More than a couple laughs at this Friday fun link: icanhascheezburger.com.

I Can Has Cheezburger? is a site that gathers, organizes, tags, and captions what we hope is the most funny and slightly weird pictures of lolcats and lol* (other animals) from the Internet. All of our lolcats and lol*whatevers are made by u, our userz. Many of the earlier images on this site were found around the internet and forums (there are hundreds of forums where this meme has grown outside of its original context such as fark, fazed, vwforums, gpforums). The practice of captioning, specifically, cats started many years ago on anonymous forums, most prominently called the *chans.… more

It all looks beautifully obvious – in the rear mirror. But there are situations where [one] needs great imaginative power, combined with disrespect for the traditional current of thought, to discover the obvious. — Arthur Koestler… more

This quote, from a recent article in BusinessWeek called The Cross-Discipline Design Imperative, is for all of the Creative Generalists out there who have, over the years, emailed me to lament that nobody’s hiring generalists:

There is a tremendous demand for design thinkers today. In industry and in consulting, those who can marry creative right-brain thinking and analytical left-brain thinking are at a premium. That’s because innovation often happens not in the center of a discipline but in the space between disciplines, and right now a lot of new value is being found at the intersection of design and business.… more

Wow! These are all freakin’ brilliant: Bent Objects (and Really Bent), by Terry, an Object Maker in Indianapolis.

(via Tastes Like Paste)… more

Critical Mass VP of Experience Design David Armano once again hits the nail right on the head with this presentation about “The Fuzzy Tail”.

Being “fuzzy” means unlearning the way we’ve always done things and moving away from rigidity toward adaptability.

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An interesting and increasingly relevant article in the latest strategy + business: How to Be a Demographic Realist. It’s about a range of assumptions we generally have as a society about aging and retirement, such as:

Assumption 1: We’ll work long enough to pay for our retirement.
Assumption 2: As our society gets richer, we can afford to retire earlier.
Assumption 3: It is useful to retire people early, because there are not enough jobs for everyone.
Assumption 4: Income and status at work rise linearly, and people retire at their most senior position.
Assumption 5: We accumulate assets while working and spend them during retirement.… more

Some of the best ideas are those that seemingly make something out of nothing but that in fact create something new from simply noticing what’s been in front of you all along. These are the kind of profound ideas that eventually appear obvious in hindsight. A fantastic example of this is “Crowd Farms,” the harvesting of the energy of human movement in urban settings – like commuters in a train station or fans at a concert. The idea was envisioned by two graduate students at MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning, James Graham and Thaddeus Jusczyk, in a proposal they made for a Sustainable Construction competition earlier this year.… more

More and more, we know more of less; until there will come a time when we will know much of nothing, and nothing of the whole. — Bernard Shaw… more

I’ve been wanting to see a Ronnie Burkett marionette show for some time now and last night I finally did, catching 10 Days on Earth here in Montreal on it’s last stop on a full world tour. Burkett is an acclaimed puppeteer who writes and performs each of his productions as well as crafting each of his characters at his Toronto-based studio (click here for a behind-the-scenes tour).

10 Days on Earth is his tenth major production. It’s a charming and sad show which centres on Darrell, a middle-aged intellectually challenged man who lives with his mother. She dies in her sleep one evening without him realizing it and we see Darrell navigate the next ten days alone, with a couple friends, and with a few imaginary children’s book characters.… more

Canadian/Columbian Andres Melo Cousineau offers a “critical stance on our dangerous desire for overspecialization” and this philosophical argument for why the Greek letter Ω (omega) is a better graphical representative for well-rounded generalists than is T (as in T-shaped people).

And graphically it works as well. This is primarily so because it portrays a gained roundedness, but with a certain permanent incompleteness to it. This is why it portrays, in contrast to the perfect circle, a permanent assured openness at the same time. Moreover, its lower extensions firmly ground its presence, thus clearly differentiating it from the upward arrow of radical progress in overspecialization.… more