SELECTED WRITINGS
[Source Images: Oksana Kit/iStock/Getty Images Plus, Prabhav Singh/iStock/Getty Images Plus, CSA-Archive, svetolk/Getty Images]
FAST COMPANY / The Big Design Freakout: A generation of design leaders grapples with their future
In retrospect, 2023 felt like the closing of a chapter. At least for a class of design leaders, who spent more than a decade participating in a massive expansion of design’s role across every sector of business, from tech to accounting firms and insurance companies. The year began with J&J’s decision to fully shutter its corporate design office and culminated in major downsizing at Ideo, long the standard-bearer for the design services industry. Along the way, a number of big companies not only parted ways with acclaimed design executives, such as IBM’s Katrina Alcorn, but they eliminated their positions entirely. Read more →
[Source Images: Prabhav Singh/iStock/Getty Images Plus, svetolk/Getty Images]
FAST COMPANY / Design Leaders are in their Reinvention Era
Last year was a sea change for a generation of my peers who led the charge in building out large scale design teams at major corporations and large consultancies. As I reported in my previous piece, The Big Design Freakout, companies including IBM and McKinsey went from few—if any—designers in their leadership ranks to more than 30 executive or partner-level positions. Big Tech, in particular, set the blueprint for this unprecedented corporate design expansion, as such firms as Amazon, Google, and Meta tried to emulate Apple’s singular, design-driven success, armed with favorable interest rates and easy money. Read more →
FAST COMPANY / Just because you can design an AI wearable doesn’t mean you should
Artificial intelligence is seeping into our lives like the rising groundwater of climate change, yet it seems like it also must be heralded by a new generation of gadgets for it to have arrived in the fullest sense. But does every new computing paradigm require sleek new hardware? That seems to be the conclusion given all of the hype surrounding Humane’s launch of the AI Pin and the Apple Vision Pro that preceded it. The masters of AI insist that artificial intelligence be with us always and everywhere in order to be both useful and user friendly. Read more →
FAST COMPANY / 4 design lessons learned from Apple’s Vision Pro
Apple CEO Tim Cook seemed to bring an almost religious fervor to launching Apple’s next computing paradigm as a counterpoint to Zuckerberg’s warmed over vision for the Metaverse. But while Apple has long been known as a design-led company, its headset seemed like a vehicle primarily designed to introduce Apple’s vision for a new era of “spatial computing.” This is Apple, so every element of the industrial design must be scrutinized. So what did Apple get right and wrong in the initial release of the Vision Pro? And which elements will set the standard for future AR headsets and which might fall away? Read more →
FAST COMPANY / Meta is having a midlife crisis, and Zuckerberg's stale vision is to blame
The news out of Meta couldn’t get much worse, with hundreds of billions in value lost and massive layoffs at the company. Yet, it’s not a stretch to say that Zuck's stale vision for the metaverse is at least partially to blame. As someone who began studying and designing for user behavior in virtual worlds more than 25 years ago, the news that Meta’s vision is on the rocks, is actually quite familiar and expected. Read more →
FAST COMPANY / We’re in a Golden Age of UX. Why is Zoom Still stuck in the 90’s?
Today we have cloud storage and augmented reality—all on our phones. Yet the user experience of Zoom and its competitors has not evolved in over 25 years. At a time when we desperately need online environments that encourage dialogue between people from different backgrounds and perspectives, why hasn’t video chat evolved at all? Read more →
FAST COMPANY / Apple Finally Created the World’s First Great Wearable. No, It’s Not The Apple Watch
Wearable technology has held the promise and imagination of designers for such a long time, and yet the path to mainstream cultural adoption has been extremely challenging. So, what does the breakthrough success of Apple’s Airpods teach us about designing for user behavior. And what are the potential positive benefits in an era of rapid urbanization, particularly with an aging population. Read more →
FAST COMPANY / What can Game of Thrones Teach us about User Friendly Design?
The set design of “Game of Thrones” embodies the changing role of design as an expression of privilege, comfort, and authority in the real world, from the middle ages to contemporary life. Read more →
WIRED / The Rapidly Disappearing Business of Design
My reflections on the rapid consolidation of the design business and the critical need for a healthy, independent design sector to tackle broader social and ethical issues that do not fit within a single corporate mandate. Read more →
FAST COMPANY / Why Interaction Design Matters
Fast Company asked me to write a short piece explaining interaction design for a broad audience. In this piece, I unpack the multi-layered user experience of the NYC subways to deliver an object lesson in the many applications of interaction design. Read more →
→ Famous Designers Show Us Their Favorite Notebooks
→ What Wile Coyote teaches us about Creative Intelligence
HBR / The Rise of UX Leadership
UX (as user experience is known) is the new black in business culture. Most of the executives I meet with, regardless of their industry, now promote UX as key to their product strategy. For a designer like myself, it’s easy to recognize which executives know their products intimately, and which manage from a spreadsheet. Thankfully, I’m seeing the emergence of a new generation of UX-oriented leaders with little patience for the hands-off approach. Read more→
→ Scaling your User Experience Strategy
→ Why Is WhatsApp Worth as Much as an Oil Field?
SSIR / When Will Design Get Serious About Impact?
Social impact designers must shift their focus from designing individual products and services to shifting the fundamental dynamics of development work by addressing problems such as: a technology-first mindset and the lack of funder support for experimentation. Read more →
→ DIY Innovation, Rotman Business Journal
→ Mind the Gaps: The Challenges of Using Design to Scale Wicked Problems Rotman Business Journal
→ Design with Intent, DesignObserver
→ Fishermen First: Protecting the People Behind What We Eat, Rockefeller Foundation
→ mHealth Innovations as Health System Strengthening Tools: a Visual Framework, Global Health: Science & Practice