One of the more difficult parts of doing work without easily identifiable artifacts is describing what you do.
When I get asked what I do for a living, I usually answer by saying “design strategy and research.” Which almost always brings on a second question; “what the (expletive deleted) is design strategy and research?” At [...]

So, if you take the basic premise that we can model creativity and apply it to daily life, what does it look like? Maybe something like this:

Or at least it does in my world. Research is good, vital. Goofing off, very important. Building models, also a key. And if you want critical, I’ll give you [...]

Continuing on in the ‘models of design’ theme, here is a model of the creative process I put together for a presentation I gave to 350 toy designers at Mattel in Los Angeles last week (a pretty cool group of people). It’s a variation and adaptation of the process developed by James Webb Young in [...]

This summer when I was at Mike and Kathy McCoy’s High Ground gathering in Buena Vista, Bill Moggridge of IDEO handed the attendees a xerox copy of a hand-scrawled 2×2 diagram. I wandered around with it in my notebook for about 4 months, and finally decided to transcribe to the digital realm this past week. [...]

Khoi Vinh made a presentation called “Control” at the AIGA Next conference here in Denver; he was kind enough to put the slides up on Slideshare. The presentation is worth viewing for a couple of reasons. First, Khoi builds a logical argument and presents it in a way that is understandable in the form of [...]

There are few components of modern life more confusing than the television remote control. For our home TV, we have three remotes, each of which is required to do some arcane bit of trickery (cable, tv, dvd), and none of which are in the least intuitive. In a hotel room this weekend, I pushed the [...]