Being a designer is not only a fun job, it is becoming a serious job. They are tasked with the burden of solving many of the world’s wicked problems, doing things they were not even taught in design school. Design education is also at a crossroads. I’ve had many discussions with design education leaders both [...]

Industry (aerospace, telecom, defense, automotive, consumer electronics, etc.) has developed a growing interest in Human-Computer Interaction. They see it as being powerful with numerous features but that does not ensure a product will be successful at all without having a clear usage understanding by their target users. HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) is a fascinating discipline; the [...]

Being the dean of a design school is no easy job today. Design schools are struggling to serve three masters: the student, the industry and society. The last one is a new one as generally designers have now come to a consensus that designs for social change is a part of the design agenda. With [...]

A growing body of research in the area of addiction suggests that Social Media Addiction Disorder is becoming a real problem, it is a psychophysiological disorder involving tolerance; withdrawal symptoms; affective disturbances; and interruption of social relationships. The most common one is Facebook /Twitter Addiction Disorder (FTAD).

To be diagnosed as having FTAD, a person must [...]

El·e·gant, an adjective and define or characterized by or exhibiting refined, tasteful beauty of manner, form, or style. Marc Jacob? Chanel? Jil Sander? Hermes? All are unquestionably elegant by design in the fashion world. How about Amazon Kindle? Apple iPhone? Blackberry?  Are they elegant? Is elegant a word reserved solely for design world. That world [...]

This is a week of design for me, meeting with two talented design practitioners in Boston who are running a very successful company, talked to the folks running two of the top design schools and interviewed 4 designers respectively from London, Brazil, LA and Toronto. And catching with my design reading on the weekend.
UK has [...]

Spent a few hours in Nanjing Lu, the main shopping street in Shanghai with lots of shopping malls, department stores and restaurants… in a nutshell: everything the Chinese and tourists want in one street. I first visited this street 25 years ago and it was very different. Today’s Shanghai is different, but China is [...]

“All the innovation people don’t work for your company.” – Rich Friedrich of HP. I often use this quote to kick-off workshops, as it is an interesting one with no simple answer. According to a McKinsey survey, a company’s main challenge with innovation today is finding enough talented people. In the survey, top managers agree [...]

Innovation is not a random event or some intangible initiative. It is a practice and a process. More specifically, innovation is best defined as “the process of creating economic value devising business ideas that addresses consumers’ unmet needs”. But there is a dilemma in understanding how ready firms are in embracing and executing on innovation. [...]

Twitter is continuing its unstoppable move forward. And what about those Twitter traffic “machines” and “buy your follower” programs? Twitter needs to figure this out quick. Twitter litter? Perhaps a payment/filter model will eventually work, weed out the hackers. We are also seeing Twitter viruses starting to happening. Anti-virus for Twitter?

The number 140 is [...]