Al Dean has been working as a technology writer for the past six years and currently holds the post of Technology Editor on the UK's leading Product Development Technology magazine, MCAD, and is Editor of Prototype, a new quarterly focussing on the Rapid Prototyping and Direct Manufacturing industries. He is also regular contributor to CADserver.co.uk, one of the world's leading providers of CAD and product development technology related web-content. He has contributed his work to numerous publications, including CGI, New Design, IPMatters.com, and Journal for the Institute of Engineering Designers.
Bruce M. Tharp, PhD is a designer, researcher, entrepreneur, and professor with degrees in mechanical engineering, ID, and anthropology. He and his wife, Stephanie Tharp run an award-winning, Chicago-based design studio, materious.
They have licensed a dozen new product ideas to companies, and currently manufacture several of their own. Bruce teaches a first-of-its-kind, product licensing course at the University of Illinois at Chicago where he is also Director of Graduate Studies.
Materious also produces discursive products and concepts to engender reflection and debate on cultural topics. They’re currently finishing a book project on the topic entitled, Discursive Design.
Stuart Constantine is a founding partner of Core77, a design enterprise based in New York City. He studied History at the University of Connecticut and Industrial Design at Pratt Institute. He has over fifteen years of consulting experience in the design and technology sectors. Prior to his involvement with Core77 he worked as a designer at Lotus Development Corp. in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and as a director at Gartner, an IT consulting company in Connecticut. He currently resides in Connecticut with his wife, three young children, a collection of guitars, and a dog.
Jeannie is a true jack-of-all trades, looks forward to a day gone swimmingly, and finds joy in all things awesome. Brilliant art, rocking the renegade music scene, conjuring up haute designs, other people's hot designs, tasty salad, trashy magazines and unicorns are some of the many things she is passionate about.
Cordy Swope is a design strategist and cofounder of normal life, an international product development company. He has directed award-winning programs in consumer understanding for corporations in a wide variety of industries. He can also roll a half dollar on the fingers of his right hand.
Don Lehman is a Chicago-based industrial designer and the founder of More/Real, a startup focused on making technology feel invisible. More/Real’s first product, Stylus Caps, turns common pens and markers into touchscreen styluses.
Don has been honored by the IDSA, featured in the CES Innovation Showcase, and his design for the Contigo Autoseal Travel Mug was named by Bloomberg Businessweek as one of the 50 Coolest Designs of the 21st Century. He has contributed to Core since 2001, first with his column, "The Student Life", documenting his design school years at RIT, and since then posting news and columns.
Emilie Baltz believes believes food to be the most revealing part of culture and works in multiple mediums, both commercially and artistically, to explore that notion in the most robust way possible. Trained in Film Studies, Photography and Industrial Design, she borrows omnivorously from multiple mediums in order to deliver joyful experiences for consumers. The outputs of this practice are personal and professional, functional and fantastical. Her goal is to provoke delicious new perspectives on the world through social, formal and industrial processes.
Aart van Bezooyen is a Dutch optimist and motivator for materials in design. He lives and works in Hamburg where he founded Material Stories in 2005 to inspire and enable the best use of materials to make design more competitive, creative and sustainable.
2011 he explored sustainable solutions from around the world during the "It's Not Easy Being Green" project with graphic designer Paula Raché. 2012 he co-organized the Materials Café This year, he is active at the University of Art and Design Halle to grow a new materials library. The "Get Inspired" newsletter is keeping readers up to date about materials news, books and events.
Glen is a caffeine fueled, photo taking, streaming music, sushi loving Australian obsessed with collecting airline safety cards and has only destroyed one laptop in 7 years of riding to work every day. With formal training in both Industrial Design and Interactive Media at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, he was the online art director at lomography.com for almost 5 years before joining the team at Core77.
Michael Doyle is a Detroit-based experience designer and amateur cultural critic. He is interested in the spaces between design, art, music and culture, and has contributed to a variety of design blogs for more than a decade. Michael is a co-founder of the hackerspace OmniCorpDetroit, as well as DJ collectives Dethlab and Dorkwave. When not designing interactive environments for o2, record covers for Ghostly International, or collaborating with the likes of the Hypothetical Development Organization, he may be found playing music at sushi bars or organizing croquet socials in abandoned factories.
Steve Portigal is the founder of Portigal Consulting. In the past 15 years Steve has interviewed families eating breakfast, rock musicians, credit-default swap traders, and radiologists. His work has informed the development of music gear, wine packaging, medical information systems, corporate intranets, videoconferencing systems, and iPod accessories. Steve is an accomplished presenter who speaks about culture, innovation, and design at companies like eBay, Adobe, Nokia, Hewlett-Packard, and Dolby Laboratories. He has a graduate degree in Human-Computer Interaction from the University of Guelph and is an avid photographer who has a Museum of Foreign Groceries in his home.
As Chief Design Officer of DEI Holdings, Michael DiTullo is passionate advocate as well as experienced practitioner of design. In addition to his work at DEI he is a contributor for the well-known design resource, Core77.com. Prior to DEI Michael was Creative Director at the legendary frog design, where he lead teams that worked with Google, Motorola, Honda, Braun, Brooks, Harmon Kardon and Intel. Before frog, DiTullo spent nearly a decade developing several product collections at Nike Inc. Michael is a prolific creative and an unfailing evangelist for our industry as a whole who frequently speaks at conferences and universities. DiTullo has been a core77 contributor since 2003, moderating our discussion forums (as Yo), producing design events, blogging, and producing a series of "5 minute" sketch videos.
Allan Chochinov is a partner of Core77, a New York-based design network serving a global community of designers and design enthusiasts, and Chair of the new MFA in Products of Design graduate program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. Allan lectures around the world and at professional conferences including IDSA, AIGA and IxDA, has been a guest critic at various design schools in including Yale University, IIT, Carnegie Mellon, Ravensbourne, RMIT, University of Minnesota, Emily Carr, and RISD. He has moderated and led workshops and symposia at the Aspen Design Conference, the Rockefeller Center at Bellagio, Compost Modern, and Winterhouse, and is a frequent design competition juror. Prior to Core77, his work in product design focused on the medical, surgical, and diagnostic fields, as well as on consumer products and workplace systems. He has been named on numerous design and utility patents and has received awards from The Art Directors Club, I.D. Magazine, Communication Arts, and The One Club.
Niti Bhan focuses on offering strategic insight for growth opportunities and revenue generation in the rapidly evolving interstitial space between design and business. Her 15 years of experience include employers such McCann Erickson Worldwide, Hewlett Packard India, The Second City and most recently, the Institute of Design. She is an engineer and an MBA whose most significant achievement in the field of design has been dropping out of two graduate design programs on two continents in two centuries - the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad and the Institute of Design, Chicago. Her areas of interest are business intelligence and trends, business strategy as well as creating a compelling user case for design as force for increasing value.
Warren Ginn is Principal of GinnDesign Product Development, in Raleigh, NC where he works his magic merging design, materials and manufacturing processes. Having worked as an industrial designer within in several in-house, design consulting and manufacturing organizations, he's a strong advocate for interdisciplinary collaboration between the designer, engineering, manufacturing and supplier communities. He currently serves on the board of the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA) as the VP of the Professional Interest Sections. He previously served as chair of the Materials and Processes Section of IDSA for 11 years and is still evangelizing the value of materials and processes education within the industrial design community. He received his degree in Product Design from North Carolina State University.
http://idsamp.wordpress.com
Mark Vanderbeeken is a senior partner at Experientia, an international experience design consultancy, based in Turin, Italy. He is also the author of the successful experience design blog Putting People First. Mark is a specialist in visioning, identity development and strategic communications and worked in Italy, Denmark, the USA and Belgium. He was communications manager of Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, European communications coordinator for the World Wide Fund for Nature (or WWF), marketing director of Gwathmey Siegel & Associates Architects (USA) and chief press officer of Antwerp 93, Cultural Capital of Europe (Belgium).
Xanthe is an artist and designer living in Ithaca, New York. Her interests include craft, the maker movement, social business, open source, and sustainability.
David writes about robots, the "Internet", and the occasional monkey for publications including Metropolis, The Guardian, Salon.com, and Eye magazine. He is the editor-in-chief of Adobe ThinkTank, an online journal covering trends in design and technology and consults for Adobe on a variety of issues. He is currently working with the Japan Society on several projects designed to foster creative exchange between Tokyo and New York. David is the co-author, with Steve Heller, of the forthcoming book Becoming a Digital Designer.
Ian Curry first got his hands dirty in design on a Chandler & Price letterpress. Shortly thereafter he moved into the more abstract realms of digital media, and has often looked back.
Ian has done interactive design work for the U.N., Eyebeam R&D, and a range of interesting companies while recently at frog Design's studio in New York. He intermittently teaches undergraduate courses in interaction design at Pratt and Parsons. Currently an interaction designer at Local Projects, he is working to reduce the number of broken-seeming interactive exhibits at area museums. If you walk by his apartment in Brooklyn, you are likely to hear him learning to play the cello.
Alissa Walker writes about design for publications like Good, Fast Company, I.D., and ReadyMade, and is the assistant editor of the California Architect's Newspaper. She can be found on your iPod as the associate producer of the KCRW show "DnA: Design and Architecture." Alissa lives in Hollywood, where she throws ice cream socials, tends to her drought-tolerant gardens, and relishes life in LA without a car. Her new blog, Gelatobaby, offers commentary on design, Los Angeles, food, travel, and Star Wars, and every so often, gelato.
Kevin is founder of Plan, a product strategy consultancy based in London that helps companies work out what to do next. As a leading product strategist, over the past 20 years he has consulted for clients including: Samsung, Ford, HP, Lenovo, Mars, Nokia, Orange, 02, P&G, Shell, Unilever and Yamaha.
Before founding Plan in 2004, Kevin was director at the product design consultancy Seymour Powell, and set up one of the first dedicated design strategy teams in Europe.
With a background that spans design, marketing, engineering and social forecasting, Kevin is never short of an opinion or three. He writes, speaks curates and chairs conferences on design, business, and society. He has been published and cited in international journals, including Business Week, FastCompany, Design Management Journal, Core77 and Blueprint. He teaches at CASS Business School in London, and is a visiting fellow at his old design faculty at Northumbria University.
Deb Johnson, is the Academic Director of Sustainability at Pratt Institute and is leading the development of Pratt's new Center for Sustainable Design Studies and Research. She is founder and executive director of the Pratt Design Incubator for Sustainable/Social Enterprise.
She is heads Greenmatter, a green design consultancy and sustainable design think tank. Greenmatter brings designers together to collaborate with people working to change the world.
Brit Leissler lives and acts between London and Berlin. After receiving a Master degree in product design from the Royal College of Art in London she started her own Shoot the Stylist! design studio. She also works as a design educator for various institutions and founded Punch'n'Cuddle Ltd., producing and distributing her own products.
When taking a break from the design world she writes, sings and composes quirky electronic pop or travels the planet. Brit loves all forms of eccentricity, joins up the dots and aims to get into interesting conversations with all kinds of weird and wonderful people. As a hardcore digital camera gunslinger she shoots everything that moves and grooves. She doesn't eat animals, is hot for cheese, loves the Kensington Squirrels, robotic dance moves and life enhancing ideas.
Lisa is dedicated to promoting the American contemporary design scene. She keeps herself busy as the co-founder of the Object Design League, an association of independent designers in Chicago, and design practice Smith&Linder, both co-founded with Caroline Linder. She also teaches foundation research studios at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Tad Toulis is the Creative Director of Teague's Seattle-based Design Studio. Prior to joining Teague, Tad worked at Lunar Design, Motorola's Advanced Concepts Group and Samsung's LA LAB. He was also a founding member of designRAW, a San Francisco-based design collective. Tad is a frequent speaker and lecturer at universities, conferences and design symposiums. His work has received numerous awards of distinction and has appeared in publications across the globe.
Helen Walters is a design writer and editor, currently working as an editor and researcher at Doblin, a member of the Monitor Group. Until July 2010, she was editor of innovation and design at Bloomberg BusinessWeek. She's the author of five design-related books and also contributing editor to British design magazine, Creative Review. She tweets.
Valerie Casey is a globally recognized designer and innovator. She works with organizations on challenges ranging from creating new products and services, to transforming organizational processes and behaviors. Before starting her own practice, Necessary Projects, in San Francisco, she held executive leadership positions at IDEO, frog, and Pentagram. Casey is the founder of the Designers Accord, the global coalition of designers, educators, and business leaders working together to create positive sustainable impact. Casey was named a “Guru” of the year by Fortune magazine, a “Hero of the Environment” by Time magazine, a “Master of Design” by Fast Company, and one of the “World’s Most Influential Designers” by BusinessWeek. The World Economic Forum has honored Casey as a “Young Global Leader.”
Steven heller is a senior art director of the New York Times and the co-chair (with Lita Talarico) of the MFA Designer as Author Program at the School of Visual Arts. He recently co-founded (with Alice Twemlow) the MFA in Design Criticism at SVA. He is the editor of VOICE: The AIGA Journal of Design and The Nose (with Seymour Chwast). He is contributing editor to PRINT, ID, Eye, Baseline and a contributor to Metropolis, the New York Times Book Review, Varoom, and Grafik. He has edited, co-edited or authored over 100 books on design an popular culture, including "Paul Rand," "Merz to Emigre: Avant Garde Magazine Design of the Tweniteh Century," "Stylepedia: A Gude to Graphic Design Mannerisms, Quirks and Conceits," "Euro Deco: Graphic Design Between the Wars," "Anatomy of Design," "Design Literacy Second Edition," "The Education of a Photographer," "The Graphic Design Reader," "Graphic Wit: The Art of Humor in Design," and "Teaching Illustration." He is currently completing "Iron Fists: Branding the Totalitarian State" for Phaidon Press and is working on a biography of Alvin Lustig. His website is Hellerbooks.com.
Andy Polaine co-founded the award-winning new-media collective Antirom in London working with clients such as the BBC, Levis and The Science Museum as well exhibiting several interactive installations and performances around the world. He was a producer at Razorfish in the UK before moving to Australia where he started the interactive department of visual effects company, Animal Logic. He was Senior Lecturer in Interactive Media and Head of the School of Media Arts at The University of New South Wales, Sydney before moving to Germany. Officially Dr Polaine with a PhD in interactivity and play from UTS, Sydney, Andy is now a Lecturer and Research Fellow in Service Design at the Lucerne School of Art and Design in Switzerland. Alongside his academic work Andy continues to work as a interaction designer, service design research and writer. His own blog is Playpen and he is also the Editor and founder of The Designer's Review of Books
I'm a multidisciplinary graphic designer and writer living in New York City. My projects have involved designing identities, motion graphics, web sites, exhibition graphics, publications, as well as copywriting and art directing. I look for projects that challenge my thinking and form-making skills, but I'm especially interested in collaborating with non-profits and civic organizations that need help to address complex social problems in ways that might spur lasting social change.
Willem Van Lancker is a product designer (UX) at Google with a passion for ethnography, maps, data visualization, and producing delightful user experiences.
Willem came to Google from IDEO where he worked as a communication designer focusing on understanding business systems and organizations through visual communication. Previous to IDEO, Willem worked for Apple, where he designed user interfaces for products including iPhone and iPad, and adidas, where he created new brand identities for various major league sports teams respectively.
Willem is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) with a degree in Graphic Design. While at RISD, Willem teamed with a small group of Brown and RISD students to create A Better World by Design, a now-annual three-day conference encouraging social and environmental impact within educational policy. He also served as a researcher and core member for RISD’s Strategic Plan, charting a new course for RISD’s academic programs and student life initiatives focused on how students of different disciplines can innovate through collaboration.
When he is not working on new innovations for Google, Willem can be found writing, sailing, playing squash (both the sport and the gourd), following English (and American) football, and occasionally regretting the decision to eat that bacon-wrapped hotdog from a food-cart in the Mission District.
Sam is a design strategist at Plan, the London-based product strategy consultancy.
With an interdisciplinary design education spanning the UK, Germany and Finland, Sam has experience in product, digital and service design, and has also worked in interaction design at Sony Design, Tokyo.
An intrepid traveler, Sam has reported on design, events and consumer culture for Core throughout Europe and Asia.
Kara works as a Senior Design Researcher at frog in Munich, Germany. Prior to this, she pursued her Master's degree in Design at Emily Carr University, where she focused her research on cross-cultural design process. Her graduate work in Rwanda has been included as a case study in IDEO's Human-Centered Design Toolkit.
She remains passionate about exploring design with rural communities and emerging markets.
Matt Brown is a designer from the Chemical City (Midland, MI) and works at IDEO in Boston. He studied Industrial Design at Kendall College of Art and Design in Grand Rapids, MI and got his Masters in Interaction Design from the Umeå Institute of Design in Umeå, Sweden. He likes railroad tracks, talking about new ideas, and funny/awkward moments. He can't play the piano but collects synths anyway and has released a couple of records with his band Fracula.
His work deals a lot with fiction, humor, and people. A good example of this would be his piece on Dogpiling and Candles. You can see Matt's work on his website, and read more on his blog.
Don Norman claims his goals in life are to make a significant difference, but to have fun while doing so. He is both a businessperson (VP at Apple, Executive at HP and a startup) and an academic (Harvard, UC San Diego, Northwestern, KAIST). As co-founder of the Nielsen Norman Group he serves on company boards and helps companies make products more enjoyable, understandable, and profitable. He is an IDEO Fellow and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. He gives frequent keynotes and is known for his many books including "The Design of Everyday Things," "Emotional Design," and "Living with Complexity" (which argues against simplicity). A completely revised, updated edition of "Design of Everyday Things" will be published in October 2013.
Venessa Miemis is a futurist, digital ethnographer, and modern day philosopher. Her superpowers include: pattern recognition, intuition, and the ability to distill complexity. She is currently pursuing a Masters in Media Studies at the New School in NYC. The focus of her graduate work is on facilitating trust-building, generative dialogue, and open collaboration in networked environments. Her blog, Emergent by Design, probes the potential impacts of social technologies on human behavior, thought processes, and the evolution of consciousness.
Ingrid Fetell is a designer, researcher, and writer whose work explores the emotional relationships between people and things. She writes the blog Aesthetics of Joy, and is working on a book of the same name, which draws on insights from neuroscience and psychology to suggest ways that design can lead the way to happier, healthier, and more sustainable lives. This allows her indulge her twin passions for delightfully designed objects and jargon-filled scientific studies. She also writes the Design and the Mind blog on the Psychology Today website.
Frank Bonomo can help you advertise with Core77. Send him an email or give him a call to shoot the shit. When he's not processing insertion orders he's performing live comedy on NYC stages.
Bill Moggridge is the director of the Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, the only museum in the United States devoted exclusively to historic and contemporary design. Bill designed the first laptop computer, the Grid Compass, launched in 1982. He describes his career as having three phases, first as a designer with projects for clients in ten countries, second as a co-founder of IDEO where he developed design methods for interdisciplinary design teams, and third as a spokesperson for the value of design in everyday life, writing, presenting and teaching, supported by the historical depth and contemporary reach of the museum.
Ben helps to lead Method’s interaction design team in San Francisco. His twelve years of experience span working within teams large and small, both in-house and consultancy, and from startups to corporate behemoths. Ben has worked on projects with many different areas of focus, beginning on the web but expanding to include mobile, brand, application, strategy, product and service. Prior to joining Method, Ben has spent time at Adaptive Path, IDEO, Twitter, Samsung, UK-based service design pioneers live|work, and Oyster Partners, a big British web agency you'd probably only remember if you still have the scars from the first dot bomb.
He teaches, currently at the California College of Arts, has written for Interactions magazine, Core 77 and FastCompany among others, and has spoken at a few different places like South By Southwest, Design Engaged, Webvisions and UX Week. He is also involved as a mentor with the Designer Fund, and has served as technical director on the committee of the last few Interaction conferences ('10, '11, '12 and '13) for the Interaction Design Association. Ben's work has been recognized by the IxDA's Interaction Awards, the BAFTAs, the Spark and the Pixel awards.
Shai Akram met Andrew Haythornthwaite while studying at the Royal College of Art, the two now run their own design practice and are also members of the Okay Studio collective. Her projects cover creative direction and design for interiors, events, and furniture/product ranges. Shai’s work is a combination of practice and theory, translating research and ideology into objects and visual language. Her work has been exhibited internationally and projects have taken her to China, New Zealand and Italy- although Shai loves to travel, she secretly wishes she would stay in one place long enough to have a cat.
Tiffany Chu is a designer and blogger based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. With a background in architecture and comparative media studies from MIT, Tiffany has a broad span of design experience including work for Pixar Animation Studios, h2o architectes in Paris, The New Orleans Office of Recovery, design/build in Cambodia, and field research on street vendors in Vietnam. By day, she currently works as an associate at the design and innovation consultancy, Continuum. By night, she dilly-dallies in internet culture, cartography, hot yoga, and dreams up design-entrepreneurial schemes.
Marina Garcia-Vasquez is New York-based writer and editor of lifestyle and culture content. Her current focus is on art, architecture, and design. She obsesses over typography, McCobb chairs, Italo Calvino, urban landscape, and poetry. She is the NY correspondent for the Australian Inside Magazine. Here for Core77, she will devote herself to emerging Mexican and Latin American designers. Aside from this reportage, she is fully vested in promoting Mexican culture in New York City through Mexnthecity.com. Follow her @MarinaGarciaVas and @Mexnthecity. Her blogs and website: www.mg-v.com, pairsofchairs.wordpress, mexnthecity.com
Manager: Design and Operations of Hand-Eye Supply Store and co-Curator of the Hand-Eye Supply Curiosity Club. Musician and musical instrument collector and builder.
Ray is the Managing Editor of Core77 and at least one other thing on the side. Aside from design, his interests include art, music, cycling, urbanism, food, patterns, maps, coffee, shoes and em-dashes—seriously, he includes at least one in every post he writes.
Kenzan is the product of sculptors and bookkeepers. An upbringing telling of his approach to design: the hands-on formation of good ideas into solutions through considered assessment and judgement. Kenzan's experience as a lighting designer, small business owner, and good neighbor has provided him a means to explore and understand the multi-faceted world of design. Both a thinker and a do'er, Kenzan finds opportunity at every step of the process to create beautiful and effective design solutions, no matter the challenge.
Joann Plockova writes about design, ideas, solutions and various other topics of interest from her base in Prague. Her work has been featured in newspapers, magazines and online publications both in the Czech Republic and abroad. She is from the U.S. and previously worked as a copywriter.
Ilyssa Kyu is a designer residing in South Philadelphia. She currently works as an experience designer & strategist at P'unk Avenue and regularly does graphic design & consulting freelance work with the Mayor’s Office of Sustainability, CultureWorks, GreenLimbs, and South Philly Green Drinks.
Her personal work explores how design can intervene in our complex relationship with nature through engineering empathy into objects and experiences.
Victoria Kirk is a senior digital strategist at Ogilvy, helping businesses create experiences that delight consumers. She has a Bachelor's (with honors) from New York University and holds a Masters of Industrial Design from the Pratt Institute. As a researcher, ethnographer, strategist and a designer, she has worked with organisations large and small to convert digital and cultural insights into tangible action. Her clients include large multi-nationals (Unilever, British Gas, Nestle) as well as educational and social enterprises (the Museum of Arts and Design, the Pratt Institute, Tilonia.com, the Barefoot College). A native New Yorker, she has lived and worked in India and is now based in London, where she is an active member of the sustainable design community, serves as board member and advisor to several social enterprises, produces documentary film and photography projects, and waits with cautious curiosity for the coming of the 2012 Olympics.
Dave Seliger is a Postgrad Fellow in Logistics and Ext Affairs at the NYC Office of Emergency Management. He has extensive experience helping firefighters, police officers, and disaster responders improve their services through design.
While leading RKS as CEO, Ravi Sawhney has helped generate more than 150 patents and over 95 design awards on behalf of his diverse list of international clients. Sawhney invented the reliable Psycho-Aesthetics design methodology, co-authored the 2010 release of Predictable Magic (Wharton School Publishing), is a Fellow in the Industrial Design Society of America (IDSA), holds a Ph.D (Hon.) from the Academy of Art University San Francisco, and is the innovator and former jury Chair for IDSA’s Catalyst Case Study program. He is also a popular speaker and editorial contributor on the topics of design, innovation and management.
Recognizing excellence in all areas of design enterprise, the Core77 Design Awards celebrates the richness of the design profession and its practitioners.
Cindy Gilbert directs MCAD’s Sustainable Design Online Program. In this role, Cindy fosters a culture of awareness and creativity through sustainable, innovative, and collaborative design. She has extensive research experience in the fields of climate change and polar ecology, and has taught several courses and workshops in the fields of biology, sustainability, and biomimicry. Most recently she served 3.5 years as the founding Director of University Education at The Biomimicry Institute where she developed and managed all higher education programs including the Biomimicry Professional Certification Program, the annual Biomimicry Education Summits, the Biomimicry Affiliate and Fellows Programs, and the Biomimicry Student Design Challenges.
Daniel is a User Experience Design Consultant. He has had the pleasure of working on service design, mobile, web and embedded interfaces for clients from Abbot to Volvo. He bikes a lot, and has taught a shocking variety of Design, Science and Food classes at the Brooklyn Brainery. He is 1/5 of The Design Gym, where he teaches design thinking to the masses. He is also 1/4 of GothamSmith, a line of 3D printed products.
Raymond Jepson is a Montréal based product designer, active in IDSA. He is currently working for Stelpro Design, a growing heating and ventilation manufacturer. He has freelanced designing products from many categories, including ice skates for CCM, lighting and car audio equipment. He graduated from Arizona State University. When he doesn't have a pen in hand, he can be found underneath the hood of cars, or amateur racing them.
Panthea Lee is co-founder and principal of Reboot, a service design firm working in the fields of governance and international development. At Reboot, she leads a multidisciplinary team of designers, researchers, development experts, and policy strategists to improve social outcomes globally, working for organizations such as the World Bank and the American Civil Liberties Union. Panthea has led projects in over 20 countries including Afghanistan, China, Sudan, and Tunisia. Before founding Reboot, she was with UNICEF Innovation.
Panthea speaks frequently on new approaches in international development, and has lectured at Columbia University, McGill University, NYU, the School of Visual Arts, and Pop!Tech’s social innovation program.
When Perrin isn't scouting the best new design talent for Core77, or working as the Products Editor of The Architect's Newspaper, or writing for Cool Hunting, Design Applause, Print Magazine, Frieze and The Paris Review, she's trying to put her MFA in Fiction from Vermont College to good use.
An Xiao Mina is an American designer strategist and researcher who recently worked on the Gwangju Design Biennale’s Un-Named Design exhibition. She focuses on the role of social media and communications technologies in building communities and empowering individuals. Find her on Twitter here.
Jan Chipchase is Executive Creative Director of Global Insights at frog, as well as an advisory board member for Makeshift Magazine. You can subscribe to his Facebook feed, follow him on @janchip.
Carly Ayres is an undergraduate student studying Industrial Design at the Rhode Island School of Design. When not in studio, she works as the elected President of RISD's Student Alliance or as a Research Assistant on the STEM to STEAM education initiative on campus. She writes on humanizing technology, congressional briefings, bike racks, and everything in between.
Roland Boal is Head of PGD, the China branch of Priestmangoode - a leading multidisciplinary design consultancy specialising in transport, aviation, environment and product design for a roster of significant brands across the globe.
Roland Boal is an experienced design-led strategist and designer with extensive experience in the consumer electronics and aviation sectors, running projects ranging from mobile phones and vacuum cleaners to aircraft cabin interiors. He has worked for a number of large industrial design companies and recently joined Priestmangoode to head its first overseas office, Priestmangoode Design, in Qingdao, China.
Ciara studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and received a BFA with an emphasis in Designed Objects. She is a conceptual designer whose interests include user interaction and social behavior in online gaming, and how they can inform the physical world and the design of tangible objects. Her work focuses on identity, human interaction, and virtual environments, exploring the relationship that people develop with the real world and the virtual.
Jeroen van Geel is interaction director at Fabrique [brands, design & interaction]. He is an international speaker and a writer on the field of interaction design and has a great interest in the world of product personality. Jeroen has pushed forward many design projects, ranging from the next generation mobile apps for Dutch public transport to interactive projects for Rijksmuseum Amsterdam and the new automated border control systems at Schiphol. He was the founder of Johnny Holland. His goal is to return a bit of wonder into the world, even if it is just for himself.
Teshia Treuhaft is currently a graduate student studying furniture design at the Rhode Island School of Design. Previously a TEDx organizer, she now splits time between school, doing Public Relations for the Better World by Design conference and writing for Core77.
She is a Michigan-born, obsessive coffee drinker and lover of travel. Teshia hates glass tabletops and loves projection mapping. She hopes to become fluent in German and build at least one really good chair in her lifetime.
frog works with the world's leading companies, helping them to design, engineer, and bring to market meaningful products and services. With an interdisciplinary team of more than 1,100 designers, strategists, and technologists, frog delivers connected experiences that span multiple technologies, platforms, and media. frog works across a broad spectrum of industries, including consumer electronics, telecommunications, healthcare, energy, automotive, media, entertainment, education, finance, retail, and fashion. Clients include Disney, GE, HP, Microsoft, MTV, Qualcomm, and many other Fortune 500 brands. Founded in 1969, frog is headquartered in San Francisco, with locations in Amsterdam, Austin, Boston, Bangalore, Johannesburg, Kiev, Milan, Munich, New York, Seattle, Shanghai and Vinnitsya.
IDEO has roots dating back to 1978. Today, IDEO is an award winning global design and innovation consultancy. We create positive impact through design by taking a human-centered approach to helping organizations in the public and private sectors innovate, grow, and bring to market new ideas. We partner with leaders and change agents to identify new market opportunities, add value, and solve meaningful problems. We design and launch innovative products, services, ventures, and brands by combining business acumen with human-centered market insights. We help organizations to build the capabilities required to sustain innovation.
Tennyson is founder and director of live|work and founder of EISE , the world's first Service Innovation School located in São Paulo, Brazil. He is also the author of Design Thinking Brasil, best seller book published by Elsevier. live|work is the pioneer global Service Design firm located in London, São Paulo, Oslo and Rotterdam running service innovation projects around the globe for Fortune 500 companies such as Johnson & Johnson, Emirates, Virgin, Orange, Itaú Bank, VW and many others.
Tennyson started his career on UX design, before the Internet bubble burst. His interest to move on to the design of whole culture-sensitive service ecosystems was born while doing projects in Africa. Living and working in Angola on the post-war period for two intensive years, he managed service innovation projects for the government helping implement the program to rebuild the country services infrastructure.
Mason Currey is the author of the forthcoming book Daily Rituals: How Artists Work, to be published by Knopf on April 23. He was born in Honesdale, Pennsylvania, and graduated from the University of North Carolina at Asheville. Currey’s writing has appeared in Slate, Print, and Metropolis, where he was an editor for six years. He lives in Brooklyn.
Rachel Swaby is a freelance writer and editor. She's written for Wired, Afar, O, the Oprah Magazine, Gizmodo, and others. Out in the wild she enjoys magazines, urban night hikes, games (both board & video), fiction, and facts.
The design world lost one of its greats yesterday. Bill Moggridge, Director of the Cooper-Hewitt, inventor of the first laptop, co-founder of IDEO, and dear friend to designers, students, advocates and thinkers the world over, was 69 when he passed away.
Bill was a great enthusiast of Core77, and we are grateful for his support and constant encouragement. His kindness and wit, his cheerleading, his warmth, and above all his unyielding passion for the power of design have been a constant inspiration to us all, and he will continue to be a beacon of creativity for generations to come.
We extend our deepest sympathies to Bill's family. We are the better for knowing Bill, and his impact will be lasting.
The Cooper-Hewitt has a wonderful film (embedded below) up at their Remembering Bill site. Visit for more.
This post is part of our year-long series, Apocalypse 2012, where our favorite futurists, resiliency and disaster experts examine the role of design to help you prepare for...the end?
We live in dichotomous times, navigating between conflicting imperatives, contradictory values, and eleventh-hour urgency. For designers, these dichotomies—far from providing generative yin/yang grist or complementary dualist push and pull—represent paradoxes that lash at our profession, our practice, and our promise. Lately I've been losing some sleep over them, so best to get this down on paper as part of Core77's Apocalypse 2012 Series. Exactly 1000 words, below.
We're at the apex of our power, but the nadir of our potency. Let's start with the biggest heartbreaker of them all: We are at a moment in history when, as designers, we are at our most powerful. There is almost nothing we cannot make, enjoying the triumphs of research and development in materials science, manufacturing technology, and information systems. We can get any answer we seek through social networks, peer communities, or hired guns. We have sub-specialties at unimaginably thin slices of expertise—from ubiquitous computing to synthetic biology—and a plumbing system in the Internet that is simultaneously unprecedented in human history and entirely taken for granted.
At the same time, unbelievably, we have never been in worse shape: We are witnessing the collapse of every natural system on earth. Take your pick—on the ground we've got clear-cutting, desertification and agricultural run-off. Underneath we've got fracking and groundwater contamination. In the air, greenhouse gasses; in the oceans, ice sheet melting, acidification and Pacific trash vortices; in space we have the ghastly and ultimately impossible problem of space debris (we won't be able to leave even when we're ready to, and nobody will be able to get in to help us if they wanted to). We carry body-burdens of toxic chemicals leached and outgassed from our homes, our cars, our food packaging. The consequences of industrialization metastasize out to slave factory labor, massive river diversions, obesity, malnutrition, gender inequality, rampant poverty, minefields. We tax our economies with war machinery instead of fueling healthcare and education provision. We feel helpless on the one end and hopeless on the other.
How can we be so strong and yet so weak? How can it be that we, as a species, are at the absolute height of our power at exactly the same moment that we are on the precipice of self-annihilation?
Is this funny? Or ironic? Or tragic? Or simply unthinkable. Whatever your reaction, for the design community, it is decidedly two things: rare and privileged. Design has been complicit in moving us to this precipice, of course, and certainly it alone will not be sufficient for pulling us back, but we need to acknowledge the fact that this time, and our place in it, are truly remarkable: We are equipped with our most powerful tools, right when the world needs us most. This is an astounding proposition for design.
The design of artifacts versus the design of systems. If all of these natural collapses have demonstrated one thing, it's that we are no longer living in a world of objects and things, but rather in a world of flows and negotiations. Undoubtedly this was always the case, but the feedback we're getting from the natural world has made it unassailable. In the old design model, we had 'problems' and we had 'solutions.' A designer's job was to take a problem—a brief, a market need, a new technology looking for an embodiment—and to solve it: Here's the problem; here's a solution. Next problem please.
We are now recognizing that this worldview is unbearably naïve and not a little arrogant; that problems are not static, they're dynamic. They are moving, organic and fundamentally systemic. You might say that they aren't even "problems" at all; they are "problem spaces"—a term progressive designers have been using for years. But I'd argue that you don't "solve" problem spaces, you negotiate them. And that this negotiation requires new kinds of processes, fluencies and participants. This is the new design practice that is emerging all around us: it's inter-, trans- and multi-disciplinary; it is tactical; it concerns itself with things like resiliency and sharing ecologies, and pays as much attention to meaning as to money. And it explores entirely new kinds of currency and value—currencies like participation, and reputation, and access, and happiness.
Is it possible that we feel powerless to 'solve' problems because we're (simply) using the wrong word to address them?
Back in 2004, I wrote an article called 1000 Words of Advice for Design Students. Flattered that several departments were using the document in their curricula, I followed it up with 1000 Words of Advice for Design Teachers, in 2006 (not used very much in curricula, that one!). For the past year I've been putting together the bones of a new MFA program in Products of Design at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, welcoming its first students in the fall of 2012. (Applications for the inaugural class open this month.) So now it's a year in and a year away, and I thought it might be a nice idea to revisit the 1000-word format, document some of the thoughts and strategies and arguments for the new program, and lay the groundwork for the certain learning ahead. It turns out that 1000 words is woefully insufficient for discussing the most important aspects of the program, but it's a taste, and if you'd like to learn more, please do head over to productsofdesign.sva.edu where you'll find mission statements, Q&As, and more curriculum information than you'll be able to save to Instapaper. In the meantime, here we go, again: Exactly 1000 words below.
You Are What You Eat
The first decision made for the MFA Products of Design department had nothing to do with philosophy or pedagogy or accreditation; it had to do with food. We've devoted a significant amount of the architecture and planning to what we eat—with generous prep space, two full-size fridges and sinks, rice cookers, steamers, slow-cookers and other industrial-grade implements that will help students do better, think better and feel better by supporting their food energy needs. Butcher-block classroom tables gang up into short and long dining tables; drawing demo mirrors double as cooking demo counters. One of the preeminent greenmarkets is five minutes away from the school, open Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays of every week. Several of our faculty are passionate about, and plan to do coursework around, food and food systems. Students will be encouraged to form dinner co-ops (you cook a meal to feed 6 people once a week; the other days you eat someone else's).
I've gotten two major criticisms on this one: The first is "But the studio will smell!" Yes, it will. It will smell like food. (Most smell like plastic.) The second is "Students are out of control! I mean, who will clean the coffee maker?" Oh hell, I will.
Build a Place, Not a Space
It's been a big challenge finding the sweet spot of what to provide students in terms of individual workspace, collaborative space, leisure, model making, presentation and celebration space. But space has been the wrong word all along of course; the goal is to create place, not space. And that's where architect Andrea Steele and her team have landed, taking a holistic approach to how the philosophy and the pragmatics of the program get instantiated in its built environment.
We've used several principles here: Build as little as possible, keeping elements versatile, resilient, and nimble; Give everything more than one purpose, leveraging vertical elements for both display and domain; Recognize that the biggest waste of space in a school is the classroom. Ours are sundrenched, tech-equipped, and furnished as students' project rooms. And once every day, from 5 to 8pm, they turn into classrooms. Provide welcome for bicycles, accommodate personal phone calls. You get the idea.
We are thrilled that the applications are flowing in for the Products of Design Summer Program at the Domaine de Boisbuchet in France, this upcoming July 10 - 16, but we'll be ending the application window soon so wanted to remind you to get yours in. We are looking for (maximum) 20 exceptionally creative, fun, and curious participants who will immerse themselves in a hands-on week of design thinking, design making, and design doing. (There will be quite a bit of "design telling" as well, not including ghost stories by the campfire.) Below is s bit of copy from the website, but please get those applications in quickly. We are open to students, teachers, and creatives of all kinds.
And if you're interested in the upcoming MFA in Products of Design launching in fall 2012, the workshop in France will bag you 1 graduate credit.
This special workshop is an immersive, multi-disciplinary experience exploring the rapidly changing field of product design. Held in Boisbuchet, France, the program will stress a hands-on, making-driven approach to create new points of entry into the enterprise of design. In addition to intensive study, students will have the opportunity to swim in the estate's lake, canoe and kayak, take walks through the surrounding woods and relax at the nearby river. Participants feast on farm-to-table nightly dinners with attendees from the two other Boisbuchet workshops taking place that week (approximately 90 people including staff), meeting designers from all over the world, and making life-long friendships.
Each day, several facets of the design process will be explored: rapid sketching, brainstorming, materials investigation, prototyping, model building, iteration, narrative creation, sustainability and environmental stewardship. We will complement the studio work with lively debates around the current mandates of design, the challenges of production and consumption, and design's ability to create value and positive social change. The evenings will offer fun, lectures and discussions.
Products of Design
Summer Program in France, 2011
"SVA @ Boisbuchet"
July 10 - July 16, 2011
Summer semester: 1 graduate studio credit
$1550
A lot happening at the Cooper-Hewitt these days, with the big conference coming up tomorrow (Core77 will be live streaming it all day here) and the Triennial humming along. The second in the series of Bill's Talks is coming up next week, featuring one of the wisest, most beloved design writers and thinkers of all time, Ralph Caplan. (Winner of this year's National Design Award for Design Mind.) Core77 was proud to do a "double feature" on the reissue of Ralph's seminal book, By Design several years ago, but next week is your chance to see Ralph live. Here's from the release:
BILL'S DESIGN TALKS
A new series of design conversations with Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum Director Bill Moggridge
Design Trajectory with Ralph Caplan
Thursday, October 7, 2010, 6:30 - 8:00pm
The design process has moved from just forming objects to addressing the situations in which objects are used. That's a major theme in Ralph Caplan's seminal book By Design, expressed in the book's subtitle: "Why There Are No Locks on the Bathroom Doors of the Hotel Louis IV and Other Object Lessons." This year Ralph Caplan is honored with the National Design Mind Award for his contributions to design research and scholarship.
Caplan will offer his take on the Cooper-Hewitt's role in shaping the understanding and presentation of design from its opening exhibition in 1976, Man TRANSforms, to the current exhibition Why Design Now? His presentation will be followed by a discussion with Cooper-Hewitt Director Bill Moggridge.
Galleries open from 5:30 - 6:30pm before the program.
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