Friday, November 21, 2014

visualization: Dashboards

Dashboard Design for at-a-glance monitoring
by Stephen Few, Perceptual Edge

What is a Dashboard?:
"A dashboard is 
a visual display 
of the most important information 
needed to achieve one or more objectives
consolidated and arranged 
on a single screen 
so the information can be 
monitored at a glance"

ideas: Productivity Challenge

The New Productivity Challenge by Peter F. Drucker @ Harvard Business Review (1991)
...single greatest challenge facing managers in the developed countries of the world is to raise the productivity of knowledge and service workers.
...
For the last 120 years, productivity in making and moving things—in manufacturing, farming, mining, construction, and transportation—has risen in developed countries at an annual rate of 3% to 4%, a 45-fold expansion overall.
...
The productivity revolution is over because there are too few people employed in making and moving things for their productivity to be decisive. All told, they account for no more than one-fifth of the work force in developed economies.
...
when farmers make up only 3% of the employed population, as they do in the United States, Japan, and most of Western Europe, even record increases in their output add virtually nothing to their country’s overall productivity and wealth.
...
The most pressing social challenge developed countries face, however, will be to raise the productivity of service work. "
...
In knowledge work, defining the task and getting rid of what does not need to be done is even more necessary and produces even greater results
...
nurses now spend only half their time doing what they have learned and are paid to do—nursing. The other half is eaten up by activities that do not require their skill and knowledge (paperwork)
..."

ideas: 1,000 True Fans

The Technium: 1,000 True Fans:

Truefans-1

...the long tail is a decidedly mixed blessing for creators. Individual artists, producers, inventors and makers are overlooked in the equation. The long tail does not raise the sales of creators much, but it does add massive competition and endless downward pressure on prices...

One solution is to find 1,000 True Fans.

A creator, such as an artist, musician, photographer, craftsperson, performer, animator, designer, videomaker, or author – in other words, anyone producing works of art – needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living.

A True Fan is defined as someone who will purchase anything and everything you produce.
...
The key challenge is that you have to maintain direct contact with your 1,000 True Fans"

Holos = Technium + Humanity + Gaia

Kevin Kelly: Technium Unbound - The Long Now:
"What comes after the Internet? What is bigger than the web? What will produce more wealth than all the startups to date? The answer is a planetary super-organism comprised of 4 billion mobile phones, 80 quintillion transistor chips, a million miles of fiber optic cables, and 6 billion human minds all wired together. The whole thing acts like a single organism, with its own behavior and character -- but at a scale we have little experience with."

... “superorganism”... “A collection of agents which can act in concert to produce phenomena governed by the collective".
...
The Technium may best be considered a new organism with which we are symbiotic, as we are symbiotic with the aggregate of Earth’s life, sometimes called “Gaia.” There are pace differences, with Gaia slow, humanity faster, and the Technium really fast. They are not replacing each other but building on each other, and the meta-organism of their combining is so far nameless. Kelly shrugged, “Call it ‘Holos.’"


The Technium - Kevin Kelly

book: "Cool Tools A Catalog of Possibilities" - Kevin Kelly