I was talking with Bryan Leister this past weekend about what design is and the challenges of design in the future. He described it as selling artisanal tomatoes. The challenge for designers in our time is to convince the general public that heirloom tomatoes are better than hothouse tomatoes. This, he said, is a design [...]

“Everything is shit. The word art must be redefined. This is the age where everyone creates.”
–Patti Smith
“The blogosphere is itself a commodification of authenticity”
–Andrew Keen
Clay Shirky posted some thoughts about humility and arrogance in design on A Brief Message this morning. I’ve been considering some similar ideas over the past few months, as have many [...]

I admit it. I have my guilty pleasures. I am a pop culture junky. I watched some Rock Star (more INXS than Supernova, where I was frightened to find myself agreeing with Dave Navarro), and quite a bit of Project Runway. Even Top Chef has some interesting moments. They’re all pop entertainment, but with a [...]

Fred Murrell sent me this link to a recent presentation at the TED conference. The presenter, Blaise Aguera y Arcas (genius), has developed a remarkable technology (acquired last year by Microsoft) that interconnects geospacial data and imagery, and allows them to be superimposed over one another without concern for the size of the files. In [...]

“Prototype early and often, making each interative step a little more realistic”
Bill Moggridge opens with this comment in the introduction to Chapter 10 of his book “Designing Interactions”. In some ways it’s the best and simplest description of the design process I have heard in a long time.

I finally got around to picking up [...]