boston/2009/02/26/kindling-a-revolution-e-inks-russ-wilcox-on-e-paper-amazon-and-the-future-of-publishing/"

Saturday February 21, 2009

The group product selection took almost 2 hours of class time! All products were initially up for voting and we zeroed in on two. Then I realized that two students who proposed exciting products were not going to be around for about 4-5 weeks each. I argued (after some extensive debate) that these products were not going forward. My main argument was that the visionary knew the product best (after 2 weeks of study) and had to be present to sustain the product through its cycles. What resulted is a great deal of class time used and a somewhat different outcome than when the products were all present for voting.

I experimented with single elimination voting which worked well this time. We merged two somewhat related products into one.

So the two products going forward are exciting with both realizable within the next five years.

Sunday February 15, 2009

Radical design - innovative design - creative design -- OK - there are techniques.

Radical design research - what does that entail?

How do we begin to apply these ideas, concepts and techniques to software design?

The first time I taught this course it was an experiment in that direction. Now I believe this is more of a process.

Can we get software designers and engineers to think radically?

The answer is yes. Radically involves creativity as well. One amazing recent surprise was discovering that the Atshuller Institute is based in Worcester. This makes the second organization (DeBono Group) I am interested in close to us. There are many others in and around Massachusetts focusing on modern approaches for innovation and as many individuals doing very creative and radical design work. I will start attending conferences and workshop to see what other research is being done and how these tools can be more effectively used.

It clearly is possible to reestablish the creativity students and people had as youngsters and provide individuals the tools and skills with which they can produce ground breaking products.