innovation playground Idris Mootee

Design Thinking Has Inspired Multi-disciplinary, Interdisciplinary and Trans-disciplinary Approaches To Problem Solving. This Is Just The Beginning Of A New Discipline.

Prague is mystical with a mix of medieval, Renaissance, and Art Nouveau architecture and the design scene is slowly taking shape. You still see traces of history of what communism had done to the city even after these buildings are completely restored. It is where Renaissance meets neo-Gothic and the baroque structures from the 18th centuries.

You can see shadow of cubist touches, which thrived in Bohemia more so in the neighborhood near Vysehrad Park. The public housing or “rabbit huts” as they called it, cheap but highly functional (the Walmart of architecture), provides a stark contrast to the Bohemia style. It is the featureless nature but with modern plumbing and heating were once considered the politically correct way to live. Or at that time, politically sustainable living as I would have called it.

I stayed at the Hotel Josef, a nine-year-old modern boutique hotel that was one of the first in Prague and still the most popular one. It is centrally located in the old Jewish quarter and right next to the Parizka Street. I don’t like the word boutique hotel, as it doesn’t mean much other than small and not part of a big chain. I rather use the word design hotel.

I was really impressed with the design and how it holds up over the years – now that’s design at its finest. There was not a thing to make you feel that it is getting out of fashion, in fact, the hotel design concept is to provide guests with a break from the fascinating baroque architectural surrounding the hotel and give them space to step back and relax in a soothing, and luminous environment. I enjoyed the hours and hours I spent sitting in the lobby lounge doing work with my Macbook while occasionally looking out the windows.

When you’re in Prague, you can’t avoid talking architecture. I’m not trained as an architect but always fascinated about the design process as well as the visual artifacts architect employs. Architects are considered designers and probably fair to say that they required the most rigor training both in art and art history compare to other design discipline such as graphic, fashion or industrial. They probably attracted a very different type of design mind than those of other design disciplines. I wonder what would happen if first year MBA students were required to spend 3 to 6 months studying the history of architecture and design, at the same time learning some basic drawing skills. I think that would drastically widen their perspectives as well as picking up some drawing skills that they can use for life.

Today, most MBAs can’t even draw simple diagrams. The pre-MBA studies are mainly statistics and accounting. There is plenty of time for accounting later in the program. The abilities to communicate using simple diagrams are extremely useful for business problem solving, strategic communications and visual sensemaking (strategic modeling and business model design). Architects use diagrams to explain their visions, elements and relationships between them. Business people can use abstract visuals to show business model options, new value chain design or customer interactions. Once business persons/design thinkers are supplied with visuals to making connections, they can see the relationships between different components better and in return easier to see something otherwise too complicated to express.

Visual sensemaking is quietly changing decision theory, it is also influencing design thinking and theories of design-oriented problem solving as a manifestation of pattern recognition. It is hard to say whether sensemaking is influencing design thinking or system thinking is influencing design thinking and in turn influencing sensemaking. It is a fact that design thinking has inspired multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary and trans-disciplinary approaches to problem solving. I will explore the application of this in my coming Design Thinking for Creativity and Business Innovation seminar organized by the Harvard Graduate School of Design in NYC this month. 25% discount for early registrations and affiliates of a list of design and business schools. Now hoping on a train to Wien.

Where Can You Get The Best Design Education These Days? Here's My Ranking. Is There A Good Place That Teaches D-Schools+B-Schools Thinking?

I've spent a good half-day in London at the Royal College of Art this week and lunch with Nick Leon of Design London. We exchange views of design thinking and the world of design and where it is going. Also met with some other faculties and plan to feature some of their work in the upcomming issue of the M/I/S/C magazine. Will write more on this next week.

Design thinking can power up strategic business innovation and change design education, but no one can agree on how to teach its methods. It is not exactly a very good time to be graduating from design schools as thousands of graduates pour into the job market this year and many industries are still in a flux. But the positive side is design is gaining importance in business probably the first time since the early days of the industrial revolution.

There are reasons to be optimistic but also concerns. I’ve interviewed about 30 designers/job applicants the last two weeks and come to the same realization that most of then are not equipped for the real world. Many design schools are struggling to find the balance between craft and thinking and some schools have not idea of what real world skills they would need. Lacking in formal and rigor methodologies is a still a challenge; some still resist the idea of needing a methodology. There are plenty of designers out there, industrial, graphic, architecture, urban planning, interactive (not enough information and service design) and definitely not many design thinkers. It is easy to assume that coming out from a design program one must be a design thinker. Not true at all, it is definitely not the case.

You don’t need to study in design school to be a design thinker, many young designers graduated with aspirations to use design to drive change and realized they are just in the business of communications – a poster (even a really good one) don’t change the world. “Design for Social Change,” sounds exciting, and when I ask them “How?” I usually get 5 minute of dead silence.

Everywhere graduates are emerging from new interdisciplinary graduate programs that integrate art, design, technology, and business. These young men and women are supposed to be trained in "design thinking." but mainly are just new ways of pushing creativity rather than thinking about new ways to solve problem. They are two very different missions.

Some schools simply bring students together from different schools or departments and allow them to do some cross-disciplinary project work. Example would be the exchange program hosted at INSEAD for Art Center students to take MBA courses for 4 months. INSEAD students can study with the design students in the eight-week 'Strategies for Product and Service' elective, offered through the 10-month MBA program. 

To train people in truly D-schools meets B-schools, the Royal College of Art is way ahead of the game in terms of training design thinkers of tomorrow. I would say this is the best graduate level design thinking education you can get today, compare to anywhere in the world. The Master's in Design program from IIT (Chicago) is also worth a mention for those who prefer wind than rain.

The Cox Review: Creativity in Business was commissioned by the UK Treasury to look at enhancing UK business productivity and resulted in the forming of Design London, an international centre for interdisciplinary design led innovation that teaches, researches and delivers radical new practices, tools and processes to transform the way organizations innovate. Design London brings together creativity and expertise in design from the Royal College of Art, engineering from Imperial College's Faculty of Engineering and the business of innovation from Imperial College Business School.

It was the first and still one of the very few schools where design is a core component of every MBA students curriculum, not just an elective course, and where MBA students, postgraduate students of design from the RCA and engineers and scientists from Imperial complete a common program which includes executing challenging innovation projects over several months.

I was excited to hear from Nicolas Neon at the RCA in London what they are doing there and it is almost exactly how we want to train our people at Idea Couture. I think this is the model where other schools should replicate.

Since RCA only offers graduate (Master or Doctorate) programs, if you want to have a good design foundation, here are the lists of best design schools in US and UK for you to consider (there are many good ones outside UK and US and I don't know enough about them):

UK Top Ranking Art and Design Schools 2010 ratings (Source: Guardian Top 10 list)

• No.1  University College London
• No.2  Oxford
• No.3  Brunel

US Top Industrial Design Schools 2010 (Source: The Idris Mootee's ranking) Stanford is considered more of an engineering school rather than industrial design school and that’s why I did not add it to the list, you can add that to the list probably as one of the top three. And then I have two No.3s)

• No.1 Art Center
• No.2 RISD
• No.3 Carnegie Mellon
• No.3 Pratt Institute

Apple iPad Is More Than A Tablet, It Is A Window To New Behavior That Has Yet To Fully Emerge. And I Want A New MacBook Pro With A New Design Before The Summer.

Microsoft and Apple are both great companies for different reasons and operate under very different philosophies. The interesting thing is as Apple grows bigger and bigger, will it begin to behave like other large mature organizations such as Microsoft or IBM? Ever since Apple market cap surpassed Microsoft, it signified an indicator that the investment community was sending a message to the industries..

But Microsoft is still a much bigger company from both topline and bottom as well as other measure. What it means, now Apple is given the currency and blessing to go out and play the next game. Who’s the next big target? I don’t think is Microsoft, I don’t even think Apple sees Microsoft as competition. They are onto the next game.

I have three companies in mind that I think Apple will be out there trying to push out. Apple was set out not to beat Microsoft, but IBM. Are they still on that mission? Apple is still a fraction of IBM’s. Both companies have significant customers lock-in for different reasons and both are tied into the fabric of our economy. Let’s face it, the primary reason for Apple's stellar growth and valuation was due to their track record of repeatedly innovating and creating new products while at the same time maintaining a long-range vision – most companies do one at the expense of the other.

Apple's advantage is that it has a good view of the end game and driven by strategic foresight – not by today’s balance sheet and they can afford to be strategic. The iPad is not important not as a tablet, there are enough tablets out there. It is the first member of a growing family of 21st century computing appliances from Apple that co-creating a new behavior. Much like the first generation iPod. I think there will be a wave of innovation from the industry as people realize this is not just another computing device to fit between a phone and a computer. Many still don’t get it when I talked to people in CES. Tablets are dead, iPad is an appliance.

I am looking forward to the next gen MacBook Pro and I hope we will see something in 3 months. For sure it will be thinner, Light Peak will replace firewire, and the DVD drive will disappear (it should) and equipped with solid state drive. he next update to its MacBook line to make way for Intel's Sandy Bridge processors. There is 90% chance that Sandy Bridge processors will be used on the 13” MacBooks Pro, it is the first to feature a graphics chip grafted atop a processor. I hope they provide a choice of different colors (unlikely) such as silver, white and black. I will take black. I don’t think they will upgrade the 15’ and 17” until later in the year. I don’t think MacAir will survive long when the MacBookPro gets thinner. It is too pricey.

I am interested to see when the revenue stream from the iPad will eventually overtake the Mac's -- much as the iPhone did a few years ago and the iPod did before that. MacBook will eventually become just be a small business unit of Apple.

Adorno Refuses To Choose Between Music And Philosophy. Now Idea Couture Refuses To Choose Between Design And Business. We Wanted Both.

My dining room as well as other 6 rooms in the house are now turned into back office and soon we will move in the SAP servers. Between my work, hobby and personal projects my life is a mess and I really have no time to eat and sleep. The paper monster is taking over the house and the kitchen is the last defense…not for long.

On another note, I am very excited to recieve the advance copy of my magazine M/I/S/T which will be in newsstands in London, Germany, New York, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Sydney and every Barnes and Noble and Borders in a few weeks. I love the cover design and it stands out among other magazines. Why another magazine? I don’t know but I think it is just a good idea. What's next after a magazine? I have another idea.

I wanted to see a design-thinking magazine that talks about design and business as one. Design and business is part of our culture. Question for myself is if I have to ask Therodor Adorno what magazine should I publish, I think this is it. M/I/S/C is a about ideas, it is about culture, it is a magazine about business innovation and design thinking.

Every issue the content are organized around four key concepts: Movement / Intuition / Structure / Complexity (I jsut thought of the name one night while having ice-cream) The magazine original idea was originally devised as a straightforward collection of random thoughts around innovation, design thinking, business, culture and technology. It is for exploration of creativity, collaboration and co-created meanings that sits at the intersections between the culture of art, design, business, filtered by an unique editorial lens.

When it comes to media, I think I belong to the Frankfurt School. It has been more than 20 years since I last read the English translation of Dialektik der Aufklärung: Philosophische Fragmente (1947 Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno). The English title is called Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments.

My favorite part of the book is what Horkheimer and Adorno called the culture industry. It was their contention that the culture industry was the result of an historical process that with an increase in technology (including mass communication technology or social media of today if you wish) there was an increase in the ability to produce commodities, which then enabled increased consumption of goods.

The consumption of mechanically reproduced cultural products—predominantly magazines and film—led to formulas of producing them for entertainment purposes, and it did not occur to consumers to question the idea that the entertainment presented to them had an ideological purpose or purposes. Consumers adapted their needs around these cultural products, and in doing so no longer knew of anything else that they might desire, or that there might be anything else they could desire. While we’re all part of the Facebook culture and occupied with media streams from everywhere, we don’t even notice that we are being manipulated (maybe there is a better word) and in fact even our lives are going through a commodization process.

According to Thomas Mann, Adorno refused to choose between music and philosophy throughout his entire life, believing that he was pursuing the same objective in two disparate fields. Sometimes I think about myself, I have been pursuing business and design my entire life and for a long time I kept them separate as two disparate fields. Now I realize it is one. Business is not just about the economies or making money, it is a great part of our culture, just look at Fast Company or better Monocle. Now business, design and technology are co-producing our culture and it is to be debated whether we’re destroying authenticity or promoting it. For Adorno, popular culture on film and radio did not bother to present itself as art. They were instead a business, and this in turn became an ideology “to legitimize the trash they intentionally produce”. Can we say the same for social media?

Expect To See A Next Generation Of Lighter And Tougher IPads, IPhones and iMacs. All Made With Carbon Fiber.

Do you ever wonder why everything I getting lighter and lighter and that include the airplane that you fly in and your car? If you ever get a chance to fly Qantas in an A380, you’ll find the economy class seats are all carbon fiber. It is very commonly used in planes due to lightweight.

Carbon fiber is basically plastic, it refers to plastic reinforced by a graphite textile. It is also know as alternatively as carbon fiber reinforced plastic or carbon fiber composite. Carbon fiber is not cheap, but has a fantastic weight-to-strength ratio and that’s why they are used in high-quality cars, boats, bicycles, and planes, including popular Formula One racecars. A small piece can withstand an impact of many tons and still deform minimally. Carbon fiber composite is currently the best material that the world can produce in appreciable quantities. Introducing carbon nanotubes into the fiber is currently in late research stages, and may offer improved ratios of 10 times or greater – a space age material indeed.

Apple engineer Kevin M. Kenney sees the future of carbon fiber and tablets, they are applying for a patent called simply "Reinforced Device Housing" that describes a way for various weaves to be backed by carbon "spine" to provide greater torsional rigidity -- to keep you from twisting it and cracking an LCD. Imagine the next generation of lightweight iPad, iMac and iPhone. IMac is still have a weight and heat issue. In face, Panasonic started making a ultra lightweight laptop many years back, but not for export. Some needs to overcome the perception that plastic is cheap as this is no ordinary plastic. Sony as early as 2005 launched two new VAIO TX series notebooks both made of carbon fiber making them the strongest and lightest with the least amount of thickness. They were ahead of Apple.

Apple’s patent text is pretty broad and it raises some issue: Embodiments may house any number of electronic components. For example, certain embodiments may be used to form the exterior surface of a mobile telephone, a laptop or notebook computer, a tablet computing device, a desktop computer, a television, a stereo receiver, or practically any other electronic device. Expect to see a generation of lighter and stronger Mac products soon.

Brand Talk on Love, Sex And Emotion. Marketers Love Drinking Their Kool-Aid.

Can a company/brand create such powerful emotive connections to make customers love them? Your advertising agency will be quick to say yes. I am not sure. I can imagine a few scenarios that it happens but is is very uncommon. Marketers like to convince themselves that you can buy ‘love’ and that’s the ultimate goal for great marketing. What's that book name "Lovemark"?  That's an example of advertisers drinking their own Kool-Aid. Yes, many customers can have a level of enthusiasm because we provide them with a great customer experience, is that love? That’s what I want to write about.

Neurologists suggest that the early stages of love are governed by parts of the brain that are used for goal-seeking and reward, and resembles obsessive-compulsive disorder. Such as the first time you look at an Apple iPhone, a Harley Street Bob, a Hermes Kelley, a Mercedes SL AMG and a Patek Philippe Calatrava.

Here's how our brain works, at the early stage of a romantic relationship sparks activity in dopamine-rich brain regions normally associated with motivation and reward. The intensity is proportion to the activity. Advertising doesn’t make them love your brand; they attract their attention and interest.

The part of our brain associated with emotion, the insular cortex and parts of the anterior cingulate cortex, are not activated until the more mature phases of a relationship. In the context of brand marketing, the emotive connections require consistence good customer experiences including the love and hate. Love happens as a result when the sum total of the interactions that a customer has with a company's products, people, and interfaces reach certain threshold. Starting from the moment when customers purchase a product to the moment when they unwrap the box and sharing their joy with their friends on Facebook.

Here's a myth. Love is not emotion, it is a strategic capability to gain happiness. And love by itself has no object. It is some invisible and unexplainable energy of consciousness sometimes we are not even aware of it. It is beyond form, yet inclusive of form. Love is a capability that can be developed, nurtured and learned. We develop this capability when we were very young. Over the years, we develop the ability to love and care for the other person(s) and sometimes even objects.
Emotion is a different animal. It is feelings (or reactions from our brain activity) that aroused as a result of stimuli. When you see something, you want to touch it, feel it and probably own it. Many people marry for the sake of convenience or benefits. The same way we are loyal to certain brands for the same reasons. Either because there is a lack of choice of simply the product category is of low involvement.

Sex, love and emotion are three different things. In an ideal world, they intersect at certain junction. Sex is not the single manifestation of love (although it can be one of them), regular purchase and consumption of a brand is not a manifestation of love for the same reason. Some people are always under the misconception that the manifestation of love is sex; the manifestation of loyalty is purchase frequency. Yes, it may be. But mostly not.

Take away for you for the weekend, emotion often gets us into trouble but we must recognize them as part of being human and accept them into our consciousness, where they need to be cared for and managed. And that cab be learned.

Have a great weekend and please share your thoughts.

What Do You Know About The New 3G? Girls, Gaming and Gender. Look Out For The Sony PSG (Playstation For Girls)

Gaming is mainstreaming these days with average gamers over the age of 34 years old that has been playing games for 12 years. The average age of the most frequent game purchaser is 40 years old. Surprised? And many are women.

Social gaming is become a global phenomenon, last year was a breakout year for virtual goods in the US which had been only an Asian thing. The virtual goods industry in Asia generates about $7B a year in revenue, seven times the US, this means major valuation differences between Asia and US with China's nine largest public online game companies valued in the $50B range compared to the top four US companies that are valued in the $22B range. Expect to see continuous growth and new competitors, Apple will eventually join the party, may be 2013.

Many still think gaming is a boy’s things and I think this is worth challenging. Historically speaking, probably yes. Women and video gaming doesn't sound like a fit. In Simone de Beauvoir’s pioneering work (1949) on women, The Second Sex, created impressions of girls at play with their dolls. After the French Revolution then came the eloquent denunciation of housework. Then in the 60s, women in the US pushed liberal feminism that the pre-1914 period never done before. If you looked at the advertising between 1950s and 11960s you will know what I mean. Femininity has come a long way.

There are still a lot of mystique on femininity, these mystique transformed doing housework, bearing children and shopping into almost a religion, a lifestyle many women accept or reject. Consumer ideology continued to reinforce this mystique. Do women like this whole package or it is the ideal lifestyle projected onto them by advertisers and marketers? Did marketers and male media executive try too hard to fool women into paying for a femininity they did not need at all. Or was it a good thing after all? I don't want to get into this debate. But I do have a POV.

No question men like video games. Or there are simply not enough titles that are designed for women? I think women equally like video games. Columbia College Chicago hosted high school girls in a summit focused on gaming and gender equity. What they did was bringing together female game designers and academics to look at the female voice in the digital gaming industry. It is called the 3G Summit, like the name? The Future of Girls, Gaming, and Gender.

It was a four-day event that engaged young women from Chicago-area high schools in a series of discussions about young women’s place in the gaming culture. Video game is rapidly evolving and now delivered over smart phones, iPad and social network sites as part of social connectivity, consumer engagement, and cultural expression.

I think the women’s gaming market is largely untapped. Many games are beginning to look like interactive movies. Where is the equivalent of “Titanic” for video games? I can’t think of any video games that are built around romance. May be the 2008's Prince of Persia, but there's no player involvement, you simply follow the story along and the attempt at non-linearity makes the development of the relationship muddled and mostly nonexistent. I can’t think of a RFG that has a strong romance and sex theme. Here is a screenshot from a sex scene in the God of War.

Sex (not romance) is now part of many popular games, gone are the days when Mario and Luigi were jumping around looking for magic mushrooms. Some video games allow the player character to have sex or romantic relationships with NPCs, wonder how the logics were built behind those romantic relationships. I guess it comes down to enough talking and pick up some good weapons; they will start to like you. I am looking forward to see the first person romantic video game designed by women for women… the PS3 free online feature will proof to be very useful, the age of video gaming romance is here.

What's The Latest Innovation From Credit Card Companies? It Is Time For Them To Do More. We Need To Have Spend Control Mechanism Embedded In Credit Cards.

Credit card fraud continues to be an issue, for banks as well for customers. I remember 15 years ago they tried putting photos on credit cards, I am not sure why they stopped doing that, that seems to be a simple solution to reduce fraud.

Now they are turning to technology to do the job, but often it solves one problem but creates another one. Think about the RFIP credit card, the idea makes sense since all you need to wave your card at the cashier and the chip supplies the card's number and expiry date through radio waves and print our a receipt. There is no opportunity for criminals to copy it since the card remains in your pocket during the purchase.

Many people have concern over the encryption which causes security concern. You can easily set up a gate antenna to scan people’s car when they walk past. The idea is great for small purchase such as cup of coffee or vending machine etc. Take a look at the chip-and-Pin card which has been standard in Asia for years, it is now coming to the US and Canada. Can the PIN solves the problem? I am not sure.

There are more serious problems than frauds in terms of credit card. It should do more than just a spending mechanism. Should we put warning signs on credit cards the same way we do for tobacco? Why not? Let’s talk about the fraud prevention side, a company in the UK has come up with a solution that allowed us to turn off and on a credit card. Yes, a credit card with switch.

The London based CardSwitch Technology has started offering its credit unions under the name of CardLock. There are still some patent issues with Visa who applied for the patent a year later. Basically the product enables cardholders to define their own user limits and prohibitions and turn them on and off.

And then there are cards that have magnetic strips that can be written upon. The two-accounts-in-one card allows user to press a button to switch the card from one account to another. Second, he showed a security-enabled card that kept both the magnetic stripe and the human-readable number on the front of the card obscured until a security code was entered in.

Here is a cool idea, I think we should explore how a credit card needs to be enabled by a cell phone, instead of a PIN, use the cell phone as a PIN. So if someone steal the data on your card but without the cell phone activation, it will not work. This is an easy solution. The cell phone will also allow real time checking on spending and provide summary of spend and warns you about over spending. With a card (and a cell phone), I can view real-time data on my spending (or the spouse of children). Any warning will be posted on my Facebook page and informing both the account holders and the supplementary card users. That's how to make spending social. I like this idea.

The credit card needs to do more than just making itself secured, it should have mechanism to help people who has less self-control. A lot of innovation is needed here and we don’t see enough.

From A Behavioral Economic Perspective, I Think Many Of Us Are Considered Imcompetent As A Consumer.

We have to deal with economic decisions on an everyday basis without knowing it. Here’s a few example of what I have been dealing with the last two days. From buying a pair of sneakers to using the iPad.

I discovered a little animal trapped inside bottom of my chimney since a few days ago, it finally climbed down to the fireplace just yesterday, and it was a little squirrel. The front of the fireplace was covered with a screen luckily so I didn’t end up chasing it around the house. After a short while it climbed back up to the bottom of the chimney. So we could I do?

If I call up the wild life people, it will cost me $300 to dis-invite the little animal. If we leave it up there, it will eventually starve to death. If I let it out, I would risk it running around hiding in the house instead out heading out the door. It is not an easy task to find a small animal in a 6,000 sq feet home with lots of little hiding places. I definitely won’t be spending $300 every time one of them decides to pay us a visit.

So I ended up borrowing a trap from my neighbor. It was left inside the fireplace for the night and I stocked it up with peanut butter bagel, a slice of apple and some peanuts. Next morning, I got it trapped. I fed it with water, more food and did a little lecture why he should never come back, then took it to the park. He didn’t say goodbye and ran up a tree, rude. What would you do? Would you spend $300 to have someone remove it or leave it to die up there? We are dealing with economic decisions like this all the time.

Here is another one. I was looking for a pair of sneakers and couldn’t find my favorite blue Adidas Gazelle. Almost given up but then I saw a pair of Converse, nice gray color. I am not a Converse fan and for whatever reason, today I bought my first pair of Converse. The sales person told me I could get the second pair for 50% off. So do I need another pair? No, I’ve enough shoes to last for 3-4 years.

But I did eventually buy another pair the same color but a high cut design. So their marketing tactics worked. They got me buying more than I need, although they made less margin on the second pair. That's a bad consumer decision, buying things I don't need at all just because there is a discount.

Another common one is reusable shopping bag. A lot of people still have not developed the habit of bringing their shopping bags including myself. We know we should, but we always forget. Do we end up buying more additional reusable bags? No, we go back to single-use bags. When people think that they have already paid for being green but they forget next time, they’re not willing to invest more in their behavior. Another bad consumer decision.

What about the iPad, I love that device but I really have no need for it. I bought one for myself, sometimes carrying it around the house but have no idea why. No idea why spending $700 buying it in the first place and why I am carrying it around in the house like I am a waiter taking orders in a restaurant. Can someone explain this behavior? Do I want it? Do I need it? Do I like it? Do I even use it? Worse, I've actually spent another $50 on useless widgets.

There are a lot of holes in the field of behavioral economics. Behavioral economists are sticking to a few simple theories. We know that people value changes from reference points (but know little about what points of reference are, and how multiple gains and losses from reference points are integrated), that expressed preferences are constructed much as people heuristically approximate solutions to different problems, that categories of wealth are not added up when people make spending decisions, but we know little about the detailed cognitive structure of their “mental accounting” of "wealth categories."

Let’s imagine we have a diagnostic tool, to measure when present people with images of new products and asked them to choose which they like most (measuring “wanting”). Then we separately measure how much they actually like using that product (“liking”). If wanting and liking brain activation are different, a consumer could be judged as incompetent. I think as consumers, many of us are simply incompetent. My iPad one is a perfect example.