As Ralph Caplan defines it, "Design is a process for making things right." This definition captures the optimism of design, and it implies our fairly natural intuition about when a situation is “wrong” or broken.
In this TEDxSMU talk, frog Creative Director Kate Canales argues that design is something we come by quite naturally as humans. We design our way around broken systems everyday. The trick, of course, is to figure out how to apply that tendency to bigger and bigger issues.
This talk is about the little things Canales has seen that give her hope about our collective ability to design for those big problems. It is also about her belief that there will almost always be a thing in design, but the thing itself is not what matters. What matters is what the thing makes us do.
Chinese companies continue to expand around the world as domestic Chinese technology relentlessly improves. How should the world and business respond? frog President Doreen Lorenzo joins Cisco's Ned Hooper, ThoughtWorks' Guo Xiao, and Qiming Partners' Gary Rieschel to discuss the China's future in innovation and business at the Techonomy Conference in Tucson, Arizona on November 14. The conference is curated by technology journalist David Kirkpatrick and invites well-known speakers from some of the most leading technology and business organizations interested in social impact including Twitter, the Harvard Business School, Ashoka, Dreamworks Animation and more.
Right now, computers are boxes that come in the forms of tablets, mobile phones, and desktops that are indeed technological wonders, but sometimes distract us from what it really means to be human. If computers can be separated from computing, the technology is likely to better fit user needs, but certainly creates new challenges for designers. Designers must now think about how to create objects, and more importantly, the social and technology fabric that supports their contexts of use. frog Chief Creative Officer Mark Rolston presents his vision for omnipresent computing at GigaOm’s RoadMap conference.
The modern city is becoming a pointer system, the new URL, for tomorrow's hybrid digital-physical environment. Today's Facebook will be complemented by tomorrow's Placebook. Explosive innovation and adoption of computing, mobile devices and rich sources of data are changing our cities: where we live, work, and play. It's about us, and how computing in the context of our cities is changing how we live.
Personal data culture is at its infancy. frog Executive Creative Director Fabio Sergio spoke on stage about the issues surrounding the personal data economy at the NEXT11 Conference on May 17 in Berlin, Germany. In his talk, Sergio explores how personal data can be used for the collective good, to improve and change the world.
How can we let users guide design? frog Creative Director Thomas Sutton spoke on Open Innovation on the main stage at the Lift conference in Geneva, Switzerland. As opposed to focusing on tests and techniques to research and define exact consumer needs, Sutton explores the importance of cultivating empty spaces where people can innovate for themselves in a guided yet unconstrained process.
In Hurricane Katrina's aftermath, frog senior designer Michael McDaniel was inspired to create an emergency housing solution that can be quickly and easily deployed, efficient and cost effective. In light of the recent disasters in Haiti and Chile, it is even more apparent that there's a critical need for a reliable emergency housing system to help those in danger of being displaced. After five years developing an actual solution, McDaniel shared the lessons he has learned about how innovation can come from disaster at TEDxNola in New Orleans this past summer.
What will it take to change people’s behavior around the smart grid? Executive Creative Director David Merkoski spoke to leading policy makers, entrepreneurs, and innovators at the Gridwise Global Forum in Washington D.C. about strategies for engaging consumers in smart energy. Merkoski explains the need for moving beyond awareness technology and towards programs that will motivate users to change their existing patterns, and ultimately there relationship, with the smart grid.
