This time I'm gonna try and make it concise, although I must say that I find it challenging enough to simply process everything I hear from the lectures. Also, I'll adhere to the instructions that were given in regards to these blog posts:
Choose a keyword from the key note lectures and review that in 150 words, the keywords being one you select (*shrug* yeah, I'm not entirely sure what that means).
So for today's we had two keynote lectures, the first one from James Woudhuysen, Professor of Forecasting and Innovation at De Montfort University, Leicester.
The title of his talk: Leadership, innovation and the silo mentality
I'll pick Leadership.
When Woudhuysen spoke on Leadership, he gave claim that today we need more of it. He tells us that we should all look at ourselves as leaders that should strive to move towards a vision. He emphasises the importance of being well informed of key political, economical or historical events, in the statistics and predictions to add more substance to the way we design.
It's all well trying to design something great, but he indicates that we must have the ability to put a price on it and understand how what we design will fit into the current climate. Without this, we are stuck in stagnation. Woudhuysen provides examples of the development of retail innovation in the late 19th century. He pointed out how these technological innovations were all mutually beneficial towards a greater vision of how the consumer was to perceive purchasing goods.
This brings us back to the need for leadership to be present amongst today's struggles. Under no leadership, we are not banded together to strive for a shared goal or vision - he warns us against the silo mentality that develops when people disconnect themselves from each other to create designs in independence, that trapping information stunts the growth of any major innovations that could have resulted from collaboration.
We'll call it about 150 words there. Next.
In the afternoon we received words from Anna Minton, a writer and journalist and writer of the book "Ground Control".
Her talk: Ground Control Fear and Happiness in the 21st century city
[Darn, I feel I ought to re-listen to her talk. I don't feel like I've absorbed much of what she said, but here's my first shot]
The major point gleamed from Minton's talk is that the happiness of people in today's cities is affected by the way in which architecture has been designed to detract from our ability to trust each other. She mentions how as a result of privately owned estates and property has created buildings that have a defensive structure, is monitored by surveliance, and is guarded by security; all this creating a priming effect that diseminates a sense of fear and paranoia to its inhabitants and therefore creates unhappiness.
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