Paul Miller

This is roughly what I said in a talk I gave at the Designers Accord London Town Hall meeting at the Design Council on 19th January 2012.   I don’t know about you but when I read, watch or listen to the news at the moment I get pretty depressed. The Today Programme seems to [...]

There’s a great metaphor in Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee’s Race Against the Machine which they in turn take from Ray Kurzweil: In one version of the story, the inventor of the game of chess shows his creation to his country’s ruler. The emperor is so delighted by the game that he allows the inventor [...]

What if the jobs crisis we’re seeing across the western world isn’t just because of the financial meltdown, but is also due to technology? That’s the argument Andrew McAfee and Eric Brynjolfsson make in Race Against the Machine. They point out that the last decade was the first since the Great Depression with no net [...]

I still don’t really know why the Social Innovation Camp format works, but it does. Last weekend we had another great event up in Edinburgh with six teams of fantastic people all trying to take back-of-the-envelope ideas through to working prototypes that could become new social ventures. The things that struck me this time about [...]

If you’d like to come along to Social Innovation Camp this weekend in Edinburgh, here are the ideas that we’ll be working on: 1.) invisibleRamps When a building isn’t accessible it’s pretty easy to see what the problem is, even if you’re able-bodied: no lifts, no ramps for wheelchairs and lots of stairs. But there [...]

  It’s the final few days to get your idea in for Social Innovation Camp. The Camp itself will be 17-19th June in Edinburgh. The last time we were up in Scotland we found the team behind MyPolice which has gone on to be a great example of how smart people can use digital tools [...]

Stewart Brand’s book Whole Earth Discipline is one of the best books I’ve read in the last few years, partly because it’s very well written and researched but mainly because it made me change my mind about some important issues. Perhaps the easiest argument for me to accept (although I still learned a great deal) [...]

Just amazing. I’ve always been a sucker for ‘animations’ but this makes you realise quite how powerful computer generated techniques have become. There is apparently no ‘real’ footage in this film. The Third & The Seventh from Alex Roman on Vimeo. (via Alfie)

About this time last year I went on a little day-trip to Birmingham with my friend Steven Johnson. It was grey and miserable and we had to go and buy umbrellas from Boots to keep dry. It was a fantastic day though. We were on the trail of Joseph Priestly tracking down the places he [...]

I put this idea into the 4iP call for ideas but they turned it down (maybe because I’m supposed to be running one of their portfolio investments ) so I thought I’d just put it out there to see if anybody was interested in taking it on or helping out… PartyStarter.org Starting a political party [...]