Great design will never save bad service, but great service will always save bad design. I say this with a certain level of confidence as I fly from Seattle to Atlanta in seat 31D (yes that's way down in the back and stuck in the middle). I'm uncomfortable, restrained, claustrophobic and bored. I'm forced to wonder, why when so much of the world's service provision has innovated over the past 20 years, the airline economy seat remains devoid of any meaningful improvement? Read More How Designers Can Deliver Service With a Smile |
The first three months of any startup endeavor is full of new things. How soon can we get the Web site up? Which logo do we like? Do we have an NDA? How about a fax template? We could really use some coffee mugs, a whiteboard and our own trashcans. If only we had some income, we might be able to buy these things. Oh what an exciting day that will be! Read full bio
Yahoo Revamps Its Homepage, but Will Anyone Notice?
Starting a Design Studio During a Downturn, Part 5: Staying Focused
Starting a Design Studio During a Downturn, Part 4: Developing the Kicker Culture
Here's my hypothesis: We are so connected now that peace is elusive. I know I have had to force myself at times to just say no to my iPhone--I find myself in social situations having to stifle the urge to crank up the ol' pocket pal just to see what is up. We are bombarded constantly with e-mail, IMs, Twitters, RSS feeds, YouTube, iPhone games, the list goes on and on. It's hard to find moments where the brain can just be still. Read full bio
Consumers Behaving Badly: Is Design to Blame?
Our creatives from all over the globe--designing everything from toothbrushes to airplanes--are working to integrate the principles of sustainability into all aspects of design: from education, to practice and production, and ultimately consumption. We are catalyzing new thinking by collectively building our intelligence around issues of climate change and social justice, and tackling those challenges with optimism and creativity. Read full bio
Fixing Conferences: Six Lessons From the Designers Accord Summit
Why Does the Best Design of 2009 Still Look Like 2000?
Case Studies in Sustainability from the Designers Accord: An Introduction
Color is skin-deep. It is a reflection of what lies beneath and within an object. I believe it is an arsenal, a medicine bag of sorts. As the color doctor, I must kindly remind my clientele that anything considered an afterthought runs the risk of appearing that way. My goal is to educate that a holistic approach has deeper, more powerful and long-lasting meaning. Read full bio
Focus Groups: It's Like Saying the F-Word to Creatives
Envisioning a Brighter Future: A ColorCorps for America's Cities
Remember, it's all about communication and making sure that you and your designer share the same expectations for your relationship. If you're not interested in blazing new paths--if you really are just looking for that incremental next-generation silver media player with sexier curves and a smaller housing that keeps you in the commodity cul de sac--you can still feel free to politely tell your designer to back off. Read full bio
Meeting the Parent Company, and More Signs of Designer Monogamy
Why You Should Have a Threesome, and Solving Other Partner Problems
I'm not typically a fan of award shows. They tend to be more popularity contests than creative competitions in my view. The fascinating bit about Cannes is the contradiction between the vanity out in the Cossette with the humility you feel by the great work featured inside the auditorium. In there it is all about the work. Cannes, is in my opinion, one of the only festivals where honestly only the best stuff gets accepted. Read full bio
Video games have defined the culture of the last two generations (with another swiftly on the way). For more than 30 years, our culture has been reprogrammed to play differently with machines. It has taught us to expect more from our entertainment, more interaction, more feedback, more options, etc. To understand pop culture and technology culture, you have to understand video games and the people who love to play them. Read full bio
Design Is a Point of View: Seven Truths in Designing
Piles don't tend to be pretty. They eat up space on your desktop, sprawling out across every available surface like a ravenous suburb. And as piles grower deeper and taller, they stop being useful. Even when we defend our piles as essential outgrowths of our fast-moving minds, we know in our hearts that sooner or later, our piles will bury us alive if we don't control them. Read full bio
When Design Is Too Good: Stunning Border Signage Is Deemed a Threat
Time and Identity: What Your Clock Says About Your Personality
A lot of companies struggle with the idea that this orchestration can create significant value. They are often looking for a silver bullet--a single product concept that they can patent and protect. But with experience innovation, the organizational device that holds a collection of products and services together is critical to value creation--the silver bullet is often a metaphor. A metaphor creates value by transferring associations from a previous experience to a new one. It functions as shorthand to help people understand the offering and what it means in their lives. Read full bio
The Portland Art Museum Transforms an Exhibition Into a Social Platform
Portland Art Museum Tells the Story of China's Newest Dynasty: Design
Choose a material that grows like grass but risk alienating confused consumers, or choose another that grows like timber but risk alienating the well-informed consumers. One choice is certainly a missed opportunity to make an environmental difference, but earning a reputation for greenwashing could have negative implications for a company doing the right thing. Read full bio
Creative Deconstruction: Why Dell's Designers Tear Apart Their Own Computers
In a business culture that likes to talk up big innovations, we may be lacking appreciation for the beauty of the small idea. Outsized ambitions can set you up for failure in a big way when you spend most of your time rejecting your own thinking. No one bats a thousand at coming up with big, disruptive innovations, so you need to explore all your ideas to find the great ones. Read full bio
Embrace Your Small Ideas for Big Impacts
Widespread Empathy: Rewiring Your Corporation for Intuition
Crafting Your Own Innovation Strategy: The Who, What, and How
If you've ever been part of a discussion on ethics, in school or elsewhere, chances are you didn't spend much time talking about your feelings. It's believed that to live ethically, we must engage our reason, which reins in the whims and follies of emotion. Ethics, then, is heavy on Spock and light on Sally Struthers. But what if unethical behavior is actually spurred, rather than prevented, by reason? Read full bio
Designing Business; Businessing Design
Tom Dair, co-founder and president of Smart Design, runs the company's San Francisco office. He directs the firm's Insights and Strategy discipline, where he has pioneered techniques for achieving better design through an understanding of user behavior, business factors, and technology trends. Read full bio
What I Didn’t Get to Say to Michelle Obama (But Maybe My Message Still Got Through)
Ravi Sawhney, is the founder and CEO of RKS, a global leader in strategy, innovation, and design. Since founding RKS nearly 30 years ago, Sawhney has earned a variety of top honors in the design industry, and assembled a client list that includes HP, Intel, LG, Medtronic, Seiko, Sprint, and Zyliss, among many others. Read full bio
Teaching Moments: A New Era for Design Education
A Better Way to Health Care Reform: Is There a Designer in the House?
Broken Guitar Has United Playing the Blues to the Tune of $180 Million
Tim Brown is the CEO and president of IDEO, and a thought leader on the subject of design thinking. He's also an industrial designer himself, and has exhibited work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Design Museum in London. Read full bio
Creating a Post-Crisis Economy: How to Design a Participatory System
Creating a Post-Crisis Economy: Control Your Own Health Care
Creating a Post-Crisis Economy: Why We Need Economic Dashboards
Robert Fabricant is a leader of frog design's health-care expert group, a cross-disciplinary global team that works collectively to share best practices and build frog's health-care capabilities. An expert in design for social innovation, Robert recently led Project Masiluleke, an initiative that uses mobile technology to combat the world's worst HIV and AIDS epidemic in KwaZulu Natal, South Africa. Read full bio
Live From PopTech: Designing for Impact
Mark Dziersk is the VP Design at Brandimage-Desgrippes & Laga, one of the world's largest design and branding firms. At brandimage, Dziersk has worked on projects for clients ranging from Dove to Banana Republic to a pop-up store for Henri Bendel. Dziersk joined brandimage in 2007, after 13 years at product design firm Herbst Lazar Bell, where he and his teams won dozens of awards for products as diverse as the Motorola NFL Coaches' Headset, to the first-ever single use camera for Kodak. Read full bio
Why Design Still Has Such Limited Corporate Impact--and What to Do About It
Gadi Amit is the president of NewDealDesign LLC, a strategic design studio in San Francisco. Founded in 2000, NDD has worked with such clients as Better Place, Sling Media, Palm, Dell, Microsoft, and Fujitsu, among others, and has won more than 70 awards. Amit is passionate about creating design that is both socially responsible and generates real world success. Read full bio
Looking at the Micro vs. the Macro in Design
"Shop Class as Soulcraft": A Book That Revels in Alternative Thinking for Designers
Body Computing Is a Glimmer of Hope in the Health-Care Chasm
Ken Carbone is the cofounder and Chief Creative Director of Carbone Smolan, a design and branding agency in New York. Read full bio
Big League Chew: Phils Out-Spit Yanks
Creepy, Crawly, Crafty: A Tapestry Woven by Eight-Legged Artists
