There’s an old saw in business to the effect that you can’t trust the customer to know what they want. In other words, a customer cannot envision a solution that does not yet exist. Therefore, it is a professional’s job to invent that solution, rather than wait for the client to describe it, and then try to […]
May 29, 2014
In his excellent book, Thank You for Arguing, author Jay Heinrichs provides a thorough and entertaining view of rhetoric, the art of argument and influencing the future behavior of others. One of Heinrichs’ key points is: the most influential arguments are done in the future tense. Past tense rhetoric is known as forensic; it focuses […]
May 23, 2014
Anti-microbial qualities have been an obsession of consumer goods manufacturers for the better part of a decade. Part of this drive has been the media’s focus on exotic and potentially deadly pandemics—Ebola, bird flu, swine flu and the like—which seem to grab the headlines every other year or so. Now it is MERS, and Florida had […]
May 22, 2014
In late 2011, I blogged about a biowall installation in a Drexel University building. Generally, plant life is not very plentiful in hospitals—despite the indoor environmental benefits they provide like toxin filtering, oxygen production, temperature moderation, and aesthetic / calming benefits to building users. When I discovered the Drexel Papadakis Building biowall 30 months ago, not […]
June 10, 2014
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