 |  | Joshua Davis Creates the Face of Watson, IBM's Jeopardy Supercomputer | | John Pavlus | | If you watched "Jeopardy!" last night, you saw an IBM supercomputer named Watson cream two human champions -- at least until it made a few dumb mistakes late in the round and allowed Brad Rutter to tie things up. But you also saw Watson's "face" -- the swirling electronic avatar that Alex Trebek dryly rebuked when it buzzed in with an incorrect answer that Ken Jennings had already made. (Guess we shouldn't fear a robot uprising quite yet.)
IBM hired veteran digital artist Joshua Davis to create Watson's avatar, and made a video describing the designer's process (skip to 1:35):  Read more |  | | | Infographics of the Day: A Son Honors His Father's Life With a Masterpiece | | Cliff Kuang | | Each year, graphic designer Nicholas Felton creates an "annual report," summarizing an entire year of life in a series of beautiful charts and graphs. For 2010, he's created a masterpiece. Instead of looking at his own life, he's captured the entire life of his father, Gunter, who passed last September. Read more |  | | | The Untold Story of How My Dad Helped Invent the First Mac | | Aza Raskin | | Jef Raskin, my father, (below) helped develop the Macintosh, and I was recently looking at some of his old documents and came across his February 16, 1981 memo detailing the genesis of the Macintosh.
It was written in reaction to Steve Jobs taking over managing hardware development. Reading through it, I was struck by a number of the core principals Apple now holds that were set in play three years before the Macintosh was released. Much of this is particularly important in understanding Apple's culture and why we have the walled-garden experience of the iPhone, iPad, and the App Store. Read more |  | | | User-Led Innovation Can't Create Breakthroughs; Just Ask Apple and Ikea | | Skibsted Ideation | | The user is king. It's a phrase that's repeated over and over again as a mantra: Companies must become user-centric. But there's a problem: It doesn't work. Here's the truth: Great brands lead users, not the other way around. Read more |  | | | The Seven Deadly Sins That Choke Out Innovation | | Helen Walters | | In most companies, there's a profound tension between the right-brainers (for lack of a better term) espousing design, design thinking and user-centered approaches to innovation and the left-brained, more spreadsheet-minded among us. Most C-suites are dominated by the latter, all of whom are big fans of nice neat processes and who pay good money to get them implemented rigorously. So often, the innovation process is treated as a simple, neat little machine. Put in a little cash and install the right process, and six months later, out pops your new game-changing innovation -- just like toast, right from the toaster. But that, of course, is wrong. Read more | | CLICK HERE TO UNSUBSCRIBE   |
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