People often talk about finding inspiration for their everyday work by looking outside of their immediate industry or practice. I agree with the sentiment, it broadens personal outlook and is more likely in my opinion to present new ways of thinking and doing that can filter back into the day job.

The video below illustrates this line of thinking perfectly. Tinker Hatfield is a talented guy - Nike’s Vice President of Innovation Design - who trained as an Architect and transitioned to Product Design whilst working at Nike. He is responsible for the classic Air Max and drew significant inspiration from the Pompidou Centre. “If I had not seen the building I might not have suggested we expose the air bag and make it visual and let people see inside the shoe.”

Having the idea however is only one part of innovating… as he goes on to say, it also takes courage to see it through “When you do something different you have to have a pretty thick skin, people are going to take shots at you. They are going to criticise what they don’t understand.”

It’s an inspiring short, have a watch, thicken up your skin and go see a new bit of the world.

^ “Respect the Architects” by Thibaut de Longeville.

Lols

Biggest lol came from “Business guys on business trips.” A satirical illustration and commentary on the design industry

The annotated weekender’s characters add a bit of spicy augmentation to the editorial.

Tech

Video for everybody with the HTML5 spec of video embedding… until is got squashed.

A decent summary of core user experience links, book recommendations and other signposts for further investigation from Whitney Hess.

Brian Christiansen’s pattern collection captures findings of consistent, unique or interesting interfaces and design flows from across the web.

Site check

Graze’s food delivery service uses carefully considered interaction that extensively uses AJAX to provide a smooth experience, focusing the user on their activity.

The Magnetic North agency uses gestural techniques to create a playful way of exploring their offering.

Music

Awesome tapes from Africa dusty tapes of blissful music from Africa. Reminds me how much incredible music is being made beyond the realms of our digital world.

Gadget

Pacemaker gadget want. Playful interaction on a portable mixing device.