12 More Videos to Inspire Innovation and Culture Change
About three years ago I wrote a post (linked below) with twelve videos that were inspiring me, and others, towards innovation and culture change. The post got thousands of views, not as many times as I played each of the videos in workshops, but a lot nonetheless. Over those years I’ve collected more videos, and once again, I’m sharing them, in order to inspire you.
The intro from my previous post sums this one up too…
“Getting people to do crazy and scary new things is hard — especially in the corporate world — but absolutely necessary to drive innovation and improve your culture. Moving slowly just isn’t an option these days, we need to take bigger steps and move faster together.
In our team we don’t just take baby steps; we move in leaps and bounds.
We’re constantly trying to inspire people to have visions bigger than what’s right in front of them, and we find that short videos (or stories) are an awesome way to convey a powerful and moving message to people, so we seek out and find a lot of videos on a weekly basis.
In the spirit of sharing the love, I’ve decided to post a collection of my favourite videos so far. I’ve added my thoughts on the video, happy watching…”
- Design Is [Speculative] Futures Design Thinking — a new toolkit for preemptive design
My thoughts: As the Design maturity of the corporate world increases, organisations are using design to push new boundaries. Speculative Design is the latest form of Design to be used. It enables businesses and individuals to manifest futures, and navigate towards the most desired of those futures. Speculative Design also allows us to glimpse into the future through physical and digital manifestations of what each future could be like, energising and motivating people away from bad, and towards better futures.
Use this to create a corporate vision, or to drive transformational change within your business.
2. LulzBot Bio — Overview of Lulzbot’s New FRESH Certified Open Source Bio-Printer
My thoughts: If you’ve been following (or doing) 3D printing for the past few years, you’ll know that printers are getting faster, smaller, cheaper, more accurate, and new materials to print with are coming out each year. In 2020, we’ll see a lot more bioprinters, where you can print things like collagen using lab-ready consumer printers. If you think about the multi-material consumer printers we have available now, and add collagen, you end up with the ability to print structures which are part organic, part inorganic. Imagine printing a mechanical robot arm, with titanium bones, flexy-PLA hydraulic tubes, and organic skin. Bioprinters will help us push the boundaries of organic printing, and integration in multi-material printers will open new doors in the mechatronics and consumer goods worlds.
3. Biomimicry is more than just good design.
My thoughts: On the topic of bio, I may as well touch on biomimicry. Climate change is upon us, and when searching for solutions to this global issue, looking to the biological world for inspiration is in vogue. We’re now using biomimicry to create lasting social change, taking clues to help us with government, communities, and relationships. When you’re designing solutions to complex problems in your organisation, make sure you build biology and ecology into your design process as inspiration, you never know, nature might be your best creative.
4. The Future of Design in Retail? Revolutionary Retail Brands Have Soul
My thoughts: IDEO is using design to drive systemic change in societies, and in sectors. So what changes are driving the retail sector, organisations are shifting from ownership to access (Uber, Spotify etc.) and towards Circular Economies (as per the below video, and often inspired by biomimicry as per the previous video). As leadership has always struggled with a shift from transactional to transformational, retail is now attempting the shift away from transactional to relational, which can only truly exist in the physical world. Hence the giant leap from well-founded Digital channels, to blended Digital-Physical.
5. The circular economy
My thoughts: Eliminating waste and pollution from manufacturing is no longer more expensive to do than the traditional, where waste and pollution was too big to deal with. Companies around the world are signing up to the Circular Economy revolution, and this shift will drive great change for our planet. There’s no longer an economic excuse for companies to use in order to not go circular, much like the outdated excuse for using coal to create electricity where solar is far cheaper to build and maintain.
Creating products in a truly circular fashion helps us not only create increased value to our companies but also to society and the ecology we exist within.
6. Canoo - a subscription only electric car | Fully Charged
My thoughts: Electric cars are mainstream, no doubt about it, and with car manufacturers getting on board more than ever, they’re still stuck in the ownership mentality, where consumers will buy and own their cars. New startups in the electric world are emerging that offer subscription mobility, and fleets of fully autonomous delivery vehicles where ownership is blurry, and the benefits to society are immense. Hyundai, who are extremely active in the transport space of late (see video below), recently invested in Arrival and Canoo adding momentum to the new world of electric mobility. As a cherry on top, Amazon recently ordered 100,000 Rivian electric delivery vans. Something big is happening in front of us.
7. Hyundai S-A1 Air Taxi first look at CES 2020
My thoughts: For the right ‘price vs convenience’ ratio, I’ll go with any mode of transport to get to somewhere like an airport, and as populations increase in cities, the inconvenience of traffic dramatically affects that ratio. I end up willing to pay more and more, for incremental increases in convenience. With air-taxis, this will be fundamental to their strategy: the right price, for the incredible convenience of flying from point A to B in no time at all.
Hyundai and Uber, have recently teamed up to create a full-scale prototype, which means this is industry taking off is imminent.
And if you’re worried about getting in a flying taxi with no driver, think about this: If I asked you 10 years ago if you’d get in a strangers car, you’d likely say no, now you do it a few times a week, so now, in 2020, would you get in an air-taxi?
8. How Bionic Limbs Are Changing Lives | VICE on HBO
My thoughts: Advances in battery technology, 3d printing, generative design, advanced materials, human-machine interfaces and other forces are driving the creation of never before seen bionic limbs. From ultra-cheap and Star Wars themed 3d printed limbs to fully functional artificial feet, it won't be long before these limbs are indistinguishable from real limbs, especially if bioprinting takes off (see video 2).
Advances will come thick and fast now that the world has a Bionic Olympics ‘The Cybathlon’ to drive innovation in the field.
9. LIGHT PHONE 2 — A Minimal Phone for Digital Detox
My thoughts: Smartphones are the centre of the universe for the majority of us, and that’s a fact that we hate, probably deny, and would fight someone over, but it’s the truth. We are addicted to social media, and we can’t seem to pry ourselves away from our phones. If you search Digital Detox you’ll come across hundreds of motivational videos on YouTube discussing how people, typically influencers who get paid to be on social media, are getting off social for a brief period of time.
I’ve always been of the opinion that rather than ‘Detox’ every now and then, you should just ‘Change’ your habits so you don’t need to detox. There are now a host of mobile phones that have low-functionality that allow us to build positive habits in our days, without the distraction of social media, and without totally removing us from the connected world.
These purpose-driven devices (devices that are designed and manufactured for a purpose that is socially good, ie. helping people get off social media) will increase in number and variety in the future. One day we’ll want to reduce the amount of time we spend in VR or AR, and there’ll be a device for that.
10. Why SpaceX is Making Starlink
My thoughts: We live in an ultra-connected world, and the faster information moves throughout this networked existence, the faster we progress as a species. The Space Industry is growing at an enormous rate, everyone want’s a slice of the sky pie. SpaceX is launching a network of satellites to speed up our internet connections across the globe, and as a positive consequence, bring the internet to areas of the world where it currently isn’t.
As more and more satellites fill the sky, we’ll have access to knowledge and content from across the world, at our fingertips, in ultra-high definition, and we’ll have no-where to hide from the hundreds of camera’s pointing down at the earth. If the internet gets cheaper and more accessible around the world, I’ll be happy, but if it comes at the cost of our privacy, I won’t be.
11. Solving Rubik’s Cube with a Robot Hand
My thoughts: OpenAI is pushing the limits of what machines can do, they’ve built training simulations for AI, games for agents to solve, competed in global esports competitions, and done some really cool stuff, like this video of a robot hand learning to solve a Rubik's cube, single-handedly. As AI gets more advanced, we’ll be taking advantage of it for everything from screen scraping data in our corporate workflows to predicting severe weather events and warning residents of potentially impacted areas so they can prepare for the worst.
AI is one of those technologies that seems pretty hard for someone to get in to. I was intrigued a couple of years ago and started looking into Computer Vision, a field of AI. I actually bought one of the Google AIY kits to make at home and experiment, which helped, but only because I was super curious. I’m picking that most people older than 40 wouldn’t want to buy anything from AIY, and wouldn’t really get any benefit from a computer vision cardboard box, but the younger generations do, and it’s critical that they learn about AI from the start.
Like generations before, this is their new tech, this is their Colour TV, their Laptop, their Smartphone. This is the tech that will invade their lives the most, the tech that they’ll need to learn to understand so it doesn’t get evil on them.
12. THE POWER OF POSITIVITY — Kevin Hart
My thoughts: In a world where so much is moving so fast, mental health and wellbeing is something that affects us all. Negative thoughts start when times are bad, or when things aren’t going our way, and those negative thoughts spiral out of control, which leads to inaction and demotivation, which prolongs the bad times, and it’s a negative cycle that is hard to break, without external influence. In these times it’s important to realise our mental states, and use the power of relentless positivity, or extreme optimism as I like to call it, to pull us out of the negative stuff, and focus on the future, and make things that will help us create the future we want, for ourselves, for our children, our families, friends and communities.
As far as tech is advancing around us, our individual mental health needs to advance just as far to stay strong in this ever-changing world. Make your mental health a priority from day 1, today.
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