eicolab: design thinking for business innovation

Thoughts

A nostalgic whirl

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I had a council rubbish collection day last month. I threw out two PCs, a pile of SCSI storage devices and a scanner (leftovers from my mi$$pent Apple days).

I almost threw out my 100Mb ZIP drive. But at the last minute decided to see if it will work with my current Thinkpad (via an Adaptec SCSI PCMCIA card). It did, and I spent the next …

No free wifi in Sydney

I am sitting in a cafe in the middle of Singapore, catching up on emails and writing. SingTel provides free wifi city-wide. And people do use it. About 25% of the patrons of this cafe are currently on their laptops. And they seemto hang around and buy drinks, as I am doing.

But Sydney can’t get its act together. Too hard, too expensive, says the state government. …

On travelling and blogging

I have been travelling around China for the past 10 days or so with friends. Beijing, Shanghai and Tianjing – the three largest cities in China.

Today is the first opportunity I had to be by myself for a few hours. Not walking around looking at things, not engaging with my friends or the locals, not seeing something amazing, or eating great food.

I realised that it has been a …

Off to Singapore and China

[Written on 8 April]

I am writing this from the top deck of Singapore Airline’s A380 on my way from Sydney to Singapore. It has been an extremely busy few weeks since Easter, hence the sporadic blog posts. I shall attempt to catch up over the next four weeks.

My plan is to spend some time in Singapore talking business with associates and friends. Plus a couple of weeks getting …

The evolving strategic needs of business

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As businesses develop and grow (and I mean this in the larger sense beyond simply size and profits) over time, their strategic needs change. This is a rough diagram that sums up my thinking thus far on the matter. Click on the image to get a PDF version where you can actually read the text.

I am using this to clarify (for myself) how …

Heart core vs hard core

My friend Christina Jayne Duncan said in an email:

“The heart core of the issue is the only way!”

“Heart core” immediately made me think of “hard core” (mind out of the gutter please, just for the duration of this post).

So much of the conventional business world is about the hard core stuff - we are business MEN and must therefore must only make hard core MANLY “rational” decisions; we …

The meaning of “girt”

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* * Happy ’stralia day! * *

Richard Glover’s How do you tell if you are a true Aussie? is a fun read.

(My snag is girt by the gray background of the page??)

New eicolab website!

I have just revamped my entire website.

This is part of the move to integrate my design and consulting work into a meaningful entity.

Please have a look and let me know what you think!

Toilet designed by a fashion designer

These are a few slides from a talk I gave to a group of high school students on the media messages and their impact on our lives/body image last year, as part of the Eating Disorders Foundation of NSW’s annual Youth Forum.

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Fashion designers work to a fantasy of what the human body looks like. They are taught how to draw human figures in …

Valuing the virtual vs the physical

While reading this article on the SMH on Amazon’s Kindle ebook device, the following quote caught my eye:

“It’s, I guess, the feel of holding a book that someone really put a lot of effort into writing, and you kind of lose that a little bit with a digital product,” said Katy Farina, 21, of Montgomery, New Jersey.

The underlying assumption seems to be that the physical nature …

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