Any bank that values design at this level has my business. In an industry that desperately needs innovation and creativity, Simple is clear at the right time and the right place.
In short they are not a bank, rather partnering with charter-banks to store you money freeing them up to focus on technology, tools and customer service that will hopefully blow away the personal banking services of our parents era.
“I invented nothing new. I simply assembled the discoveries of other men behind whom were centuries of work. Had I worked fifty or ten or even five years before, I would have failed. So it is with every new thing. Progress happens when all the factors that make for it are ready and then it is inevitable. To teach that a comparatively few men are responsible for the greatest forward steps of mankind is the worst sort of nonsense.”
At its time the multiplane camera was by far the most advanced tool in animation. Although it has all be replaced with a few click in After Effects, it is still interesting to see what went into the process in the pre-computer days.
Via Computerlove
I still remember getting my first Popular Science subscription in the 3rd grade, and every month I would flip to the back pages and dream of the hovercrafts, personal helicopters, and ray guys that I could build by myself with the mail-order assembly guides. When I found the Inventables site on 37signal’s Signal vs. Noise blog this morning it sparked a similar urge to tinker, experiment and invent. I have no clue what I could make with hand moldable plastic, skin conductive switches, squishy magnetic gel and glow in the dark thread, but now I’m determined to find a use.
Rather than taking the typical approach for selling scientific materials by listing the crystallisation temperature, viscosity, melt flow index, Inventables created their site to spark inspiration with great product photography, example applications and easy to read descriptions.
It’s a good lesson for anyone who’s trying to compete with bigger competitors. If you’ve got a smaller product mix, you can obsess over these details in a way that big guys can’t. Customers respond to that.
Take the time to read the article on Signal vs. Noise and browse through Inventables. Both are full of lessons that can be applied to any site, product, brand, or business.
Even companies serious about innovation can fall victim to their own, well-meaning creative process.
Taken from Ryan Jacoby, the head of IDEO New York’s practice, talk at NYC/Poly Leading Innovation: Process Is No Substitute. Read the full overview on Co.Design.
“The key skill of the innovator is error recovery not failure avoidance.”
Frog Design looks the way that ideas travel, reproduce and evolve in human history in their first essay for Fast Company. They make the case that the ability for humans to exchange ideas is key human invention.
In every case it was openness to exchange, within and among nations, that drove innovation (and predation by chiefs, priests, and thieves that shut it down). The same is true today. Countries that open their borders to the free exchange of goods and services and ideas and innovations flourish, while those that cut themselves off and seek economic self-sufficiency stagnate.
“We have a natural tendency to romanticize breakthrough innovations, imagining momentous ideas transcending their surroundings, a gifted mind somehow seeing over the detritus of old ideas and ossified tradition. But ideas are works of bricolage. They are, almost inevitably, networks of other ideas. We take the ideas we’ve inherited or stumbled across, and we jigger them together into some new shape.”
Steven Johnson, author of the new book Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation. Read the full context of the quote in the article The Genius of the Tinker.
Check out the illustrated trailer for the book that I posted last month. I’m looking forward to reading this book as soon as I finish Delivering Happiness by Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh (highly recommended)
Via Michael Lebowitz
“The key skill of the innovator is error recovery not failure avoidance.”
“Innovation is almost insane by definition: most people view any truly innovative idea as stupid, because if it was a good idea, somebody would have already done it. So, the innovator is guaranteed to have more natural initial detractors than followers.”
— Ben Horowitz
Via Signal vs. Noise
PSFK’s Future of Health Report details 15 trends that will impact health and wellness around the world. Simple advances such as off-the-grid energy and the introduction of gaming into healthcare service offerings sit alongside more future-forward developments such as bio-medical printing. It is our hope that this report will inspire your thinking and lead to services, applications and technologies that will allow for more available, quality healthcare.
Via PSFK
“Innovative design always develops in tandem with innovative technology, and can never be an end in itself.”
Stories of innovative young people who love what they do.
We’ve found the most passionate, cutting edge young trailblazers we can get our camera on and asked them, simply, to share their stories. Our archive of fascinating shatterbox stories will grow as we seek new characters to feature across limitless industries
“Redirect your hatred of Flash to the W3C, whose embarrassingly slow pace forced devs to use a plugin because the standards were so weak. Also, I am looking at you, developers who bitch whenever a browser offers “non-standard” but innovative APIs. Browser makers need to go nuts with non-standard APIs and let the W3C standardize later. Waiting for the committee to innovate is suicide.”
As everyone is discussing the latest technology announced today, it’s always good to put things into perspective.
Reblogged from Jarred Bishop and ckck
