Umm.. fly to Berlin to give a 9-minute talk? Sure, I’d like to visit Berlin. Actually we had a great session last Tuesday on design at the IFA+ Summit, and I had a chance to hear and meet some really good people. They included Carlo Ratti, director at MIT Senseable City Lab, Caroline Seifert, Senior Vice President of Product Design, Deutsche Telekom, Michal Rinott, Senior Faculty Member, Holon Institute of Technology, Nikolaus Hafermaas, founder of Uebersee Inc. and Tjeerd Hoek, Vice President of Creative at Frog Design.
The theme was innovation, and my talk was titled Disrupt Yourself. I decided that, with 9 minutes, I would divide my talk into three 3-minute sections. Each covered something that, if you are currently doing and you want to innovate, you should stop doing immediately. The are: 1. Stop coming up with answers, 2. Stop listening to your customers, and 3. Stop fantasizing about women. IFA is a consumer electronics trade show. My third topic refers to the fact that the field consumer electronics has lots of opportunity to better connect with females. As a first step, stop imagining and stereotyping females (unfortunately a common practice), and meet and design for some real ones.
