ARTICLES

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED on CORE77 – see it here The other night, I caught myself riveted to one of those blocks of cable programing one stumbles upon with increasing frequency: back-to-back episodes of some show you’ve never heard of. On this particular evening the focus was Animal Planet’s Monster Inside Me. For those who haven’t had the pleasure, each episode is a gruesome account of parasitic

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED for TEAGUE – see it here Last week we had a bit of time in the studio, and as invariably happens in studio cultures, we used the downtime to do some creative housecleaning; we closed a pair of internal projects we’d undertook a few months back with the University of Western Washington. As an organization that earns its keep by means of a point of view, TEAGUE thrives by maintaining an

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED for CORE77 – see it here Watching last month’s meteoric funding spike for Alerta’s Pebble Smartwatch you no doubt caught your inner voice asking: Could I do that? The weekend of April 21st—as the project rocketed from roughly $3 million to $4.5 million and on to approximately $7 million by week’s end—what was truly impressive wasn’t that Alerta’s ask was for a

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED for TEAGUE – see it here Designers, in my experience, are a curious lot—fiercely competitive, at turns obsessively egocentric, but capable nonetheless of limitless magnanimity when it comes to advancing their trade and the community of design. I was reacquainted with this fact on a recent trip to Pune, India. Along with a group of designers from Adidas, BMW, Volvo, Orange Telecom and RKS, I

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED for TEAGUE – see it here Over the winter jump I picked up a copy of Debbie Millman’s “Brand Thinking”, a compilation of interviews exploring the meaning and function of brand. Reading through the twenty or so conversations included in the book, I found myself reminded of Stephen Colbert’s 2005 neologism Truthiness. Wikipedia definesTruthiness as ‘a “truth” known intuitively “from the gut” o

ORIGINALLY WRITTEN for iF BEST CREATiFES 2012 For centuries human ingenuity has been propelled by access to two critical resources: ideas and capital. And for almost as long, the relative scarcity of those resources kept innovation sequestered within the tidy domain of private institutions and universities. Today the democratizing nature of technology—its tendency to disrupt and to reduce barriers is turning innovati

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED on CORE77 – see it here I’ve been giving ‘collaboration’ a lot of thought. I guess that’s inevitable when you work in a company that’s partner to one of the longest running collaborative gigs in design consulting. In design circles, especially around award time, collaboration gets a lot of airplay—but what happens to it the rest of the time? Why is something we

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED on CORE77 – see it here Design discourse often strikes me as analogous to a family get together. It sets out well enough; optimistic with an undercurrent of reconciliation, but it can turn sour. A casual remark or offhanded comment cuts quick, unearthing volumes of unresolved conflict and lingering baggage. It can be disquieting and, at times, maddening. But generally speaking, it’s o

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED on CORE77 – see it here A few months back, on this forum, Don Norman wrote a great piece that drew back the curtain on the ever-expanding blur that is design thinking. Norman’s piece eloquently articulated a number of criticisms surrounding design thinking, but as I thought back on the article, I couldn’t help but feel dissatisfied. For all the chatter the piece solicited, there