We have open source browsers, operating systems, and other digital solutions, but it’s heartening to see open source also make it into physical products. October’s Scientific American covers the Open Prosthetics Project, a clearinghouse for free new designs for better prosthetics. (Just think of groups of people swapping and checking in CAD files instead of pieces of code.)

All started by Jonathan Kuniholm—himself an amputee from the Iraq War—and his North Carolina firm Tackle Design, the project has generated numerous improvements to the classic prosthetic arm, fixing common failure points partially by working with test patients who take their prosthetic arms to extremes.

Also see the article in Wired, the BusinessWeek post, and the podcast with Red Hat Magazine. And note the Project’s interest in Eric Von Hippel’s Democratizing Innovation, the same dude that’s nuts for another open source approach to physical products, Threadless.

The problem for the Open Prosthetics Project is now an economic one. Through open source they’ve eliminated the cost of design and development, but they still battle the cost of manufacturing an improved design. There’s the challenge for physical product open source systems: after design and development, they still have to manufacture and distribute, something the digital world takes for granted.

At two upcoming events in San Francisco and in Calgary I’ll be sharing the benefits and the how-to basics of sketchboards:

• First, at UXWeek in August I’ll be conducting what’s likely to be a crazy high-energy workshop with the smart and vibrant Leah Buley where we guide everyone in producing Better Design Faster. UXWeek should be more awesome than ever, with fundamentals, play, service design, media design and a freakin’ incredible list of speakers. And, you can get 15% off with the discount code FOBS.
• Then in Calgary in November I’ll be unlocking all of the sketchboard secrets at nForm’s CanUX 2008 conference. This is also looking like a great event, as I’ll be able to learn from Dave Gray of XPlane (I’m a big fan of his flickr photostream) and Luke W., whose forms book I’ve been following religiously.

But still my very favorite thing to host is the Design Strategy day of the UX Intensive workshops, which will be in Copenhagen in October. I keep on finding more interesting methods and tools to share and pack into this very hands-on day. The gist: I want to demystify strategy for UX designers and provide some lightweight tools that are meaty enough to help their work be successful without being so involving that they have to request special time/resources to do it. Here too, you can get 15% off with the discount code FOBS.

Drop me a line if you think you’ll be at any of these too!

Lately I’ve been working on a beefy article for the Journal of Business Strategy. The working title is, “New Mindsets to Pirate Off the Web.” While I’m working to get permission to share some excerpts of the text, I figure I can share the wordle visualization of the content:

Need a startup idea? Venture firm Y Combinator has already done some of the intial thinking for you, classifying the spaces in which they’d like to see startup ideas. Some of my favorites from their list:

9. Photo/video sharing services. A lot of the most popular sites on the web are for photo sharing. But the sites classified as social networks are also largely about photo sharing. As much as people like to share words (IM and email and blogging are “word sharing” apps), they probably like to share pictures more. It’s less work and the results are usually more interesting. I think there is huge growth still to come. There may ultimately be 30 different subtypes of image/video sharing service, half of which remain to be discovered.

I love-love flickr but I have to admit that that’s only one way of sharing photos. What about sharing where graffiti is encouraged? Or where camera phones, not PCs, are the based platform? Or where geography trump ownership as the primary means of organization?

13. Online learning. US schools are often bad. A lot of parents realize it, and would be interested in ways for their kids to learn more. Till recently, schools, like newspapers, had geographical monopolies. But the web changes that. How can you teach kids now that you can reach them through the web? The possible answers are a lot more interesting than just putting books online.

Amen. I run into people all over who are looking for practical education to help their career or fit their interests without having to go back to school. On the flip side, Adaptive Path has started virtual seminars and the tools are lackluster. They’re all stuck in one-point-oh-land, mimicing offline presentation behaviors. Why would you mimic something that didn’t work that well in the first place?

28. Fixing email overload. A lot of people, including me, feel they get too much email. A solution would find a ready market. But the best solution may not be anything as obvious as a new mail reader.

If this isn’t a problem for you now, it might be a problem soon. Emails are easy to cc and forward, but hard to consume and manage. It’s become a feed, not an inbox. People and organizations are ready to pay money to solve the information anxiety from email. Somebody save us.

This week Peter talked with BusinessWeek reporter Matt Vella about Subject to Change and the approaches necessary for focusing on experience as the product you deliver to customers.

On of my favorite points from the podcast was on lessons learned from our recent Managing Experience Conference. Peter put together patterns he was hearing from design leaders like Cordell Ratzlaff of Cisco and Chip Conley of Joie de Vivre Hospitality, California’s largest boutique hotel company:

“They both talked a lot about culture, and corporate culture… In order for an organization to successfully deliver great experiences, it’s a matter of mindset of people in the organization, that that is their orientation—to deliver great experiences. You need to have a corporate culture to do it.”

Here’s the podcast, which you can also get through iTunes.

Tomorrow at the IASummit I’ll be presenting on The Long Wow, a systematic approach for building great customer experiences that lead to real customer loyalty. It’s one of three approaches to practicing design differently that I outline in Adaptive Path’s new book Subject to Change. This is a talk that I have a lot of fun with, so I’ll looking forward to doing it.

The premise of these three approaches is simple: If we all practice design (or IA, or UX, or whatever you call it) the same way within organizations, then no design practice will be considered truly strategic. Strategic applications of design only exist when design practices are focused on the aspects of an organization that make it distinct. Otherwise you’re just employing best practices, and your executive leadership will only see you as a cost center.

I’ll work to get the presentation onto Slideshare soon, but until then, here’s some detailed notes on some of the references I made during the talk:

• My essay on The Long Wow
• Learn a little more about the Net Promoter Score and the corresponding research study from Bain & Company on “Closing the Delivery Gap“
• Here’s a brief review of the peak-end rule from Daniel Kahneman. Also, the very interesting book Paradox of Choice makes some references to the peak-end rule and how it applies to concepts like the experience of colonoscopy exams.
• For those not familiar with the often told story, here’s the history of OXO Good Grips and Sam Farber’s original inspiration
• TripIt is the travel organization service I referenced as a good example for finding a wide area of customer need that they can return to again and again for new inspiration
• Peter Merholz’s interview with the CEO of Zipcar
• And who can forget radiators.com!
• The flickr Color Contest outage message, and the winners
• Adaptive Path’s book, Subject to Change

And here’s where you can download a PDF of the slides (48.5 MB) from the talk. As a reminder, you can register for upcoming Adaptive Path events in San Francisco and Minneapolis for 15% off by using the code FOBS.

It’s may sound a bit crazy, but we’ve decide to announce our CEO search and request suggestions via the Adaptive Path blog. We’re in a great position today, as a firm, and so there’s no reason we shouldn’t openly reach out while we’re looking for someone to help us keep striding forward. We love networks, and we love openness, so this is just another way of showing it.