You have manipulated computers using devices such as a keyboard, mouse perhaps even a touch screen or voice commands. But have you ever done it with your thoughts or seen someone do that?
For those interested in the visual display of information Edward Tufte is no stranger. He is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Statistics and Computer Science at Yale, but his claim to fame is expertise in displaying information. A quick visit to his website will show you the scope of his work and suffice to say he is a renowned expert. Now he is getting in the act to help the government.
It is known that one way to become more creative is to shift one’s perspective.The best selling author of The Da Vinci Code Dan Brown, is said to hang upside down with gravity boots to help shift his perspective for the creativity needed in his novels. Travel is another helpful method for shifting perspective. There is now some new research to show that distance can be helpful in making a person more creative. But the research has an important and interesting qualifier.
How much do you like it when information is visually conveyed in a very pleasing manner? The New York Times Graphics Department is particualrly adept at this. It is a group of about 30 people with various backgrounds who create the visual representations for the Times publications. The group is mainly composed of cartographers, illustrators and programmers. The graphics editor Amanda Cox is unusual in that she is a statistician. You can see her ability to visualize data in the following examples. The Times graphics group dominated the gold medals at the Malofiej Awards, the most important prize for graphic design. Cox won the gold for Individual Portfolio.
Here are some examples of the group's work. Take your time to look at how simply, yet appealingly these are laid out and the amount of information that is packed in with minimal clutter. The designers have been able to stretch their imaginations in the online edition in ways not possible with the paper copy.
In Steven Spielberg's sci-fi movie Minority Report, Tom Cruise plays a special kind of cop who belongs to a unit that aims to prevent crimes before they happen. The movie contains many of the yet-to-be invented devices that always seem to make the future far cooler than the present. One that I was particularly taken with is an information search system that Cruises' character uses. He starts with some special equipment that resembles a virtual reality kit (gloves, etc). A database in holographic form appears before him. He turns pages like you would in a book and grabs information as you would things from a closet. If you haven't seen it, take my word that it looks very cool. Recent innovations like the iphone and Microsoft Surface have started providing some of those features. But none take it far enough and certainly none surpass it. Until now. Pattie Maes and Pranav Mistry at the MIT Fluid Interfaces Group have imagined and demonstrated a product called the Sixth Sense that does that.
Where are the Thomas Edisons of today? That is a common lament heard from people who believe that the days of the lone inventor struggling in a basement to create fundamental concepts is long gone. Science has advanced so much that new inventions are highly specialized and hardly understandable goes the thinking. Well, it is time to meet Woody Norris a likely contender for the title of Today's Thomas Edison. Like Edison, Norris is a serial inventor. While Edison's focus was on electricity, Norris' passion is sound. His latest creation is called HyperSonic sound and is a basic science concept. Hypersonic Sound is to sound as the laser is to the light bulb. When switched on, a light bulb throws light in all directions. A laser however focuses light onto one tiny spot thus leading to a variety of modern applications including CDs, printers and other everyday electronic instruments. Norris has developed a way of transmitting focused sound such that only the intended recipient can hear it, even from a great distance. His process can almost be described as sound-on-demand. In conventional applications, sound is produced in a speaker and propagated over distance thus losing quality over time. In his method the sound is effectively produced right near a listener's ear thus providing the feeling of creation inside the head.
You remember Rubik's cube, don't you? You may even remember cracking it in a reasonable time.
Ever seen someone do it really fast? Without looking? Here it is.
Do you procrastinate? Have you ever told yourself that you do your best work if you wait till the last minute? You may not be as creative as you think, according to Teresa Amabile the Edsel Bryant Ford Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. A leading authority in the field of organizational creativity, she has conducted intensive multi-year studies to understand the nature of creativity in organizations. One of the findings that surprised even her was that time pressure was actually an impediment to creativity. Even people who felt they were being more creative under time pressure are actually less creative.
Researchers at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business and the University of Waterloo have conducted some experiments with very interesting results about the impact of brands on people. They started with prior research that has shown that people modify their behavior in response to environmental cues. For example, exposure to rude words leads to people behaving rudely; exposure to elderly people made others walk more slowly. Even exposure (or priming) with a parent made people achieve more if they believed that the parent would be interested in their achievement, or if they were hoping to please the parent. The question asked by the researchers in this study was whether brands could have similar effects on people and the results turn out to be quite interesting.
