Scoble’s Link Blog

Two manhole covers-one about 100 yards from my Colorado house:

and the other on a typical residential district in Tokyo.

Any questions?

Beauty and attention to design detail… everywhere I turned during my two week stay (Tokyo and Kyoto), I saw it. Every-and I mean every Japanese restaurant (including the fast-food sushi joints) had an architectural bent. A sense of style. An aesthetic sensibility you just don’t see throughout the US!

Does this matter for the rest of us? If you listen to Daniel Pink, author of A Whole New Mind, yes. It matters deeply. It might even mean our jobs.

Eric gave a brief preview of the book in this entry, and I’ll do a more thorough review when I finish, but his main premise is that in the new economy, we can no longer rely on left-brain activities (he uses left and right brain as a metaphor), because those are being outsourced and automated. And because there’s so much abundance of goods out there, you cannot compete on utility and function. You must add meaning (or what he calls “significance”). Through aesthetics… look and feel. Adding beauty and style and fung shui or…

His notion is that if you are doing something that a computer can do, or that can be done by someone else for less money, or that is not in great demand (either because nobody wants it or because the supply is already so great), you better start looking at enhancing and evolving your right brain skills. Design is one of those.

Really, we’re all designers — at least with a lowercase “d”. We’re all trying to create solutions. But we should all-ALL OF US-be adding design to the list of “must learn” topics for this year.

The Japanese are being raised with a design/art/aesthetic sensibility, and we need to do the same. Besides the manhole covers and the gorgeous Japanese lunchbox take-out meals, I noticed another dramatic example of the relative importance of design to the Japanese vs. the average American:

I went into a large Borders-like bookstore in Kyoto, and considered how it matched (or didn’t) the way one of our large US bookstores is laid out. The main difference? In a typical Borders or Barnes & Noble in the US, the art/design section is off in a corner somewhere while the top bestsellers (DaVinci Code, etc.) are all displayed right up front near the cash registers or wherever the most prominent location is for that store. But in this Japanese store, the bestsellers were off to one side and the art/design section was in the center location right in front of the main registers! But that’s not all… it was also the most crowded section. I had to fight my way in while Japanese of all ages were browsing through books on everything from architecture to zen gardens to pop culture graphics to photography to illustration and… (not anime, which got its OWN section).

We should all start thinking like designers. Lots of folks are talking about it, and we made references to it in Beth’s entry Why cool is good for your brain and my earlier How well do your know your user’s brain, where I gave links to Don Norman and Virgina Postrel’s books on rise and importance of aesthetics today.

The good news is anyone can learn design. With a lowercase “d”. A good book to start with might be one of these two:

Design Basics, or the newer Universal Principles of Design.

And you can also start by picking up a design magazine like iD or HOW, or something on architecture. It’ll be good for your brain, and good for your users. Whether you’re a software engineer, marketer, teacher, doesn’t matter. We all need to start thinking more like designers and we all need to add meaning and significance to the things we create from software applications to learning experiences to books.

I’m a little too jet-lagged to say any more right now except to leave you with some fun links I found about others who’ve been captivated by manhole covers (I had no idea).

the Flickr manhole group

Drainspotting, a manhole enthusiast site.

A company that sells some cool ones (why isn’t that nautilus one on MY street?)

And someone else who blogged about the beautiful Japanese manhole covers here.

Vancouver Canada is doing something interesting, considering manhole covers “art under foot”, here.

Have fun! I’m glad to be back… I missed y’all. Thanks Beth for your wonderful blog entries, and thanks to the rest of you for participating.