frog is delighted to be a partner of the India Design Forum, which will take place in New Delhi on March 9-10, 2012, with the goal of bringing the international discourse on design to India.
The IDF will comprise of a Design Trail (March 2-10, 2012) featuring public exhibitions, workshops, and perfomances in the heart of New Delhi, as well as a two-day conference (March 9-10, 2012). The speaker line-up includes architects Rem Kohlhaas and Thomas Heatherwick, MoMA curator Paola Antonelli, luxury designer Christian Louboutin, Adam Bly from Seed Media, Tom Dixon, and Karim Rashid, among many others.
My colleagues Jan Chipchase and Robert Fabricant, and I will speak at the conference, and frog will also throw an after-party on March 9 in Delhi.
The IDF founders Rajshree Pathy and Mitra Khoubrou envision the event to be an open, cross-disciplinary conversation between designers to identify the elements that define contemporary design in India. The IDF is conceived of as a platform to improve India’s access to the global design community and help it become a leader in shaping the global design agenda.
Rotman magazine, the print and online quarterly of the Rotman School of Management, has just released its new (Winter) issue, devoted to the theme “Open.” Openness has been a buzzword for a while, ever since Henry Chesbrough wrote his seminal book on Open Innovation, but, to apply Gartner’s Hype-Cycle terminology, now it seems as if Openness has finally reached a plateau of productivity after going through years of troughs of disillusion.
A few weeks ago swissnex San Francisco hosted an SFMOMAArchitecture and Design Forum panel discussion on the topic of Dieter Rams and the effect of Modernism on today's design landscape. Panelists included Yves Behar of Fuse Project, Cathy Baily of Heath Ceramics, Markus Diebel of InCase, and myself, Michael DiTullo of frog. The event was moderated by SFMOMA Architecture and Design curator Joseph Becker. We recieved some fantastic questions from the audience as well as from Joseph, including inquiries on the "tyranny of good design", what the shape of the designer of the future will be, and the impact of smart products on industrial design. I think you will enjoy the video below documented by Fora TV. You can jump to individual clips of specific questions on their site here.
Every week we publish the best things we come across; films, apps, resources, sites and other goodies worthy of your attention. We call this the weekly digest. This weeks selections are curated by Amsterdam based frog designer Niels-Peter Foppen.
After a crazy couple of weeks in the consumer electronics/smartphone/computer/telecom mega-industry (it's really all one now), another bombshell arrived yesterday with the news that Steve Jobs has resigned as CEO and is taking on role of chairman of the board. In reality, it probably means he will be in an advising capacity not unlike what he's probably been doing for the last year while on medical leave. But still, a shock to the system.
The popularity of Apple's design aesthetic and the renewed interest in the work of Dieter Rams of Braun both stem from a common source: they represent calm and certainty in a time of chaos and angst.
This weekend, I participated in HOW Design Live, a U.S.-based conference intended to help designers, in-house design managers, and creative freelancers gain the information and inspiration they need to succeed with their design work. One of my contributions to the conference was a talk about facilitated collaborations with design clients.
The digital world is here, and it is here to stay. It will continue to grow and permeate every nook and cranny of our millennia-long analog life. It will force us to reframe our comfort zones, and challenge us with new ways of viewing our world. With that said, I must admit that I am one of those people who is totally fine with technology’s role in this new life. I love the inherent “magic” technology delivers as it instantly converts the invisible ones and zeros into photographs of our loved ones half a world away, or into songs that bring back nostalgic memories. I also love the near obsessive-compulsive organizational abilities technology provides, as it attempts to help us manage our insanely empirical schedules and enable us to poetically update our Facebook status, at any time from almost anywhere.
Design, like the world as a whole, is unpredictable and messy. If you think it boils down to "research," you're mistaken.
A job interview can be a pretty dry affair, but a few years ago, I had one that I'll never forget. I was talking to an advertising executive about one of his clients, a major telecommunications company that had recently renamed itself. At the end of the interview, he asked if I had any questions for him. "What do you think about your client's decision to change names?" I asked. It seemed to me that discussing the pros and cons of a decision like this would be one of the more interesting aspects of a job in advertising. But his response didn't inspire much of a dialogue.
Marco Beghin, president of Moleskine, delighted the FUSE conference audience in Chicago today when he skirted the traditional and, often tiresome, power point presentation and moved towards an overhead projector. He placed his small moleskin notebook on top of the clean white screen to begin his talk “The Analog Digital Continuum.” Storytelling in the most nostalgic way, Beghin flipped through his notebook to unfold pictures and script that were tucked between the pages. This underscored his narrative about the importance of artifacts in human identity, highlighting a 3,500 year old skeleton of a nomad found among his knives, bowstring, and copper axe as an example of how the objects that we carry with us can tell a story of our experiences. But Beghin wasn’t arguing for us to bury our experiences in notebooks. He explained the obvious: the possibility of sharing analogue experience is amplified by the digital experiences we have through online storytelling. At the Salon di Mobile this week in Milan, Beghin announced that Moleskin would display the reverse phenomenon by capturing all online data happening around the event with a 3ft high robot and transcribing it on pieces of paper to create a physical expression of the conversations happening digitally.
