Design students, who venerate the perfect objects created by their professional idols, forget that innovation is a messy, imperfect process, plagued with fits, starts, and failures.
A set of storage towers, custom-created for the new Stanford d.school, is designed to show off work in progress, and to invite passing observers to chime in with ways to make it better.
You know what the Dutch love almost as much as design? Design awards. Yesterday, they announced the latest: The 2009 Great Indoors awards, which selected five winners, from among over 380 entries worldwide. And the winners are...
There's lots of perks at Google HQ out in California, but the design itself is a snooze. Things are a lot more interesting at their just-completed engineering offices in Zurich, Switzerland.
The common spaces are particularly zany, and they play off of lots of tropes of Swiss culture. Above: Meeting rooms in the form of ski-lift gondolas.
Design is drilled into Japanese culture--and Japanese designers treat every object as a chance to design something superb: bento boxes, kitchen knives, filing cabinets, toothbrushes. And even, apparently, dentist's offices. Check out these surprising examples.
Swiss Life's brand-new headquarters is one huge spiral ramp, which can be reconfigured into offices or meeting spaces as the business changes over time.
Let's say you're based outside NYC. But you come here often enough to need an office. But not so much that it's worth renting one long term. How's someone who's design obsessed supposed to pull that off? You can't very well sell your next high-tech, high-design Ponzi scheme over drinks at the Holiday Inn.
Research by Dr Vinesh Oommen, from the Queensland University of Technology, claims that the use of open plan offices is adversely affecting productivity. Moreover, open plan offices are linked to decreasing levels of privacy, increasing levels of job dissatisfaction and rising levels of workplace conflict. And if that’s not enough, open architecture and office floor plans can also lead to higher blood pressure and the spread of infectious diseases. In other words, the open plan office is just about the worst possible environment that you can work in.
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Design students, who venerate the perfect objects created by their professional idols, forget that innovation is a messy, imperfect process, plagued with fits, starts, and failures. 
