Podcasts about Core77

Danu Ardhata believes that living in two completely different worlds has always fueled his creative ventures. Born in Chicago and raised in Jakarta, the Indonesian-American graphic designer and brand strategist recently earned his master's degree at ArtCenter College of Design, California. He talks about his upbringing, learning software on his own, and why The Intern is such a special movie.-Danu Ardhata first discovered graphic design in the 12th grade, but long before that, he was already captivated by the visual storytelling of movie posters and the immersive branding of events, from promotional materials and stage designs to merchandising. He's been recognized by PRINT Magazine, the 2024 Community Choice New Visual Artist Winner, and 2024 New Visual Artist 15 under 30, alongside accolades from Graphic Design USA, Core77, and Graphis.https://www.danuardhata.com/about-me https://www.instagram.com/danudanari/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/danu-ardhatahttps://www.printmag.com/new-visual-artists/print-new-visual-artist-community-choice-winner/ -The Intern (2015)https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2361509/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZU3Xban0Y6A https://www.architecturaldigest.com/gallery/intern-movie-set-design https://www.brownstoner.com/brooklyn-life/movies-set-in-brooklyn-intern-bridge-of-spies/ https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-et-mn-the-intern-review-20150925-story.html

Engin Ayaz, a transdisciplinary designer and strategist with a background in architecture, systems thinking, and interaction design. He is the co-founder of ATÖLYE, a design and innovation consultancy, which amplifies the impact of purpose-driven leaders by transforming people, places and experiences through the power of communities. Engin received a dual degree in Architectural Design and Engineering from Stanford University, and a master's degree in Interactive Design and Media Arts from Tisch School of Arts, ITP of New York University. His work has been exhibited worldwide and received awards from Core77, Architizer, Arkitera, World Architecture Community, and Good Magazine, among others. Engin was the Fall 2024 Social Innovator in Residence with the ERA Chair in Social Innovation and the DESIS Lab at NOVA SBE. Follow Engin on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/enginayaz/ Learn more about Atölye: https://atolye.io/

On today's episode, we are going to talk about designing for health equity. Adriane Ackerman is a community convener, strategic innovator and life-long rabble-rouser. She currently directs several programs at the Pima County Health Department in Southern Arizona, including a $4 million grant program from the Department of Health and Human Services' Office of Minority Health to Advance Health Literacy, the department's new Cultural Health initiative with its pilot project, SaludArte, the emerging Pima County Network for Equity and Resilience (PCNER), and the first ever Office of Health Policy, Resilience, and Equity, all of which aim to increase health literacy and equity through innovative models, by elevating and centering the leadership of historically and contemporarily excluded communities. Adriane holds dual Bachelor's degrees in Political Science and Urban & Public Affairs and seeks to bring the depth of her lived experience to bear as she convenes, facilitates and uplifts the work of harm reduction from within bureaucracies and community partnerships. Robert Fabricant is Co-Founder and Partner of Dalberg Design, where he brings human-centered design and innovation services to clients looking for new, creative approaches to breakthrough innovation and expanded collaborations in the field of social impact and international development. Before Dalberg, Robert Fabricant was the Vice-President of Creative for frog design, where he managed frog's global leadership across Design Research, Product Design, Software Design, and Experience Strategy. Robert writes about Design and Social Impact for publications like HBR, SSIR, Fast Company, Rotman Business Journal, MIT Tech Review, ChangeObserver, and Core77. He is a member of the adjunct faculty at NYU and SVA. His client portfolio includes experience across verticals including financial services and financial inclusion, social impact, mobile and technology, healthcare and public health, and media. Robert has an MPS in Design and Technology from NYU and a BA from Yale University. Episode mentions and links: https://www.fabricant.design/ https://dalberg.com/who-we-are/our-leadership/robert-fabricant/ https://www.adrianeackerman.com/ Adriane's previous work: https://www.portlandpeoplescoalition.org/ Adriane's restaurant rec: La Indita (a mixture of native Sonoran, Pascua Yaqui, and Tarascan cuisine) Robert's restaurant rec: Le Succulent Follow Adriane: LinkedIn Follow Rob: LinkedIn | Twitter Episode Website: https://www.designlabpod.com/episodes/118

In our tenth episode, we pick the brains of Jon Marshall. A veteran, London-based industrial designer, and partner at Pentagram, a multi-disciplinary, independently owned design studio with offices across the globe. Jon's work has been seen in Fast Company, Wired, and Core77 to name a few. In 2012 Jon co-founded MAP, a design studio that crafts physical products for the digital age. We ask about the cost vs benefit of education, big breaks, running your own studio, and the challenges of creating hardware in a world full of CGI.Show Notes:Follow Jon Marshall on Instagram | @jonmarshallJon Marshall | Pentagram Alessi Australia ​​Barber Osgerby Barber Osgerby - Olympic Torch 2012Real Designers Ship (@real_designers_ship) Yoto Player Honda. Great Journey._____Follow (REDACTED) on Instagram | @redacted_designpod Follow (REDACTED) on TikTok | @redacted_designpodFollow (REDACTED) on Linkedin| @redacted_designpodHosted by Oliver Alexander & Fraser Greenfield with guest Jon Marshall

Allan Chochinov is an educator, writer, speaker, and advocate for the power and capacity of design. He is the Founding Chair of the MFA in Products of Design graduate program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, and a partner of Core77, the design network serving a global community of designers and design enthusiasts since 1995. Allan has moderated and led workshops and symposia at venues from the Aspen Design Conference to the Rockefeller Center at Bellagio, and has been invited to speak on design at organizations from frog Design and SYPartners to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, The New York Times, and the National AIGA. A frequent lecturer and critic, he has worked with students at schools including MIT, Yale School of Management, Columbia School of Business, RMIT, IIT, and Carnegie Mellon. Prior to SVA and Core77, his work in product design focused on the medical, surgical, and diagnostic fields (early work focused on HIV/AIDS, and later projects included work for Johnson & Johnson, Oral-B, FedEx, and Herman Miller). He has been named on numerous design and utility patents, and has received awards from The Art Directors Club, The One Club, I.D. Magazine, and Communication Arts. He has also served on the boards of the National AIGA organization, Designers Accord, Design Ignites Change, and NYCxDESIGN. Episode Mentions: Tanaka Kapec Design Group http://www.wedesigntosimplify.com/ Change Everything You Hate About Meetings With This One Single Word Follow Allan on Twitter | Instagram | LinkedIn Show website link: https://mailchi.mp/designlabpod/allanchochinov This episode is sponsored by: Fortune Brainstorm Design, to be held May 23-24 in Brooklyn is a curated experience for passionate and successful design and design-minded professionals. Join Fortune and be inspired by diverse examples of design excellence, explore how design thinking and practice can be challenged and advanced, meet and network with high-level peers, and leave with concrete ideas and partnerships to drive transformation within your organization. Listeners of Design Lab with Bon Ku can use code “designlab” for a 20% discount on registration!  For more information or to register go to FortuneBrainstormDesign.com. More episode sources & links Sign-up for Design Lab Podcast's Newsletter Newsletter Archive Follow @DesignLabPod on Twitter Instagram and LinkedIn Follow @BonKu on Twitter and Instagram Check out the Health Design Lab Production by Robert Pugliese Cover Design by Eden Lew Theme song by Emmanuel Houston

Today, I’m talking LinYee Yuan, a design journalist as well as the editor and founder of MOLD magazine, which approaches food and the future from a design perspective. It’s one of the most innovative food magazines out there, with a global scope and an honest relationship to unpleasant realities like hunger, waste, and even fecal matter.We discussed how the magazine came to be, how its point of view has been forged, and its trajectory from the microbiome toward its sixth and final forthcoming issue about soil.Alicia: Hi, LinYee. Thank you so much for being here.LinYee: Hi, Alicia. I'm so thrilled to be here with you today.Alicia: Can you tell me about where you grew up and what you ate? LinYee: I grew up in Houston, Texas. I am a first generation Chinese American woman, and I basically ate all the things that kids in the ’80s ate in the United States. So Lunchables. I was obsessed with Cookie Crisps. I did the whole Pop-Tarts, all the things. But the difference is that my mother is a dietitian. And I just grew up knowing that those things were kind of foods that were just kind of special foods. So I would often go to friend’s houses to access those things. And because I'm Chinese American, we would typically eat some kind of Chinese-ish every night. My father is a man of ritual. And so, he's not super into being very exploratory with his kind of daily meal. So often growing up, my job when I got home from school–’cause I was a latchkey kid, ’cause it’s the ‘80s—my job was basically to make the rice. So I had to go into our chest freezer and dig out cups of rice, wash the rice, and then put it in the rice cooker. So that was very much kind of my experience growing up. My father was an avid gardener. And because I grew up in Houston, Texas, we had access to the water. And his other passion in life, besides gardening, is fishing. And so oftentimes, we would have fresh vegetables, fresh fruits from the garden, and fresh fish that my father had caught and then scaled and then cleaned and put them in the deep freezer. So that's basically how my parents still eat today. They do a lot of fish. They do rice at every meal. When the season is right, they eat a lot of vegetables and greens from their own garden. But we also would do at least a weekly trip to Chinatown to get Asian greens and other pantry staples that I grew up eating.Alicia: And so, what first interested you in food? Can you give us kind of a bio, a rundown of your career?LinYee: Well, I've always been interested in food, in the sense that food was always the centerpiece of any sort of familial gathering. As a child of immigrants, we would always make an excuse to come together over a meal. So whether that was just kind of weekend dim sum with my aunties and uncles and my grandparents, or going to my grandmother's house for a meal or something more celebratory. For example, now as adults, my family, we meet for Thanksgiving. And so, that's kind of our central purpose for meeting. Everything always revolved around what to eat. And so, I think that food always meant more to me than just a source of sustenance. There was always kind of a reason for celebration when it came to food. And it always meant family. And it always meant joy and connection. And so professionally, I have worked in magazines basically my entire career. And I was never really interested in food media and the way that we understand it today. I wrote about design. I wrote about culture. But the food media wasn't really something that seemed interesting or accessible to me. I wasn't really interested in restaurant reviews or recipe development even. But what I was interested in, especially in the kind of 2010s, was this culture of restaurant pop-ups. And so being from Texas, living in New New York, especially in 2010, there was no proper Texas-style barbecue here. And this was the kind of age of the Brooklyn Flea. And so basically, the moment I had access to a backyard in my personal space, I bought a smoker and started smoking brisket for friends with—over the summer. So I would host a little party at my house. And then I would just, I would smoke a brisket. And one of my friends who was also from Texas, who is also Asian American and first-generation was like, ‘Hey, we should just do this at the Brooklyn Flea.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, I just never thought about that. But ok, I'm down to try.’ And so we launched a little Texas-style barbecue business, and started slinging brisket sandwiches at the Brooklyn Flea. And so, that was kind of my first entry into a more professional understanding of food, besides being a waitress when I was in college and that type of thing. But again, not really interested in the traditional modes of working in food. I wasn't interested in opening a restaurant. Food has just always been part of my understanding of who I am and how I navigate the world and why I travel it. Why I would visit certain neighborhoods in New York, or even with friends at that age. And still today, we always gather around food.Alicia: Of course. And so, how did Mold come to be?LinYee: So I was working as an editor for an industrial design resource called Core77 when I started seeing a lot of really interesting food design projects. And they were primarily from students, often, or they were speculative in nature. But at the time, most design websites weren't covering anything to do with food design, because their focus was really on furniture and lighting, interior objects. And so I was like, ‘I love food. I'm interested in food. I am a design journalist. I'm very well situated to actually write about this.’ So I was like, ‘Well, let me just start a little nights and weekends project’ where I would write about these interesting food design projects that I would come across that didn't really have a lot of space in other places for publication. So Mold was just a nights and weekends project. I reached out to a friend who connected me with a designer. And I was like, ‘Hey, can you give me an updated Blogspot template, or maybe a Tumblr template for this project I want.’ And he was like, ‘Oh, actually, I can just design a whole website for you. It'll probably take about the same amount of energy.’ And so, I worked with him on creating a kind of vessel for these content ideas. And that was basically our online presence for the first seven years of Mold. And so, it kind of immediately became something that felt real. And that was the start of all of it. Alicia: That's so fascinating. Well, I worked in magazines, too. But I come as a writer from writing about literature, or writing about food, specifically on restaurants and the recipe development. So this whole other side of it that is more mainstream. And then recently, I've been reading so much about, not just with Mold, but also these writers, usually from the Netherlands, I don't know, doing, really thinking about food systems regionally and how design fits into all of that. And how architecture is a food systems issue. And things I hadn't thought about at all, because I never thought about those things at all. They weren't in my mental wheelhouse, I suppose. It's been so fascinating to find these actual connections, and I—it just seems such a lost possibility to talk about them more broadly, or in a way that's more accessible. It seems a lost opportunity for food media, specifically, not to be talking about how food fits into design and fits into landscapes. LinYee: I mean, it's insane because design is such this, a bit of an obscure profession in a lot of ways. Because on one hand, everything is design. Literally everything in your built environment was designed by a human. Somebody made a decision about the materiality, about its shape, about the way it was going to be produced, how it was actually going to—the system that not only makes the thing, but then gets it to you in a store or in your home is also designed. The system in which we live is designed. So everything that surrounds us is designed.Yet nobody talks about design as a lever, as a kind of invisible kind of layer into the world that we live in. I think often because design is about complexity. The way that we're educated, especially in the United States, is not about complexity. It's about creating a lot of dichotomies. It's about enforcing binaries. It's about telling stories around ways that things cannot change. And so, I think that by introducing design as this kind of wildcard within the conversation about food, it makes people nervous. Because it's hard to explain why we have apples 365 days out of the year at every single grocery store, deli, bodega, whatever. You can get an apple, or one species of banana everywhere, all the time. So why is that? It's a huge question that nobody really wants to answer.Alicia: It is so much complexity. And you're right. That is something we're trained not to do. I think the only time people in food media talk about design is to talk about a restaurant, how it looks. And that's literally the extent of it. LinYee: Yeah.Alicia: Yeah. [Laughs.]And so the one fascinating thing to me about Mold, and it's something that I'm—you can find in literature, you can find in art criticism, but you don't really find in food—is that it has a global scope. It's something that food magazines based in the U.S. tend to not be open to. Whetstone, always, is an exception, of course.LinYee: Stephen’s incredible. Alicia: Incredible. And so, you claim the phrase ‘the future of food,’ too, without it being solely about food tech. Which is something I've been thinking about so much, which is how this phrase has become, to be the synecdoche for this one way of looking at the future in food. And so basically, how did Mold’s point of view come about to be global in scope, to be about the future, but to be so broad, basically, in what it will look at?LinYee: So I started just being interested in food design as this weird emerging corner of the design world. And through the work of writing about a student project that was actually a poster project, I came to learn about the coming food crisis. And so in a lot of ways, this student project by an Australian designer named Gemma Warriner really did the job of what she had set out to do, which was to tell the story around the coming food crisis to raise this flag, that the United Nations basically warned that if we continue eating the way that we do today, that we will not be able to produce enough food to feed all 9 billion people by the year 2050. And that fact totally just stopped me in my tracks, I had A, no idea that there was a coming food crisis. B, didn't realize that it was literally like 30 years down the line. At that point, it’s 35 years or around the corner. And I was like, ‘That's within our lifetime.’ And there was consciousness around climate change at the time. But it's not the way that we talk about it, and the urgency that we talk about it today. And so, that student project completely shifted the course of the editorial focus for Mold, from being kind of a general interest in food and design into being kind of a warning bell to designers that, ‘Hey, you actually have the professional tools to offer solutions at various scales for this coming crisis.’ And so, that has been our focus and our mission since. And I think that the global scope of that is in a lot of ways the global nature of design, where oftentimes best practices and ideas from many different disciplines influence the way that we think about design. And also design, in some ways, it's kind of a—it's more of a scaffolding in a lot of ways. So designers are A, trained to ask the right questions. B, work in this very interdisciplinary way. And the future of design really lives in this idea of designing with people or designing with others, whether they're living or nonliving entities. And then there's a lot of space for that conversation, where that is not a—there's not enough space for that conversation in a lot of other fields. Just kind of planting my flag in the future of food was a way of signaling that we are facing this coming food crisis, but also to say, ‘Hey, we cannot address this in a kind of techno-bro kind of way.’ Design has always taught us that in order for something to be successful, it needs to be aspirational. It needs to be joyful. It needs to speak to the human condition. It needs to be emotional. And I think that those things, again, are kind of woven into the fabric of what design understands the world to be. And so, it's always grounded me in the fact that our solutions cannot be merely technological, especially when it comes to food. Food is not just a source of nutrients. Food is so much more, as your audience totally understands. And so, that's why I didn't think food tech was the sole answer. The other thing is that, let's just be honest, that food tech being heralded as the kind of future of food is about perpetuating systems of capitalism. Who owns food technology? I'm interested in design solutions or solutions that are grounded in systems that can be owned by people that are not—You don't have to pay somebody else to participate in this thing. But you have autonomy. You have agency. You have sovereignty to determine what your food future looks like for yourself, for your community, for your family. That's not the way that technology in the way that we think about it today works. It's very much about top down control. It's very much about hierarchies of like, ‘This is what you're going to eat,’ and this is how you're going to eat it. I mean, at the time, people were really excited about hydroponic greens grown in warehouses. And they were like, ‘That's the future of food.’ And I was like, ‘First of all, I am a person who doesn't eat salad, period.’ I mean, I do sometimes in the summer when I'm feeling a certain kind of way. But it's not part of my typical diet. And I'm sure, because I'm Chinese American, it's not part of a lot of people's diets. Basically, most of the people in the world are not eating salad every day. So I realized very early that those technological solutions were not for me. They want to try to solve for me. And once again, just being a little bit outside of that kind of, I would say, I—the person that those technological solutions are designing for allows me to be like, ‘Well, what else is there?’ and ask more questions.Alicia: No, it's really funny that you brought up the garden, the hydroponic gardens, ’cause that's exactly how—that was my kind of introduction to food tech, and then, and the solutionism of it. And I was like, ‘But what is the end result of this? Is it we buy lettuce subscriptions? Am I going to have a Spotify subscription for lettuce?’ And just, ‘is that what you're envisioning? I don't understand what the purp—How is this literally the future of food?’ Also, a lot of that hydroponic lettuce has no freaking flavor whatsoever. What actually are we trying—’cause I used to work at Edible Brooklyn. For a few years, they had this event called Food Loves Tech, which was just my absolute nightmare. And so yeah, just trying to deal with that perspective on the future of food. I was like, ‘None of this makes any sense.’ And then, it just kind of got worse from there.I think we're hoping, in a moment of a little bit of clarity around it. I don't know. This is what I'm asked to talk about to college students, like, ‘Wait? Are we supposed to be thinking about food like this? Is there another way we can think about food?’ So I'm hoping that we're kind of over the hump of food tech solutionism, because it is—It was a very troubling moment, and people made a lot of money off of it. People are finally kind of seeing the wizard behind the curtain of it all in terms of—Yeah. [Laughs.]LinYee: I don't think that there's a single silver bullet for the future of food. And if you are somebody who eats salad every day, which is a lot of people in the United States, it's a great thing to be able to grow salad greens hydroponically. You're probably not eating them because you like the taste of radicchio. You're eating them for a different reason. So it's ok that maybe it doesn't taste the best salad you've ever had in your life or—But I also am interested in how can we stop replicating the same extractive models that we have been working in over the last 100 years, this kind of industrial capitalist model? Where does that stop? And where can we find new models, or reach back for older models of producing nutrients, producing food that is culturally appropriate for the populations that are eating it? That reflect the actual capacity of the land that is being used to produce it? And I think that those questions are much more interesting than saying, ‘Ok, lab-grown meat or salad greens grown hydroponically is the only answer for the future of food.’Alicia: Right, exactly. Well, Mold has had—as you know—Mold has had five print issues so far. How has the point of view of the magazine changed or not changed over the course of that time?LinYee: So I think that this kind of interest in regional local solutions for our, models for our kind of new food systems, this interest has really come into sharp focus over the course of the last five issues. So if you look at the first issue, the order—The issues have been organized by scale, and in loosely, so from the micro to the macro. So the first issue was about designing for the microbiome. And the second issue was about designing objects for the table. The third issue was designing food waste. The fourth was about designing for human senses. And the fifth issue was about seeds, which we could talk a little bit more about later. But the idea was to go from the micro to the macro. And the first issue, there's a lot of kind of speculative projects. And I think that it was important to have more provocative ideas in the first issue, because it was a way to kind of capture our audience and engage them in these questions because they're visually interesting, but also asking you some hard questions about what your vision of the future of food should look like. But through writing about all these things, I realized that the most important thing is for us to actually have a relationship with our food, which is such a simple idea but one that is so divorced from our typical reality of eating and procuring foods. And so, now that we're kind of five issues in and then we're working on our final issue, right now, the focus on, ‘Well, let's ground these solutions in something that works for you and me, living in different places and recognizing that the solutions are probably going to be very, very different.’ There is not a single solution for the world. And there shouldn't be. That mindset is also a very kind of colonial understanding of the ways that work. So if we can just break out of this idea that there's going to be one answer for everybody, how does design that supports the kind of multiplicity, the complexity of living networks? And that living network includes the microbes in the soil, the pollinators in the air, the food itself that's being grown in the ground or not in the ground. All of these things are all networked together in this kind of what we think of as the food web. And what is the human place in all of that? How can it be more equitable for both—Or not both. Everything involved in this? Well, so that's kind of the progression. The nice thing about publishing an independent magazine without any sort of advertiser or kind of outside pressures is that we get to take that journey for ourselves. We get to come out the end and be like, ‘I'm in a totally different place than when I started.’ And I'm totally cool with that. But this is the thing that really gets me out of bed in the morning. These are the kind of intellectual—but also, I would say, life and death questions that I am most excited about talking about.Alicia: I love that so much. Publishing independently, I think, is the only way to answer, ask those questions. Only way to really be engaged with the world. [Laughs.]LinYee: And thankfully, we have new models and media that allow for that, because as you know, just a couple years ago, people were like, ‘Media is dead. Print is dead.’ And through that kind of fire, we have come with all these new, more interesting independent models that support independent people, independent ideas. And I'm so thankful for those conversations.Alicia: Absolutely. And one of the things that strikes me in reading Mold is that it is a food magazine. It's about food, but it also acknowledges hunger. And it acknowledges the unpleasant aspects of food and the unpleasant aspects of food systems. And whether that's waste that is wasteful in general. Whether it's hunger, whether it's literally the fact that we excrete our food after we eat it—LinYee: Well, s**t is food. [Laughs.]Alicia: S**t is food! And so—[Laughs.] I mean, we've talked about how you've developed your perspective on these issues. But are there other publications, other media, other writers? Have you seen a different approach to food system issues emerge? And how have you gotten new insight, new perspective from, in food?LinYee: Well, I think that the kind of reckoning of the last couple of years as mainstream food media has really brought a more, I'd say, global and diverse group of voices to the forefront. And I think that that's been very exciting for me, because we mentioned Whetstone earlier. But I love that Stephen has a South Asia correspondent for the work that he's doing. And even larger mainstream publications that we don't necessarily have to name are diversifying their editors and writers. And I think that's so, so critical just to have different voices that are going to reflect the reality of what it means to eat and drink today in the United States.What would be really revolutionary would be to have people from various classes, actually, being able to participate in more mainstream food media? Food media comes with this understanding that you have access to all these things. And that's not true for the majority of people living in the United States. And so, what does it mean to have a complete, joyful meal for Americans or people living in the United States who don't have access to a grocery store in their neighborhood? Or a relationship with a farmer? I mean, what can food media do to support the idea that every person living in the United States should have access to—that would support both agricultural systems that are really floundering in the United States? A lot of small farmers are not making it out of this pandemic, with the people who actually need those nutrients. There's just so many ways that, I think, by talking about the food system as this kind of naughty, complicated place that is designed in a very inequitable fashion, just starting from that place of understanding would allow for so much more conversation to be had. A big difference, I think, between when we started and today is that many mainstream publications are recognizing that we are facing a food crisis. It's something that they might be wedging into the larger conversation around climate change, which makes a lot of sense, because agricultural production is one of the largest producers of greenhouse gasses. But also architecture and building and construction is one of the largest contributors of greenhouse gas. I mean, obviously, climate change is this urgent thing. But the way that we eat is very much entwined and entangled in this conversation. The fact that food media isn't ringing this bell every day is very, very disappointing and also, I think, a huge disservice to the people who read and enjoy media. Alicia: Yeah, no, it's hard. I did an interview last week that—when it comes out, that'll be very weird. But I was asked, ‘Why do I talk about sustainability and making one's food life sustainable, as though it is challenging? Why do I say it isn't easy to be sustainable?’ And I was like, ‘Well, because most people are floundering economically. Most people do not have the time, the access.’ And she asked specifically. And I was like, ‘Well, eating, caring about your food is a privilege because it is time expensive. And I think that you do a disservice to not talk about that time expense.’And I think about that with how I write recipes, which is—A baking recipe is a different thing, because it's always going to be something kind of frivolous and unnecessary and whimsical. And that's what it's supposed to be. But when you're talking about a food item that you use to sustain yourself, it's like there's no reason for this to be unnecessarily complicated. There is a way to write recipes that tastes really good, but that are broken down into the bare necessities of what you need to get a certain flavor or a certain something. Basically I think that aspiration and accessibility can coexist. You just have to approach it in a way that is mindful of the constraints that most people live under.LinYee: Yeah. And the capitalist constraints, right? Not to be harping on the capitalist system we live in. But I just think that if we're going to talk about the food system, we have to talk about capitalism. Because capitalism is telling you that your time should be focused on working. You are a worker within the capitalist system, and before our work was actually caring for our families and producing edible things to eat. And that was the work that we did. And so, if you really want to get into it with the time constraints, I have two very, very small children, so completely understand the challenges of what it means to feed your family with time constraints. But also, I'm interested in what it looks like to cook in a non-extractive kitchen, where we use things like solar cookers, or rainwater catchments, or thinking about kind of the circularity of the systems. And those things, in theory, are incredible if you live in a sunny place that also gets rain. But cooking on a solar cooker takes a really long time, and a lot of planning that you don't typically have the mind space to actually consider. And so yeah, I mean, I really feel for single parents out there, people who have multiple mouths to feed in their homes while working while trying to make time for themselves. It's an impossible task within the system. I think food is one of the best ways to be able to talk about these things, because it is—it affects everyone. It is a source of joy, typically, for people. And it's easier in a lot of ways to talk about how you make rice and—than it is to talk about the system in which it's produced. So starting to tie it by talking about what it is that you love to eat, and why is a great way to have these long, larger conversations around what the future of the food should look like. Because realistically, we should all be able to have a kind of voice in that, shaping what that is.Alicia: Exactly, yeah. We've touched on it, but in the broader food media, because Mold is so singular and unique and cool in its design, what—Where do you feel that design and food media, outside of your own magazine, like are—Where could these intersect in a way that does make these subjects comprehensible for people or, where could food media be better about design?LinYee: I think that just A, recognizing that design is a factor in our food and our relationship with food, I think is a great starting place. Because there is a kind of focus on design as this tableware aesthetic, or what we talked about as interior design with restaurants, which also, there's a place that could be really radical and interesting. But it's not that accessible. And those aren’t necessarily the projects that are being spoken about. Because as we mentioned earlier, construction is a huge contributor to climate change. So what does it mean to build a place in which you are ingesting natural things into your body—Or maybe unnatural things. Whatever. But literally bringing things into your body to be, become the person you are? What does it mean to do that in a space that is equally considered as far as its materiality, as far as it's designed for the physical hands that are producing those dishes, or cleaning the dishes or cleaning the space? What does that look like? I just think that by focusing on the-Well, just recognizing that we're living in a very, very designed world is a huge starting place. I mean, Mold looks the way that it does, because our art director and designers are just incredible human beings. Eric Hu, Matt Tsang, Jena Myung, they really have created this very unique visual language for the magazine. And through their work, we have been able to reach our primary audience, which is designers. We want designers to pick up a copy of Mold, recognize that it is a design artifact to engage with and kind of dig into the more, I would say dense, naughty, complex conversations that are happening within the publication. And it's really through their design choices that that has been able to happen. And so, I just want to recognize that the magazine itself is very much a collaborative effort between our contributors, our editors, our art directors, our designers, to produce this really—I would say, we're kind of hard to pin down. We don't really fit in the current ecosystem of food media, which is great. And we don't fit in the ecosystem of design media, either. We kind of have our own little planet somewhere in all of that. So I'm totally okay with it.Alicia: Well, that is interesting, though, because I do—Why do you think food occupies such a strange space when we're talking about it as a cultural subject? Because it does touch on all of these things. There are political aspects. There are economic aspects. There are labor aspects. There are ecological aspects. There are design aspects. Like most aspects of culture, it touches on a lot of things. But food isn't taken as seriously as other parts. Do you disagree with that? Do you see food as something that is taken seriously as an area of cultural critique and study? Is it not? I consistently feel people don't take food seriously, but do take other things seriously.LinYee: Yeah, I agree. I think it's because food is multisensorial. And it's something that's kind of been historically relegated to the work of women. And so, I think that for those reasons, it's oftentimes not taken very seriously. I mean, our just weird society is just like, ‘Oh, anything that brings you pleasure? Can't be serious,’ right? I love sharing this little nugget of information, which is that eating is the only thing we do besides having sex that engages all of our senses. And it's a truth. And it speaks to how important it is to ground food and joy and community in being fully multi-sensory. Because we, as humans, are designed to experience it that way. But I think because of that, often, it's relegated to this kind of soft, murky place of feelings, you know? And that’s not considered serious. It's also just so fundamental. We can give a biennial to architecture, right? It’s in Venice. But once you talk about the biennial of beans, which is the thing that I want to produce and make in my life, nobody wants to talk about that. It's the foundation of the things that we do, every day we eat.Alicia: How do you define abundance?LinYee: This is such a critical question in the world that we live in today, because I think the concept of abundance is a very radical concept within a capitalist system. Because capitalism tells you that we—luxury is about scarcity. It's about what I can afford that you can't afford. There's only so many of these things, these wedges, and I have to own one. Whereas if we look to nature, we see that there are models of care models of network systems, trust and interdependence, that consistently tell us that nature is abundant. You think about a single seed creates a single plant that then creates hundreds, if not thousands, of more seeds. If that kind of scale of one to 100, or 1000, doesn't indicate abundance, then I don't know what does. If we can all understand that implicitly we are connected to one another, there is more than plenty for everyone. It's just about understanding the systems in which that interaction, that interdependence is nurtured and cared for as opposed to squashed and us living in these weird isolated bubbles. And that's a very long definition of abundance. But that's how I think about it. I look to nature to kind of help me understand and remind me because I'm not always living in an abundance mindset. The other day the Spanish fashion house LOEWE, they dropped a Spirited Away collaboration. And I was just on the Internet window shopping, I was like, ‘Ah, I just went $5,000 so I could buy this T-shirt.’ I'm not a perfect example of that. But we do what we can. And honestly, just gardening, every season, planting seeds every season, knowing that some of those seeds aren't going to germinate. Some of them will, some of them won't survive when I put them outside. But then the ones that do survive will give me more seeds for next year. That cycle is just so humbling, and just a reminder that if we can just trust a little bit, that there's a lot more to access in the world that we can maybe understand in this moment. Alicia: Well, and for you is cooking a political act?LinYee: Oh, without a doubt. I didn't fully understand this, or have the language for it, until I read this zine that came out in 2020 from Clarence Kwan. And his Instagram is thegodofcookery. And he is a Chinese Canadian creative director, but also cooks at a Chinese restaurant on the weekends. And he put this little zine out called Chinese Protest Recipes. And it just reminded me that cooking the food of my family of my ancestors is a form of resistance. Sure, I love to cook whatever thing is in vogue. Sheet pan dinner is great. I do serve that often for my family. But when I cook the food that reminds me of my grandmother and serve that to my children, it's a way of saying that like, ‘This cannot be homogenized. This can't be taken away from me. It can't be taken away from my family or my children.’ And I think that that is a great reminder for all of us, that what we cook and what we feed our families, what nourishes us, can and should be an act of resistance.Alicia: Thank you so much for taking the time today.LinYee: Oh, thank you so much. It's just been such a pleasure to speak with you.Alicia: Thanks so much to everyone for listening to this week's edition of From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy. Read more at www.aliciakennedy.news. Or follow me on Instagram, @aliciadkennedy, or on Twitter at @aliciakennedy. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.aliciakennedy.news/subscribe

LinYee Yuan is the founder and editor of MOLD, a print and digital magazine about designing the future of food. She previously was an editor for Core77, the entrepreneur in residence at Quartz, and has written about design, art, and food for Food52, Design Observer, Cool Hunting, and Elle Decor. In this conversation, Jarrett and LinYee talk about the intersection of design and food, the decision to make a print magazine, and what designers can learn from food systems. Links from this episode can be found at scratchingthesurface.fm/209-linyee-yuan. — If you enjoy the show, please consider supporting us on Patreon and get bonus content, transcripts, and our monthly newsletter! www.patreon.com/surfacepodcast

Jennifer Rittner is a design educator and writer. We talk about design, education, ethics, social justice, system design, and design joy. Listen to learn about: The current state of design education  Human-centered design methodology Important designers working at design's cutting edge Designing with and for marginalized populations  Smaller scale design  The empathy problem The power-design ecosystem   Our Guest Jennifer is a writer, educator and communications strategist who has taught at Parsons School of Design, the School Visual Arts, and SUNY FIT. In Fall 2021, she was a visiting lecturer at the California College of Art. She has been published in The New York Times, Eye on Design, DMI: Journal, and Core77; and recently guest edited a special issue on Policing & Design for the Design Museum Everywhere. She frequently writes and lectures about design and social justice.   Show Highlights [01:00] Jennifer talks about starting her career as a museum educator before finding her way into design. [01:56] Jennifer's career teaching design, and some of the courses she taught. [03:26] How design shows up in the world and how it shapes our reality. [04:22] An important a-ha moment some of Jennifer's students had about design. [08:52] Human- and community-centered design. [09:29] Dawan and Jennifer talk about design education and learning design as a never-ending process. [10:44] Technical skills versus soft skills in design. [11:50] Jennifer's thoughts about human-centered design as a methodology. [13:15] The need for a more critical thinking approach to how we teach design. [14:06] Designers who are doing the work of critiquing current methodologies and offering alternatives. [16:08] Something Jennifer would like to see design schools teach about methodology. [17:45] Jennifer talks about her background and some of her current struggles in the design space. [21:43] The concept of “inappropriateness” and design. [24:51] Design on a smaller scale and designers whose work Jennifer admires. [25:03] Design and technology. [25:33] How design often marginalizes disabled people. [27:09] The importance of design in helping the people being served find their own voices to speak on their own behalf. [28:37] Advice for designers who are looking to move into work that is more socially impactful. [32:41] Jennifer talks about the problematic nature of workplace culture. [35:18] Dawan and Jennifer talk about empathy and how it is often misunderstood and misused in design work. [40:30] Empathy and how it relates to people and organizations that hold power. [43:29] The importance of knowing the history of a problem if you intend to design in that space. [44:15] Making the case for systems design. [45:51] Design and the institutions of power. [51:29] Jennifer's hopes for design as it begins to grapple with system design challenges. [55:53] Where to find out more about Jennifer and her work and writing.   Links Jennifer on Twitter Jennifer on LinkedIn Jennifer on Instagram Jennifer on Medium Content Matters NY – Ideas Design for Social Justice Equity Representation Art The Latinx Project interview with Jennifer Jennifer at Montclair Art Museum Core77's interview with Jennifer Sloan Leo Liz Agbu Annika Hansteen-Izora Antoinette Carroll Ari Melenciano Liz Jackson Alex Haagaard The Disabled List Marc Dones at King County Regional Homelessness Authority George Aye Sabiha Basrai   Book Recommendation: The Black Experience in Design: Identity, Expression & Reflection, by Anne Berry, Kareem Collie, Penina Acayo Laker, Lesly-Ann Noel, Jennifer Rittner, and Kelly Waters   Other Design Thinking 101 Episodes You Might Like How to Learn Design Thinking + Design Thinking Pedagogy with Julie Schell — DT101 E15 Critical and Emancipatory Design Thinking with Lesley-Ann Noel — DT101 E57 Trauma-Informed Design + Participatory Design Perils + Research with Vulnerable Populations with Sarah Fathallah — DT101 E72

Ray Eames was a graphic designer and abstract artist at the height of the post war era. She studied abstract art with Hans Hoffman for six years before meeting and moving to California with her husband, Charles Eames, in 1941. Ray was not professionally trained as a designer but was deeply involved in the design process. She combined her abstract sensibilities with her interest in structure and form. The Eames are most well-known for developing molded plywood chairs and other furniture that blurred the line between playfulness and function. The Eames Office did more than just design furniture. They worked on ads, packaging, exhibition spaces, toys, and even films. The Eames Office was incredibly collaborative, and everyone at the office was involved in every project. As a result, Ray never claimed any design as her own. However, she was responsible for some textile designs and magazine cover illustrations for the Arts and Architecture publication. Ray was in her element when it came to color and arrangements. She arranged furniture exhibits for Herman Miller and designed the color schemes for her own home. It's not hyperbole to say the furniture and designs that came out of the Eames Office defined a generation and they have Ray's influence written all over them.TIMELINE1912 – b Sacramento, California1931 – May Friend Bennett School for Girls 1932 – mentor at Hans Hoffman studio for 6 years1940 – moved to Michigan, studied at Cranbrook Academy of Art1941 – married Charles Eames1943 – Eames office established1942-1947 – covers for Arts and Architecture magazine1946 – Ray Eames pattern designs made 1953 – Deborah Sussman hired at Eames office1957 – Day of the Dead film1959 – Moscow World's Fair2010 – Eames exhibit made by Deborah Sussman and Andrew ByromREFERENCESBanks, T. (2012, August 22). Addressing the need: The Graphic Design of the Eames Office. Design Week. https://www.designweek.co.uk/issues/may-2012/addressing-the-need-the-graphic-design-of-the-eames-office/BBC The Genius Of Design 3 of 5 Blueprints For War 2010. (2011, October 21). [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_0z1kvM6nsBrown, B. (2017, November 6). Celebrating Graphic Design Sorceress Deborah Sussman. Journal. https://architizer.com/blog/inspiration/industry/deborah-sussman-dies-at-83/Butler, A. (2013, December 11). Deborah Sussman Interview. Designboom | Architecture & Design Magazine. https://www.designboom.com/design/deborah-sussman-interview-12-11-2013/Caduff, R. (Director). (2011) The Visual Language of Herbert Matter. [Film]. PiXiU FilmsCohn, J. & Jersey, B. (Directors). (2011) Eames: The Architect and the Painter. [Film]. Quest Productions. Bread & Butter Films. American Masters ProductionsEllison, K. (2018, March 10). The chromatic legacy of environmental designer Deborah Sussman. 99designs. https://99designs.com/blog/famous-design/environmental-design-deborah-sussman/Hans Hoffman. (n.d.). HANS HOFMANN. http://www.hanshofmann.org/1930-1939Ray Eames in World War II. (2019, September 27). Eames Office. https://www.eamesoffice.com/blog/ray-eames-in-world-war-2/4 films by Charles and Ray Eames. (2019, October 18). Eames Office. https://www.eamesoffice.com/the-work/4-films-by-charles-and-ray-eames/Day of The Dead. (2019, April 16). Eames Office. https://www.eamesoffice.com/the-work/day-of-the-dead-2/Dot Pattern.(2019, October 24). Eames Office. https://www.eamesoffice.com/the-work/dot-pattern-drawings/Eames in NYC.(2017, March 2). Ray (Kaiser) Eames Office. https://www.eamesoffice.com/the-work/ray-kaiser-eames-new-york-city/Ray's Arts & Architecture magazine covers. (2019, October 4). Eames Office. https://www.eamesoffice.com/the-work/rays-arts-architecture-magazine-covers/Kirkham, P. (2021). Ray Kaiser Eames. Pioneering Women of American Architecture. https://pioneeringwomen.bwaf.org/ray-kaiser-eames/Lawrence, S. (1985). Declaration of Function: Documents from the Museum of Modern Art's Design Crusade, 1933-1950. Design Issues, 2(1), 65-77. doi:10.2307/1511530McGuirk, J. (2020, September 23). There's no I in Eames. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2010/oct/26/eames-furniture-team-charles-rayNarkiewicz-Laine, C. (2020, June 1). The Good Design Awards. Good Design. https://www.good-designawards.com/news/2020/06/01/the-seventy-year-history-of-good-design%C2%AE/Neuhart, M., & Neuhart, J. (2010). The Story of Eames Furniture: The Early Years (Vol. 1). Gestalten Verlag, Berlin.Olsberg, N. (2017, November 27). Herbert Matter. Drawing Matter. https://drawingmatter.org/herbert-matter/Phaidon Editors. (2012). Eames graphic designs on show | design | Phaidon. Phaidon. https://www.phaidon.com/agenda/design/articles/2012/august/28/eames-graphic-designs-on-show/Raphael, T. (2016, April 12). The “Damsels of Design,” women who changed automotive history. The World from PRX. https://www.pri.org/stories/2016-04-12/damsels-design-women-who-changed-automotive-historyRomano, A. (2019, June 17). The Value of Good Design. DisegnoDaily. https://www.disegnodaily.com/article/the-value-of-good-designSaval, N. (2019, April 4). How “Good Design” Failed Us. The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/how-good-design-failed-usSchuessler, J. (2020, May 16). Ray Eames, Out of Her Husband's Shadow. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/15/arts/ray-charles-eames-artists.htmlSmith, R. (2009, June 5). The Ordinary as Objects of Desire: MoMA Looks Back at Everyday Design. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/05/arts/design/05desi.htmlSussman/Prejza & Co. (2020, June 29). Deborah Sussman. Sussman Prejza. https://sussmanprejza.com/bio/deborah-sussman/The design genius of Charles + Ray Eames. (2009, July 6). [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0vDWqp6J7YThe Museum of Modern Art. (2009, May 6). MoMA REVISITS WHAT ‘GOOD DESIGN' WAS OVER 50 YEARS LATER[Press release]. https://assets.moma.org/documents/moma_press-release_387178.pdf?_ga=2.250983619.475073280.1609623298-1952243929.1609623298Veit, R. (2016, March 22). The Story Behind GM's Celebrated “Damsels of Design.” Core77. https://www.core77.com/posts/49498/The-Story-Behind-GMs-Celebrated-Damsels-of-DesignWalker, A. (2015, April 2). The Designer Who Helped Give L.A. Its Look. T Magazine. https://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/17/on-view-the-designer-who-helped-give-l-a-its-look/

We are thrilled to be joined by a former award-winning Industrial Designer, now UX Researcher, Catherine Suen. And yes, Catherine works closely with our Creative Director at Smart Tech - as we've said before when you have access to a pool of incredible talent, why not share their stories and experience with the world? With her career spanning just a decade, Catherine has already created an impressive portfolio, designing experiences for Microsoft, RCA, Honda, Jaguar, Hive and most recently, Vodafone Smart Tech. Catherine trained initially as an Industrial Designer and worked for a design studio in her home town of Hong Kong before moving to London and completing a double Masters degree in Innovation Design and Engineering. She then went on to work as an Innovation Consultant and helped set up a design lab in Tokyo before returning to the UK and transitioning into UX Research. Catherine's work has received global recognition picking up awards from Core77, HKDA Global Design Awards, Red Dot and iF! She is also passionate about inspiring others and works as a guest lecturer for the Royal College of Arts. In our conversation, we discuss Catherine's academic and professional path. What fuels her work and has driven her to try a variety of creative roles. Naturally, we couldn't have her on the show without giving you expert guidance on UX Research practices. Catherine very kindly shares practical advice that you can bake into your own process. What are you waiting for? Let's get into it. Get show updates on Instagram: @design_podcast https://www.instagram.com/design_podcast/ LinkedIn: @design_podcast https://www.linkedin.com/company/design-podcast All episodes are available on: www.designpodcast.co

GUEST: Scott Anderson, Ford Design PANEL: Rain Noe, Core77; Mark Williams, Freelance; Gary Vasilash, on Automotive

The pandemic caused us all to readjust our values and focus on what truly matters. It also forced us to alter how we communicate and innovate.In this special episode of Prism, Dan Harden moderates a discussion with founders Fred Bould and Caroline Flagiello on how we can use the lessons from this experience to create an exciting new era of Design. The panel reveals:How to make the most of our newly realigned values, the work-life blur, and virtual creative collaborationsWays to implement the new design thinking that's emerged which values experiences, quality of life, and purposeThe ideal vision of Design and the roadmap needed to get thereListen in on their perspectives on how we can all find design nirvana.GuestsCaroline Flagiello, founder of Akin, is an innovation expert with two decades of experience leading teams and designing for every kind of organization, from nascent startups to high profile Fortune 500 companies, in industries ranging from consumer electronics to fashion to food and beverage.Fred Bould, founder of Bould Design, has collaborated with leading innovators such as Nest Labs, GoPro and Roku. Their work has met with both commercial and critical success. Recognition includes numerous IDEA, Core77, D&AD, and Red Dot Awards, as well as the Cooper Hewitt and SF MOMA Permanent Collection. Bould's design solutions are noted for usability, simplicity, and elegance.This episode of Prism was originally recorded as a live Whipsaw virtual event on July 28, 2021.Episode TranscriptDan Harden 0:07Hello and welcome to Prism. Prism is a design oriented podcast hosted by me Dan harden, like a glass prism that reveals the color hidden inside white light. This podcast will reveal the inside story behind innovation, especially the people that make it happen. My aim is to uncover each guest unique point of view, their insights, their methods, or their own secret motivator, perhaps that fuels their creative genius.Okay, hello, and welcome to finding design Nirvana. I'm Dan Harden. Whipsaw's Founder, CEO and Principal Designer and with me are Caroline Flagiello and Fred Bould. We're here to discuss how we can evolve from this somewhat dark time that we find ourselves in. We've experienced something truly extraordinary in the last Well, now what year and a half, and it's still going on. But how can we evolve from that time that we have all experienced into a better we'll call it designed to future. That's why we call this finding design Nirvana. We think we should be learning from these tough times in order to advance design to a higher Well, maybe even more ideal state, if that's possible. That's what we wanted to investigate with this discussion. Tonight, we'll talk about the lessons we have learned from the pandemic that can help us re examine how we think about design, especially in terms of what design should be focused on where the opportunities lie to innovate, and how design should or can be practiced. So without further ado, let's meet our panelists, Caroline, Fred. Fred is the Founder and Design Director of Bould design, Bould, has collaborated with great companies such as nest labs, GoPro, Roku, and many, many others. They've won lots of Design Awards. They've got worked at the Cooper Hewitt and SF MoMA. They're designed many of you know it. They're designed as noted for simplicity, elegance, and a focus on usability. They always do great work can always count on Fred and his company. I met Fred in the 80s when we both worked at Henry Dreyfus associates. And we've been great friends ever since. Good to see you, Fred.Fred Bould 2:21Great to see you. Carolyn. Good to see you. Yeah. My first got to know Dan, when I was an intern at Henry Dreyfus associates. And Dan was one of the young hotshot designers there that everybody looked up to. So it's, it's really, it's really gratifying to find myself here, you know, 100 years later. We're working in close proximity to Dan and, and his elk. So this is great.Dan Harden 2:52Thanks for joining Fred. My other guest is Carolyn Flagella. Carolyn is Founder and CEO of Akon a firm she founded in 2015. Caroline is an innovation expert with two decades of experience leading teams and designing for every kind of organization from Little startups to high profile Fortune 500 companies. She also worked at Pentagram and IDEO, and I've known Caroline for over 25 years. She helped me chair the National idsa conference in 2002. I still can't thank you enough for that, Carolyn. And you may have also seen Caroline on the CBS series, California by design. Welcome, Caroline. Thank you for joining.Caroline Flagiello 3:33Oh, thank you for having me. Yes. And good to see Fred. Um, yeah, Dan, when I first met you, it was at the MoMA. And it was during an idsa Awards event. And you were President of Frog at the time. And I was like, Oh, that's Dan. And so, you were you know, you were the god. Oh, well, I was still, you know, starting off in my career. So anyway, it was a long time ago, but you were still the god.Dan Harden 4:05Oh, my God. Okay, we did not practice Believe me this.Okay, so let's, let's get into our discussion, but thank you. So, let's start out kind of broad. Alright, so this crazy pandemic that we've been through, I mean, it has rocked us all to the core in so many ways. But let's talk briefly about its impact on work, especially, like, How were your practices impacted? And how did you adjust? Did you survive obviously, or how did you thrive?Fred Bould 4:41Carolyn, you want to take?Caroline Flagiello 4:44Sure, so, um, when I started Akon seven years ago, it was relational based consultancy. So basically, our goal is to have long term key clients and reduce that churn and spend And I also thought that there was a different way to be able to create a consultancy that didn't look like the consultancies that we've all you know, and love and work for, and thought that we could leverage global talent in different ways. So I leveraged a distributed teams, as well as our core team. And so like, our practices really haven't changed. But what we did is we really honed the ability to connect in hybrid ways and connect through video, you know, seven years ago, and that, you know, being able to access global talent is just really important. And I think, really, we've seen the the fruits of that, through hybrid work, quite honestly. And I think organizations are really realizing the power of accessing global talent and that way. But in terms of our practice, we're continuing to thrive in this hybridized environment. Now, others who see the power of that are really appreciating and understanding that, and our clients are getting even more comfortable with that now that it's become more of the norm. So we haven't changed so much in the way that we have practiced, but I everyone around us has. So that's been really nice, because now it's elevating all of us.Fred Bould 6:30Yeah. I guess I, my experience, I'll be really honest, I was, even though at the beginning of my, when I first started Bould design. I worked actually worked from my house for several years. And, and even despite that, I was kind of To be honest, I was a work from home skeptic, I really was I felt like, you know, it's, how are we going to review mockups, and, you know, share sketches and things like that. And, but then when I kind of saw it coming, but I have a brother who lives in Shenzhen, so I've been talking to him about, you know, he was on lockdown, months, months before we were and it was still in question whether it was going to sort of make its way here and you know, what the, what the depth would be and so on. But at some point, I turned to my partners, and I said, Hey, we need to get set up for this. And, you know, we got our we got our system set up so that people could take computers, we'd all be connected and be able to connect to the server and whatnot. And, and sure enough, about two weeks after we did that we you know, the word came down that everybody had to be work from home. And I wasn't, I didn't have a lot of anxiety, even though I was kind of a work from home skeptic, I kind of said, Well, you know, we don't really have a choice. So let's, let's, let's do this. And, you know, 24 hours later, we were set up, you know, 16 people working from 16 different places around the Bay Area. And it worked fine. It was I, you know, I can't say I was surprised because we're, we're very good communicators, and we're well organized. So I think that that that helped us. But it it went pretty well. I think some of our some of our clients saw things go quiet on on their side, you know, in terms of sales, because I think people were, you know, hesitant to go out and buy things when they didn't really know whether they would have jobs or not. I'm talking about the the general population, whether they would have jobs and whether they would be getting paychecks and things like that. But you know, I think when the government stepped in and said, Okay, we're going to, we're going to give people money and people felt reassured and they said, okay, you know, there, somebody, somebody has our backs. And so a lot of our clients have done extraordinarily well. You know, we have clients that are involved with, you know, streaming entertainment, well, guess what, when people can go out, guess what they do? networking equipment, sick, things like that all became very important. So it's actually it's been a pretty good year. And I think we've we've learned an awful lot about the boundaries of what works, you know, for work.Dan Harden 9:29Yeah, it sounds like you've adjusted. I know. Personally speaking, I would agree with you. I've always been a wfh work from home skeptic right when when I would get an email as an employer, you don't want to see wfh, I'm down I'm going to be working for like, Yeah, right. But you know what? My team blew me away. They're so effective. I mean, I never would have guessed that this was possible. But but it does take adjustment and adjust. We did and not only survived, but I think we're thriving more than ever because of it, we learned a lot about one another. Partly because we're all on this equalizing grid like we are right now. And people that didn't work together before, you know, especially the certain engineers and designers or the UX team working with engineers, they get to hear one another's problems and issues. And it's, it's really created a lot of empathy and understanding among individuals in the company. But I can't tell you like, you know, like that first week, when it all came down, this pandemic is going to be such a big problem. I can tell you in one week, we lost three clients. It was like 10% of our business in one week. But you know, this is like, Royal Caribbean, like everyone's like, No, no, I'm not getting on a cruise ship. So you know, they call they're like, stop all work. Some of the gaming industry stop all work. There were a few clients like that it was kind of alarming, I must say.Caroline Flagiello 10:58Yeah, I think a lot of clients gave pause. Right. And they did it, whether it was a couple weeks, or a couple months, you know, we all paused quite frankly, we didn't know we were stuck at home, literally couldn't move. Right. And we didn't know what the virus was doing. A very scary information was coming every day. We were it was social unrest. I mean, we had some major things all happen at once. So I think it was a lot as humans to take in. But Dan, I love what you mentioned about humans, because we saw each other's humanity. I think as as work has changed, our work has completely changed forever, right? We have seen each other's humanity in ways that we've never thought were professional, or we've redefined professionalism for ourselves now.Dan Harden 11:49wOkay, but what does that mean, when it comes to real effective virtual collaboration, because collaboration, you know, it's just it was a buzzword 10 years ago, you have to collaborate, build your team. And we're, we're all used to doing that, you know, in jam rooms, or war rooms, whatever you want to call them. But what about virtual collaboration? And the creative fields? Where are the challenges that you guys have found? And how have you overcome that? Do you think it works?Fred Bould 12:17Yeah, I mean, it's funny, because we looked at things like, you know, like getting tablets and stuff that we could sketch on, and things like that. But then after not too long, we ended up just basically saying, you know, here like this, and, you know, flashing sketches up on, on on the camera, and then on the other side, people go click, and they capture it. And then we'd have these, like, documents, these, like, you know, shared documents running all the time in the background. And it I guess, it was a little bit ad hoc, but it was effective, you know, like, we'd have like a Google present, you know, document going that we would just throw stuff into, we'd like take pictures of sketches and throw them in there or cap, you know, do you know, screen captures and stuff like that. And we kind of got pretty fluid, it was a little bit, you know, a little bit Herky jerky at first. And I have to say, at the end of the day, I would be I would be exhausted. Because you, you know, when you're having a conversation with somebody face to face, you're taking in all this information cues, you know, all sorts of things that are absent when, you know, you're talking to people on little boxes. And so your brains kind of working in overdrive to fill in, you know, to, you know, pull out all the information to camp. And so I would, you know, I enjoyed work, but I have to admit, at the end of the day, I'd be like, wow, I need to go stick my head in a bucket of cold water.Dan Harden 13:58That was such a surprise that that that condition ones mindset after day, it feels like more work even though it sounds like it should be less right working from videowall to design is so social, you know, that's why I was worried about it working in this manner. Because you learn so much through nuance, you know, the subtle look on somebody's face when you see our concept that may not quite resonate with someone, it's enough of a signal to tell you Oh, maybe I should work harder on that detail.Fred Bould 14:28So we're even like the curve of a line on a whiteboard sketch. You don't need it. It can you people will look at it. You can say yeah, it's sort of it accelerates here. And it's harder to do that like this.Caroline Flagiello 14:45It definitely is. But I do think with tools like Miro and like you said screen capture and being able to you know, draw either virtually or you know, I am being able to post you get really fluid. And I think what's really interesting is that we haven't ever leverage the power of video in the way that we have recently, right? Like, we have all these tools. And we've talked about the future of work and what it looks like. But the pandemic accelerated all of these tools in our toolbox. And honestly, like our mirror has been a lifesaver. We like Nero vs mirror roll. But you know, obviously, there's, they're both there. Because our clients are now being able to jump in the boards with us see, the process, it doesn't have to be the tidhar that we've, you know, used throughout our careers, and they get to see the workings we collaborate a lot easier. And then from a design perspective, we get to populate what we want to and then what's great is you can turn those into pages, so you can make those into a presentation. But, but like the design piece of it, like when you're designing physical products, yes, I mean, that's probably the more challenging component of design. But when you're designing systems, culture, change, you know, all of those things, that's a lot easier within the virtual environment. But I do think that we're honing our skills and being able to read each other.Dan Harden 16:18True, there's a really great question that just came in, where do you go for your creative inspiration when you're stuck in your house?Caroline Flagiello 16:24That is a good one.Fred Bould 16:25For me, it's about it's about asking questions. I obviously I want to know, the environment that I'm that I'm operating in. But I think for us, you know, we just looked really closely at who you're designing for, you know, what the what the newest nuances are the function of the the device that you're developing? And, and and prototype.Dan Harden 16:49So, yeah, I would even I would add that design for me is, yes, there's a physicality to it. But even more so I think design is more of a mental construct, requires seeing, observing, feeling sensing, while simultaneously thinking and solving pragmatic problems. And sometimes there's a benefit to having environmental context. In other words, getting out and seeing the world. Yes, sometimes those acts are benefited by having people around you being in a studio. Of course, I missed that. But I can always jump on video as a medium, it kind of replaces that in person. In order to get those juices flowing. And get creative with whatever is around, you might have one one of our designers, he didn't have any polyurethane foam, and he couldn't get in his car to go find polyurethane foam because the stores were closed. So he used aluminum foil to create this, the Hand tool thing I was like what in the world is this pile of aluminum foil, but I'll be darned the shape was there. The idea was there, the ergonomics were there. It was it was really cool to see that. So get creative with whatever is around you. The most important thing is to just stay creative, no matter where you are. I mean, if you're stuck in a little village and in Vietnam, and you get a design idea, figure out with what's around you to whatever you need to do, do it.Caroline Flagiello 18:23I think that that we our creativity has been pushed to new limits, right? How you get access to content, where you search for content, and spread, you aren't stuck in your home, maybe you can go out with a mask. We definitely have done that we literally do are designing this cooler for camping. And I had the design team Meet me at the campsite. So we ended up camping over the weekend. And we were designing in context. Which, you know, normally you visit and then you leave, but we were literally designing and context as a team. So I think you just get creative about how you do things. But I feel like in that creativity, it's opened up new processes for us and new ways of gleaning inspiration and and inspiration from a material standpoint. Like if you think about sustainability, I think we're thinking about what are those materials out there that we can have access to you start making phone calls, you get stuff shipped to you I have boxes coming multiple times a day, write to our studios so we can see the latest, the greatest get get your hands on stuff. So hybrid work does not replace physical touch physical experience is just how you do it. And this process does take longer. That's the other thing. I will say that does design in general has taken longer during COVIDDan Harden 19:52It has that something's longer something faster because you have the tools to make certain decisions like right now. With your client, you know, we're drawing online in video and showing concept literally real time. So there is there is some odd benefit. So considering that the process has certainly changed, did the type of work that were coming into your companies change it certainly did it whipsaw I mean, we got way more health care, work, protection work. Certainly a lot of home goods, because people aren't spending money, you know, their budget allocations going more toward material things that will help them in their home versus getting on an airplane and flying somewhere. And also service design. But where have you guys seen the the uptick and different kinds of work?Fred Bould 20:46I just want to go back to the collaboration thing, because just for one second, because I would actually venture a guess. And like, if I go into the room next door and say, Tell me the truth. Did you guys like the fact that you were kind of, you know, for long periods of time, you were kind of on your own, you had more independence, you had time to think you could try things that maybe wouldn't try when you were in the studio, you know, that there was just a little bit more, I'm guessing that a lot of designers probably felt more independence. And that was probably, you know, liberating and refreshing. I mean, we tried, you know, trying to give designers space, but you know, their schedules and meetings and stuff like that, but I'm venture I'd venture to guess I'd say a lot of designers felt like it was.Dan Harden 21:37I would agree with you, Fred, I might even venture to say that the creative people. Well, you're either more creative when you are very relaxed and your zone, not pressured. Or, or under extreme anxiety. Like I've got a deadline tomorrow morning, Daniel, I got to figure this out. Now, you know, I find that I'm either in one of those two extremes, or I'm very, very heady and kind of like trying to reach my subconscious for solutions on the one hand, and the pandemic has been good for that actually come up with some wild ideas, just like sitting around in my sweatpants. I don't wear a sweat pants, but we don't need to discuss what I wear. So yeah, that's it's really interesting. I think there is an upside to it.Fred Bould 22:27To answer your question, we saw a continuation of what we were what we were saying before, but we did, we did pick up some medical and we actually, one client was COVID, a COVID related project, it was this disinfecting device for commercial spaces. And you know, that had to happen really fast. So we started, you know, we started the project in June last summer, and they were like, yep, we want to be shipping in October. So that's June, July, August, September. That's four months, including design for manufacturing and everything.Unknown Speaker 23:09Well, yeah.Caroline Flagiello 23:11I mean, our work stays pretty consistent. I mean, we're purpose driven and the work that we take on. But what was interesting was the focus is shifted to even more culture, more, the future of so I'm a big futurist, we love the future of tight projects. And the future of work was one that we've worked on in many different sectors, within industry, within governments, and thinking about what it means to reinvent work for ourselves, and or embrace this new way of working because we're in a working Cultural Revolution right now. Where big companies are, like, you know, come back to work, or else and workers are saying or else, right? And so, we need to be flexible. And because we started realizing what's really important to us as humans, we started reevaluating our own values around life work, and it's not work life balance, it's actually work life fluidity. And those boundaries between work and home, they were already starting to shift with, you know, Fridays off or, you know, flex Fridays, etc. But no, it's actually very different now. And so being able to, as designers think about how we're able to incorporate that fluidity in a way that really services people, their heart, their their soul, and feeds us in a different way. We were missing our family, we're missing the life with our heads down work ethic that we have all experienced. And so that's the kind of work that we started seeing more of as well as transitions. What does it mean to transition Thinking about as a culture and as a human, as you go through these transitions? How, what support do you have? What models do you have out there? And, you know, what is your ecosystem? What's your network? And who are the people that thrive in transitions and don't? And so that that's the kind of deeper human work that we started getting into over the course of the pandemic.Dan Harden 25:23Very cool. You know, one, one thing in addition to that, I've also seen that the pandemic has acted like an accelerant for certain businesses and technologies, for example, we're starting to see way more interest in different kinds of precision medicine, or very specific solutions around healthcare. Partly because the technologies are realizing that that's where the answers are, if you look at, you know, what Pfizer and moderna had to go through to create that, that vaccine. And of course, all of this relates to design because we have to ultimately package these solutions and present them in a way they're palpable and understandable intuitive to those end users that that we want to have consumed these products. So we're starting to see way more AI driven diagnostics, lots of biology plus electronics, netting products that are very weird and wild, something like we did recently for this company called Conoco just really unusual things. And the pandemic is, it's been like this, this catalyst in some way good. Some people are like, well, the heck with it, let's do this.Fred Bould 26:34Yeah. There was a doctor at the National Health Service in England, who said that they've seen 20 years of innovation in two weeks. And I, I experienced it myself, I had a pinched nerve in my neck from doing stupid things. And so my doctor said, Well, do you want to do PT on zoom? And again, I was skeptical, but I said, Yeah, sure, that sounds great. Let's do that. And it worked. It was a little bit, you know, was a little bit odd. But it, it worked. You know, here I am three months later, and no more pinched nerve than I, you know, other than seeing the physical therapist online, I'm sure it made their job much harder. Because they couldn't, you know, like bend my neck and say, Hey, Did that hurt, or things like that. But I think we've seen a tremendous amount of innovation in a very short time. And I think that it's opened people's eyes to opportunities for new types of products and services.Dan Harden 27:41Yeah, it is a plus. I think that, you know, when things get tough, people have a tendency to really reassess what they want out of life, and start to think about things like quality of life being more important than quantity of life. And this is, this is really where I want to move the conversation is, it sounds to me, you know, all three of us are experiencing the same kinds of changes in our companies. There is more of an emphasis on quality of life and health care and home centric design. But will it stick? I want it to stick, because it seems like people are being a little bit more sensible. I think quality of life and quality of design go together like peanut butter and jelly. I mean, they work well together. So but but we all live in a wild world, and everybody's trying to make more money, and they're, you know, the traffic's coming back. And are we gonna fall back into these patterns? How can we make it stick in the foreseeable future?Caroline Flagiello 28:38Well, I think one of the things that we are missing, and we're seeing this in our, we've been auditing Silicon Valley companies and honestly, nationally as well. And what's missing is that friction, that friction and that need that, that innovate helps innovators and creatives Spark, and if we don't get back to that level of Spark, which comes from interacting with each other, and or, you know, seeing things and being inspired, you know, like going to see us For example, when person brought up how CES was important to kind of Spark. She used the word envy, but I don't I don't know if it's envy, but like just Spark, you know, that that creative, Uh, huh. Like I want to get in the mix, we will start seeing a push for the lack of comfort, you know, in the home so that we can get to that creative spark. So that's one of the things that we need to think about how do we create that spark or keep that spark going, and we're also posting on a lot of our relationships that we had pre pandemic. So starting a project with a client that you've never met in person and or teammates that maybe you have new hires that just started really hard to do. If you haven't met in person, a lot of projects are failing, all around and every company with teams that haven't met in person. So how do we keep it going in terms of that balance and and honoring what people are feeling like they're missing? But then how do you just keep that that creativity, that hunger alive? haven't figured that out yet?Dan Harden 30:32What do you think, Fred, about that?Fred Bould 30:36I think that there was a lot of friction to enough friction to start a lot of a lot of different fires. So I, you know, I think likeCaroline Flagiello 30:48creative friction, versus like, destructive fire affection.Fred Bould 30:53Yeah, no, I, I think that the, I think that the pandemic, just really, I mean, for me, personally, it, it definitely helped me kind of realign, I feel like there's, you know, within the studio, there's just, I think there's a lot more empathy for everybody. And I think that when people are more empathic than they, they, they're more attentive to each other's needs, and they're kinder to each other. And I think that plays into design, I really, I think that helps you know, us, you know, when we're because we're always sometimes we're the uses of things that we're designing, but a lot of the times where we have to imagine and so I think that when you're more empathic, it's easier to imagine, you know, and you go that extra mile to make create a better experience.Dan Harden 31:42But Fred, how do we make this the tangible benefits that we just heard? And I think there are more unforeseen dividends, right, that have happened from this pandemic? I mean, it's, it's been held for a lot of people, let's face it, not to mention that the disgraceful loss of life, but how do we make some of these, these these good things stick?Fred Bould 32:04I think they'll stick because it's a value shift, the underlying, you know, like, he talked about, you know, mass flow, I think the shape of the pyramid of the base has changed, and what what people are, are going to support and tolerate, it has changed. And so, you know, they're some of the biggest companies in the world, you know, come back and said, Okay, here's what we're gonna do. And people have said, No, I don't think so. I'm not doing that. What else do you have? And so I do think that there, there's a shift and that that employees feel and understand that they have more power. And so and I think that, you know, whoa, whoa, to the, the organization that doesn't take that on board, you can, you can go and pick up the Economist magazine and read, you know, dozens of articles about this kind of thing. Things have things have changed, and things have shifted, and I don't I don't, you know, I feel like it's a, you know, the toothpaste has come out of the tube. We're not you can't put it back in.Dan Harden 33:24Yeah, like, I really, I agree, I hope that some of these, these benefits that we're talking about, really, really do stick, I think it's incumbent upon us designers to make sure that we we do we do carry a new kind of torch, and that we are strong and persuasive, and making sure that we're offering good sound meaningful, truthful solutions to the clients and be brave stand up and just, you know, proclaim what innovation means to you. That's okay. I think there's, I think the big message here is, it's okay. Make your Proclamation. Everybody is we're in this time now.Fred Bould 34:03Yeah. I also kind of wonder, like, so, you know, as a work from home skeptic, you know, I was proven wrong. And I think that, that kind of has emboldened people to say, Okay, well, what other things that I held to be true, are also incorrect. And so I see, I see my designer is asking questions like, well, do we really have to do it that way? Or, you know, is, you know, why is that a sacred cow? Why can't we change that? So? I don't know. I think that I think there's I think there's a shift going on.Caroline Flagiello 34:44Right. Well, I do think as I mentioned before, the idea of work fluidity, that you we as designers need to design tools and experiences that allow work fluidity, so that we are It's not flexibility. And this is the difference. So and I stumbled across this Aha, you know, thinking about the future of work, that it isn't about either or, it's about that we are working in our cars, at the cafe, at home with our teams that are home office back, you know, hopping on a plane working on a plane, like work happens everywhere. And while we may have thought about that, we still think about it as binary work from home, right? Well, actually, it's not just from home. So work fluidity needs to happen as our devices pick up from one area to another, you know, content, our access to content, our access to people, we need to think about that even more, because honestly, our tools are still very limited in what they can do and how they support idea generation collaboration. Well, it's great that we have what we have now, they're really still very, very limited. So I think, to keep it going and moving forward, we need to reinvent our tools for creation, collaboration, communication, and start thinking about other dimensions. So we're even playing around with VR, right, and collaborating conducting meetings, we have, we are just on the precipice of an amazing time, if we choose to take it, our muscle memory is so strong to the way it used to be or normal, I think that we may be missing a big opportunity in advancing how we create, how we work, how we think, how we transmit ideas. And so VR is the real untapped dimension, quite frankly, on how we can collaborate together and start bridging some of those arenas. But I don't want to diminish, you know, the, the in person power because we as human animals can communicate and transmit energy that you just don't get anywhere else. So we need to not forget that, obviously, in person is hugely valuable. But I don't want to miss out on all of the other dimensions that we haven't really tapped fully.I think designers intrinsically, are so good at that. Because many of us are crafts persons, artists, musicians. And it allows you to have this, this touch point with your own humanity. And it's often that that element of that designers bring is sometimes sidelined by big business and managers and CEOs that maybe value the bottom line more than an individual's big idea. So if it's allowed us to bring out more of our humanity, that's, that's awesome. I love that perspective. Carolyn, do you think it's do you think,Fred Bould 38:02you know, like, great tools, right, we have zoom and Google Hangouts, we have all these other things. And when we first you know, I think that the people who develop them were sort of like, Oh, crap, we have like, you know, 500 times, number of people using this now. And I think that they really, they probably, you know, people generally, like, I'm very thankful to be able to talk to people like this. But in fact, the software could be better. You know, it could be easier to use, it could be more flexible, it could allow us to share more easily. And so I'm, I'm guessing that there's this sort of unseen groundswell of people out there going, Wow, there's a lot of opportunity for making this a lot better. And so I think that when you say, how are we going to do it? I think it's probably happening, you know, you know, out there in Silicon Valley and across across the world, people are probably imagining great new ways for collaborating.Dan Harden 39:18To do you think this pandemic in both of your opinions has made us especially designers, has it made us more accountable? Is it going to make us more responsible? Will it prompt us to really think about the essence of a problem and how to how to really go about solving it that might additionally be very sustainable in every way, not just environmentally sustainable?Caroline Flagiello 39:44For sure. I mean, honestly, at the beginning of the epidemic last year, I was on a panel where scientists were talking about from the UK we're talking about you think this viruses bad wait till the Climate change hits you, and you're worried about being in the home now. Just wait. And it's in years, not in 10 years, it's in a couple years. And I honestly, you know, we've heard climate change. And it honestly, it doesn't stick with you, as much as when this scientist was talking, it scared the bejesus out of me. And ironically, from that, that conference to when clicked, you know, client work started picking up again, it was all about sustainability more than ever before. And, and it really gives you pause about, and especially as design leaders, being able to say, Hey, wait a minute, I don't know if that deserves to exist, this product that you want to create, like, let's prove, why does that deserve to exist. And I don't know if I want to partake in creating that thing. And I think also when we think about sustainability, for the product, its lifecycle. And the onus that we have as designers, not just in sustainability, but in the creation of things, or services or experiences, just because I think we really have a lot more power and being able to redirect a refocus. And also be able to shift and build a business case for maybe something that's an alternative that actually has much more positive outcomes. And that process of development as well as much more positive. So in that, though, I will say as designers, it is crucial for us to get up on many different manufacturing techniques out there for let's say sustainability, because I don't think that we have in our toolbox, enough sustainable knowledge to really design effectively, cradle to grave. and beyond. I just thought why don't just think I know. And I think it behooves all of us to really get deep into what this looks like. And sustainability, not just in physical product, but and the whole cycle of our experience, from product services, culture, everything needs to be sustainable. We worked on a program years ago around human resilience, human resilience as part of sustainability, right? And thinking about how we're able to tap into ourselves to be sustainable, which also mirrors back into a earlier point that you made down around. How is this changed us? Like how were we more sustainable as humans in the condition that we're in right now, but also sustainability and the products, as I mentioned, and the services that we design? Yes, we do have greater responsibility than ever before, because we've seen the effects.Dan Harden 42:55Yeah, I also see this, there's has been for the last 50 years, this relentless Corporate Drive to make more money through design. And honestly, I know I do design for a living, but that kind of motivation simply does not inspire me. I mean, my my definition, and the pandemic has really driven this home is of my definition of prosperity is totally the opposite. And like a lot of designers, I mean, I think we have to value meaning over money and outcome for users of our income for corporations. I think growth of cultural value is more important than growth of shareholder value. I think we have to somehow through the means that you just mentioned Caroline, keep pushing for these, these values that are more sustainable, and more holistic definition of what sustainability even is. And I think that's our big challenge. I mean, Fred, I know you because I've known you for a long time. I know so wholeheartedly, you would you would believe in that or tell me maybe that you don't? What do you thinkFred Bould 44:10I i've always I've always been frustrated by the, in order to see real change in sustainability. You have to have a change in you know, it's like steering a supertanker. They are like we've we've gone out many, many times and looked at you know, different types of material that are more ecola more environmentally sound. And they're always these these nice things, but I think it's things are slowly changing, because people are starting to understand, well, you know, I can still do well, by doing good and, you know, at some point, something's going to happen. It's like I've always said with With consumer electronics, if you go and look at the reviews, or you'll get what's selling the best, it's not like something selling 40. And this one's 40%, this one's 30%. And this one's 20%. This one's 10. It's like this one's 90%, because it's the best. And then this one is 6%, because it's cheaper, and then this one selling 3%, because it's really, really cheap. I think we have to get to that situation with, with sustainability, where we can go out and there there are options for you know, for materials and systems that are better. And that we can and that there we can be they can be deployed on a massive scale, not Nish. I'm not talking about, you know, making lamps out of orange peels. I'm talking. Go Go look on the scene, it's there. But no, I'm talking about like, really, really meaningful ways of doing things like, you know, at the at the Tokyo Olympics, they made the they made the beds out of cardboard. Okay, that's awesome. Why, you know, I would it be okay, sleeping on a cardboard bed? You know, I don't I don't, it doesn't, it doesn't need to weigh 600 pounds. You know, I? So I think that there's, there's two things, there's the systems, the infrastructure, and then there's our limited ways of thinking about them.Caroline Flagiello 46:33Right? Well, I wanted to ask, so we're working on sustainable running shoes right now. And it's interesting when you start investigating, like in the running shoe category, you know, all these proclamations, right, from big companies that we all know and love and have worked for around their sustainable shoe. But you know, there's a lot of carbon credits that they're buying, right? And as does he mean, you know, it's kind of cheating, right? It's not, it's not really being sustainable, or using an ecologically sourced material, but it's still last forever. As designers, you know, how now I'm taking your role dance, as designers. How do you feel about pushing back in that arena? Like, what would you work on a project where you knew the client was buying carbon credits, and, you know, basically buying their way into sustainability? Or, you know, how does that fit with you guys?Dan Harden 47:36I think as long as you are able to make the positive change that you should be as a designer, then the means in which that occurs, providing the ends is a good result, some benevolence, some benefit to the end user that I'm okay.Caroline Flagiello 47:52Yeah, it's kind of interesting, because, you know, our client isn't necessarily advocating for that. But it was just the investigation out there seeing the greenwashing if you will, and it doesn't sit well with us, we're like, Huh, if you're really willing to make a change, we're there for you. Right, we're gonna take it, we're gonna see this through. But if you're, it's a marketing ploy. We're not really that interested in engaging?Dan Harden 48:20Oh, I misunderstood your question. And then I hate anything disingenuous. So you know, we and we are often every design firm will you'll pick these moments when you have to ask yourself, should we be doing this? You know, we'd turn one down this morning, a client that wanted to work with us, and we're just like, no. And, yeah, you're those are hard decisions sometimes, because they're, they're often not black and white. Right?Fred Bould 48:47You know, I think you have to ask yourself, okay, is this is this supertanker? Do they want to make a turn? Or do they just want you to, you know, get on the deck and cheer them on? And I think that if you can, if you can make even even an incremental positive impact than it, then it then it's worth doing, because there's definitely somebody else out there who won't care and will just say, yeah, sure, we'll do that. So, you know, if you can, if you can get in there and and even make, you know, like, if we could, if we could get a client to just make a change in their packaging, to go from say, you know, a plastic insert to a compostable insert, you know, from go from like a styrene, or something like that, which is horrible to, to, you know, an egg crate or something like that. Then it's, you know, these these things are, they're all incremental, but they're, I think they're meaningful.Caroline Flagiello 49:53Yeah, and that's a really good point, right, like, increments do add up, they do stack up It is important. And I think to answer the circle back down with your question around responsibility. I do always we're all saying that yes, we do have responsibility to bring up these really hard questions. And then also to guide the process to guide the process towards a better answer are utilizing things that they've already used but a new way. And that's where doesn't always have to be reinvention. Right. It could be rejiggering of an existing system, but just optimized in a way that actually improves exponentially over time. So I just want to circle back.Dan Harden 50:38Yeah, good. Very, very good point. If there's ever a time that we have the IRS, you know, in the C suite, or clients, it's probably now because with all of this change, we're seeing, I mean, whether it's social change, climate change, changes in the Delta variant. I mean, there's just so much that we're dealing with right, it's hard to cope. designers are good at coalescing solutions, at culling from what we see in the world into some form of betterment. I think that spells when there's so much change going on, that spells opportunity to me, change occurs, and very difficult times and very positive times. So I think that's what we're seeing here. And it is our moment to do exactly what you're just saying. So this is this is awesome. we've, we've covered so many interesting things. There have been so many incredible questions coming in. So there are so many here on our list. I'm going to just hand select one or two or three, maybe let's see if we can get through them. These are real time. Let's see. Work From Home is made everyone worked more than ever. And where to guess that end is blurred the line between work and home life? What's your plan for returning to a healthy balance of work and rest for your employees?Fred Bould 52:21Well, we're actually we track that pretty closely, we actually we actually go to people and say, we think you're working too much can what can we do to help you balance your workload? Because I mean, we know that when, when people are working too much, the actual productivity goes down, their happiness goes down. And, you know, the work just isn't as good. There's, there's definitely, you know, there's a limit to how much you should work. And we, we we actually be reviewed that every Monday, we look at how much people the leadership team here looks at it and says, Okay, well, everybody's good, you know, sort of like everyone's somewhere around 40 hours. If somebody is above, then we'll go and talk to them and say, Okay, well, how can we help balance your load? It's, it's super, it's super important that people have known this for for ages to there's, you know, somebody works 70 hours, 70 hours a week is not doing a good job for a number of those hours.Caroline Flagiello 53:35Right. Right. I think also, you know, not capping vacation time, I think, what's been really interesting is, you know, people don't tend to abuse that. I mean, some people can, but if you take the time that you need, and expect everyone to be responsible adults, obviously tracking what's going on, you're able to flex and people are happier, as you had mentioned, Fred. You know, I think also, at least for us, like Gone are the days of, I need to see you working in, you know, your desk, 40 hours plus a week, if I don't see you working, then you're really not productive, right? I think, being able to understand that work in life, if they're going to be more fluid, they're going to happen. And you know, what's interesting is that you need to also take care of your wellness. And we are big advocates of that meaning like, Hey, I just need to take a little bit of time to go for a walk or, you know, I you know, at certain time I'm taking this Pilates class or you know, you know, what have you or I want to take a painting class, and it's, you know, started it this time in the evening. That that says it being able to be fluid, but also you can't abuse it, right. So trying to find that that fluid line, and we've been pretty successful in doing because everyone has that drive to do well, I mean, that's we're hungry, if you're a hungry designer who needs to create and innovate, that's great, but then you have rest time, otherwise, you will never replenish. And when you go, go, go, which is what I think as a society we've been doing, but as designers, if you do not give yourself that downtime, you are an empty husk, empty husk and you will not be able to give your best give your all it's why great ideas come in the shower, right? You need that experience during the day, to be able to and it's daily, to be able to do that. And I think with the way that we've been working, and how easy it is to get on video. I mean, I have to admit, I have not myself been very good. At the end of the day, like I just told my husband, also a designer, I'm like, you know, at the end of today, we're running out of here screaming and going to go get dinner, we call it purple dinner, because we eat in our car, but um, you know, mobile dinner and myrin. So, you know, whatever that is, you need to find that joy,Dan Harden 56:23I would agree that also design it's it's one of these professions where you're so informed by the things that you're not necessarily at the moment thinking about or trying to solve, you know, it's, it's, it's the subtle observation you made about an individual in a conversation that somehow informed the way you're thinking about a design problem a year from now. It all goes in, it all goes in, and then it's your job as a designer to sort of readily access it when you need it the most. And, and apply it and sometimes walking around in your sweatpants. A that's all of a sudden you use career something you see something. Yeah, that's all. So here's my final question for you too. What does design Nirvana mean to you, you know, society as gone through something. And as designers, if we're to learn anything from this, we should be able to carry our profession forward in some way to elevate what we do to advance it to bring it to a higher state of existence. I mean, that's kind of what Nirvana is. But is there such a thing as designer about a will the world really benefit from design? And if so, how? How can we move our, our society you know, we went from an industrial society to a creative one, where are we going now? And what is design Nirvana?Caroline Flagiello 57:55So I will say, for me, I have, personally this mix of futurist with light. And I. So think that we are in this age of technology, and design, much like fashion, where it's hope future, it's in your face, we are we're tethered to our products were tethered to our phones, were tethered to our technology. I think for me, design Nirvana would be that technology recedes into our environment more than it ever has. And we call upon it when we need it. But we need to be able to get back to our humanity in a way that I don't think that we have, and it's why home family, and you know, family values, all these things have resurfaced, when you have a very serious question of life or death, right? And for me, I would love to see technology recede into our walls more recede into our environments more, like I said, and populate, you know, when when we need it, and then it recedes back again. And so for me, if we can as designers almost get over ourselves, and the flashiness of look at the cool thing I just made or the cool system I just designed, and be like, wow, and then it just goes away. That to me would be Nirvana.Fred Bould 59:27I would say for, for me does design Nirvana is and we were talking about this recently, is just meaningful, meaningful, hard to solve problems. Because I think that that's, you know, that's, that's what makes work interesting is to have have a hard problem that that needs to be solved, to work for clients that recognize and value our Our efforts and are supportive of the process that we go through. And I, I would say we have that in our clients are generally very, very supportive of what we do and how we do things. And then, you know, to be to be working with a team of a team of experts, people who are super engaged, and, and really engrossed in love what they're doing. I think that's what that's what makes the the studio special is that there's this, this just sort of, kind of, sort of unspoken understanding amongst everybody that, you know, that we're, you know, what we're doing is, is, is, is challenging, but but fun. And, you know, and we all grow, sort of engaged as a group and supportive of each other as individuals.Dan Harden 1:01:01Awesome. You know, I think we're out of time. And it's a shame because we have received so many questions. There's got to be a way well, you can find all three of us online. Sorry to have just volunteered your more time Carolinian friend. But if you wanted to ask any of us individually, any questions I know, I'd be open answer a few questions. And I'm dan@whipsaw.com. And you can certainly follow us at whipsaw design. I just want to thank everybody for tuning in. It's always a pleasure to do this kind of thing. We do have to just stay connected. What we're trying to do is really just keep our community together and have stimulating conversations like this with really cool people like Caroline and Fred. So thanks, everybody. Huge. Thanks, Caroline. Fred, wonderful. As always seeing you guys and good night.Caroline Flagiello 1:02:00For you, Dan. So good to see you, Fred, too. Thank you for havingFred Bould 1:02:04likewise and thank you to which song for organizing this. I know a lot of work went into it. I appreciate everybody on the team for making it happen.Caroline Flagiello 1:02:14Yes, great job team. Right,Dan Harden 1:02:15that good set. Yeah. Great. Thanks to my team. Alright. Goodbye, everybody. Thanks a lot. Thank you for listening to prism, follow us on whipsaw.com or your favorite streaming platform. And we'll be back with more thought provoking episodes soon. prism is hosted by Dan Harden, Principal designer and CEO of Whipsaw, produced by Gabrielle Whelan and Isabella Glenn, mix in sound design by Eric New See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Join us for another incredible conversation with award-winning Industrial Design Director, William Stuart. Will has built an incredible portfolio over the last fifteen years, working on many well-known products, including; August Lock, FORME Life, Coway Icon Air Purifier, Vodafone Neo and Hive View. Will currently leads an industrial team at the world-famous FuseProject, working alongside the legendary, Yves Behar. If you're not familiar, you have got to check out this studio! Their work is continuously receiving recognition from Good Design, Dezeen Awards, Red Dot and Core77. In our conversation, Will shares his personal journey from designer to design leader and his move from London to San Fran. Along the way, we explore his creative process, leadership style and discuss some of his favourite projects. This is a great chat for designers of all levels, but there is some wonderful content for those leading teams. Designer, check. An outstanding portfolio, check. Great character and open to sharing with the Design community, check. Let's get into this one. Get show updates on Instagram: @design_podcast https://www.instagram.com/design_podcast/ LinkedIn: @design_podcast https://www.linkedin.com/company/design-podcast All episodes are available on: www.designpodcast.co

Bill welcomes artist and author Rebekah Modrak. Rebekah is a writer and interventionist artist whose artworks resist consumer culture. Re Made Co. (remadeco.org) poses as an online “company” to recreate actual company Best Made Co. by promoting artisanal toilet plungers. RETHINK SHINOLA (rethinkshinola.com) will guide you through the Shinola company’s past and present of marketing white supremacy. Hyperallergic, Core77, The Creators Project, Detroit MetroTimes, and Design Observer and other publications have written about her work. A Professor in the Stamps School of Art & Design at the University of Michigan, she is co-editor of Radical Humility: Essays on Ordinary Acts.

A big round of applause for La who is joining us this week in Lacey's absence. Y'all know when La is on the pod, things get gross. This week we celebrate all the weird and wonderful nightmare fuel in medical history. Some old school gross shit. From power tools to invasive parasites to pool noodles, we've got some seriously squeamish stories just for you. Remember, whenever in doubt: don't put household objects, animals, or power tools inside yourself. Don't be pre-nut stupid. Be post-nut smart. Send all of your love to Lacey who will be back with us soon. The Wyrd Sisters Podcast is produced on Wurundjeri land. We acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the land, the peoples of the Kulin Nation and pay our respect to their Elders past, present and emerging. Content warnings: non-consensual surgery, childbirth, pregnancy, miscarriage, infant death, parasites, weird sex shit, bestiality, gore Sources: MammaMia, Homa Khaleeli via The Guardian, The Principles of Midwifery by John Aitken, All That Is Interesting, Rain Noe via Core77, Mental Floss, Business Insider, The Pregnancy Zone, TOMO News US, Did You Know Facts?, NBC News, The Richest.com, Buzzfeed, Thomas Morris via new Scientist.com. Music: “Halloween Creep” by Bruised via Envato

On this podcast, Nora and Cathi continue from Nora's backyard with a couple of contemporary robotics stories. Nora mentions fire fighting robots rolling out for use in Los Angeles (via Core77). As we've seen during the pandemic, there are plenty of roles for robots to work in dangerous situations, but is it time for international rules to govern the uses robots can be put to? Cathi has an innovative use too: little walking robots that can move huge buildings to make way for a new development. Watch the video of them in action here.

GUESTS: Peter Rawlinson, CEO and CTO, Lucid Motors and Derek Jenkins, VP of Design, Lucid MotorsPANEL:Rain Noe, Core77; Gary Vasilash, AutoBeat; John McElroy, Autoline.tv

Allan Chochinov, Founding Chair of the MFA in Products of Design graduate program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, joins Lou to discuss how his program approaches the education of new designers—from the belief that grades can hamper creativity and risk taking, to the need for his students to learn the art of careful listening. After eight graduating classes, Allan offers surprises and insights about different career trajectories for design students, and clear evidence that career paths are often non-traditional. Allan Chochinov is a partner of Core77, the design network serving a global community of designers and design enthusiasts since 1995. More about Allan: https://www.allanchochinov.com/ Allan Recommends: •Girls Garage by Emily Pilloton https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44601186-girls-garage?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=ghIzeV0mbb&rank=1 •Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6260997-half-the-sky •Not to Scale: How the Small Becomes Large, the Large Becomes Unthinkable, and the Unthinkable Becomes Possible by Jamer Hunt https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51203318-not-to-scale •Present Shock by Douglas Rushkoff https://rushkoff.com/books/present-shock/ •User Friendly: How the Hidden Rules of Design Are Changing the Way We Live, Work, and Play by Cliff Kuang and Robert Fabricant https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/41940285-user-friendly •By Design: Why There Are No Locks on the Bathroom Doors in the Hotel Louis XIV and Other Object Lessons by Ralph Caplan https://www.secondsale.com/i/by-design-2nd-edition-why-there-are-no-locks-on-the-bathroom-doors-in-the-hotel-louis-xiv-and-other-object-lessons/9781563673498?gclid=Cj0KCQjwreT8BRDTARIsAJLI0KLamLylKCGMu5u7Sz-ZM8lyn8ZgDdugGTwGC7dHJgHBEu_vqp2OL-waAmPQEALw_wcB

Bill welcomes architect and author Donald M. Rattner to the show. Donald's professional and academic activities have been featured on CNN and in such publications as The New York Times, Work Design Magazine, Better Humans, Town & Country, Robb Report, Connecticut Cottages & Gardens, Builder, Traditional Building, L-Magazine, Brooklyn Magazine, ChildArt Magazine, Design Milk, and Core77. Donald is also the author of My Creative Space: How to Design Your Home to Stimulate Ideas and Spark Innovation, The Creativity Catalog, and Parallel of the Classical Orders of Architecture.  Don't miss it!

Have you tried meditation but can't seem to stick with it? Do you want to meditate but don't know how to start? This is the episode for you! Our guest today is Jesal Trivedi, a serial entrepreneur, speaker and thought-leader. We discuss the many benefits of a regular meditation practice, and how his new company Audri can help us learn to meditate, and stick with it! Jesal is the Founder and CEO of Aduri, a venture-backed tech startup in health and wellness. Based in NYC, they ran a successful Kickstarter campaign, have been featured in Cheddar, Entrepreneur Magazine and Core77, and are backed by NYC's top investors.Prior to founding Aduri, Jesal led the mobile product team at Blue Label Labs, co-founded Tech808 / The Phat Startup (featured in TechCrunch, Fast Company), and was an innovation consultant working with brands like Nike and MetLife. Jesal holds a Masters in Interactive Technology from NYU ITP and B.A. in Economics and Business of Media, Entertainment and Technology from NYU.

Welcome to the Elevator World News Podcast. Today’s podcast news podcast is sponsored by elevatorbooks.com: www.elevatorbooks.com CORONAVIRUS INDUSTRY UPDATE ELEVATOR WORLD (EW) has been the vertical-transportation industry’s source for news and information for 67 years, and we aim to continue to be during the coronavirus pandemic affecting readers, advertisers, employees, contributors and associates around the world. With magazines in the U.S., India, the Middle East, Turkey, Europe and the U.K. and a strong online presence, EW has a wide reach. We will share your company news as often as it comes in, so please send it to us at email. Current updates include: - Core77.com, a publication for industrial designers, recently shared “Four Anti-Virus Design Changes for Elevators We'll Probably See in the Near Future,” which includes ideas from the Chinese division of thyssenkrupp Elevator and heating, ventilation and air-conditioning company Freedom Industry Co. - Lerch Bates Inc. is providing complimentary assistance on the systematic process for exercising elevator and escalator equipment during this period at email. The consultancy’s next tip will discuss how COVID-19 will impact vertical transportation as employees return to the workplace. Image credit: courtesy from Resolute Elevator To read the full transcript of today's podcast, visit: elevatorworld.com/news Subscribe to the Podcast: iTunes │ Google Play | SoundCloud │ Stitcher │ TuneIn

On Episode 003, Dave sits down with Emily Engle, a now freelance writer. In this conversation we talk about how Emily got into writing for Core77 and Hypebeast, discusses being an introvert, interviewing profound names like Tom Sachs and Jeff Staple, to having goals of opening up a bed and breakfast in Japan.

In this episode of Sustainability Matters Today, I interview Safia Qureshi, award-winning Architect, designer and environmentalist, founder of CupClub, and a Champion of Replacing the Disposable with the Reusable. CupClub partners with businesses, catering companies, facilities management providers, retailers and brands to replace disposable cups with a significantly more sustainable alternative. The company is pioneering the circular economy by creating a returnable cup that people can “borrow” from a coffee shop and return it to a convenient location once they’re done. With its products manufactured in the UK, CupClub creates half the carbon dioxide equivalent of disposables and ceramics, while significantly reducing waste. CupClub has earned a variety of awards including top prize winner from the 2017 Ellen MacArthur Foundation and IDEO and appeared in a number of media and publications, including BBC, Sky, Design Week, Core77, Dezeen, Design Indaba and The Drum. Please make sure to subscribe to the Sustainability Matters Today podcast to learn more about other champions of sustainability like Safia. I hope you enjoy the episode! Resources: Other Resources: Read the transcript: https://www.sustainabilitymatters.today/safia-qureshi-cupclub-transcript Watch the full episode: https://sustainabilitym.at/Safia-Qureshi-Youtube

In episode 12, I talk with Michael DiTullo, one day after he received his Personal Recognition Award by IDSA during IDC 2019 in Chicago.“Michael DiTullo has designed for mega-companies like Google, Nike, and Honda as well as innovative start-ups. He has been the Design Director at Converse, Creative Director at frog, and Chief Design Officer at Sound United.Michael is known for his impressive body of work, yet as one of his nominators writes, “his ability to give back is underrated.” He is gracious in giving his time to students and non-profits; served on several design boards and committees, including this year’s IDEA jury; and has contributed to Core77 for nearly two decades.Michael is praised for his honesty and willingness to promote a healthy dialogue about big issues in ID. His latest initiative #RealDesignersShip(link is external) is just one example of his ongoing commitment to building a supportive and trusting design community.” - IDSAWith Michael, I talk about the what he learned designing and prototyping with Michael Jordan working at Nike, risk and opportunities for the future of design and industrial design, why kids should be taught in schools about design and how to report as a VP of Design directly to the board and talk to business.-The next IDC will happen 2020 in Seattle. For more information about it head here: https://www.internationaldesignconference.comChris has an interdisciplinary background ranging from Design Strategy, Research as well as Service and Industrial Design. Recently he had the chance to work as a Senior Design Consultant for Embraer exploring the future of aerial urban mobility as well as working as a Creative Director for InReality in San Francisco.Chris tells about the process of realigning the IDSA programme and organisation using design and especially service design. Of course, we also dive into the future of Industrial Design itself and how to position yourself as an Industrial Designer in a world that gets more complicated and a design industry that constantly invents a new definition of design and categories of designers like “hybrid-designers”. We talk about what is important for Industrial Designers to learn moving forward, trends to be aware of and give also give advice to young design students. Why, how and what industrial design drives forward: we also dive into the impact and responsibility of industrial design and how we should act on this.-The next IDC will happen 2020 in Seattle. For more information about it head here: https://www.internationaldesignconference.comAbout IDSA:For over fifty years, IDSA has worked to advance the practice of industrial design through education, information, community and advocacy. Our roots stretch to the beginning of the profession and our members are, and have been, some the most celebrated industrial designers of all time. However, being a part of this community means you are joining something bigger than any one individual. Your participation helps strengthen the industrial design profession as a whole and contributes to the boundless impact of design within business, culture and society.Learn more at https://www.idsa.org

This week we recap the Core77 Conference. We share our thoughts on topics presented by some awesome speakers including Liz Jackson, John Maeda, and Francois Nguyen to name a few. Give us a call on our google voicemail 1-646-494-4011 or send in a question to minordetailspodcast@gmail.com. Our shoutout of the week is @thechrisdo . You can find us on instagram @minordetailspod, @nickpbaker and @idrawonreceipts. Support our partner @letsdesigndaily. Come join the conversation on the discord.

Ani Liu uses scientific processes to create art pieces that delve into the diverse aspects of humanity and our ever-evolving culture. These fringe art experiments have taken the form of biologically-modified plants, mind controlled sperm, a "forced" happiness lab (using science to induce positive feelings), and much, much more. Through all these art explorations, Ani questions, in this technologically mediated age, what does it mean to be human?-About Ani Liu-Ani Liu is a research-based artist working at the intersection of art & science. Her work examines the reciprocal relationships between science, technology and their influence on human subjectivity, culture, and identity.Ani's work has been presented internationally, and featured on National Geographic, VICE, Mashable, Gizmodo, TED, Core77, PCMag, FOX and WIRED. Her work has been shown at Ars Electronica, the Queens Museum Biennial, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Asian Art Museum, MIT Museum, MIT Media Lab, Mana Contemporary, Harvard University, and Shenzhen Design Society. She is the winner of the Princeton Arts Fellowship (2019-2021), the S&R Washington Prize (2018), the YouFab Global Creative Awards (1st place, 2018), the Biological Art & Design Award (2017). She is currently teaching at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and is on critique panels at Harvard, Dartmouth, MIT, University of Pennsylvania, NYU, UNC Charlotte, Pratt, Parsons. At MIT, she is on the committee of Art Scholars. Ani has a B.A. from Dartmouth College, a Masters of Architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and a Master of Science from MIT Media Lab.Ani continually seeks to discover the unexpected, through playful experimentation, intuition, and speculative storytelling. Her studio is based in New York City. Learn more about Ani at studio@ani-liu.comFollow here @ani.liu.studio

It’s been a busy day for us - super fortunate to have so many people here in Chicago this weekend, and all dropped by our CONTEXT podcast to say hi! We sat down with two of our advisors - Emily Engle, Editor at Core77 and Pedro Montalvo, Designer at TURF. We talked about the awesome things they’re doing and their impact on the design community. To follow their design work and journey, be sure to follow Emily and Pedro on Instagram under the handles @_peddz and @notemilyengle. Thank you for tuning into CONTEXT, send us a DM or email at hello@advdes.org to provide us with your thoughts and comments on our dialogue with designers!

Allison is currently living in NYC working at Core77 and is in contact with some of the best thinkers and designer that America has to offer. Her pulse on the world of design is impressive and I really enjoyed talking to her about many ways humans can direct the future of our quality of life. Allison is a versatile guest who is able to move from topic to topic through a design lens to help make earth a more comfortable place to exist. https://www.core77.com/conference https://www.instagram.com/allisonfonder/?hl=en https://www.instagram.com/core77/?hl=en PATREON https://www.patreon.com/planetdosed VENMO @planetdosed INSTAGRAM https://www.instagram.com/planetdosed/ GMAIL planetdoesed@gmail.com

I'm joined by LinYee Yuan for a lunch of slow roasted salmon with citrus and chiles, along with a simple avocado salad and parmesan lemon Israeli couscous. LinYee is the founder and editor of MOLD, a critically-acclaimed editorial platform about designing the future of food. Through original reporting, MOLD explores how designers can address the coming food crisis by creating products and systems that will help feed 9 billion people by the year 2050. LinYee was previously the entrepreneur in residence for QZ.com and an editor for Core77, T: The New York Times Style Magazine and Theme Magazine. She has written about design and art for Food52, Design Observer, Cool Hunting, Elle Decor and Wilder Quarterly. LinYee also contributed the foreword to “Food Futures: Sensory Explorations in Food Design” and “Cooking Up Trouble.”

On today's podcast, Nora Young talks about Ordine, from Italian design studio, Adriano (via Core77). It's a smart solution for people who don't need an oven, and don't want to dedicate full time real estate to a stove top. The Ordine burners hang on the wall when not in use. Simply put them on the counter when you're ready to go. They use induction heating, (they refer to it as an "induction hub") so you don't have to worry about blazing hot burners sitting out on your counter. See pics and other smart home designs here. So, you have your small urban space, how are you going to get around in our increasingly crowded cities? Romanian company, Carpii has the 4ciclet, a four-wheeled bike/Segway sort of thing designed for covering relatively small distances (via New Atlas). You 'pedal' the 4ciclet using a couple of treadles with your feet while standing, so it doesn't require the same effort as conventional cycling, suggesting its use for older people. See videos here.

Michelle Sheng is our guest this episode! Ann Arbor in tha house! We talk about the NASA InSight landing and the weird fun that comes along with being multihyphenate creator of things. Rob takes a swing at animation and gets beaten up by about 5 different animation applications. Michelle brings her sketchbook pages to the web and navigates the dark forest of self-identification. Taylor rolls with the punches this episode. We also talk about jumpsuits, fireworks and the health ramifications of 3D printing. Also, congratulations to Earlonne Woods! You can check out our projects at http://projects.opposablepodcast.com Props to Blondihacks, Nik Kantar, Walter Kitundu, Federico Tobon, Kelly Martin, Luke Noonan, Mike Tully, Adam Mayer, David Bellhorn, Tim Sway and Charlene McBride! They're our top Patreon supporters! Join 'em at: https://www.patreon.com/opposablethumbs Special Guest: Michelle Sheng.

There’s a Difference Between School and Real Life: This week on Track Changes, Paul and Rich sit down with Allan Chochinov, chair of the MFA in Products of Design program at the School of Visual Arts and founder of design network Core77. We talk about who is really teachable, building good design from huge problems, the vast applications of "design thinking", and how much time is wasted on meetings. Allan shares two incredible medical UX-design moments that he's witnessed— building an at home diagnostic tool for HIV testing and creating a quick-attach prosthetic limb. Both of these scenarious required empathy towards consumer experiences and pragmatism. These small design gestures can have a big impact.   Paul Ford You’re a— you’re a sensitive, in touch person. Rich Ziade [Crosstalk] Are you in your fifties, Allan? Allan Chochinov I am, yeah. PF It’s a little— RZ You look great! PF [Crosstalk] When you realize . . . AC I’m gonna be 57 soon. PF Yeah. RZ What?!? PF I know— it’s [snickers] we’ve had this conversation. RZ Oh he’s had LSD— PF Look at the beautiful hair— AC My mom’s— [inaudible over crosstalk] PF Yeah, some grey. Some grey. RZ I— I can’t see his face right now but the forehead is tremendous. PF No, no. Alan just won a lottery on this front. RZ Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Are we recording? PF We are. We’re talking about— RZ Steph, feel free to put this stuff in [laughter]. PF [Chuckling] We’re talking about how handsome Allan is [voices fade out, music fades in, plays alone for 18 seconds, ramps down]. Allan Chochinov, a key person in New York City tech and design for a long, long time. Let’s talk about that in a minute but the first thing to talk about, really, is you run a program at the school of visual arts. [0:56] AC Yup. PF What is the name of that program? AC Uh [music fades out] the name is MFA in Products of Design. PF Ok. That— [yeah] ok. Let’s break that down a little bit [laughs]. AC We should. We intended for it to be uh future proof and [uh huh] it actually came true because— well, I mean the idea was that everything is a product of design [mm hmm]. So each and every kind of design: uh graphic design; industrial design; service design; interaction design, social innovation design; tons of business design— PF So a new design— like, you know, suddenly there’s a new kind of way— AC Well, yeah, radically, you know, multidisciplinary or generalist anyway [ok] but what’s interesting is people see the word product design they think that we’re an industrial design program and we do teach industrial design— PF Like make a teapot kind [yeah] of thing, yeah. AC But the fortunate thing is that, I guess about four or five years ago interaction designers kind of like stole the term product design from [snickers] industrial designers— PF Actually that’s— boy, we did, didn’t we? AC Which is— it’s either like funny or heartbreaking depending on which side you’re on. PF No, it’s funny for us. Yeah. We’re— we’re enjoyin’ it. AC So many of my colleagues spent their whole lives trying to, you know, help people understand what an industrial designer was, you know you would— you would say well, “We’re— we design product.” [Oh!] Product design. That was easier. Now it’s just like, “Oh, what platform? Facebook?” PF [Exhales hard] We destroyed everything with that— RZ “We” is a lot— PF No. But you know how many times have we said “product design”? RZ We jumped on it. We did jump on it. [2:17] PF Yeah. AC You know? Many people have said everything is interaction design, everything experience design. So— PF It’s true. AC Alright. PF Alright, so tell us a little bit— this program, it’s a graduate program? AC Yup. PF And it has how many students— AC There’s about 18 students a year. Uh it’s single track; every student takes every course, uh no grades which is really helpful uh cuz we want maximum risk and, you know, it’s point of departure is that uh and, you know, we’re really upfront about this that like everything’s broken. And so that everything can be uh reimagined. We’re I wouldn’t say cynical about best practices but we’re certainly interested in doing things in a way that we haven’t gotten good at doing them. PF You gave me a piece of advice once um [uh oh] um that— No. It was very, very valuable. It was just that there’s a real difference between life and school. AC Yeah. PF And that when you’re in school and you’re learning that’s not practicing for the real world, exactly, it’s not like, “Here: learn these incredibly necessary skills for tomorrow,” some of that has to be there but for the most part it’s like, “Let’s break things; let’s figure it out. I want you to be thinkers.” AC Yeah. I— I’m still really sympathetic with that um I think you need, you know, especially grad school, it’s just a two-year program, and, you know, they’re grownups, they’re people who chose to come back to school so there’s a strange— like when I’m meeting with potential students or prospective students and, you know, they have this idea of this place where they wanna be after grad school [right]. So they’re trying to find either the right grad school to get them from where they are now to this vision of the future or whether grad school at all is the right sort of medium to get them from here to there. Uh but the problem is that grad school’s job is to like mix you up, in that, you know, couple years between where you are and where you wanna be and, in fact, even within the first, you know, two months, where you thought you wanted to be like probably won’t look very interesting anymore [sure]. And also— you’re gonna— grad school’s other job is to show you all these other potential futures that you didn’t even know existed, many of which, as you know, don’t even yet exist. [4:16] PF What are some of the things they do in this remarkable journey? AC You know, we have a— a real mix between very purposeful, very social projects and very fanciful and projects around— we actually have a course called Design Delight. PF Ok. AC Um you know a couple projects that stick out, Smruti Adya’s one of the projects she did— she was doing a project around prosthetics [mm hmm] uh and limb loss and limb difference and um a lot of these theses they can really turn on one sentence, like one of their subject matter experts or one of their, you know, user interviews will say something that will change everything. And so she was interviewing um a woman who had lost her leg and she said, “You know, late at night um when I have to go to the bathroom, uh sometimes I crawl to the bathroom. [Oof] Because it’s just— yeah. Because it’s just so onerous um—” PF “I don’t wanna put my legs on—” Yeah sure. AC And you know, that’s, you know, it really made an impact on Smruti and I think in like one or two days she just banged out this device, it’s actually— it’s on the website, called Swift and it’s essentially just a white tube that can expand a little bit and you would either print it out at Shapeways— you could, you know, measure and— and order a size or maybe there would be several sizes at— at Amazon and it’s just like this opportunistic limb that you can slip on, not have to crawl to the bathroom and then return to bed. So, those kinds of products are amazing to me because there’s not a— there’s a— it’s like an incredible lots for incredible little [right] um and I just love the idea of the power of design where you could make a small gesture and get an extraordinary impact from it um— RZ Usually I— I think what’s— AC And the visuals are very convincing. I mean like you— you should see the work. RZ I mean oft— oftentimes that— when the design or the design arm of some big company, it’s usually driven by markets, right? [Mm hmm] Like it’s time for us to have little teeny Bluetooth headphones because Apple came out with little teeny ones [yup]. PF Right. [6:19] RZ So go do those, right? And that’s not driven by fundamentally a problem. Of course, everyone would like smaller headphones but really [yeah] the catalyst prove to be competition and [trails off as Paul comes in] — PF Well and, “I’m gonna— I’m gonna put my mark on it.” RZ You know and, “I’m gonna put my— we gotta—” AC [Crosstalk] Oh for sure. RZ “— have ‘em.” PF Yeah. “Ours will be purple.” RZ Yeah. Exactly which is— and— [stammers] that sits in such stark contrast to what you just described, right? Which is— AC It does. I mean, you know, one of common denominators, which I actually don’t talk and think much about but for this moment I will, is beauty. I mean this thing— this thing’s beautiful uh and so there’s a whole spectrum of we could say “purposefulness” um in design, everything from, you know, what industrial designers would call like “skin jobs” like, you know, very styling, take a thing and just, you know, shroud it in something beautiful or really rethinking the problem. Some of the stuff that you do in reframing, let’s say you have a client comes to you and they think that they want something and, you know, that’s good enough to start but likely that’s not what you’re gonna end up doing and the problem finding uh the scoping, the reframing of the whole engagement is gonna be the most important part up front. That’s no less true for any kind of design in my opinion including uh product design, just product design’s really [chuckles] hard. PF Right. AC You know: materials; technology; labor practices; supply chain. It’s just endless. PF We find this all the time. Like nothing that— people walk in the door and are ready to get that contract moving [yeah] and it’s we don’t want them to. RZ Well, actually, it’s— it’s counterintuitive, right? We actually get ‘em— we wanna slow down for a sec. AC Yeah, you wanna add some friction which they don’t wanna— [7:49] PF No! Cuz especially if they’re ready to go, it feels terrible— RZ And also we wanna— we also wanna close the business. [Yeah] So it’s a little weird for us too but you also don’t wanna end up— end up down a path where it’s like you’re doing a thing that a) is untenable; or isn’t gonna make a lot of sense down the road. PF You know what I’ve learned though is that everybody knows, like you just— you don’t wanna blow up that— that moment of fantasy is really important where your idea is absolutely transformational. Because the process whereby you actually start to go, “I’ve had a few of these ideas,” and then you start to sort of see them get poked at by reality as you walk around with them and then you figure out what you’re really in the business for, why are you doing this? You know? What change could you affect? Because kind of any— especially with technology, any technology idea you come up with: a smarter watch; a better hat. It’s doesn’t matter. Is going to be utterly world transformational and worth a trillion dollars. AC It’s everything is— and everything is a platform. PF That’s right. AC Even if it’s not like unless you look at it at the platform level, you’re not looking at it. The systems mapping, I think, is the most valuable thing that the students do. Infinity mapping; system mapping [how do they— what’s]; user journey mapping— PF What do those look like? Just— AC The most basic one, and probably the funnest one is a mindmap where you’ll put let’s say the topic in the middle of a piece of paper and you’ll draw a circle around it; and then you’ll have these lines that radiate out like spokes on a wheel; and they’ll radiate out to other circles, the things that are related. So maybe— like my background is in medical design, so it might radiate out to— well, what we’re talking about, industrial design, let’s say ergonomics. And then it could radiate out to regulatory, and then it could radiate out to money. Uh and very close to that is gonna be insurance and then payers and payees will be around insurance bubble and then you start making smaller bicycle spoke wheels around each of the wheels, and all of a sudden you have this map on the wall. And then it’s a pretty quick trip to do what we would call a systems map after that which is— RZ [Crosstalk] Well, ok— AC— where you would start to organize this a little bit, it’s not just a big like blah on the wall. And when you show that to a client or to really anybody, it is likely the first time they’ve ever seen what they do, and it is often just, you know, they’re jaw drops. Because nobody ever showed them a picture— [10:00] RZ [Crosstalk] They finally zoomed out [yeah] and took a bird’s eye view. PF Well, your own— your own process is a mystery, right? Like who knows your own process? AC Absolutely. Same with students like they’re the worst— they’re the worst at seeing what they do or just a little edit that will turn something from good to like, you know, great [sure]. I mean you find with— with your clients, right? That you have to do that in the beginning or you’re— you know, you’re digging a hole that you’re gonna be in, sometimes when I say to my student’s, you know, when they’re like, “How should we write our thesis books?” I’m like, “Well, you know, imagine reading them.” [Laughs] [Right, right] Write them— write them as if you would actually have to read them and they’re like, “Oh. Ok.” PF So students come in, they wanna make things, they wanna do things, design things, what are they— what are they like when they come out after two years? AC You know there’s certainly converse— I wanna say that they’re multilingual [ok]. That’s— that’s ambitious but there’s certainly converse and they understand how, you know, VCs talk and what they worry about; they’re gonna understand how to pitch to foundations; they’re gonna understand UX, UI, lots of principles around graphic design and typography hierarchy. Just like all of it. It’s— it’s ambitious. The thing that we do is we have a lot of short courses instead of [huh] — we almost— we have almost no 15 week courses left. I believe that people can learn things faster than most people think that they can [mm hmm]. Also, graduate students worry, like they’re old enough to know, I— I’ve written about this, they’re old enough to know that they’re uh decisions have consequences so they don’t wanna negative consequences so they don’t wanna decide anything. So they read another book. And so when you have a project that is, you know, 15 weeks long, you know, they’ll start and then by week three or four like it’ll get hard. [Sure] You know, cuz like anything worth working on gets hard. And then they’re like, “Well, maybe I should try this other idea?” So then they go to their other idea and then three or four weeks later, that gets hard too cuz anything [snickers] worth on gets hard. And they’re like, “Well, you know, now I’m getting worried. Lemme go back to my first idea,” and then it’s just like this desperate rush to the finish [right]. I’m sure it’s the same— same in business, right? With a seven week course, you begin and then you middle and then you end, you’re ending after like class two or three um and you have to commit to idea— to an idea and just never, never give up. Like [mm hmm] no changing your idea. Of course it will change and evolve but no like starting like, “Oh well now I’m gonna do something around optics.” So we design out those weeks of anxiety where students will typically have like an [snickers] existential crisis but the best part is if we make a course from 15 weeks to seven weeks, we have a new seven weeks now that we can create a new course around [mm hmm] um and because we’re in New York and because a lot of the classes are in the evening, you know, I can get people to say yes to teaching who could normally never say yes to teaching like 15, you know, afternoons. But you know like Paola Antonelli can give us, you know, five evenings a year, right? Um— [12:45] PF That’s right. She’s the Exec Director of MoMA, right? AC She’s at MoMA, yeah. PF Yeah. AC Uh she’s actually on sabbatical this year but and also like she can kill it in five weeks, you know? PF Sure! Where do they go when they graduate? AC I thought that it was gonna be just entrepreneurship city [mm hmm]. You know? It was so in the air, like I always conceived of it as a leadership program but I did have an idea that there would be more businesses launched out of it [mm hmm] and I think that I was a little naive— I’m Canadian. Still Canadian. I’ve been here for 30— 32 years. PF [Laughs] It’s never gonna leave you. AC Ugh. I wanted to vote. I mean, you know, it was the— PF Yeah. RZ Oh you’re still a Canadian citizen. AC Yeah, I am. RZ But residing here, in the US. AC Yeah, so I underestimated just the— the financial burden of this thing. I mean— RZ I was about to make a joke— AC— you know, grad school is so expensive. RZ— you just left ‘em with a debt [laughs]. PF Yeah. AC Yeah, I know and they worry about that. [13:31] PF “You owe me 80,000 dollars and start a company— go start a company.” Yeah. RZ “Good luck with your startup.” AC And, you know, add— add to that the cost of living and eating and they’re not earning money, right? Like they don’t have jobs [sure] while they’re in school. So it’s a— the opportunity cost is immense, in any event— So they get the jobs at IDEO and Frog and SYP and Johnson & Johnson, like lots of really great companies. And then medium and small sized consultancies as well, and it’s really only in the last couple of years that the students are— are leaving those, you know, probably their second jobs— PF Right. AC— and starting out on their own. The other thing that I knew but I— I hadn’t internalized is that like nobody stays anywhere more than 18 months. So I can— I can calm some students when they’re so worried about like, you know, picking the right first job kind of thing and I’m like, “You know, don’t worry about it so much.” PF “You’re gonna leave.” AC “You’re— you’re gonna leave anyway.” PF “In a year and six months.” AC And this used to be more of like an advertising agency model [mm hmm], you know, you’d raise your salary by leaving every 16 or 18 months or whatever the convention but, you know, creative people are really restless. Um [yeah] and they want new challenges and, you know, school in a way makes that worse because it spoils them with all these fascinating things to do like every day of the week, every week of the two years, and then they get somewhere and, you know [well and also you’ve just given them—] it’s not inventions time every day. PF You’ve given them the leaders of thinking in New York City around the field as their teachers, advisors, and friends. AC Yeah. RZ WHo— whose doing great work right now? [14:56] AC Well, actually, I mean back to one of my students, Souvik Paul, he’s actually turning his thesis into a commercial product, it’s called Cathbuddy. It was called Clean Cath. Two weeks before he came to the grad program, a friend of his was in a car accident and became paralyzed, so sort of back on paralysis. And he knew that for his thesis he wanted to— to do work around, you know, life in a wheelchair, but one of the things that he discovered is that there is a budget for how many disposable catheters you get a month if you are, you know, cathing and that it’s usually not enough, what insurance will pay for, and that people are sterilizing their own disposable catheters and reusing them. This is just like pretty specific design challenge. And they’re using like, you know, Clorox and microwaves and I mean it’s just [Paul sighs] — it’s a disaster out there [yeah], right? And so the risk for infection— RZ Wow. AC Yeah. It’s like — it’s a— it’s a big deal. So he came up with this device that would use a UV sterilization and you would put your used catheters into this device and it would sterilize them and then you could use them again. And he had really kept this dream alive since he’s graduated and worked so it’s gonna— PF That’s great. AC— it’s gonna be a real product. So like— RZ It’s not out yet. AC It’s not out but it’s like you think like that’s really like almost arcane. Right? It’s like a really, really specific but the numbers of people who use, you know, these products is extraordinary, so the scale of something like that could have really great impact. RZ Also there’s no segmentation here. This isn’t a urban problem or an American problem— AC Yeah, I know. PF Yeah, you’re— AC I think it’s a not talked about problem which makes it actually extra fascinating. PF Your persona work is pretty simple on this one. RZ Straightforward and it’s global in scale, I mean. [16:39] PF The other thing uh that I love is you and I love to talk about how we like really, you know, difficult, disgusting, horrible problems. And that’s a— RZ Are you looking at me right now, Paul? [Laughter] PF You and me. Yes. RZ Yes, yes. PF Yeah, we love to— we love to brag about it and that’s an actual like— RZ That’s an actual horrible problem. PF Cath— catheters that have to be clean where you can’t get the insurance money. So you had an agency. AC Yeah. It’s— it was that but it was, you know, sister to uh a design like publication platform. So this is ‘95. I had graduated in ‘86 and ‘87 from Pratt with an industrial design degree and I was— I did my thesis on stick proof hypodermic needles. So hypodermic needles where you couldn’t get an accidental needle stick. PF Gotcha. AC Uh HIV/AIDS was like new and everyone, you know, all the healthcare industry was like freaking out. The world needed a device like this. I mean now it’s like mandated by law but in those days it didn’t exist and no one could spend anymore money on any kind of— RZ State the problem, again. AC Um, you’re taking blood or [huh] you’re giving a shot [yeah] um and you remove the needle from the arm and you turn and accidentally um, you know, stick somebody [mm hmm] or you’re sheathing um the needle with the needle cap, the plastic cap, and you miss it and you jab your thumb. RZ Yourself. AC Um I worked for a year and a half in that area, ultimately it expanded to um a phlebotomy which is a fancy word for laboratory blood collection. So looking at the whole, well, user journey of blood from when it leaves the arm to when you’re gonna get, you know, a result. So things like, you know, when you put blood in a test tube— we’re getting very detailed now, right? Um that blood builds up pressure and so when you open up the rubber test tube top it can aspirate into your face, um and you can contract HIV/AIDS through your eyes that way. Um this is getting lovelier and lovelier, right? Um so I graduated and I knew I wanted to go into medical design. I always had like a big problem with solid waste. I knew I wanted to design things but I couldn’t stand the idea of mass production in just garbage. So I went into medical design. The joke’s on me, of course, cuz, you know, medical design creates more plastic than anything [crosstalk and laughter] and it’s like incinerated so it’s like extra bad, right? [18:51] PF It’s not like a styrofoam wrapper for a hamburger. That’s like [Rich laughs]. AC Oh I mean the mechanics in some of these devices like surgical staplers, I mean and it’s all just thrown out after a single use. I got to continue my interest in HIV/AIDS, I worked in secret on a project for Johnson & Johnson, it was the first home— uh home HIV test kit. PF Sure. AC But they weren’t ready to put their name on it and so like we couldn’t tell anybody we were working on it. Mackenzie was involved; the FDA; [wow] C. Everett Koop, if you remember this very beloved [yeah] Surgeon General [yeah]. Uh you know so I’m like behind the one way mirror like testing the design of this— of this kit that you would essentially prick your finger and then it provided a dry blood sample and then it— it sent in the mail but we knew that we were, you know, we— even in those days, we didn’t call it like, you know, user segmentation but we knew that we were really looking at sexually active teenagers; we knew that we were looking at, you know, in all candor, like cheating spouses [sure]; we knew that we were looking at groups that are high risk for HIV; and that this thing was gonna be done secretly and in some like with a lot of anxiety [mm hmm]. And so pricking your finger— RZ Lock the bathroom. AC So lock the bathroom. So thank you. That’s the first place is where is this is gonna happen? It’s gonna happen in the bathroom. So in the bathroom, not a lot of horizontal surfaces. Right? So we actually had to create— PF Ahhh. AC— a surface, this kit actually unfolded into a surface because we knew that it was gonna be in some sense laying in the sink. PF It’s not a desk. RZ You’re on toilet. [20:15] PF You’re not in a lab. Yeah. AC Well it’s before phones, so— you’re not in the toilet that long. Yeah. Um well and then it gets— so you have to get rid of the evidence, so the kit has to somehow go away. PF Yeah. RZ Alright. So wait, I’m trying to visualize it, so you’re in the bathroom, maybe you got on the floor, maybe you sat on the toilet. You open this kit up, it kinda creates almost like a— I guess a tray. AC Kind of a flat surface. Yeah. RZ A flat surface. Ok. Next. AC The big battle was the pre-test counselling. PF Ok. AC Because there had never been— there’s no precedent for a home diagnostic kit, like a pregnancy kit for instance, of a fatal disease [right]. Right? Um also the false-positive and false-negative was really, really important here because— RZ Stakes are high. AC— even if you were negative, you had to be re-tested in three more months [right]. Right? And it had to be private. So the idea— we came up with this like barcoding system where you would pull out this ticket and we shaped it in the size of a credit card so it was a very familiar shape. And you could put it in your wallet and hide it. PF Right. AC But if you were in a situation where you weren’t hiding this kit, where you were with a partner, and you were both doing it, let’s say, then that number would be on there. Ultimately there was a 1-800 number and the way that it shaked out was that if it was negative, you would get a kind of recording and if it was positive, you would get a live person [mm hmm]. So this was really hard to do and there were two different land sets in the package cuz sometimes you miss on the first one cuz it really hurts [sure]. So even if you miss and you don’t get enough blood, you have to do it again. And you’re really scared to do it again. Like I’d come home with these like sore fingertips for weeks [right] um— [21:48] PF Oh cuz you have to test this thing, constantly. AC The full user journey, right? So now what happens? You haven’t— it hasn’t worked. You take it back to the drugstore and you want a refund? This is supposed to be anonymous. Right? There’s no name attached to this. You’re not registering to do this. So— so thinking through these just unbelievably complex— RZ Sure. AC— thorny user experience design issues. RZ Also, there’s— there’s blood on stuff. AC The whole thing is just— [yeah]. You know back to the pre-test counselling— or the no pre-test counselling because C. Everett Koop was so beloved in those days, I think a deal was made probably bar— uh you know, brokered by Mackenzie and FDA that if C. Everett Koop wrote the— the manual then that, in some sense, would count as pre-test counselling. I mean it really came down— RZ That’s ridiculous. PF Woah! AC — It really came down to, like, “Listen: people should go to a clinic. They should go their doctor.” [Right] And then on the other side it’s just like, “People don’t go to the clinic, they don’t have a doctor, people are dying. Do you want this kit with a booklet? And no pre-test counselling in person? Or we’re gon— or nothing?” And so it became this really— it was an extraordinary— RZ It was a lot at play. AC— moment in time. Yeah. RZ Yeah. AC So as— and every one of these was just such an unbelievable design decision. It comes on the market, it’s ripped off in one day. [Someone whistles in disbelief/amazement] Right? The knockoff like same forward factor; similar graphic identity; basically the same layout. I think it was on the market— J&J was on the market for I think a year or two only, you know they really need a homerun with J&J like just the scale— PF It’s a giant company. Yeah. AC Yeah, so they, you know, have to sell a lot of anything and they’ll— they’ll sink, you know, huge sums of money into R&D for a product and if it doesn’t go, it doesn’t go. Um— [23:26] PF This is not something you can market like Q-Tips. AC No and all of— I mean imagine those meetings. PF Yeah. AC Right? PF Well that’s just giant company, too [yeah]. Like what are you gonna do? You got Mackenzie and the FDA in there. It’s a tornado. [Yeah, yeah]. And little Allan just trying to do his job [laughs]. AC Yeah, you know, I was just— anyways, so um I started teaching in 1995 and that’s where I met Eric Ludlum and Stu Constantine who were the founders of Core77 and Pratt was smart enough— for their thesis they wanted to make a website. So this was like two years into the World Wide Web and um and that was the year that I started teaching and Pratt was smart enough to hire them to design their first pratt.edu website and gave them um a room and a T1 line which you will appreciate. RZ Woo! PF Yeah. AC Yeah, right? PF Wooooo! AC Um and essentially like incubated them when that word wasn’t a word yet [sure] and so in those days I would teach like a full day which was amazing. Like three hours in the morning; three hours in the afternoon; like sophomore id studio. You could show a film; you could have a discussion; do critiques. It was amazing. PF Oh so it was a good thing? AC It was a good thing. PF That much teaching? AC Yeah but I had a lunch hour and I— PF I’m tired just— [24:26] AC — well yeah, now it’s like unimaginable [laughter] but I’d go there— I’d go there at lunch time and uh to the Core77 office and I would like learn HTML. PF Sure. RZ For those that don’t know what is Core77? Let’s— AC Uh so Core77 was actually the first design website online. It specialized in industrial design. So it had a very tight like per-view. And Stu and Eric talk about it that they created the site that they wish they had when they were looking for grad schools. PF Sure. AC Um and it had all of these sections, it had a resource section. Um like you remember what things were like in 1995, right? It was like web 1.0. Um— PF There wasn’t that much web! AC No, no, I mean and it was— you know these were static pages. I actually had a column called Contraptions. Stu and Eric tease that I— they say that I was first design blogger which actually might be true cuz I— I would pick like a funny object and write like some pithy paragraph about it and do like five of them a month kind of thing. PF I’m just worried Jeffrey Zeldman will burst through this door. AC I know. Yeah [laughs]. RZ He’s coming for us from three blocks away. AC Yeah I don’t know [Paul laughs] if there were web standards either. So I— I got to know these guys and um— and then there was a project that uh I was consulting with Ayse Birsel for Herman Miller. It was this brand new— you might remember a system called Resolve, it was based on 120 degree angles instead of 90 degree angles. PF Oh that’s right! It was the future of the cubicle! [25:40] AC Yeah it was— it was phenomenal. RZ Oh! PF Yeah. AC And then the first Dot Com bust happened, you know, eight months later. Like Herman Miller couldn’t build enough factories to make enough of this stuff and just— it was just unbelievable [Paul crosstalks]. No, in the contract furniture industry, that’s the first to go. PF Oh ok. Oh, that’s interesting. AC That was heartbreaking. Anyways, so I started doing some consulting with Stu and Eric at Core77 and uh we did this project for this Resolve system and it actually won a lot of awards like, you know, The Gold Pencil and the Silver Cube, I actually like have those engraved [mm hmm] and all of a sudden, Herman Miller starts calling and said, “Well, can you do that for our system?” [Sure!] And then we started to do all like the physical computing in our— PF Ah that’s for young designers, what’s a better than a call from Herman Miller? AC Well, yeah and [26:19?] was around and, you know, we worked with a lot of amazing artists. From ITP and— PF That’s really close to like the core, right? AC And they’re design-driven, right? PF Yeah. AC So, yeah we couldn’t ask for much. Anyway so I ended up like running a lot of this stuff in between like, you know, managing editing, um— PF I see you’re always teaching. AC Yeah, it’s a long time.  Yeah. PF Yeah. AC It’s probably 23 or 24— 24 years. And then um so that design publishing went on a long time and Core grew, the web grew, like everything exploded. [26:49] PF Are you connected day to day? Are you kind of advisory now? AC You know I’m on— I’m on partner meetings [ok] um you know most of my life is at SVA right now. PF Right. AC But yeah, no, it’s um— PF It’s still very much part of your life. AC It’s, you know, there’s not a lot of things that have lasted that long. PF No. AC Uh that are really about, you know, making design connections and helping people find either fascinating things to care about or fascinating opportunities, you know, job opportunities or finding talent. RZ So, Allan, design— it feels like somebody made two or three billion stickers that say “design” on them [yeah] and gave them out to everybody [yup], designers and non-designers, [yeah] and now there’s— there are design stickers on everything. PF Well there’s design stickers on giant consulting firms around technology, around— just everybody’s a designer. RZ The way a term’s like, you know, “customer journey” get tossed around. I mean it’s a strange— I’ve watched this not as a designer but more as a spectator— AC Mm hmm. RZ— and seen I think it’s the last ten years, more like five I feel like it really started to heat up. PF Well, do we— let’s— let’s actually— you’re saying, let’s ask Allan: do you feel that design has been commoditized in the last ten years? In a way that it wasn’t before? RZ Or describe this, like I— it’s just exploded and one I— I mean you can put on one hat and say, “Isn’t this great? Finally we’ve arrived.” And then there’s the other hat which is, “God we’re being— I mean it’s just— it’s been diluted into shit.” Uh give me your perspective on where we’re at today. [28:28] AC I think the first thing to notice— like so I’m not cynical about this, like the first thing to notice is that design has moved from something that is seen as aesthetic and coming at the end to something that is truly strategic, you know? And coming at the beginning. Adn like you understand that better than anybody. Right? You know? Again, you’ll make something beautiful but in a— in a Bucky Fuller kind of way if it’s the right solution, it will be beautiful. You don’t have to make it beautiful. So I think that there’s a new appreciation that— PF If you like domes. AC If you like domes. PF If you love a dome. AC Yeah. PF Yeah, ok. AC And then the other thing that, you know, people love to make fun of is design thinking which, you know, um even Tim Brown would like argue is just it’s pretty common sense. Right? Like work with your user; uh listen; prototype early; and then do it again. You know and iterate. And like don’t be an idiot. Basically. Like those [Rich laughs] are it. That’s design theory. PF That’s the man who runs IDEO. AC Yeah. PF Yeah, that’s Tim Brown. Ok. RZ Um design thinking is a wonderful thing. PF Well [sighs] — AC Well but people— but people make fun of it. And I think that a lot of people who make fun it— I mean first of all: the word, I talked about this in that no meeting article [https://productsofdesign.sva.edu/blog/nomeeting], the word thinking is in design thinking and everybody knows that design isn’t about thinking, it’s about making stuff. It’s about doing. PF Right. AC Um so right away it’s tricky um and then the idea is that if you thought about something hard enough then you— you would solve it, and that’s like ridiculous. I also think that people who criticize design thinking have actually never been in a design thinking workshop. Like I’ve run one uh with a bunch of um doctors and some managers and med students at Jefferson University just a couple months ago, and it’s like they see God. Like they can’t believe, they come up to you after and they’re like, “I can’t believe . . . I didn’t know about any of this. I can’t believe the notion of iteration. I didn’t even know that word, for instance. I didn’t know that we could make a low resolution like, you know, prototype of a webpage on a three— you know on a mobile app on three Post It notes and actually see something that we’ve been sitting in meetings just talking about and doing nothing about.” It’s like a revelation to them. RZ Mm. [30:24] AC So I think that people would be less willing to criticize— PF Well that’s the conversation where design thinking is brutal in the marketing message. AC Well and that’s the thing is journalists like to talk about the over promise of design thinking [right] and of course that’s bad. And again the over promising is— is part of the problem, the— the— the journalism of the over promising part is— that’s a fun article to write. You know? So. PF Well there was also a moment where everything kind of caught fire and went too far. It’s like TED was a good example like [mm hmm] 90 percent of the TED content is typical magazine style content. It’s pretty packaged up and then 10 percent is a little woo woo [mm hmm]. And fine, ok. Like that’s— that’s how America works and how we consume content but there was so much of it at one point that everybody was like, “I’m gonna make fun of this now.” AC Yeah, yeah, no, and I mean I think everything comes up for parody at a certain point [that’s right]. You know I liked it before it was cool kind of thing. PF Yeah. Yeah, yeah. AC Um so I see the more people talking or thinking about design as an actual process and not as a thing, as an artifact, like the better. That is— RZ It’s really value. AC Especially in a world where, you know, cynically, you know, it’s all about extracting value. Like the design process adds value. PF Right. AC Um and the earlier the better. Um I know Postlight’s like super design driven and you have a place, you know, you understand that everything, you know, starts and ends with design. [31:45] PF Thank you, you’ve saved us 30 seconds of marketing [Rich laughs]. AC Yeah. Ah it’s really, really true. RZ If you don’t mind [Paul laughing, Allan crosstalks] we’re gonna use that clip— AC Yeah, for sure. PF “Allan Chochinov says,” [Rich laughs] um you know a tricky thing too is the process can be really goofy, and that it’s hard to like it’s hard to commoditize like goofy thinking— AC Uh and— and risky, I mean if you’re a designer, you have to be comfortable with ambiguity [yeah] and business is not comfortable with ambiguity. Like they— they’re in the risk reduction business, right? A lawyer is too. Regulatory too. Policy too. So— PF One of the ways that I think we’re able to get stuff— AC— it’s antithetical to a lot of people’s like you know— RZ Sure. It’s scary. AC— way of life. RZ It’s a scary process. AC It’s really scary, yeah. PF One of the ways we get things across the line is just it’s so hard to ship software that people accept— there’s a point about halfway through on a lot of projects where we’re like, “You know, I know when you walked in and you said this and this and we said we didn’t know, we weren’t a 100 percent sure. It actually turns out that instead of A and B, C’s gonna be the better path.” They’re so anxious about not shipping that they’re able to sort of like process and listen and react to that because they’ve had experiences where things haven’t gone out the door because people have tried to do everything for them. RZ Also transparency is key there [yeah] like you can’t show up and say, “Listen: um it’s gonna be path C.” They— they have to have seen how we got there and involved— PF Rich has a wonderful maxim which is nothing’s bad news uh 60 days ahead. [33:10] AC Oh I love that. Mine is everything’s shitty until it’s better. You know? PF Right. AC Everything’s worse until it’s better. PF And if you just keep telling the story and they know that like, you know, path C is probably gonna be our option but it’s two months before delivery date, everyone is gonna calm down. AC Well do you think that— that scale like that number 60 changes depending on how, in some sense, in love they are with their own idea before they managed to get to you, to find you? PF [Exhales] We— we— AC Like how dug in they are to like, “We know that this is—” PF We destroy the love at outset of engagement. RZ Well, it’s— it’s— we have very much— we don’t report back, we’re more like, “Come on in. Come sit. [Yeah] At the table.” And you know that virtual table is Slack today. We don’t do the weekly report. We’re like, “Here’s what’s going on. Come on in.” Sometimes they don’t do it. They don’t come in. And then they just show up and they say, “Hey, what’s going on?” And— PF Actually not— not of the current class. Like we’ve got most of that out of the business. RZ Yup. It’s— it’s very— PF It’s too risky. RZ— collaborative. And because we want them to, first off: we want to have them in the room as we talk through the problem because a lot of times they’re the domain experts, not us. We’re just— AC Oh yeah. RZ We’re still trying to learn their world. AC Well I think appreciation for local knowledge is a nice tenet of design thinking. RZ Absolutely. Absolutely. AC It’s like not everybody— the client isn’t an idiot all the time. RZ Exactly. AC Kind of thing. Um. Yeah. [34:27] PF We are done with that. Like that— when we started this firm, my instinct was the clients were gonna show up and they were gonna show up and they were gonna be smarter than they used to be. The consumer of a platform company services is often a— a product leader on the other side and they— or they are experienced or they— also the— the resources for learning for what apps and what platforms and APIs are are— are so much better than they used to be [mm hmm]. So they come in pretty educated. AC Well and they also have consumer experiences on their devices [that’s right] that are like, “How come our work doesn’t work like this?” [That’s right] Like, “How come I don’t have a dashboard for this for my business but I do for my jogging?” PF Yeah, that’s right. AC “You know my running.” So, maybe half the battle is done for you. Maybe not half but at least they understand power of design, they may not understand the actual, you know, plumbing of it. RZ I think it has to do with— and I think you’ll see this even right up to big consulting, I mean the message now is, “We’re gonna worry about these problems with you. We’re gonna work through this. Design is part of the whole story. Here. Rather than it’s a bolt on.” And— and we say that, and so when people come to us, they kind of have an idea of how it’s gonna go, that we’re not a just raw engineering shop that is gonna take a blueprint and just produce the thing. AC I just wonder— you know one of my favorite quotes is Petrula Vrontikis, she’s a— a designer and a teacher in California, she says, “I work with my ears.” And so I wonder sometimes like well what kind of clients come in here where you’re mostly listening and what kind of clients are coming in here where you have to just help them understand like who are; what you believe; the process; the kind of team that you have. RZ Usually when they come here, there is so much bottled up. We go into pure listening mode. We just— we don’t even wanna actually have a dialogue much. We just sort of let them go. AC Put it out like let us see the reality of what you’re worried about, basically. [36:20] RZ Exactly. PF Around about minute 50 of a meeting— AC Yeah. PF I— I think like, “Oh, you know, we should tell them what we do.” Seriously like that’s— RZ We gotta let ‘em go and do the thing and then little by little we start to get into the— the conversation. You’re gonna know pretty quickly um whether this person is going to relinquish a lot of that control to allow us to do our thing or if it’s— if it’s going to be too tight and it’s gonna not allow this to be a success. And we can see it. Usually in that first or second meeting you can tell. AC Yeah, I’m sure you have really good instincts as well. Well lemme ask you the magic wand question like if you had a magic wand, what would you want that person to ask you or to know about you in those initial meetings where they’re trying to understand like, “Do I need design?” Like, “What is design capacity gonna do for me?” And I mean sort of where we started about choosing, you know, whether to go to school at all or with school and if your organization is the right fit for them. What would they ask you? Or what would they tell you that you couldn’t sort of sort of interrupt them at minute ten, say, “Listen, can you—” PF No, I mean— AC This would be helpful. PF For me, and Rich you might have a different point of view, but for me it’s just it’s very much— it takes a long time to get to the user. People have their— they have their peers and their business— AC They have the wrong user usually. PF Yeah and they’ve got the CEO and they’ve got so many anxieties. They have either money they have to spend or money they have to go ask for and— RZ Promises they’ve walked around for bigger companies. PF And who are we? Who the hell are we? AC Oh right, of course, like you’re not necessarily the only people they’re talking to. PF No and so they’re— they’re trying to figure us out. And so it often takes I think really three or four conversations until you can finally relax everybody and they can say, “Yeah, no, I know exactly who the user is here.” Right? But they cannot relax into that on that first meeting. It’s actually very closely held information. [38:13] RZ It’s often ambiguous. We had a client, the message was: there’s a big event coming in 90 days. And we wanna do a thing so that there’s— we make a good impact at the event. AC Right. RZ Like ideas came out like you know you pop the confetti thing? [Laughs] AC Exhibition design; branding; the whole brand environment. RZ They didn’t know. They had ideas. They had sketched stuff out. And they had what was actually great was they had this timeframe which we were able to use as sort of a forcing function [yeah, that’s true] to say, “Alright, listen: some of these are great and 3D is awesome.” AC [Chuckling] “But 90 days is 90 days.” RZ [Laughing] “But we’re 90 days away.” Right? AC And you’re budget’s your budget. RZ Exactly. That steering process and then eventually you have to give us the keys, right? We’re like, “Ok, we gotta run fast here.” I mean that is the reality. PF You’re gonna set up the server, you’re gonna put it on Rails at that point. RZ Yeah, yeah. And— and— AC And you might not get to test it so much. PF No, that’s right. That’s right like— AC Cuz an event like doesn’t slip. That’s— that’s the scary part of that. RZ It doesn’t slip. AC It’s just like, “Well, if we wait three more, you know, weeks, it’ll be, it’ll be [exactly] —” [39:15] PF No, it won’t get better and we won’t fail. Like we won’t let you fail. And so we actually have to build that relationship. The good news is that the people who are right over your shoulder watching every little bit, they tend to be super cheap. Like they don’t wanna pay. They wanna watch you and they wanna tell you how to do it and they’re gonna— they’re gonna watch every minute and so by the time we get even— even to back of envelope, they’re gone. AC They’ll know. You know that chart? It’s like, you know, design fees? You know whatever it is like 500 dollars, you know, if I do it [yeah], 750 if you watch me do it. PF Yeah [laughs]. AC You know? 1100, you know, if you’re in the room, you know. PF That’s right. AC Um and it just gets more expensive the more um [laughter] — there’s a bunch of these things on Instagram. They’re pretty great. I’m gonna find one and send it to you. RZ It’s also— I mean we think about the designers, it’s pretty demoralizing if you’re just— if somebody took your hand while it’s on the pencil [yeah] and are just constantly in there. It’s very— PF It’s not good. RZ It’s not good. PF Alright, Allan, what do people do to get in touch with you? AC I’m not much on Twitter. I mean I’ll be on it cuz I feel like I have to be on it. I like Instagram for hobbies. So that’s a good place to find me. Um, you know, you go down to chochinov.com but uh probably SVA is gonna be the— you know where you’re gonna see the most exciting stuff. So. PF Where? What is the name of the program? AC It’s uh Products of Design, it’s plural. Productsofdesign.sva.edu. PF Alright. AC Oh and I have this whole essay on changing the word “meeting” to the word “review”. Uh the argument is that if you use the word— if you had a review at three o’clock this afternoon, you know, you’d look like an idiot showing up empty handed to something called a review. But if you had a meeting at three o’clock like whatever, no need to prepare. So um this idea came up um in a— in a staff meeting from Alisha Wessler, our Director of Operations, and, you know, it was like, “Can we— can we reimagine the word ‘meeting’? Can we actually just change it in the department?” And she said, “Well what about the word ‘review’?” I was like, “That’s it!” So I went back to my computer and I downloaded an autocorrect Chrome Extension and I made it correct one word, whenever I typed the word “meeting”, it would change it to the word “review”. And then I went into my iOS and did the same thing. Um and so I spent seven months not being able to type the word “meeting”. [41:22] RZ How’d that go? AC It was awesome. Because you type “meeting” and then it changes it into “review” and you’re like, “Oh no, actually, we should probably ask people to like do something before we take their time and get together.” RZ Huh. I’m applying this test right now, so it’s like— AC Yeah. PF No, it’s not— it’s not— don’t just bring your ideas. Bring a plan. AC Anything— any kind of prototype. PF Yeah. AC Um and so one of our faculty, Bill Cromie, actually built a custom extension called No Meeting. Uh so you don’t have to like type in anything— RZ [Crosstalk] God bless web extensions— AC No, and get this: he came up with this idea to make a Slack bot, which he did. Which you can find at this— at this article. So when you type it into Slack, if the No Meeting Slack bot is in there, then the Slack bot will pop up and it says, “Hey, I noticed you uh typed the word ‘meeting’, would you like me to change that to the word ‘review’ so that people always come prepared to future gatherings?” PF Allan! RZ This was great. PF Yeah. I could listen to stories about medical devices being designed for the rest of my life. AC Well, thanks for having me. RZ Allan, thanks— thanks so much. [Music fades in] This was great. AC Yeah, this has been a thrill. RZ A lot of fun. AC Thank you. PF Hey, if anybody needs us, hello@postlight.com, that’s the email that you could send to and it would go to me and Rich and we’ll forward it to Allan if you have any questions for him. AC Ah, totally. PF Alright, let’s get outta here. Let’s hang out and talk about medical devices [music ramps up, plays alone for four seconds, fades out to end].

Ani Liu is an research-based artist working at the intersection of art & science. Her work examines the reciprocal relationships between science, technology and their influence on human subjectivity, culture, and identity. Ani's work has been presented internationally, and featured on National Geographic, VICE, Mashable, Gizmodo, TED, Core77, PCMag, FOX and WIRED. Her work has been shown at Ars Electronica, the Queens Museum Biennial, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Asian Art Museum, MIT Museum, MIT Media Lab, Mana Contemporary, Harvard University, and Shenzhen Design Society.

Nick almost met Jony Ive. James critiques the new iPad Pro and talks with Nick's mom. This week we chat about what we learned from Core77's Now What Conference. We share our insights from many speakers including HAWRAF, Jamie Wolfond, Craighton Berman, Alex Daly, Emily Cohen, and Bompas & Parr. Our shoutout of the week is @jung_soo_park . Send your questions to minordetailspodcast@gmail.com and follow us @nickpbaker and @idrawonreceipts

On this podcast episode, Nora Young talks about a super smart idea for capturing the wind energy created by passing vehicles: small wind turbines along the roadside. See more at Core77. Meanwhile Cathi Bond has two cool earbud designs for you. Firefly are quick charging, inexpensive wieless earbuds with long battery life (via NewAtlas). Then there's Bose's innovation: sleepbuds, designed to be noise cancelling and super comfortable to help you sleep (via Engadget)

This week on the podcast our special guest is Carly Ayres. A bit of background: she studied Industrial Design at RISD, she worked for Creative Mornings for 2.5 years from mid 2012 as the Chief Content Officer, she was then a writer and strategist at Google Creative Lab in New York and in September 2016 co-founded HAWRAF, an interactive design and technology studio based in New York. From generative identity systems for orchestras that react to sound to mirrored selfie posters for dental startups, HAWRAF creates interactive communications for consumer-facing brands that help them engage and have more meaningful, authentic interactions with their end users. Carly has written extensively on the field of design for publications like Core77 and Wallpaper*. She has spoken at conferences from Stockholm to Belfast on how to treat design like a conversation and why you should invite your audience to say something back. Remember! We are now an ENHANCED podcast. That's right - If you listen to our podcast in Overcast or Pocket Casts, or Castro, you can get super special images, links, and chapter breaks in your player while you listen. Featured links from our discussion - Want to get these in your inbox every Friday? Sign up for our text-only tinyletter at tinyletter.com/jackywinter Bianca A guide to working with clients https://thecreativeindependent.com/guides/a-guide-to-working-with-clients/ Unti-tled http://www.unti-tled.com/new-york 100s Under 100 #show-n-tell IRL https://www.eventbrite.com/e/100s-under-100-show-n-tell-irl-r5-tickets-46445814682 Why we are getting rid of our hourly rate https://www.teehanlax.com/blog/why-we-are-getting-rid-of-our-hourly-rate/ Jeremy Elon Musk drawn into farting unicorn dispute with potter https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jun/27/elon-musk-farting-unicorn-mug-cartoon-tom-edwards Peter Norway tweet https://twitter.com/classiclib3ral/status/1008286473437794304 When you’re Elon Musk, a tweet is never just a tweet https://theoutline.com/post/4809/elon-musk-twitter-erin-biba-trolls-stans-online-harassment?zd=1&zi=4yxx27lr Lara Statue of Liberty Stamp Mistake to Cost Postal Service $3.5 Million https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/05/arts/statue-of-liberty-stamp-copyright-las-vegas.html Carly Is design still a (cis)man’s world? https://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/alice-rawsthorn-design-as-thiknking-is-design-still-a-cis-mans-world-opinion-030718 Design as an Attitude- Alice Rawsthorn https://www.amazon.co.uk/Alice-Rawsthorn-Attitude-Ringier-Documents/dp/3037645210 Ladies Get Paid http://www.ladiesgetpaid.com/ People of Craft https://peopleofcraft.com/ For More Carly: HAWRAF https://hawraf.com/ Carly’s Twitter https://twitter.com/carlyayres?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor HAWRAF Twitter https://twitter.com/hawrafintl If you like the show or these links or think we sound like nice people, please go and leave us a rating or review on iTunes. It helps other people find the show and boosts our downloads which in turn lets us know that what we're doing is worth doing more of! Jacky Winter Gives You The Business is produced by Areej Nur To subscribe, view show notes or previous episodes head on over to our podcast page at http://jackywinter.givesyouthe.biz/ Special thanks to Jacky Winter (the band, with much better shirts than us) for the music. Listen to them over at Soundcloud. Everything else Jacky Winter (us) can be found at http://www.jackywinter.com/

Kate and Yoko chat with Rain Noe, Senior Editor at Core77, sewing machine collector, and native speaker of the rare Staten-Island–Westchester combination accent. We discuss Rain’s careers in industrial design and writing, the “Asian hookup,” and the merits and drawbacks of “fusion food.”

How to Fund Your Social Impact Design Project: Joe Speicher of Autodesk Foundation (Core Talk Ep 4) by Core77

PostlerFerguson talks with Core77 about their time spent designing consumer products—we discuss their favorite kinds of projects to work on, the pros and cons of working with small vs. bigger clients as well as what they are looking for in the 2017 Core77 Design Awards consumer product submissions.

Petrula Vrontikis, the Core77 Design Awards Design Education Initiative jury captain, talks with Core77 about her teaching methods that emphasize the importance of professional knowledge as well things she hopes to see evolve in the education of design.

On this podcast, Cathi Bond talks about a soft, lightweight "exosuit" created by the Wyss Institute at Harvard, and ReWalk Robotics (via Gizmag). Unlike other experiments in exoskeletons designed for people who can't move their legs, this is a support for people with some mobility impairment. Nora mentions this segment on her show, Spark. Meanwhile, Nora Young talks about Smart Slab, a design for a 'smart' table that offers heating, cooling, and device charging. In addition to being great looking, it's the kind of design Nora and Cathi think we could see a lot more of in our connected future (check out the pictures via Core77)

Have you ever had a great idea, the next big invention, that you wished you followed through on? Today we're speaking with an accomplished inventor about idea generation and finding a lane in life that's perfect for you, despite your personal challenges. Embracing your challenges and leveraging the gifts that come from them will move life forward. Stephen Key is an award-winning inventor, an intellectual property strategist, and a successful entrepreneur. The more than 20 products he has licensed over the past 35 years have sold in Walmart, 7-Eleven, and Disney stores and theme parks worldwide, as well as been endorsed by Michael Jordan, Alex Trebek, and Taylor Swift. In 2001, Key cofounded inventRight, a one-on-one coaching program that helps people license their ideas. His bestselling book One Simple Idea: Turn Your Dreams Into a Licensing Goldmine has been translated into five other languages. He writes about entrepreneurship and licensing online regularly for Inc., Entrepreneur, and the website Core77. Highlights - 3 keys to evaluating a good idea Turning adversity into your strength Finding a lane, that fascinates you Embracing the tools you have Bringing joy to others   Resources - Zoho Inventory Running your business and processing orders, following up on the delivery status and keeping track of your inventory on a daily basis is challenging.  Zoho Inventory helps you tackle this problem, is easy to set up and simple to use. It automates the entire order management process so you can just focus on growing your business. You can even manage everything from one place. It's straightforward and hassle-free! Go get free access to explore all the features of our professional edition of Zoho Inventory for the next three months! Acuity Scheduling Client scheduling a crazy hot mess? Don't hate. Integrate! Acuity automates your appointments, cancellations, reminders & even payments with one(non-frustrating) click. No more back and fourth, missed meetings, no shows or multiple calendars to manage! Get your special 45-days free trial(typically 14 days) here:  Grammarly Getting your point across in business can be tricky. Grammarly uses a browser extension to check your text for spelling and grammatical errors anytime you write something online to help you avoid mistakes in comments, tweets, and status updates. Get access to your own personal editor 24/7!   Free Webinar: I'll be sharing how to leverage your creative side and use it as an advantage in business. Join me for my free webinar, How To Succeed In Business Marketing Yourself and Your Talent. Register here or text warrior to number 33444 to unleash your creative thinking to propel your business forward.   Guest Contact - Website  Twitter  Facebook  LinkedIn Books: One Simple Idea: Turn Your Dreams into a Licensing Goldmine While Letting Others Do the Work 

Welcome to Real Fast Results!  This is Daniel Hall, and I’m very excited about this particular episode because I’m bringing on a guest who is going to be covering a topic that I am intensely interested in.  His name is Stephen Key, and he is going to be going over the idea of licensing your ideas for passive income.  That means selling your ideas to companies and making a royalty income from that. I have searched high and low for an expert to come on who is both very accomplished and willing to share their secrets.  So, I am very appreciative that Stephen decided to join us today.  Stephen, welcome to the show. Hopefully, the people reviewing this material will understand that they can take action as soon as today or tomorrow. What I will do is show you how to come up with simple ideas, show them to companies, and let them pay you for your creativity.  You don’t have to build a business or spend a lot of money to do this. The Benefits of Licensing Your Ideas I believe that we are all creative, but a lot of us don’t want to start businesses.  I admit that I'm not the business sort, but I'm very creative.  So, what should I do with all of my ideas?  Should I let them just sit in a corner?  I feel I let them sit, sooner or later I'm going to see them out there on TV or on store shelves.  The game has changed.  You don’t have to start a company, or raise money, or quit your job.  You don’t have to do anything that’s scary or dangerous. You can take some of your ideas, show them to the “right” companies, and you don’t even have to own it.  That’s what surprises everyone.  Everybody thinks that you have to have a patent.  You don’t have to own anything; it’s all about speed to market.  So, you just have to have the right idea and show it to a company. The big idea is that you can take intellectual property that you have developed, without having a patent for it, and bring it out to the marketplace and actually sell it so that you end up with money in your bank account.  It doesn’t matter if you have a business or not.  You’re not actually selling an idea but renting it.  You’re just going to let these companies rent your idea for a while, and every quarter, you’re going to collect royalties from it. If you can make this work for you, this opportunity will allow you to live anywhere you want to, and you won’t have to work a 9-5 job.  However, once you start doing this, you’re going to want to work on this all of the time.  You can work anytime you want, live anywhere you want, and let the big companies do all of the work for you. Steps To Licence Your Ideas For Passive Income The first step is to see if you have a marketable idea.   You need to find out fairly quickly, and the best way to do that is to just study the marketplace.  What’s out there?  I recommend doing a Google Image search.  If you’ve got a new hammer, look at all the hammers in the world.  You can do this at home.  Spend a little time just playing around with the idea, and be an expert in a micro-category.  Just sit, search, and see if you can find your “idea”. If you find that there’s something unique about your idea, move to the next step, which is to do a Google Patents search.  That sounds very difficult, but all you do is go to Google Patents and type in a few words that hold similarities to your idea. Then just scour through what other people have done in that space.  In order to create for the future, you must know what’s been done in the past. By looking at past patents, it gives you a glimpse of the past. If you’ve taken these first two steps, and you still think that your idea is unique, you’ll want to continue moving forward with it.  Now, this doesn’t mean that you need to reinvent the wheel. You just need to be able to propose a small improvement, but one that no one else has seen.  The smaller an idea, the better. Simple ideas is where it’s at, and for a few different reasons.  First, if you make a bit of an improvement on an existing idea, then you know there’s a market for it already.  Also, it’s likely that the manufacturing can be done because it’s already being done, but you’re making a small improvement. The third step in this process is to show a company your idea.  It really is that simple.  You do this with a one-page sell sheet.  It’s basically just an advertisement.  You know how you drive down a freeway, and when you see a billboard, you get it instantly?  That’s all your sell sheet needs to be.  It should have a big benefit on the top that tells the company what your idea does and why they should care, a picture pertaining to your idea, and then your contact information down at the bottom. Here’s how easy this is.  Let’s say that you just have a sketch on a napkin.  You can find a freelance designer on the Internet that does 3D computer generated graphics.  This person would be able to take a simple sketch of yours and make it beautiful.  They can make your idea come to life.  It may not be real yet, but they can make it look real, and you can have that done for under $100. It’s important that you understand that the benefit statement that you use should let people know, at a glance, how your idea will make the buyer’s life better.  It’s essentially just a benefit-driven headline.  Once you have a sell sheet, you need to make a list of companies that could benefit from your idea.  I call it follow the money.  Who could benefit from my idea?  Just go down to a retail store that you think it might sell in, and look at where it’s going to be on that isle.  Those are the companies that you’re going to submit your idea to. The next step that you’ll need to take is to file a PPA (Provisional Patent Application).  You can file it anywhere in the world and in the United States for $65.  It gives you one year to shop around and show it to companies and put “patent pending” on it.  Now, that $65 just gives you one year, but during this time, you can shop it around and see if anyone wants it.  After you have that, then you can move forward and contact the company. To reiterate, here are your steps: Step 1: Check to make sure your brilliant idea is marketable. Check Google Images Check Google Patents. Step 2: Make a sell sheet to present to companies Benefit-driven headline Image that makes idea come to life Contact information Step 3: Make a list of companies to submit your idea to. Step 4: File a PPA Step 5: Submit Your Idea Submitting Your Idea To submit your idea, I recommend that you go to LinkedIn and find a company that you want to send it to.  Find someone in sales or someone in marketing.  Tell them that you’re a product developer.  Never tell people you are an inventor.  Anyway, let them know that you would like to submit an idea to their company for them to review, and ask them what their process is.  That’s all it takes to get up and running. This person is going to tell you what you need to do, and they may just respond with an email address, which is great because you can just send your sell sheet in electronically.  If the company takes an interest in it, they will bring all of the right people in the room to look at it.  Hopefully, at that point, they will pick up the phone or send you an email saying, “We want to know more.”  Now you’re in the game.  That’ when the magic happens.  Either they will like it or they won’t.  You’ll know very, very quickly whether you hit it big or not.  If it’s a great idea, the company that you submitted it to would respond very fast in most situations. It’s when they call that things get a little trickier.  It’s time to cut a deal. I recommend that you get someone with a little more experience to help you.  If you’ve never done this before, find someone that’s done it, or find someone with a bit of legal expertise.  You’re going to need some guidance at this point.  Now they want it, and they are going to want to cut a deal. You want this deal to be cut in a way that you benefit best for your idea. This is so simple that anyone can do this at any age.  I have been teaching people that are 18 and still in high school to do this and people in their 80’s to do this.  Anyone can do this. Cutting A Deal Exactly how you can go about cutting a deal with a company is beyond the scope of this particular discussion. However, here is a little insight. There will be a licensing agreement, and they are going to pay you a royalty on every one (use of your idea/product) that they sell.  So, basically, you’re going to rent it to them.  At this point, you can also get them to pay for the patent too.  There are all sorts of things that you could potentially negotiate, but on the whole, they are going to rent it, they are going to sell it, they are going to pay you. Royalties - Example Let me give you an example of one of the ideas I had. It was a little Nerf basketball goal. But, the backboard depicted a picture of Michael Jordan, and it was in the shape of Jordan’s head and shoulders.  This sold for 10 years, and I collected royalties on a prototype that probably cost maybe $10.  The first year was $100,000 in royalties, and it continued to sell for 9 years after that. I sent the Michael Jordan basketball goal idea in on April 9, 1999, and had a contract on the 12th.  So, I had a contract 3 days later.  That’s how fast it went.  They were already selling the square ones with a little picture of Michael Jordan on them.  It was a split royalty.  They paid Michael Jordan and they paid Stephen.  In this case, Stephen’s cut was 2.5%.  That’s not a very high royalty, even for a small idea.  Usually, the average is 5-6% off of the wholesale price of the product. Every time the product was shipped for $4.99, I would get 2.5%.  They made bigger ones and smaller ones, and they even made them with different basketball players.  Another product of mine also sold for 10 years. The last check i got was for $0.55 and I kept it. More Tips On Licensing Products The most important thing to understand is that you can do this.  You don’t need to have a degree in product development or even a business of your own.  All you need to do is have a love for products.  Find a category that you’re fascinated with.  If you like golf, stick with that.  Look at golf products, study them, and think about what problems there are.  That’s really the first step.  It’s not hard. I like to teach people that they should try to be an expert in a micro-category.  It may be something that you’re already in the business of.  It’s even better if it’s related to something you’re already doing.  One of my students was in the restaurant business, and he noticed that it was really hard to get the tomato paste out of the big cans that they used.  He created a tool that allowed them to pull it all out at one time.  You see?  He knew the problem personally because he was in the business.  He discovered there was a problem, created a mechanism to solve that problem, and then licensed the mechanism. Most people don’t even know that you can license ideas in the hospitality industry.  This is a huge industry.  Here are more industries that are on fire at the moment: The Pet Industry The Kitchen Industry “As Seen on TV”* The Fitness Industry The Home Improvement Industry The money that you can make in the "As Seen on TV” industry comes so quickly that you have to be a little careful. All of these industries want ideas.  If you want to take action right away, call a company that you have no idea that you want to submit an idea to. Just call them up and ask them about their process.  Tell them that you’re a product developer and you would like to start submitting ideas to their company.  Then, ask them what their process is and take notice of how they treat you.  They are likely going to treat you with great respect, tell you about their process, and endearingly wait to see what you have.  That’s when you’ll realize that there are no barriers to this.  You don’t have to have experience, and you’re only as good as the ideas you are sharing with them today. So many people are surprised because once you take that fear away, they can see that they can do this.  On the other hand, some people just expect companies to just take their idea.  I've been teaching this for 15 years, and I haven't seen a problem yet.  If you act professionally, read as much as you can on the topic, and be reasonable, you won’t have much trouble.  You do have to do your homework, however.  Search for the company, and look up complaints people have had about that company.  Also, understand that if they treat you great going into it, they will treat you great throughout the process.  Kick the tires, but be professional about it. Companies don’t take ideas because you might have some intellectual property, and social media is a nightmare.  They want the doors to be open, but people don’t submit ideas anymore that make sense.  There are industries that have been doing this successfully for years.  For instance, the toy industry has been welcoming outside people for 50 or 60 years.  Imagine having 10,000 people submitting ideas.  This would increase any chances that you have of finding a winner, and then they could cherry-pick the very best.  Most companies would love to pay you royalties for a winning idea. Do I Have to Have a Brilliant Idea to Do This? You do not have to reinvent the wheel.  Big ideas take a lot of money and time because you have to educate, and most likely, spend a lot of money to get it going.  When you make simple improvements on existing ideas, the product is already selling and has already been proven.  You’re just bringing the next addition out.  They already have the marketplace established, so it’s speed to market. Here is an example of how simple this can be.  I've got a water bottle with a label on it, and you could spin the label on the bottle and it would reveal more information from a little window on the back.  In other words, the label is in two layers. When you spin the bottom of the bottle, new information would be shown through a little window on the top label.  This could be used as a marketing device. This particular water bottle has a college team’s logo on it, and it was being used as a recruiting device.  Imagine yourself at a football game, and you happen to spin the bottom of your bottle of water and realize that it does that, so you begin reading.  Then you find out all sorts of things about what the university you were at offers. This is a sort of cool and clever idea, but all it really involves is an extra layer of the label on a water bottle.  The best part is that this piggybacks on products that are already on the market.  All I did was add a little value by making some use of, or a simple improvement to, the label that would have existed already.  It delivers more content.  You could use this for contests and all sorts of things.  In fact, you basically double the label size this way, and a company can add more promotional materials, which makes the label all the more valuable to the company at hand.  For this project, my one-line benefit statement was, “This label adds 75% more space.” If you had an idea like mine, you might begin by doing a Google Image search for, “Labels that add more information.”  Then, I would just look at all of the images.  I've seen labels that pull out like an accordion book.  I might even go into someone’s website.  I'd just search around for everything having to do with labels.  I'd look up “expanded content labels”, and “labels that add more information”, and “labels that function”.  I just start to become an expert in one little area.  In this case, I looked at this and found retailers that sold different types of labels.  Those would be the companies that I submitted it to.  In other words, you could go to those who have something substantially similar, and that could be the first step in who to contact. Everybody thinks that you’re going after the competition.  No, it’s your potential licensee.  As you are researching the market, you’re also looking for potential licensees.  The next thing that you would do is perform a search on Google Patents.  I would type in the same thing as I did before, which would be things like “Labels that add more information”.  Various patents involving these types of labels would come up, and I would search through them to make sure that I'm not copying anyone else’s patented idea. Then I would search through the manufacturers that came up in this search as well. Again, when you do this for a day or so, you begin to become sort of an expert in a very narrow category.  If you do this and you start to think that you have a marketable idea that would work, that’s when you begin to make plans to put together your sell sheet.  You might even decide to make a YouTube video about your ideas.  YouTube videos are very powerful, and one that you make for something like this shouldn’t be more than about one minute long.  All you need to do is demonstrate a problem and how your idea could be the solution.  For example, if you wanted to sell the label idea spoken about before, you could show a person that was frustrated because there wasn’t enough information about something on his label.  Then, you could show that person happy because he found a bottle that gave him all the information he was looking for. If you made a YouTube video and a sell sheet, you could add a URL to your sales sheet that people could click on to see a demo of your idea.  Since you studied the marketplace and made a list of companies, you have done all of the work.  You have a video, a sell sheet, and a list of companies to send the sheet out to.  That’s when you’ll want to file your PPA (Provisional Patent Application).  At that point, you’ll have one year to shop it around before you have to file a non-provisional, which would be a patent.  You can file a PPA anywhere in the world, yourself, for basically $65.  If you are in a higher income bracket, it might cost $120.  Either way, it’s very affordable. The sell sheet that you make would need a good image. A 3D, computer-generated graphic might run you $50-$70.  That, along with the cost of your PPA shouldn’t exceed more than about $200, and yet, you’ve created a package that could potentially be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. I'm amazed at how many ideas I have seen that were truly remarkable, but they take forever because they aren’t simple.  People try to reinvent the wheel and have to educate people about their idea.  On the other hand, I've seen small improvements on products get licensed all of the time.  In fact, I see licensing agreements almost every other week.  The people that are getting these contracts are using my 10-step system, and five of these steps you learned about today. It’s really quite easy to put together the marketing material, create a list, make a sales sheet, and reach out to a company.  These are all steps that people can follow and complete both quickly and inexpensively.  I have even taught people in other countries how to do this, and they end up feeding ideas to United States companies.  You can do this from just about anywhere. Speaking of doing this inexpensively, there are people offering to do 3D renderings on Fiverr each and every day at a very low cost.  It’s incredible how much skill people have today and what little they charge for them.  There was a time that something like this would have cost thousands of dollars, and now you can have this sort of thing done for as little as $10.  It’s just incredible. One of the points that I want to get across is that you need to reach out to everyone that you can, and if you get a “no”, don’t let it deter you.  Keep trying.  I recommend contacting at least 25 different companies, and all at the same time.  Don’t wait to hear back from one.  Right now, you might be thinking, “Well, what if there are two different companies that want it?”  I usually respond to this question with, “What a great problem to have!”  This could potentially cause a bidding war for your idea. By the way, there’s one industry that you would not want to contact more than one person at a time with, and that’s DRTV (Direct Response TV, otherwise known as “As Seen on TV”).  It’s a very small community, so contact them one at a time.  There are only five or six players in that community anyway, and you’ll want to contact each of them one at a time.  When it comes to everyone else, however, you’ll want to contact as many people as possible.  Keep good notes, and even if you get a “no”, you might get a “yes” next time. Act professionally and ask for feedback.  Maybe you can resubmit it, or maybe you can tweak the idea a bit before submitting it to the next company.  Everything is based on relationships, and if you submit another one before you know it, they’ll start to tell you what they are looking for.  That’s golden because if you know what people want, you’re in a much better position to provide it.  This definitely gives you an advantage, and they realize that you are working for free for them; that is, until they take it and rent it from you.  You’re an asset.  They want these calls, and they are really going to love you. When they finally say, “We want to talk more,” you’re going to fall out of your chair.  This gives me goose bumps to this day.  That’s when you’ll know that you’re really in the game.  Again, anyone can do this.  The steps are easy, and you’ve been given all of the advice that you need to get started today.  The only thing that hasn’t been discussed much at this point is the contract.  I can talk all day about how to cut these deals, but there note enough time during this interview. However, here are ways to cut deals that you get it every time. How To Get A Deal There’s one way to get a deal every single time.  It’s all about taking away fear.  When a company sees your idea, they want to license your PPA.  They want to license that number.  They want to license your concept.  It comes down to what you are granting and what they are licensing.  In their mind, they need something tangible.  I always tells these companies, “We’re going to make improvements.”  That’s because they are; they always do.  That sounds really simple, but they always say yes.  It’s good business.  The company will tell me, “You’re right Steve; you’re going to make improvements.  We’re going to make improvements, and we need to add it to the contract.”  Now, what happens when they do that? When your idea is patent-pending, you’re going to ask for a certain royalty.  That may be 5%, for example.  Then you make the agreement that when your idea goes to patent, you’ll be paid 7%.  At the same time, make the agreement that if it doesn’t issue at all, they pay you at least 1% for your efforts.  Doing it this way takes away all of the fear from that company.  They are always worried about owning something.  I don't believe that you own anything, ever.  Products go in and out of the market so quickly today that your product might go through its life cycle before a patent can even get issued.  It’s not about patents.  It’s about selling.  So, the way you do these deals is you just take away the risk for these companies. During your negotiations, you tell the companies that you speak with, “If it issues pay me [this], and pay me [this] if it doesn’t.”  Since you opened up the grant of license, you can always file another PPA to get paid the 5%.  That may seem a little complex. I have written a book on this topic alone.  These are the deals that I see happening every day because you take away the risk and you give the companies three different opportunities, and all along, you play the patent game.  Even more importantly, the patent game doesn’t play you this way.  This is something that’s a bit hard for many people to grasp, but it’s not that complicated if you sit down and think about it for a while. What happens is when your product lands on a company’s desk, the CEO may look at it and say, “Hey, I like this, but let me bring my team in.”  He shows it to the sales guy, and the sales guy goes, “Hey, I can sell this.”  Then, they go to the marketing person, and he says, “I can market this product because it has a great benefit.”  They bring the manufacturing guy in, and he goes, “This is an improvement on our existing ideas, so we can make this.”  Finally, they bring the legal guy in, and he asks, “Well, does he own anything?”  This makes everyone in the room start to think, and they say, “We don’t know.  Take a look at his Provisional Patent Application.”  That’s when the legal guy asks, “Well, will he get a patent,” and everyone goes, “I don’t know”.  You see, no one knows; this is the gray area. You’re playing the unknowns.  This opens the doors for you to say, “I know it is speed to market, and I know it’s not about protection.  It’s about selling.  So, let’s just go sell it now.”  Why wait for a patent to issue when it might not even issue?  Even if it does issue, by then it may be too late.  So, you play that game of the unknown, and that way, when you work the contract, you can keep that gray area open and a little vague by adding new intellectual properties that keeps that patent pending as long as you like.  At the same time, you are minimizing their risk because you’re telling them that if it doesn’t go to patent, my royalties will be basically nothing.  It makes them very happy, in fact, because you’ve countered everything that could possibly happen. Again, it’s really about selling.  It’s not about protection.  I have seen tons of licensing agreements in my lifetime, in 99% of them, no one owns anything.  A lot of the time, people don’t like to hear that.  Patent attorneys don’t want to hear that, for example, because they want to sell you the patent.  They want to sell you that process of filing a patent. I want everyone to know, that’s not what I'm seeing.  I see these agreements probably every other week, and I've been seeing this for 15 years.  It’s not about fear, or being an expert, or anything like that.  It’s really about getting into the game today.  If you’re creative, you don’t need to have a background.  All you need is one simple idea. It's always a numbers game in anything you do in life.  You can start one business and pour all of your money and energy into it.  In four or five years, you may have become a substantial success, and you may not have.  With this, you may have 20 or 30 ideas in a year, and you can just put all of those bowls out there.  Essentially, you’ll have all of these companies working for you and you’ve increased your chances tenfold.  On top of that, you were not the one to take the risk. Licensing Your Products Vs. Selling Products Through Amazon FBA I have a lot of students that do both.  Personally, I don't want to have any skin in the game, at least not financially.  Plus, I know that I don't have the time to manage something like this, and have no interest in doing so anyway.  At the same time, I do like to have multiple products out in the marketplace, and I like to have several different balls up in the air at any given time.  I like that what I'm doing carries no risk at all.  This is something that’s very easy to do, and I have done the other. I have managed a company before, and have had my own employees.  It’s complicated because you have to watch all of the time and stay aware of the market swings.  All of that stuff is someone else’s problem when you’re just licensing your ideas.  It’s not that this is any better than any other business model, really.  It’s just another way to play the game.  I personally think you should play the game in all sorts of different ways.  So, it’s not a matter of one being better than the other; it comes down to how you want to spend your time. If you’re a really creative person, and you want to find something that can build great wealth, then you need to find something that has a multiplying effect.  Licensing your ideas does this. Connecting With Stephen The 10 steps that were partly outlined are completely outlined in a book called One Simple Idea.  You can find it on Amazon, and it’s been selling there for over five years.  It has also been translated into five different languages (learn more about selling foreign language rights to your books).  I call this book your “road map” for pursuing this type of business.  I also have a YouTube channel called “inventRightTV”.  My partner Andrew Krauss and I produce two YouTube videos every week, and each one is on the 10-step process that you’ve been introduced to today.  Last but not least, I also write for three online magazines, on a weekly basis.  They are: Entrepreneur.com Inc.com Core77.com       Daniel's Real Fast Result Tip: Passive Income I agree with all that Stephen has discussed today. I firmly believe that we should all seek out a business model that supports our lifestyle and gives us the kind of time freedom that we need.  This particular model is right in the cross-hairs of that goal.  That’s one of the reasons why I just love the idea of all of this. So, go out and make it happen! Resources Stephen's Book - One Simple Idea Google Image Search - https://images.google.com/ Google Patents - https://patents.google.com/  Finding 3D Artists - https://www.fiverr.com/ Selling Foreign Language Rights To Your Books Real Fast Results Community If you are diggin’ on this stuff and really love what we’re doing here at Real Fast Results, would you please do me a favor? Head on over to iTunes, and make sure that you subscribe to this show, download it, and rate & review it. That would be an awesome thing. Of course, we also want to know your results. Please share those results with us at http://www.realfastresults.com/results. As always, go make results happen!

Panthea Lee is a Principal and lead designer at Reboot.org, a social impact firm dedicated to inclusive development and accountable governance. Panthea is focused on the practical applications of ethnography and systems thinking in delivering effective international development and governance programs. Prior to co-founding Reboot.org, Panthea worked with the UNICEF Innovations team where she managed the development of a real-time data platform to support child rights advocacy in Iraq and mobile learning tools in Suriname and Sudan. She also contributed to the launch of Palestine's first open-source software community. Before joining UNICEF, Panthea worked as a journalist covering access to information, press freedom, and sustainable development. Panthea writes and speaks regularly about her experiences around the world. She has presented at A Better World By Design, Microsoft’s Social Computing Symposium, and TEDxDumbo. She has lectured at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the School of Visual Arts, among others. Her work has been featured in The Atlantic, MIT Innovations Journal, Touchpoint: The Journal of Service Design, Core77, TechPresident and Fast Company.

If you’ve hung around Core77 for awhile, you’ve probably seen the name “Yo!” pop up on the Discussions boards and writing the occasional article on the main page. Yo! happens to be the alias of our good friend, Michael DiTullo. Michael is a super talented designer who has worked for Evo, Nike, Converse, Frog and is now the Chief Design Officer of Sound United. Sound United is a Southern California company responsible for the audio brands Polk, Definitive, and BOOM. Today, I talk with Michael about what’s it’s like to exhibit at CES, how he approaches getting Sound United’s products sold into retailers, the intense competition of the Bluetooth speaker market, and what the design scene is like in Southern California.

Bryn Smith is a writer, graphic designer, and critic based in Brooklyn. She writes about design for Core77, Designers & Books and L’ArcoBaleno, among others, and teaches in the graduate graphic design program at the Rhode Island School of Design.

Core77 is pleased to present Afterschool with Don Lehman. Our very first guests are Theo Richardson, Alex Williams and Charles Brill of Brooklyn furniture and lighting design studio Rich Brilliant Willing

Allan Chochinov is highly influential in the world of product design. He's the editor in Chief at Core77 and recently the Chair of the MFA Products of Design program at the School of Visual Arts. On this show, Allan talks about his program and what made him decide to go through with it. We also talk about products, we as consumers, and what's changing in the world today. http://www.listencloseshow.com/

On this episode of Design Matters with Debbie Millman, Debbie speaks with Allan Chochinov, editor-in-chief of Core77.com, the widely read design website.

On this episode of Design Matters with Debbie Millman, Debbie speaks with Allan Chochinov, editor-in-chief of Core77.com, the widely read design website.

Patriot Radio, Talk - Politics, Voting - Commerce - Making a Difference, Getting out of "the Loop". Canada, British Commonwealth - Lord Conrad Black, Hollinger - Media Barons - Moneybags, Dominant Minority, Psychopathic Dynasty - Rothschilds, Bank of England. Europe, Catholic Church, Charlemagne - Money, Religions, Royalty - Sumer, Priesthoods - Phoenicians (Canaanites), Greece, Trapezi, Debt and Standing Armies. World Standardization, Takeover - World Empire - United Nations. Pets, "Companion Animals", Robotics, Animal Rights - Dog Seizure - Veterinarians, Checkups, Shots. Age of Control Freak - Fees, Licensing - Slavery. Nashville, (10) Tennessee, Occultic Symbols, D.C. (ten), Mason-Dixon Line, Nash (serpent) - Obelisk over Water. Royal Society, Isaac Newton. Computer Language, Logic - Programming, Predetermined Conclusions - Electricity, Trick of the Elect. Jesse James, Robbing for "The Great Work". Chemtrails, Spraying above Clouds, Rain - Night Spraying. ("Digital Tattoo Interface" Jim Mielke, Core77's Greener Gadgets Design Competition 2008 (core77.com).) *Dialogue Copyrighted Alan Watt - Feb. 22, 2008 (Exempting Music, Literary Quotes, and Callers' Comments)