You could say design has finally arrived. It’s now taken seri­ously by big business, leading companies have included designers at their executive levels, and design has become the driving force for innovation behind some of the leading companies in existence today. For those of us in the design field, there…

When Pixels Dominate Design, Your Hardware is the Brand First Published in FastCo. March 26 2013 A major takeaway of the Samsung/Apple patent dispute last year: Physical objects have retained their power in the digital age. …

Getting Seated and Feeling Settled When Work-at-Home is the Only Option I think everyone working from home has a chair story during these strange times. A story of finding that the seating options at hand are now having to do quadruple duty — used for dining, working, lounging and even…

Contemplating the effects of personalization In Don Norman’s 2013 updated introduction to his seminal book The Design of Everyday Things(1988), he points out that the original edition was badly outdated because “technology has undergone massive change.” He says how new technologies have deeply influenced the principles of design, in particular…

Last September, global design and innovation consultancy Fjord and its parent firm Accenture acquired Matter. A fast-growing product design consultancy based in San Francisco, Matter focused on the design of connected physical products including the PlayBase for Sonos and the Carnival Medallion for the Carnival Cruise Company. …

How architects and product designers are teaming up to create digital-physical experiences that are distinctly human With so much news over the past 18 months focused on how our digital data is being compromised and how our social media feeds are being cluttered with false information, one could be forgiven…

In my 30-year career as a designer, I have witnessed incredible change in what it means to be a designer and how that applies to the types of product I design. The first products I created were fairly straightforward. In fact it was possible for me to design, prototype and…

How connected technologies are changing the cities of tomorrow The fundamentals of what defines a city and how it works are being challenged to the core. Currently, more than half of the world’s population lives in urban areas, and by 2050, it is anticipated to increase to two thirds. …