Mayari’s Blog

Imagine it’s a normal day and suddenly people around you just freeze for 5 min.

How would you react? What would you think?

Watch the video here.

By http://improveverywhere.com/

There is no single methodology for creating the perfect product—but you can increase your odds. One of the best ways is to understand users’ reasons for doing things. Mental Models gives you the tools to help you grasp, and design for, those reasons. Adaptive Path co-founder Indi Young has written a roll-up-your-sleeves book for designers, managers, and anyone else interested in making design strategic, and successful.

I feel this approach to design new things is exactly what correspondents to my beliefs. It’s about to know the WHY (which I feel is strongly correlated to emotions and intuitions) people act the way they act. This understanding is crucial, especially if people are self-determined eg. self-educated like in today’s idustrialized societies. We have to understand human behaviours, cultures, philosopy first before we can come up with meaningful products or services. We should understand and research more to see the big picture before taking action in order to create sustainable solutions. We in the developed world can (or merely have to) afford this.
My further thoughts… The internet is a good but not complete way to accomplish this: you get loads of information, but you can only learn the WHAT! However I learned from experience, rhetoric class and psychology lesson that it’s much more the HOW YOU SAY/DO SOMETHING that’s important not to mention the WHY! I think the through the HOW (considering the context/culture) you can understand the WHY (underlying feelings and thoughts) of someone’s actions. Where is the HOW visible and even more where can we experience the WHY through the new medias (like seeing the passion in the eyes of a person while talking and feeling ones motives)… reading between the lines?! It’s too vague for me. I have to go out and observe and meet people face to face.

I remember an article by Peter Bieri, “Wie wäre es, gebildet zu sein?” (NZZ am Sonntag, 6.November 2005) my teacher gave us to read. I liked it so much that I kept it. Now, rereading it a few years later it still touches my heart.

How important self-education is to live in peace, to become tolerant and understanding! How important traveling is to understand other people’s lives, to respect them truely. Realising that your life is an accident in time and space, same as every other person’s life. No child can ever decide where on this earth, to whom and when to be born and to be raised. Only one thing is certain: we are all born thinking and feeling humans to the same planet.

I’m sorry if you can’t read German. But those who can I think it’s worth reading this essay!

Here are some thoughts: one who is curious is educating oneself | knowledge impedes you to become a victim | never stop asking questions | look at things from a distance | consider language | moral identity is contingent | serendipity | everything is relative | education/experience forms personal identity | education makes you an adult | enables you to decide for yourself | makes you addicted to documentary movies and books | there are uneducated academics | he learns the language of the heart | one knows to talk about oneself in an interesting because differentiated way | he/she creates or finds and evolves self-perceptions | an educated person knows of his unstable inner diversity | he/she creates his/her own mental identity | nobleness of heart | wishes and experiences are self-determined | one becomes more and more free | he/she accepts uncertainties | he/she develops moral sensitivity | tolerance | true respect | tension | no fears | empathy | social fantasy | education IS value per se | education mustn’t be prevented by anything! | knowledge about cultures | education is about everything: orientation, intelligence, self-awareness, fantasy, self-determination, moral sensitivity, art, luck… everything.

Kluster is a place to harness the power of community collaboration to get stuff done. everyone has ideas, we provide a platform to get them out of heads and into the world…where they belong.

We initially built kluster to facilitate large group decision-making during product development, marketing/advertising initiatives, and event planning. then, after the system got its algorithmic brain, we realized it was powerful in virtually any decision-making activity, with groups large or small.

So here it is… use “Schwarmintelligenz”. Let your ideas go. Help others innovate. Give and take. Because tossed around ideas mostly get better! Don’t think your ideas are unique (read a familiar problem in businessweek). There are so many clever brains out there. Why not working together?

IDE is a unique international non-profit organization that has been helping poor farmers in developing countries escape poverty for more than 25 years.

I think working together, exchanging knowledge and experience is important to make a business successful. Collaboration between rich and poor, educated and experienced people is very tough but it’s worth it I guess.

If you want to invest money but you can’t decide where Kiva could be a good and social option. It enables poor people to set up their very own companies so that they can permanently escape poverty taking action themselves. Kiva believes in the poor but passionate entrepreneurs. Finally they have almost nothing to loose and a lot to gain.

That’s why I like Chris Jordan’s photographic arts called Running the Numbers.

Skull With Cigarette, 2007 [based on a painting by Van Gogh]
72×98″

Depicts 200,000 packs of cigarettes, equal to the number of Americans who die from cigarette smoking every six months.

Good podcast about the topic sustainability. It’s not only a question about the material goods we buy - or buy not it’s also about human behaviour. What we think, why we think the way we think. We need to think outside the box in order to create sustainability - even more we have to have a new box. The whole issue is not easy to solve. It needs understanding of different and complex aspects: technology and humanity.

Listen to it here.