Worklife » Industrial Design

Ramblings about workplace culture, life in Japan, and then some.

Industrial Design


User segmentation, profiling is dangerous

I’ve learned about Fear­gal Quinn’s Crown­ing the Cus­tomer through read­ing Tom Peters blog a few years back.   It’s a classic.  I read it over and over, and each time, I am inspired on dif­fer­ent pages. What I was inspired this time was what Mr. Quinn wrote about “see­ing cus­tomer as people”.  He encour­aged his work­ers who […]

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20 Nov, 2010 | No comments yet
Starting up design essay project

14 years ago, I attended Yoshiko Sakurai’s sem­i­nar for small busi­ness audi­ence. She said, when you read a book, have a pen or pen­cil in your hand, and under­line the parts that means some­thing to you. If you do that for 10 years, you will be stand­ing here instead of me, giv­ing sem­i­nar about the […]

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19 Nov, 2010 | No comments yet
Humans will be mostly manufactured

Maybe humanss will be man­u­fac­tured, not born by year 2209. Look around now.  We seem to have already made the choice.  We are wait­ing for the tech­nol­ogy to catch up.  Kids in advanced coun­try planted in front of PC or gam­ing device or some sort of machine, because there aren’t room for them to play outside.  […]

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01 Aug, 2009 | No comments yet
Why meet face to face?

This year, more peo­ple than ever attend the World Eco­nomic Forum at Davos.  As this video asks:  Why attend?  We are now capa­ble of shar­ing so much infor­ma­tion vir­tu­ally. It will prob­a­bly take sev­eral gen­er­a­tions, if ever, for the humans to become nat­ural at vir­tual meetings.  In the recent sem­i­nar I orga­nized about build­ing a […]

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30 Jan, 2009 | No comments yet
Toyota dealership visit in suburban Tokyo

http://www.flickr.com/photos/projectkobo/sets/72157612706079650/ Buy­ing an auto­mo­bile has never been an option to me since I moved from the US to Tokyo.  Why would I want a car?  Trains and buses are so cheap, they are every­where, runs on time, clean, safe.  Taxis aren’t so expensive.  If I needed to drive some­where for some rea­son, I would rent […]

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18 Jan, 2009 | No comments yet
Sustainability effort: moving small office

I did it again.….  I let a few months slip by with­out writ­ing any­thing. August, Sep­tem­ber were really busy, then came mid Octo­ber and nothing.  So this is what it’s like to be, affected by the eco­nomic sit­u­a­tion of the time. Being a small oper­a­tion, it was an easy deci­sion to close my stu­dio, espe­cially the […]

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11 Dec, 2008 | No comments yet
Kohoku New Town Green Matrix

Urban devel­op­ment in Japan is finally mak­ing the kind of progress that res­i­dents can feel. The clus­ter in eco­nomic devel­op­ment as dis­cussed by Michael Porter exists in Japan as can be read in Strat­egy for Clus­ter Ini­tia­tives in Japan by Yoko Ishikura, et al

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12 Apr, 2004 | 2 comments


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