On Wednesday night I was luckily enough to get invited to the RCA Innovation Night 2012, with Will.i.am – Musician, Entrepreneur and Director of Creative Innovation, Intel Corporation, as the guest speaker. Previous speakers include Burberry Creative Director Christopher Bailey, Apple’s Jonathan Ive, YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley and Sir James Dyson.

It was really interesting to hear how Will.i.am is using his fame and fortune to do so much great work in local communities across the US. Including launching I AM Auto, a car company that brings computer-programming and car-engineering skills to the deprived neighbourhood where he grew up.

The three tips I took from the talk included:

Don’t forget to dream, as dreamers mould and create the future, and right now we need to dream.

Being a palm tree right now is the best thing to be, as they have deep roots and after storms they are the last things standing.

We need to bring science and design closer together, which I think is really exciting!

I have just been reading an interesting article written by PSFK reviewing a Stanford research paper that explores how you can increase people’s saving behaviors for the future, through age-progressed rendering of their future self!

As many people fail to save what they will need for retirement, because of a lack of belief or imagination, to identify with their future selves. The research studies showed people future images of themselves, all of which resulted in the tendency to accept later monetary rewards over immediate ones.

Looking at my own photography above, I admit it’s pretty scary!

I’ve just been reading that IKEA have plans next year to start building a neighborhood in East London, named Strand East. It will include car-free streets, 1,200 houses and apartments. With plans to provide residents an events calendar of things that are happening in their community, I hope that doesn’t include building any IKEA furniture!

I’m sure Ness and Abigail will want to can share with them the outcomes from our current neighborhood project in Trafford.

I love what Anthon Berg a Danish chocolate brand did to inspire people to be generous, think of others, have fun and promote their chocolate. They opened a pop-up chocolate shop for one day, where people had to pay with the promise of a good deed instead of cash or a credit card.

To inspire people to see the positive effects of being generous, The Generous Shop in Copenhagen ‘priced’ its boxes of chocolates with over 30 different good deeds including ‘Help clean your friend’s house’ and ‘Serve breakfast in bed to your loved one.’ Customers made generous promises towards a friend or loved one on Facebook using the in-store iPads to ensure they followed through with their payment.

Its great to see the Family Space Croydon website up and running following Jess and Ivo’s hard work. The service aims to be the go-to place where parents can find the information they need and also feedback their experience of services with each other and to the services concerned.

Family Space Croydon is an outcome of Croydon’s Total Place pilot, a project co-sponsored by NHS Croydon and Croydon Council aimed at building public services around the user – taking a ‘whole area’ approach to deliver better public services at less cost.

Today Deborah is speaking at the International Conference for Innovation and Creativity of Women for Economic Development, within the Parliament of the Republic of Poland in Warsaw. The event brings speakers from across the world in design and business to discuss and share ways for designing the quality of life in modern economy.

The conference is being held by the President of the Republic of Poland Bronislaw Komorowski. Thanks to Malwina, Deborah can now also speak some Polish!

Today some of the thinkpublic team were at the Public Sector Efficiency Expo in Olympia, getting people involved in making lemonade, to demonstrate how prototyping can help create outcomes that are even tastier. Only joking, we were bringing to life the importance of using prototyping to quickly and cheaply involve communities and staff in the design and testing of new services.

The lemonade went down a storm…. To be honest I was surprised how good it tasted! Well done James for designing the stand.

So if you would like to send us any post or give us a call, check out our new contact details by watching this lovely animation made by Ness! We look forward to seeing you soon.

We’re On The Move from thinkpublic on Vimeo.

I’m loving the fact that one of my extended family members (somewhere along the line of Bearded Collies) has become a TV star overnight in the new Halifax advert the Furry Hero. Great choice of dog Adam and Eve London.

Just in case you need another hero I’m always available and I’m pretty good at football too!