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What if makers of audio guides in large museums could connect Global Positioning Systems to their units?

This would mean you wouldn’t have to follow the prescribed path through a space, but the system could load the relevant tracks for a room/space as you walked into it – at the whim of the user.

Stairway

Originally uploaded by Leon Jacobs

Sincerity

Originally uploaded by Leon Jacobs

Seen on a bulletin board in Beijing’s famous Silk Market.

There is also the corresponding list of banned words.

E. O. Wilson, winner of the 2007 TED Prize makes a compelling case for charting all of the planet’s micro-biodiversity in this TED talk, presented at TED during 2007. As it happens, human existence depends on it.

I suspect that it is pretty difficult for the man in the street to fully appreciate the complexity of life as we are wired to engage with life on this plane, in order to survive. But if we are to survive, we need to become aware of the destruction that is happening on a micro-biological level. Archiving all of this life in an Encyclopedia of Life is one way. For the man in the street, there might be another.

What if we got some of the globe’s biggest companies to pool together a percentage of their marketing spend and launch a global campaign to just document life on a micro-level. As we found this week, they want to do something special anyway. We could blast billboards, Web sites and TV slots with just documentary evidence of the beauty and complexity of the layer of life beneath us – that sustains us.

A constant, beautiful and inspiring reminder of life on another plane, can shift paradigms in people’s minds about our connection to the planet.

Concrete separates us from this connection with nature. Based on the evidence that Wilson presents in his TED Wish, it is clear that we need the average city dweller to become aware of another plane of living. In order to sustain or own.

Lots of people don’t think in numbers. And lots of people like dragging blocks and other shapes around on screens.

So, what if banks designed their internet banking systems to allow you to interact with your accounts in a graphical way. Imagine being able to size the blocks of cash that you need to pay an account, and dragging and dropping it into the beneficiary’s bucket.

Most internet banking systems I have dealt with has taken the conventions of paper accounts into the interactive space, ignoring the possibilities of users actually interacting with their money.

If you designed a consistent and simple system, you could even help educate people about more complex financial concepts like the effects of compound interest.

That would be something worth doing.

I was randomly clicking through the intarwebs and found a video about Cape Town.

At around 0:17 I noticed something peculiar. Something rather familiar.

It was this picture which I shot about two years ago during a massive fire in Cape Town.

So I am all for the free flow of ideas. But you still have to ask and credit the owner of the creative material. That is the beauty of the Creative Commons License.

And I think this post proves that you always run the risk of being caught.