Monthly Archives: September 2008

The US economy is in the toilet and everyone who doesn’t work in the stock market or in government is either stuffing money into their mattress or simply watching the market freefall with jaw dropped. What is a designer to do? Continue reading What American Designers Can Do to Help the US Economy >>

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Tom and I went last week to go see “Breathing Life into Buildings: Interaction Design for Physical Spaces” hosted by the San Francisco chapter of the Interaction Design Association. Continue reading Notes from IxDA-SF's "Breathing Life into Buildings" >>

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Let’s face it: most talks around sustainability and green design are dull, preachy, and hand-wringingly apocalyptic when they aren’t all “Design Can Save The World!.” Which is why I was so happy to stumble onto Lunar Design’s The Designer’s Field Guide to Sustainability (pdf). Continue reading Small Steps Towards Sustainability >>

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Earlier this week I attended a talk at Adaptive Path by Dan Roam. It’s not surprising that the author of “The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures” would be pretty handy with a pen, but the talk provoked more thought than I anticipated. Continue reading On Drawing >>

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My friend and former colleague Brandon Schauer tipped me off to the Open Prosthetics Project. It’s a really fascinating glimpse into the future of product design, when the values of “Web 2.0″ (transparency, community participation, hackability, the sharing of data) permeate fully into the world of physical objects. Continue reading Designing Products in an Open Source World >>

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Nicholas Carr has written an important, yet readable, book in The Big Switch: Rewiring the World from Edison to Google. It’s a book that, if the thesis is true, (and I suspect it is) it will have vast implications for those of us working in the technology and product design fields. Continue reading Review: The Big Switch >>

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When we were first talking about what the philosophy was behind how Kicker would design products, one of the terms we came up with was Inside-Out Design. Meaning that we care as much about how the product works as we do about how it looks or feels. Continue reading Henry Dreyfuss: The Godfather of Inside-Out Design >>

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