The New Deal

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

Design This Day

As the President and CEO of Teague, John Barratt is responsible for positioning the company for future success and building upon Teague's rich heritage. During his three years in this position, Barratt has guided Teague in building and strengthening partnerships with some of the world's leading brands. The result of these collaborative partnerships is design work that has been recognized with a growing roster of international design awards. Read full bio

Design for the New Economy

Jennifer Bove started her multifaceted career in tangible and interaction design at the circus--quite literally--at Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey. In the last 13 years, she has created multi-platform products and services for myriad clients including Nokia, Yahoo!, BBC, Gucci, and American Express. Her design management background includes the Prada Epicenter store in New York, which inaugurated a new paradigm of tangible retail experiences. Jenn is fluent in French and Italian, and has lived and worked in the U.K., France, Italy, and Germany. Before Kicker, Jenn was VP of User Experience at HUGE and at Schematic, and is on the faculty at New York's School of Visual Arts MFA in Interaction Design. Her work has been exhibited throughout Europe, including the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. Jennifer has a Masters in Interaction Design from the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea. Read full bio

Design Thinking

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

Design Matters

After graduating in industrial design from San Jose State University in 1981, Robert co-founded the design consultancy Lunar. Subsequently, he was hired as Director of Industrial Design for Apple Computer where he served for seven years. In 1996, he was appointed partner in the international firm Pentagram, helping lead the San Francisco office. In 2006, Brunner and entrepreneur Alex Siow launched the start-up Fuego, a new concept in outdoor grilling. In 2007, Robert founded Ammunition, focusing on the overlap between product design, brand and experience. He continues to lead Ammunition and Fuego concurrently. In 2008, Robert co-authored the book Do You Matter? How Great Design Will Make People Love Your Company with Success Built to Last author Stewart Emery. He also teaches advanced product design at Stanford University. Read full bio

Like It or Not

Graham Button is a writer from London who worked in advertising for more than twenty years. He took the scenic route to Genesis, passing through agencies in Hong Kong, Toronto and finally New York, where he was a creative director and executive vice president at Grey Worldwide. He has created advertising in most media for every kind of brand and all sorts of companies, including Diageo, Kaiser Permanente, Molson Breweries, GM, and South China Morning Post newspapers. Beaver Creek, one of the Vail Resorts brands, chose to follow him to Genesis from Grey. Work he originated as a copywriter or championed as a creative director has been recognized in awards shows in Los Angeles, Toronto, New York, London, Cannes, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Sydney and has been featured on America's Funniest Videos and Larry King Live. Read full bio

Networked Culture

Valerie Casey is a globally recognized designer and innovator. She works with start-ups, governments, and companies all over the world on challenges ranging from creating new products and services, to transforming organizational processes and behaviors. Valerie is the founder of the Designers Accord, the global coalition of designers, educators, and business leaders working together to create positive environmental and social impact. Valerie's work has been highlighted in multiple publications, and she has been named a "Guru" of the year by Fortune, a "Hero of the Environment" by Time, and a "Master of Design" by Fast Company. Valerie lectures on design throughout the international community, and is an adjunct professor at California College of the Arts. She holds a master's degree in cultural theory and design from Yale University and a BA from Swarthmore College. Read full bio

Design 4 Impact

Ken Carbone is the cofounder and Chief Creative Director of Carbone Smolan, a design and branding agency in New York. Read full bio

Shaping Brands/Enhancing Lives

Peter Clarke is a visionary entrepreneur who founded Product Ventures 15 years ago as the ultimate strategic creative agency for the research, design and development of manufactured goods. His passion for excellence and dedication to helping shape products and packaging to enhance consumers' lives have garnered Clarke enormous recognition. Product Ventures has been honored to create innovative and award-winning package designs for such notable clients as Procter and Gamble, Nestle and Bayer, among many others. As an expert commentator, Peter Clarke is frequently profiled in the media, including CBS' The Early Show, Fox Business News, and news broadcasts discussing industry trends. Read full bio

Smart 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

DPOV

Principal and chairman of Duffy & Partners, Joe Duffy is one of the most respected and sought after creative directors and thought leaders on branding and design in the world. Joe's work includes brand and corporate identity development for some of the world's most admired brands, from Aveda to Coca-Cola to Sony to Jack in the Box to Susan G. Komen for the Cure. His work is regularly featured in leading marketing and design publications and exhibited around the world. In 2004 he founded Duffy & Partners as a new kind of branding and creativity company, partnering with clients and other firms in all communication disciplines. Also in 2004, he received the Medal from the AIGA for a lifetime of achievement in the field of visual communications. His first book--Brand Apart--was released in July 2005 and in 2006, he was recognized as one of the "Fast 50" most influential people in the future of business by Fast Company. Read full bio

Design Finds You

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

Powers of Design

As a seasoned product developer with a background in both analytical and creative thinking, John Edson's primary role is to build new programs for clients with the right innovation processes led by the right creative team to make a real difference for clients. His experience includes managing the birth of successful products for Philips, Motorola, InFocus, and several startups. Products developed under John's management have been honored with accolades from the I.D. Annual Design Review, the Chicago Athenaeum Good Design Award, iF Hannover, PC Magazine's Editor's Choice Award, and IDSA's Industrial Design Excellence Award. Developing the contribution of design creativity and innovation process in the service of business, society and the environment, John explores the impact of design creativity in a weekly podcast, Icon-o-Cast, that he hosts with guest speakers ranging from BusinessWeek's Bruce Nussbaum to author and cognitive scientist Don Norman. John is also a regular speaker, having lectured at Wharton School, given a keynote at Intertech's Flexible Display Technologies conference, and participated in a talk for the Business Marketing Association of Northern California. A lecturer at Stanford, John teaches courses in product design and creativity. Read full bio

Design 4 Impact

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

Femme Den

The Femme Den is here to save good women from bad products. They started as an underground collective of international women at Smart Design, searching for answers in a world that was not designed for them. They've now grown to a leading team of design researchers, industrial designers, and engineers who are paving the way for a deeper understanding around design and gender. They speak around the world on the topic, working to stimulate positive change in the design and business communities. Read full bio

The In-Between Spaces

Karin Fong is a director and designer based in New York City. As one of the founding members of Imaginary Forces, Karin's work spans the diverse worlds of entertainment, experience design, and advertising. Among her best-known projects are title sequences for Terminator Salvation, The Pink Panther 2, Ray, Definitely Maybe and Charlotte's Web. She earned an Emmy Award for Masterpiece Theatre's American Collection and a nomination for the hit NBC series Chuck. Karin has created environmental design projects in Las Vegas, Lincoln Center, and at the Los Angeles Opera. She directed television commercials for Target, Honda, Sears, and Herman Miller, and was recently named one of the Top 100 Most Creative People in Business by Fast Company. Karin has had work in the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, Artists Space, and The Wexner Center. Read full bio

Dreaming in Technicolor

Laura Guido-Clark is an expert in the skin of consumer products--their color, materials, and finish. This is perhaps the area of industrial and textile design that requires the greatest understanding of the human heart. Laura has spent her life studying the always new and always surprising ways that human beings react to the look and feel of any given product. Laura is the rare color and finish consultant whose expertise includes not just textiles but heavy manufacturing industries such as automotive, electronics, and major household appliances. This experience has given her vast knowledge of the raw materials and processes used in product categories across the board. Throughout her twenty-plus year career, Laura has analyzed the conscious and unconscious influences that drive buying decisions. Her ability to translate those influences into prescient forecasting and, ultimately, into concrete applications of color and finish has helped companies such as Samsung, Apple, Mattel, and Toyota design products that resonate with consumers and succeed in competitive markets. Read full bio

Whipping Post

Dan Harden is president and chief designer of Whipsaw, a highly acclaimed industrial design and product development consultancy located in the Silicon Valley. A consummate designer and prolific creator, Dan has been an industrial designer for 27 years and has designed hundreds of hit products for major corporations around the globe. He has been honored internationally, winning over 100 design awards, including Red Dot, Gmark, IDEA, I.D., IF, and MDEA awards. He has also been granted over 150 patents. Read full bio

Dear Stuart

For 25 years, Stuart Karten Design (SKD) has been a strategic partner to companies seeking to differentiate their products through creativity and design. Connecting creativity with commerce, SKD designs products that serve as brand ambassadors for its clients and lead to greater market share and increased profit. SKD's team includes 25 includes designers, researchers and mechanical engineers who can guide a product from design conceptualization through final production. SKD is especially renowned for its medical products and its ear-centric devices, which have included communication headsets for Jabra and Plantronics, the Zön hearing aid for Starkey Laboratories and noise-cancelling ear buds for Ultimate Ears. SKD has been the recipient of numerous awards, including IDEA, Red Dot, iF, Good Design and the I.D. Annual Design Review. The conceptual "Epidermits Interactive Pet" was a part of Museum of Modern Art's recent Design and the Elastic Mind exhibition. In 2008, Fast Company named SKD among America's top five "Design Factories" in its annual Masters of Design issue. Located near the beach in Marina del Rey, SKD is tapped into the cutting edge culture that defines Los Angeles with our fingers on the pulse of the trends that will affect the nation. Read full bio

Creative Think Tank

Executive director and worldwide creative officer of Sapient, Gaston Legorburu has been a driving force in the evolution of the interactive marketing business since co-founding Planning Group International (PGI). Under his leadership, PGI became the largest privately held interactive agency in the United States and was acquired by Sapient in 2006. Throughout his career, Legorburu has spearheaded some of the most successful online campaigns in the history of the Internet. He has partnered with clients in industries ranging from financial services and travel and leisure to technology and food service.He has helped clients gain unparalleled insights into effectively marketing their products and services in today's increasingly complex marketplace. Legorburu continues to provide clients with forward-thinking answers to overcome their critical business challenges. Read full bio

ASTRO Design Blog

Brett Lovelady is the founder and driving force at ASTRO Studios of San Francisco, a company he launched in 1994. Brett created ASTRO to be a pure design culture, where he and his talented crew could blend design skills, innovative technologies and lifestyle influences into high impact, supercharged products and brands. Within a short time, ASTRO has become an international design powerhouse by designing industry leading products and brands for companies like Nike, Microsoft, HP, Alienware, Herman Miller, Xbox, Virgin and many more. Also, Brett and ASTRO recently spun-off a new company called ASTRO Gaming, providing high performance video gaming equipment for pro gamers. In the past decade, ASTRO has won numerous design and industry awards, including 2 prestigious BusinessWeek/IDSA Design of the Decade Awards, for both NIKE Triax Sportwatches and Kensington Smartsockets and was featured as one of Fast Company's Fast 50 in 2003. Prior to starting ASTRO, Brett did time as VP of Design at Lunar Design and before that, VP of Design at Frog Design on the mean streets of the San Francisco bay area. Read full bio

Design Your Life

Ellen Lupton is curator of contemporary design at Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York City and director of the Graphic Design MFA program at Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore (MICA). An author and illustrator of numerous books, articles, and blogs on design, she is populist critic, frequent lecturer, and 2007 AIGA Medalist. Now working on Cooper-Hewitt's 2010 National Design Triennial, Lupton also co-curated the museum's current sustainability exhibition, Design for a Living World. Ellen Lupton's latest book, Design Your Life: The Pleasures and Perils of Everyday Things (2009), is co-authored with her twin sister, Julia; and her books Indie Publishing: How to Design and Produce Your Own Book (2008) and D.I.Y.: Design It Yourself (2006) are co-authored with her MFA students. Baltimore-based Lupton and husband Abbott Miller, a partner in the design firm Pentagram, met as students at The Cooper Union and collaborate on books, exhibitions, and their kids Jay and Ruby. Read full bio

Beyond the Widget

Steve McCallion is a skilled innovation architect and brand strategist. His groundbreaking work includes redefining Umpqua Bank's role as an anchor for community prosperity, creating Sirius Satellite Radio's award-winning experience for the "iPod fatigued," and working with real estate developers Gerding Edlen to create more meaningful neighborhoods. Other clients include Xerox, Black & Decker, Whirlpool, FedEx, McDonald's, Coleman, Kenwood, and Compaq. Steve's primary charge is to foster Ziba's consumer experience practice. He founded the company's award-winning Design Research and Planning practice group, which has developed proprietary research and design planning methodologies. Read full bio

Look Both Ways

Debbie Millman has worked in the design business for over 25 years. She is president of the design division at Sterling Brands, where over the past 15 years she has worked on the redesign of global brands for Pepsi, Procter & Gamble, Campbell's, Colgate, Hershey, and Hasbro. Prior to Sterling, she was a senior vice president at Interbrand and a marketing director at Frankfurt Balkind. Debbie is president of the AIGA, the professional association for design. She is a contributing editor at Print Magazine and the Chair of the Masters in Branding at the School of Visual Arts. In 2005, she began hosting the first weekly radio talk show about design on the Internet, "Design Matters with Debbie Millman," which is now featured on Design Observer. She is the author of two books, How To Think Like A Great Graphic Designer (Allworth Press, 2007), and The Essential Principles of Graphic Design (Rotovision, 2008). Her third book, Look Both Ways: Illustrated Essays on the Intersection of Life and Design, was published by How Books in 2009. Read full bio

Think.Design

Ken Musgrave has been building and leading Dell's Experience Design Competencies, including industrial design, visual identity, and usability, at Dell Inc. since 2001. The team now extends globally with creative professionals in Austin, Texas, Singapore, and Taiwan. For the first twenty years of Dell's history it enjoyed growth through operational efficiencies and superior cost structure. Three years ago, Dell recognized that the principles and process that got it to that point would not be the same ones that would carry it into the future. Design has been at the forefront of that cultural shift. Ken has lead the development of a design competency and design culture through that transformation--including seeing Dell move from being a U.S.-centric manufacturer of computers to being a global source for great product experiences. At Dell, Ken has lead design-centered strategies ranging from consumer personalization to enterprise experiences. Before Dell, Ken led several design leadership and corporate identity roles at Becton Dickinson, a medical technology company. While there he led a global program to redefine the company's visual, product and global corporate identities. Ken holds an MBA from the University of Utah, an MS in design from the Georgia Institute of Technology, and a BS in industrial design from Auburn University. Read full bio

Innovation

Dev Patnaik is the CEO and founder of Jump Associates, a firm that helps companies create new businesses and reinvent existing ones. He advises senior executives at some of America's most admired companies, including GE, Nike, Target, and Hewlett-Packard, and is also an adjunct professor at Stanford University, teaching design-research methods. His 2009 book Wired to Care: How Companies Prosper When They Create Widespread Empathy, makes the audacious argument that the human power of empathy is the source of all innovation. Dev was recently featured as a guest on "The Business of Innovation," a series on CNBC. His articles on innovation and strategy have appeared in BusinessWeek, Brandweek and the Design Management Review. Read full bio

Design Reach

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

Designers for Human

Rob Tannen is an expert in designing products, interfaces, and systems that accommodate the complexities of human behavior and capabilities. He has researched cockpit interfaces for U.S. Air Force, designed trading floor order systems for the New York Stock Exchange, and created touchscreen applications for consumer appliances. Rob is Director of User Research and Interaction Design at the product development firm Bresslergroup. He also has a PhD in human factors and is a Certified Professional Ergonomist. Read full bio

What's Cookin'

Tucker Viemeister leads the Lab at Rockwell Group, an interactive technology design group combining digital interaction design, modeling, and prototyping for hotels and restaurants, casinos, packaging, and products. The LAB seeks to blur the line between the physical and virtual, exploring and experimenting with interactive digital technology in objects, environments, and stories. Tucker also co-founded the collaborative Studio Red with David Rockwell that was dedicated to innovation for Coca-Cola. Since joining Rockwell Group in 2004, Tucker has been instrumental in the design and development of JetBlue's Marketplace at the JFK International Airport, "Hall of Fragments," an installation that opened the Corderie dell'Arsenale at the 2008 Venice Biennale, a "living wall" for the lobby of the Sheraton Toronto, the traveling Red Lounge for Coca-Cola, and MGM City Centre in Las Vegas. Read full bio

Design (Education) is Changing

Paula Wallace is the president and co-founder of the Savannah College of Art and Design, which was established in 1978. Over the last three decades, she has served as the university's academic dean and provost and was appointed president in 2000. Since that time, Wallace has led the university in unprecedented growth, transforming SCAD into the most comprehensive art and design university in the United States--a nonprofit, accredited institution with more than 9,300 students and 1,500 faculty and staff. Read full bio