Rohit Bhargava's Blog, page 10

At Milan Design Week (Salone del Mobile,) you might expect to see new designs for chairs or reimagined interior living spaces. A category that rarely receives any design attention from the most elite European design teams is the funeral urn. This year, The Last Post exhibit, a project curated by Alberto Alessi, “explores the funeral urn as a final container — an object surprisingly overlooked by the design world despite its significance.”

As one critic goes on to write, “The Last Pot refl...

If there is an optimal time to eat a particular type of food, then there are suboptimal times to have it too. The problem is, we don’t usually know this sort of detail about the things we consume. Yet scientists already know that “nutrient sequencing”—the act of eating fiber-rich vegetables first during a meal, followed by protein and fats, and then carbohydrates—is becoming a recognized way for people with Type 2 diabetes to better manage their blood-sugar levels. Now there is a startup called ...

Thirty percent of the visitors to the Museum of the Future in Dubai have never been to a museum before. That’s just one of the fascinating insights that emerge from this interview VentureBeat did with the museum’s creative director Brendan McGetrick about the inspiration and creation of the immersive experiences that are inside the museum. I was lucky to visit for the first time back in January and even as someone who has been to many museums and spends a lot of time thinking about and talking a...

If you are a fan of thought exercises and a visual process to help you imagine the future, this is the perfect book for you. I first read it several years ago when it came out and was immediately captivated. The writing is excellent but the way that the concepts are broken down into easy methods anyone can use in a meeting or brainstorm to see the future and prepare is a masterclass in a book for how to run an effective workshop. Whether that’s your goal, or you just want to open your mind to se...

Rather than relying on chains and the human eye to measure whether teams have achieved a first down in NFL football games next season, the league is turning to Sony 8k cameras with a new technology known as “hawk eye” to precisely and instantly measure whether a first down was achieved. The idea is to verify the exact line and distance required by high-definition cameras to remove the possibility of human error and make the game faster.

Yesterday was also International Fact- Checking day,...

The week of April Fool’s Day, I regularly look forward to reading about all the brands taking risks, exploring their fun sides and doing something with personality. This used to be one of my favorite weeks to read all the advertising trade publications. This year wasn’t as much fun. Much of the coverage seemed to center on spotlighting the cringiest pranks or the weirdest ideas or even offering a historical look back at failed efforts from previous years. So much negativity. Hardly any brands th...

What if you could get the restful benefits of taking a nap without actually taking a nap? Researchers studying the health effects of “power naps” recently performed a test on monkeys where they simulated the brain activity of sleeping with electrical pulses. The monkeys showed the same cognitive benefits that come from sleeping without the nap. The findings suggest there may be new ways to treat sleep disorders but also may lead to an “artificial nap” industry where pods or venues offer this sor...

Buyback programs are getting popular among retailers in many categories but usually they are for products that are still in “sellable” condition that can be refurbished. When legendary luggage brand Rimowa launched their own in-store buyback program, they began receiving used suitcases from customers that had clearly taken a beating and traveled the world. As they refurbished and resold them, a curious truth emerged. People loved the pieces because of all the dents and bruises and stickers and u...

In the words of bestselling author Garrett Graff who recently wrote a review for The Washington Post, this book “examines some of the remarkable people who make up the federal workforce — career civil servants who have accomplished the extraordinary in quiet ways, people whose jobs are normally buried layers below any partisan rancor. Perhaps never before has there been a book better timed or more urgent.” It is indeed a timely read in a moment when the Federal government is being attacked from ...

There is a theory circulating Wall Street and other circles that aims to take all the chaos of the first several months of the new Trump administration and offer an explanation for how it all fits a grand master plan that could, if it works, be heralded as “the greatest geopolitical deal of the century.” If this idea seems far-fetched, follow the link and read the full story from The Atlantic which breaks down exactly how these seemingly haphazard tariffs and other early economic moves could mak...