Trends: Neo DIY, Ethnography and Cigar Box Musical Instruments

There are three trends that we are paying careful attention to these days:

1. The new DIY (stands for ''do it yourself'), as exempified by Make Magazine: 20,000 people attended the recent 'Makers Faire', sponsored by Make (www.makezine.com). If you don't understand the need for an adult-sized tree-to-tree zip line or a soda bottle water rocket that travels hundreds of feet, you may not be interested. Note: See Brad's posting on this blog on the Make Magazine phenomenon.
2. Ethnography: A recent article in Business Week (www.businessweek.com) calls it the "new core competency" (we already knew that!). Thanks for an attendee at a recent lecture I gave with Jay Heisler of UPS on Ethnography in the Front End of New Product Development (you can download it from this site.) for this tip. We'll be posting several summaries on several related Business Week articles on New Product Ethnography & Design ASAP.
3. Musical instruments made from cigar boxes (who knows why, but we're in!): Google 'cigar box guitar' for instance and you will see what we are talking about. Note: be careful about signing up for the Cigar Box Cigar listserve--you will get more interesting stuff from brilliant eccentric inventor/tinkerers than you can even imagine.

Stay tuned for plans for building a cigar box fiddle that actually sounds good on this blog. We're almost finished...really!!

DR