A lot has changed in the two years since the Finding Substance blog started... so we felt this was an appropriate time to apply the "do better" idea to findsubstance.com. Time for a refresh.
our thinking about Inspiration…
Found in Translation
This week, Stephen and I had the opportunity to present to a group of young Japanese design professionals at the Pacific Northwest College of Art. The group was here in Portland as part of Teruo Kurosaki’s international desi…
It’s the Soft Stuff that Matters Most
Sometimes while mowing my lawn I drift off into some crazy internal philosophical discussions. Today’s started out with equal parts nonsense and rationality, but ended up being something significant and share-worthy. Here it…
Life at the Summit - A Substance Summit Recap
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rno59mxEp6E Wow. What a great start to this idea. Thank you to everyone who make it, and we hope the rest of you who couldn’t make it this time will be at the next. I know I rely upon the ad…
The Substance Summit, July 9 (#ss)
Just a quick reminder that the Substance Summit is on Wednesday, July 9th. What is the Substance Summit? In it’s simplest terms, it’s a conversation between creative and technology. It’s discussing how creative a…
Are you relevant?
“If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less.” – General Eric Shinseki, U.S. Army Chief of Staff (retired) We were discussing the concept of relevance at the long table (we love t…
Announcing The Substance Summit
“Do not covet your ideas. Give away everything you know, and more will come back to you.” - Paul Arden (thanks to @swestbrook for the quote) What? The first in a series of conversations with the Portland creative commu…
Change the Culture, Change the World
“It is not a matter of business as usual, it is a matter of total innovation in business models, in operations, in marketing too. Total innovation tends to go one of two ways: ignominious failure or drastic success.” â…
Hacking the Light Fantastic
“Hacking means taking things that suck and making them better.” – Umair Haque From Harvard Business Press blog writer Umair Haque: http://discussionleader.hbsp.com/haque/2008/05/last_week_i_asked_how.html There are p…
The Death of Education, the Dawn of Learning
“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.†- Albert Einstein I have two kids who are growing up in a world that is vastly different from the one I grew up in… differe…


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43 minutes ago / twitter.com/substance