By Clay Odom - May 26, 2010
How designers are introducing the idea of “simple” to a group of high school students.
“People who think that small (dumb) things don’t matter have never slept in a room with a mosquito.”This is the mantra I’ve always used with my university students. It gets their attention, and it's a good way to look at the world we inhabit and the things we create. I don’t mean to be pedantic, but simple is just too complicated. We’ve all heard the saying “simplicity isn’t simple,” so to make things simple, I call simple “dumb.”
By Jason Severs - April 29, 2010
By Sara Todd - April 12, 2010
I love food. But more importantly, I love fresh, delicious food. Living in the Bay Area makes that pretty easy thanks to the farmers markets and restaurants committed to serving local and sustainable food. I even have my own hipster backyard garden and, I hate to brag but my friends will agree that my fridge has triple the amount of fresh food than all of theirs combined.
By Adam Richardson - March 4, 2010
A story of innovation, ecosystems, and success from the author of Innovation X.
Companies that transform their industries usually do so by creating nicely integrated combinations of products, software, online experiences, and services. Apple, Amazon, and Google are top examples. Let me suggest that we add Zipcar to that list.
By Meriah Garrett - February 16, 2010
After teaching local high-school students the benefits of design, a team of frog designers helps them realize a goal.
As mentioned in our first post on this blog, “Why We Should Teach Design Early,” our initiative, TeachDesign, is a collaboration between a team of designers from the Austin studio of frog design, architects from SHW Group and the Austin Digital Media Council. The team is currently working with a group of students at McCallum High School to imagine a common space on campus that is useful, interactive, and inspiring.
By Eric Wicks - February 3, 2010
Planning clearly-marked urban biking systems can help us educate car drivers and decrease cycling accidents.
If you ride a bike and live in Texas like I do, you’re screwed. Three of the largest cities in the country are in the Lone Star state, and they are all among the worst to bike in. But in fact, only one or two of the biggest urban areas in the country are considered acceptable for biking by the most basic standards. During the life cycle of these cities from small town to metropolis, planners had to answer the question of how to accommodate the transportation needs of the growing population. Unfortunately, those boom periods coincided with the rise of the automobile and the oil industries, not the urban biking surge we’re now experiencing. As a result, planners are now faced with the task of retrofitting new concepts and ideas to existing infrastructure.
By Jason Severs - January 28, 2010
Why we have a responsibility to choose intentionally, and move from consumerism to userism.
By Adam Richardson - January 20, 2010
How wedding blogs and brides can help us fight terrorism.
In the wake of the failed bombing attempt on the Northwest Airlines Detroit flight, "connecting the dots" is all the rage. How can security agencies do a better job of connecting pieces of data together to head off similar terrorist attacks in the future? Even in small- and medium-sized organizations, corralling, analyzing, and disseminating disparate pieces of information is fiendishly difficult. For a loose affiliation of huge organizations at the governmental level it is much more difficult.
By Eric Wicks - January 4, 2010
What the bicycle can teach us about the design challenges of the next century.
Albert Einstein once said, “The problems that exist in the world today cannot be solved by the level of thinking that created them…” and he was right. In the next century, our job as designers will be to evaluate accepted solutions through a different lens. For a solution to be truly sustainable and good it must have a positive return to the environment and society. At the heart of any design problem is a question: Are we trying to make something less bad or are we trying to make things better?
By Jason Severs - December 18, 2009
“Design, once narrowly defined as a marginal activity concerned with aesthetic appeal of a limited range of consumer goods, can now be seen to be at the core of all our conceptions and plans for our personal and collective social lives.”
–Victor Margolin, author of “The Product Milieu and Social Action”
