Kelly Ashley

From an interview with CEO F. Mark Gumz

“And so my boss said, ‘That’s good. But let me give you a few tips.’ He said: ‘No. 1, don’t make any promises you can’t keep. No. 2, keep every promise that you make. No. 3, if you don’t know the answer, say you don’t know the answer. People will accept that you don’t know the answer. But what they can’t accept is if you tell them something that’s wrong, because they’re going to act on that. And then if you have to come back later with a different answer, you’ll lose credibility.’

‘And the other thing is, get back to me. If you say you’re going to get back to me with an answer, make sure you get back. If you do all those things, you’ll be successful.’

And off I went. I felt empowered by that, because they were very simple lessons, and I’ve never forgotten them.”

Source The New York Times

  What if there were a way to transform complaints into something positive and productive? What if we reframed the exchange to be less about adversity and more about cooperation and action? What if citizens were encouraged to offer their thoughts on how things from transit systems to city parks might be improved — as opposed to simply airing their grievances about all that was wrong with them? That’s the beauty of Give a Minute, created as part of CEOs for Cities’ US Initiative by the media design firm Local Projects.

 

What if there were a way to transform complaints into something positive and productive? What if we reframed the exchange to be less about adversity and more about cooperation and action? What if citizens were encouraged to offer their thoughts on how things from transit systems to city parks might be improved — as opposed to simply airing their grievances about all that was wrong with them?

That’s the beauty of Give a Minute, created as part of CEOs for Cities’ US Initiative by the media design firm Local Projects.

Source The New York Times

Wasted Data

Indhira Rojas, a graduate student in the design program of California College of the Arts, wrote her thesis on the role of design in creating a “zero-waste culture.”

In short: Start with the ubiquitous bar code. It’s already the medium not just for price and information about the thing you’re buying, but also for tracking the fact that you bought it.  …Ideally all your shopping data would flow into one spot, accessible from your computer or mobile device. This could reveal perhaps surprising patterns (drinking more soda than you would have guessed?). But apart from guiding your future consumption, it would also provide information about whether what you’ve already bought can be recycled, and how. If a package needed to be broken into parts, for example, you’d have that information; if unused contents can be composted, you’d get those details too.

Source The New York Times