The phenomenon of cheaper, faster, better (better in terms of having more options) is more a result of global economics than it is a corporate mandate. If you think about Bauhaus (the origins of Industrial Design) and how it was intended to provide a social service of making houses and household product...
Idea Couture has its roots in digital innovation. Frog, Adaptive Path, my good friends at Normative Design, and many other leading innovation firms also have amazingly strong foundations in the digital world. Three years ago, I left the interactive industry to pursue innovation consulting, and while...
48 hours. 1,236 service designers. 60 locations. 203 service design concepts. Mix these all up and what do you get? An global event demonstrating what immense creativity, collaboration, innovation, and an aggressive time crunch can produce — Global Service Jam 2011! Participants from San Paulo,...
As you might expect, the terms Innovation and Design Thinking come up pretty often at Idea Couture. It’s not very often I have to intellectualize the terms, but earlier this week, I ran an internal workshop outlining the foundations of design thinking as it relates to facilitation [side note -...
To address better ways of integrating Transportation in Urban environments requires a very wide-angle perspective lens in order to view the whole scenario of life in an urban environment as well as those in and around the emerging world. It requires that we put ourselves on the same streets of the...
Traditionally, the notion of Beauty and Elegance is what makes classic examples of automotive design, which is designed to encourage observers to dream about an irreverent future. In the early days of the 1920’s and 1930’s these notions of dramatic proportions were predicated on people who lived...
Recently there have been a few great and green projects that have caught my eye and feel the need to share these innovations with all of you… The Clever Little Bag by Puma Recently Puma announced the Clever Little Bag that will reduce their environmental footprint. As a shoelover, a shoebox is...
PART 3 of 4 Months after eating at El Bulli my thoughts and perspectives on the meal are still changing: Certain taste memories are extremely vivid and seem to get stronger, others are bizarrely still changing. It has also been fascinating to compare and contrast my experience there with other innovative...
A lot of emphasis gets put on how terrible airlines treat their customers. But lets be honest, the experience delivered by the airports we visit has a large role in our travel experience. And anyone who has ever fought the escalators during rush hour in o’Hare, had their plane take off five hours...
This past summer, I left my apartment in Milan, Italy for a farm in Normandy, France; That’s right – I voluntarily traded Prada for permaculture. Little did I know that I was leaving a design capital to get a serious design lesson. Rubber boots and metal sheers in tow, I was ready to heave...
I’m not trying to discount the capabilities of industrial designers, researchers, or architects who’ve found their way into the innovation space, but the qualities of digital innovators put them in a unique position to solve some of the world’s biggest problems.