DPL Reading List – June 22, 2018
Here are some of the articles we found this week.
What It Takes to Think Deeply About Complex Problems – “Simple answers make us feel safer, especially in disruptive and tumultuous times. But rather than certainty, modern leaders need to consciously cultivate the capacity to see more — to deepen, widen, and lengthen their perspectives. Deepening depends on our willingness to challenge our blind spots, deeply held assumptions, and fixed beliefs. Widening means taking into account more perspectives — and stakeholders — in order to address any given problem from multiple vantage points.”
Watch RadioShack’s TRS-80 Model 100 usher in the laptop era – “The Model 100 wasn’t the first laptop—Epson’s HX-20, a clear forerunner, even had a built-in printer—but it put together all the pieces in a way that made it irresistible, especially to journalists and other writers. The hardware (designed by Japan’s Kyocera) fit in a briefcase, sported a comfier keyboard than most 2018 laptops, ran for 20 hours on AA batteries, and had a built-in modem for connecting to online networks.”
The legendary Apple research group that shaped our world – “The ATG was founded in 1986 by Larry Tesler, a computer scientist who had previously worked at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center–aka PARC, the birthplace of the graphic user interface–before moving to Apple. The group’s mission was to create breakthrough technologies that didn’t need to be products. The theory went that the ATG’s computer scientists, shielded from the company’s day-to-day grind, would have the creative and professional freedom to spark the Next Big Thing in consumer tech.”
What Is 5G? Understanding The Next-Gen Wireless System Set To Enable Our Connected Future – “While this fourth generation of wireless technology has paved the way for new mediums of mobile consumption, it does have limitations. Over the next decade, the rise of connected (IoT) devices will require networks to transmit massive sums of data in near real-time. The next generation of wireless technology, known as 5G, will allow just that.”
Why touchscreens in cars don’t work – “But if there’s anything I learned from this research, it’s that few environments compare to driving or operating a car. And as a result, designing for the automotive use case can’t be approached with the same lens as designing for smartphone use cases. For each task a driver has to perform, we need to especially mindful of which input method most minimizes cognitive load.”
How to Get Blockchains to Talk to Each Other – “Hardjono and two colleagues at MIT argue in a new paper (PDF) that today’s blockchain developers should borrow a concept from the internet protocol suite called the datagram, which is a common unit of information that can move across different networks. “Every network that sees it knows how to parse it and knows how to forward it,” Hardjono says. “What is the datagram equivalent for blockchain systems?””
Thinking Big, Testing Small. Creating Teams That Build Stuff – David Bland is the Founder & CEO of Precoil, an innovation agency in the San Francisco Bay Area. He pioneered GE FastWorks with Eric Ries, advised emerging product teams at Adobe and even mentored Toyota on lean startup practices. In his presentation from the 2018 Inside/Outside Innovation Summit, David offers a different approach to creating new products.
