design

If you're small, you're in a position where it's to your advantage to be weird—you can have a point of view that the big tech companies never could. In the world of chairs—you're not going to build a cheaper chair than Ikea. Why not build something they couldn't—like a more interesting one?

"If we turn this wonderful technology we have for knowledge into a weapon for disinformation," he told me, "we are in deep trouble." Why? "Because we won't know what we know, and we won't know who to trust, and we won't know whether we're informed or misinformed. We may become either paranoid and hyper-sceptical, or just apathetic and unmoved. Both... See more

The perils of designing for scale

“We are in the midst of a major social transformation — moving many of our day-to-day activities from physical places to information-based places that we experience on our phones and computers. The central question here is: How can we design these information environments so they serve our social needs in the long ... See more

To this day, when someone wants to reference the dollar bill in a design, it’s noticeable how certain visual cues remain—even when the medium and the level of fidelity are completely different. Leveraging mental models from previously established fictions helps create a feeling of familiarity, which in turn helps people believe in the new, emerging... See more

After my experience at The Met, I spent the next few months viewing and considering as much beauty as I could. I went to more museums. I spent weeks researching obscure Baroque furniture makers, legendary luthiers, prominent architects, naturalist illustrators, Italian car designers, and philosophers of aesthetics. What I came out the other side be... See more

I realized that the craftsmen of yore had elevated weaponry, a category of merely utilitarian objects, into some of the most exquisite things I had ever seen. They had taken objects of ubiquitous, vital importance in their respective eras and made them beautiful. My initial aesthetic shock was quickly replaced by jealousy — no one was lifting the m... See more

We learned the hard way that new products are hard enough to figure out, and we should make as many things as familiar as possible. Again, life and new products are hard enough. When you can use a familiar term instead of being original, do so. Never opt for a solution that is more creative but less effective.

Your success as a designer depends equally on your relationships as it does on your design talent . The powerful people you need as allies will likely know little about design and you will have to teach and persuade them. Your amazing ideas and concepts can’t help the world if they are never built by your organization. Your ability to explain your ... See more

Like the technium itself — our values are continually going through an evolution. This is why when viral tweets about the founding father’s misdeeds circle about, it doesn’t change my opinion about the Constitution. If their acted values were the exact same as ours, it would for me to question us , not them!

So as we think about what we manifest in... See more