Like most of us, perhaps, I know that the world is going to hell in a hand basket.  Pick your poison --  here are two of my recent  'favorites':

No seafood left by 2048 -- we over-fished the oceans! Yay humans!

All these severe earthquakes might be more severe because of global warming.

Also, like most of us, I had no idea what to do about it. So I was blown away by Valerie Casey's keynote here at SXSW Interactive.

A former exec at IDEO and Frog Design, Ms. Casey started The Designers Accord , a group of designers focused on sustainability and social change.  Her talk was really simple but moving.  The outline of it:

-- The world is going to hell in a hand basket.

-- The interactive community ( egocentric me, I didn't know I was a member of a community . . . there you go ) has done boo to help with these problems.  We lag product designers, urban planners, architects, you name it. 

-- These big 'intractable' problems are tough to solve because they are systems problems. By systems, I mean bunch of interdependent actors, and behaviors, with associated outcomes.

-- No other design discipline knows more about systems and systems design than interactive designers.  Especially if you include gaming and social as part of interactive.

-- So get out there and do something!

Email sent to Val Casey and Designers Accord.  Let me see if I can do something.  

Forgive me for partying like it's 2006 and chatting about highly forwardable videos, but I found this interesting.

Here's a link to the most viewed videos on the Web.  Each of them have over 100 million views, which is, not to get too technical, quite a few.

And of the top 15 videos on the list, comprising 2.84 billion views, how many came from this magical thing called 'user generated content'?

Three.  The remaining twelve are music vids, TV clips, trailers, etc. --  mainstream media product.

Now, I am a firm firm believer in the democratizing power of the Web in its many forms, but I found this stat intriguing. The media machine still works, on a good day. And it's very hard to create a 'hit single' no matter what the medium.

Yup, no posts here for about a week.

Could it be a conicidence that the ACC Tourney and the Big Dance are happening at the same time?  I think not.

As a half-Midwesterner (read: Big Ten hoops fan) / half-New Englander (read:  Yankee-loather), I get the best of both worlds in the Triangle -- better basketball and deeper and more complex rivalries. 

Just don't bother us much until this thing is over. Or at least until the UNC / Radford game is off the big screen.

Long live college hoops!

I just posted this message to our Interactive Community email list -- I probably should have sent it to everyone at the agency.

Read http://five.sentenc.es/

If we followed this policy for internal emails only, and talked face to face for anything longer than a five sentence email, would we be:

A) more productive

B) less productive

C) something else _______________________________ (please note).

I am curious to see how folks respond.  What do you think?

OK. Instead of working, I took this procrastination test. 

I scored a 58 out of 100. Eh? A moderate procrastinator. No surprises there. 

I was a decent but not great student because there was no immediate negative (or positive) reinforcement.  Thank God for the working world, we got plenty of reinforcement here.

My procrastinatory habits (?) used to bother me, but I actually believe it's a force of good, especially in this industry.  Wandering, surfing web, "boredom" etc. lets your mind settle.  Which can lead to odd insights.

Like how brands actually exist in your brain.  Not your mind, mind you, but your brain.  More on that later.

Sometimes you break a constraint in the design of a product or experience and the focus of simplicty shifts.

Think about coins.

Coins are wicked simple - small descrete objects that we (and vending machines and toll booth buckets, among other things) can easily recognize by touch and sight. Discrete is the key word here - each object an indivudual one, its size and especially design representing a single concept like a state's brand or a central event. 

Now check out these winning coin designs from the Royal Mint. Wow. Coins as puzzle pieces. 

But there is still simplicty here. The Royal Coat of Arms of the United Kingdom, the completed picture within the puzzle, becomes the unit of simplicity.

Neat.