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Why Every Ski Map Looks The Same This past weekend was a big one for skiing and so this article was interesting and timely – all about the life and work of a man who has drawn hundreds of ski maps for resorts. It is a fascinating reminder that there is beauty in the details of
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Japanese organizational guru Marie Kondo recently launched a show on Netflix and has inspired millions of people to get rid of the clutter in their lives. Perhaps predictably, now some people are extending that advice to their digital lives too, as the WIRED UK article linked here points out. In this quest to rid ourselves
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Japanese Hotel Has First Round Of Robot Layoffs I first wrote about the Henna hotel, staffed entirely by robots, more than two years ago. It seems that the experimental property in Japan has discovered a hopeful truth: people sometimes prefer people. And so it may also be the first example in history of robots being
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If you think about it, there are a lot of brands that define what they do or how they sell based on their names. This week at CES, Mastercard announced they would be dropping the words of the name from their logo. It’s a smart move considering how the financial world is moving away from
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Huawei’s New App Uses Sound To Let The Blind “See” Emotions Imagine an app that uses AI to read facial expressions and then translates the seven universal human emotions – anger, fear, disgust, happiness, sadness, surprise and contempt – into seven distinct sounds. Once it detects an emotion, it will play the sounds to allow visually
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There was a time when people used to think the waiting list for season tickets to Redskins games took decades to clear. Then the team finally admitted those numbers were inflated and made season tickets available again last year. The idea of a show/venue being “sold out” is one of the most basic marketing techniques in entertainment …
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Japan Turns To Immigration To Solve National Demographic Crisis Can Japan find an antidote for their aging population crisis through immigration? The country is notorious for how difficult it is for outsiders to live and prosper, so it will be interesting to see if this new policy works. The First Major US Copyright Expiration In 20 Years
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You know that moment in most long running TV shows when they do that recap show filled with all the greatest scenes from past episodes? Reading stories this week was a bit like watching one of those shows, with lots of recaps of the past year. So this week’s “holiday edition” of the Non-Obvious newsletter
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Every year my team and I read and review hundreds of books in the process of curating ideas to incorporate in our annual list of trends. Beyond using those books to inspire how we see the world, we also select our favorites each year to feature as part of the Non-Obvious Book Awards program. For
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For the past six months I have been curating stories and insights for the upcoming 2019 edition of Non-Obvious, and it will be out in just a few weeks. This post offers a sneak peek at five of the trends from the upcoming report this year. If you’d like to read the full report, you
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