The Masters of Design

Patrick Whitney is creating a new kind of practitioner: business-savvy designers who draw not the prettiest lines but the most powerful conclusions about how companies can focus on the consumer. For more than 20 years, Whitney has been a steady voice for business; his graduates wear titles such as Motorola's director of marketing in Korea. "He's shifting the conversation from design as form-giving to design as strategy," says David Kelley, the Ideo founder who is establishing Stanford's new design school. "He sees that the way designers think has great relevance to business strategy." And like any serious change maker, Whitney isn't proprietary about his approach. He's collaborating with like- minded champions and open-sourcing ideas to the handful of other schools around the world that are taking design in a new direction. -- Christine Canabou

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Matthias Schuler

Director, Transsolar,
Stuttgart, Germany

How do you create the right climate for success? That's the challenge facing Matthias Schuler. He works with the world's most influential architects to create buildings that give maximum "human comfort" for minimal use of energy and materials. Schuler is trying to give cubicle dwellers more access to daylight and fresh air, and he's also aiming for a more sustainable future. And he's shaking up the way buildings get built by applying considerations of climate and sustainability to the earliest design stages with his collaborators, including Frank Gehry. That could mean, for example, aligning a building with the sun's path and prevailing wind patterns, as was done with Bonn's Deutsche Post Tower. Says Toshiko Mori, the New York architect: "His work may affect things that are hard to see and admire, but his frameworks have a strong effect on the design of spaces around human activities." -- CC

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Janine Benyus

Author and cofounder, the Biomimicry Guild,
Stevensville, Montana

In 1997, when Janine Benyus published her sixth book, Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature, she wasn't aiming to become a new source of inspiration for designers. "I was just writing another book," she says. But Biomimicry was an eye-opener, for it showed that the natural world is filled with elegant examples of sustainable designs that might well be applied to the industrial world. After the book's debut, the phone began to ring, with people like the urban visionary Jane Jacobs on the line. Ever since, Benyus has been a conduit between scientists and designers. The Biomimicry Guild, the consulting practice she founded, helps organizations such as NASA and Nike adapt natural models for building business strategies. A self-described biologist at the design table, Benyus is a natural game changer. -- CC