John Thackara has a new book: "In the Bubble: Designing in a Complex World." Looks like an interesting read. Here's an excerpt from the introduction:

In a less-stuff-more-people world, we still need systems, platforms, and services that enable people to interact more effectively and enjoyably. These platforms and infrastructures will require some technology and a lot of design. Some services will help us share the load of everyday activities: washing clothes on the roof of apartment blocks, looking after children, communal kitchens and gardens, communal workshops for maintenance activities, tool and equipment sharing, networks and clubs for health care and prevention. The most important potential impact of wireless communications, for example, will be on the resource ecologies of cities. Connecting people, resources, and places to each other in new combinations, on a real-time basis, delivers demand-responsive services that, when combined with location awareness and dynamic resource allocation, have the potential to reduce drastically the amount of hardware—from gadgets to buildings—that we need to function effectively. Most of us are potentially both users and suppliers of resources. The principle of use, not own can apply to all kinds of hardware: buildings, roads, vehicles, offices—and above all, people. For more or less anything heavy and fixed, we don't have to own them – just know how and where to find them.

Silicon Valley Watcher writes:

The more I think about the term “mashup” the more I like it as a very fitting descriptor for this emerging Internet 2.0 world.

Here are a few Internet mashup observations:

* The current fashion of using tags allows content to be mashed together because folders separate content.

* Blogging mashes up the many formats of writing. News style gets mashed up with email style, for instance.

* The distinctions in media communications are being mashed up: online media with online communications of all sorts.

* Trackback unveils a mashup of different types of readers of online content. This is completely different from traditional media, which is always targeted at a specific demographic/type/job.

* Flickriscious communities — Flickriscious is what we call a quality that provides for spontaneous expressions of aberrant behavior by online groups. It is a mashup because it involves people of all types.

* Domain names are mashed up: siliconvalleywatcher.com and I sometimes write mashedup sentences on SVW.

WSJ has an interesting article on how P&G's CEO A.G. Lafley has some simple, straight -forward advice which businesses could also apply to their customers.

These days, employees spend hours with women, watching them do laundry, clean the floor, apply makeup and diaper their children. They look for nuisances that a new product might solve. Then, they return to the labs determined to address the feature women care about most.

"We discovered that women don't care about our technology and they couldn't care less what machine a product is made on," Mr. Lafley told P&G executives in Caracas, during a recent tour of Latin America. "They want to hear that we understand them."

Roughly 80% of the people who buy P&G products in the U.S. are women. That's why Mr. Lafley routinely stops women in stores to ask them about their purchases. That's why last year he persuaded P&G directors to follow around a group of French women shopping for beauty products. And that's why on a recent morning, Mr. Lafley climbed up a steep set of concrete stairs in Caracas, into the cramped kitchen of 29-year-old Maria Yolanda Ríos, to listen to her describe how often she washes her hair, what kind of skin cream she uses and if she wears nail polish.

For an hour, Mr. Lafley sat in the corner of Ms. Ríos's kitchen, where bright yellow paint peeled off the wall, and listened to the young mother. Avon Products Inc., which sells cosmetics through door-to-door salespeople, dominates the beauty market here and P&G wants a foothold. Ms. Ríos, a housekeeper, told the group through a translator that she and her husband, who drives a school bus, together earn just under $600 a month.