If the future is here, but unevenly distributed, as the Canadian science fiction author William Gibson suggests, then I’m pleased to report from the near future here in Austin, Texas at the fourth annual SXSW Accelerator.

The Accelerator Program is dedicated to the discovery and promotion of the newest and most innovative web-based products. The program is a great format to hear from many different start-ups in a short time. With two minutes for their elevator pitch and ten minutes to address questions by an expert panel of entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, each start-up is competing with four others in a 3-day round-robin style competition that concludes on March 14.

Of the 56 competitors so far, the five that interest me the most, and whose success I will monitor in the future are:

Funf.org is an open source framework for mobile sensing and data processing developed at the MIT Media Lab. Already the recipient of two Google Grants, Funf helps collect and interpret the abundant rich data about individuals, their devices and their environment.

Swift.Ushahidi.com develops free and open source software for information collection, visualization and interactive mapping, increasing transparency and lowering barriers for individuals to share their stories. An example was residents in Japan sharing their individual home radiation levels and seeing them mapped in aggregate.

BuzzData.com from Toronto pitched their platform as the best way to share and collaborate on spreadsheets and other datasets publicly or, using their premium paid service, within a private organization.

Foreca.st is a simple way to share where you’re going instead of where you are now. Something that may be useful helping your friends find you when you’re out and about.

Brandyourself.com claims to be the first DIY platform that makes it easy for anyone to take control of their personal Google search results, optimizing positive information to the top results.

Which innovative new products do you have your eye on at this year’s SXSW Accelerator?

From Austin, Texas, see you in the future.

There has been a lot of talk and gawk about Toronto hosting the G20 and its billion dollar price tag. The Honourable Rob Moore, Minister of State and Peter Van Loan, Minister of International Trade are quoted on the G20 government website as saying:

“The promotion effort for the G8 and G20 will highlight both of Toronto’s main convention centres and the Deerhurst Resort complex in Muskoka, generating worldwide publicity and branding Canada as a world-class tourism and convention destination.”

A convention destination? A tourism photo opportunity? Really? How about the bigger picture of Canada setting the stage for the leaders of today to come up with the vision for the world of tomorrow.

Sounds like a billion dollars worth spending. That’s the thought leadership of a brand in which I’d happily invest my tax dollars. So I say forget about the money; think about the potential of the ideas.

From eco-friendly type to Kindle font rendering, seems like these days it’s technological innovation that drives all the hot type talk. But at least one prominent typographer is getting back to basics and thinking outside the Mac – and cheese, that is.

For graphic designer Marian Bantjes, playing with food is more than kids’ stuff – as evidenced by her growing collection of type made from everyday materials such as sand, sugar and pasta.

Earlier this year, Bantjes presented at the TED conference in Long Beach, California, where she shared what she referred to as a “transformational personal story to pursue a more personal approach to her work.”

“These days I call myself a graphic artist,” she said. “[But] where my work as a graphic designer was once to follow strategy, my work now follows my heart and my interests – with the guidance of my ego – to create work that is mutually beneficial to myself and the client.

“This is heresy in the design world. The ego is not supposed to be involved in graphic design. But I find that for myself, without exception, the more I deal with the work as something of my own, as something that is personal, the more successful it is as something that’s compelling, interesting and sustaining.”

Thanks to one like-minded designer, Stefan Sagmeister, many of us will have already seen Bantjes work in his book Things I’ve Learned In My Life So Far. He’s also on record saying that Bantjes is one of the most innovative typographers working today.

Many designers have been influenced and inspired by hand-drawn type dating as far back as Toulouse-Lautrec’s Moulin Rouge posters. Many more will likely find inspiration with the release of Bantjes upcoming book, I Wonder.

If you’d like to see Marian Bantjes speak, keep an eye on the TED.com site for the release of her talk. Or see her live at this year’s Design Thinkers conference in Toronto. She’s the first confirmed speaker.

Infographics – or “data visualization” as it’s also known – is the design discipline of translating large, complicated quantities of information into easily understood, illustrated graphs and images. It’s a burgeoning field that’s just received a big credibility boost from the President of the United States.

Earlier this month, Barack Obama appointed info-graphic design legend Edward Tufte to assist in providing “transparency in relation to the use of recovery related funds and to prevent and detect fraud, waste and mismanagement” for the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board.

So, if you’ve been wondering what $787,000,000,000 in economic stimulus tax money looks like, here’s hoping Tufte brings his A-game. I’m guessing we’ll see his infographics at work in the quarterly report prepared for the President and Congress.

To see examples of Tufte’s work, check out one of his many books or his website.

Or to see a non-Tufte-designed infographic of the U.S. government’s financial bailout history, check this out.

And so continues the Obama marketing machine’s love affair with design. Shepard Fairey’s “HOPE” Obama campaign posters were the graphic design story of 2008. (I recently saw the original at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. It’s as arresting as ever.)

Here’s hoping that graphic design can now play a role in the accountability and transparency of his government.

As early as five years ago, only organizations such as World Vision and the Red Cross or governments with armies could mobilize and respond quickly to massive humanitarian crises. Today, technology connects us in ways that enable, empower and compel us to do more than lament. We can act on our intentions by giving in extraordinary ways.

Case in point: There has been an overwhelming response to the recent Haitian crisis. Largely, it has been achieved by harnessing quick, real-time applications such as Twitter, texting and Facebook. Companies large and small are all thinking creatively and quickly to set up fundraising for these platforms. People have been able to immediately share the ways that they’ve given with their friends, which has inspired (and pressured) others to respond as well.

In the hours and days immediately following the disaster, you could text “HAITI” to 45678 on your Rogers, Bell, Virgin or Telus cell phone and $5 would automatically be directed towards The Salvation Army from your monthly bill. (More details here.) Rogers has promised to donate $250,000 to relief efforts, and customers can donate $5 by texting “HELP” to shortcode 1291. You can also text “HAITI” to 90999 to donate $10 to the American Red Cross relief for Haiti.

How much money are we talking here? The Red Cross has reported that as a result of the mass social network campaign, it received $35 million in donations in the first 48 hours after the earthquake — more than half through online contributions and at least $8 million by text.

Great results, but a word of caution: beware of jumping on the fundraising bandwagon without proper research. Many companies and non-profits may not be organized to direct the funds to the right place. There have also been a number of false fundraisers setting up collection bins on Facebook and other websites. The Federal Bureau of Investigation has even released a Haitian Earthquake Relief Fraud Alert.

Personally, I like the transparency of the Clinton-Bush Haiti Fund. Donors can give to the efforts, then connect with up-to-date information via email, Facebook or Twitter. Once you’ve donated, you can tell all your friends by posting links and buttons, tweeting and blogging.

It’s Design Week in Toronto. That means the Toronto International Design Festival is on from January 20-24. Anchored by the Interior Design Show (IDS), the city is set to burst into little design flames with shops, galleries and even schools opening their doors to celebrate design and innovation.

Curated and promoted by Design Exchange, there are a number of events that span the disciplines of design: fashion, interiors, graphics, architecture, and environmental.

My top pick? I’d like to hear Bruce Mau share his thoughts on “A World Without Oil” at IDS. Opinions of Mau are polarized, but he’s clearly a design thinker who contributes across many disciplines and he’s been a longtime proponent of lateral, collaborative work in efforts to cause positive social change.

Unfortunately, it will cost you dearly for the privilege: $125 for a half day of talks.

Then, of course, we have Advertising Week. It picks up where Design Week leaves off. January 25-29, to be exact. Promoted by the Institute of Communication Agencies (ICA), it will be held concurrently in six Canadian cities and will include film screenings, talks, networking events, exhibits and the like.

Apparently Advertising Week is for people in “creative industries and those who aspire to be creative.” That covers just about everybody, doesn’t it?

There are a lot of great picks here, ranging from Toronto advertising celebrities such as Terry O’Reilly and living legend Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at MaRS with ideas, tools and inspirations for “Leading Social Change.”

The only downside to all this action is that it’s impossible to take it all in. Maybe somebody will design a time machine. Or at least a better way to track the growing number of relevant events now that things are really getting interdisciplinary.

You know about TED, right? The small, non-profit devoted to “Ideas worth spreading”? TED’s ever expanding online database has more than 500 15-minute videos: the TED Talks – ranging from Al Gore’s climate to Jane Goodall’s primates, and all points in between.

If I had one issue with all that knowledge, it would be that while it’s topically diverse, it often just scratches the surface. In other words, it’s a mile wide but only 15 minutes deep.

For people hungry to dive deeper into TED’s world of ideas this holiday season and beyond, check out this list from its book club:

• An Inconvenient Truth – Al Gore
• Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming – Bjorn Lomborg
• Design Like You Give a Damn: Architectural Responses to Humanitarian Crises – Kate Stohr and Cameron Sinclair
• Earth From Above – Yann Arthus-Bertrand
• Everything Bad Is Good for You – Steven Johnson
• In Pursuit of Elegance: Why the Best Ideas Have Something Missing – Matthew E. May
• Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City – Eric W. Sanderson
• McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld – Misha Glenny
• The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World – Jacqueline Novogratz
• Ocean: An Illustrated Atlas – Sylvia A. Earle and Linda K. Glover
• Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape our Decisions – Dan Ariel
• slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations – Nancy Durate
• Stumbling on Happiness – Daniel Gilbert
• The Assault on Reason – Al Gore
• The Atlas of the Real World – Daniel Dorling
• The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable – Nassim Nicholas Taleb
• The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It – Paul Collier
• The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope – William Kamkwamba
• The Case for God – Karen Armstrong
• The Elephant, the Tiger, and the Cell Phone: Reflections on India – The Emerging 21st-Century Power – Shashi Tharoor
• The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom – Jonathan Haidt
• The Invention of Air – Steven Johnson
• The Invention of Hugo Cabret – Brian Selznick
• The Untied States of America: Polarization, Fracturing, and Our Future – Juan Enriquez
• Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us – Seth Godin
• What Are You Optimistic About? – Edited by John Brockman
• What Matters: The World’s Preeminent Photojournalists and Thinkers Depict Essential Issues of Our Time – David Elliot Cohan
• What We Believe but Cannot Prove: Today’s Leading Thinkers on Science in the Age of Certainty – Edited by John Brockman
• Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto – Stewart Brand
• Work Hard. Be Nice.: How Two Inspired Teachers Created the Most Promising Schools in America –  Jay Mathews

Have you already read any of these? Would you recommend them? Why or why not?

The TED India Conference that I attended in Mysore India last month was themed by the concept: The Future Beckons. It seems to me that the future is arriving at an exponential speed compared to its passing, and with it is the ever-pressing need to find solutions to marketing’s global challenges.

The idea of “design thinking” provided an underpinning for this year’s TED. On that note, the Director of the Stanford Design Program and the founder of the “Design for Change Lab”, Banny Banerjee had this to say:

“Design Thinking – the term used for the combination of the processes, skills, cognitive processes, and attitudes prevalent in design – is being used to infuse innovation into businesses; an even more significant phenomenon is that design thinking is being looked at as having genuine promise in addressing issues of sustainability.”

Banerjee’s ideas, like so many speakers at TED, got the design geek in me super-psyched to help spread the gospel of design thinking. And writing this post forced me to think about some examples that prove its relevance to our world of marketing. Thankfully there are many.

Here are three:

1. Progressive Insurance – Progressive Insurance implemented design thinking in the early 90s; the result was real time accident evaluation and customer care – an industry first. With operational innovation, Progressive could suddenly provide better service at lower costs than its competitors, according to a 2004 article by Michael Hammer in The Harvard Business Review. That move reflected a designer’s way of thinking about customer needs, but the company was able to execute the idea through its ability to measure, analyze and improve its processes.

2. Pact Underwear – Launched earlier this year, PACT and futurist Yves Behar are refashioning how people perceive apparel in the 21st century by focusing every aspect of their product through a socially conscious lens. They started with the integration of a social aspect into the design itself. As part of the brand’s essence, PACT is commiting to partnerships with nonprofit organizations that work to create social and environmental change. Each underwear collection is aligned with a nonprofit. Internationally recognized artists and designers create graphic visualizations of each organization’s mission with underwear as their canvas. PACT then gives 10% of each sale to support these organizations. That ladders back to a positioning that’s embodied in their motto: “Change Starts With Your Underwear.”

3. Apple – And, of course, there’s the iPhone. Simply put, the now-iconic commercials that bring to light the tactile functionality and intuitive nature of the device are a succinct reflection of what Mr. Jobs presented to the brand’s legions of followers via the keynote unveiling of the iPhone.

If Banerjee’s (or my) opinions about the power and potential of design thinking have piqued your interest, you might be interested in Toronto’s Roger Martin, the Dean of U of T’s Rotman School, and his concept of “Integrative Thinking”.

Torontonians who want to learn more about Design Thinking and Integrative Thinking, should check out the “Integrative Thinking Experts Speaker Series” at Rotman. Next Event is December 3, 2009.

The portfolio-sharing website Behance is on a mission to organize the creative world. And their recent partnership with the oldest and largest professional membership organization for design, the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA), takes them one big step closer.

Here is a huge, old-school, largely volunteer-based hierarchical organization (AIGA) that’s just opened the door for its membership to communicate and collaborate directly:

“This transition reflects AIGA’s commitment to providing professional tools for designers to develop their practice, in this case by promoting themselves and their work in an extensive network, with a clear designation as belonging to the professional association for design.”

In other words, this agreement allows designers the best of two worlds: recognized accreditation and innovative collaboration.

Take a virtual tour here.

As the good folks as Behance say: “No bold pursuit can be achieved without good partners and friends.”

Indeed.

So . . . it was with childlike glee that I received Pantone’s Fashion Colour Report for Spring 2010. Pantone is already well known in the graphic design and printing industries for its standardized colour palettes. Recently, it’s been extending its reach to the worlds of interior, industrial and fashion design, with support from the likes of Tommy Hilfiger and Alice Temperley.

Got me thinking about how these predictions get made in the first place. Here’s what I found:

Dating back some 100 years, we start seeing “colour cartels” such as the Color Association of the United States. They were created as pacts between the people who made clothes and the people who sold clothes. The pact was designed to make sure that the dyes they used to colour their textiles would leverage economies of scale. In other words, if we all use yellow, yellow will be cheaper. And since everyone was using the same colour fabrics, shop owners would never be stuck with colours they couldn’t sell. By limiting the colours that were available, they effectively steered consumers toward trended colours.

Surprisingly little has changed in the world of colour since then. The colour cartels, though more numerous, still dole out colour prescriptions masquerading as colour predictions. It’s true that there are associations between colour and current events. Economic downturns, for example, inspire appetites for neutrals and that ever-versatile ‘designer black’. But these trends are as much a part of the colour cartel system as they are separate from it.

All this to say “colour prediction” is a misnomer. I love Pantone’s quarterly bibles of colour style. But personally I prefer to let my intuition guide the colours I choose. So for spring 2010, my colour choices – like my general outlook – will be on the bright side. Here’s hoping that’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.