As I’m finishing up Verganti’s Design-Driven Innovation, a door wins Architectural Review’s Emerging Architecture Award. I’m completely enamored with the idea and the aesthetics of this door: the meaning of a door as a static object that interrupts a space has been totally upended.
Could a focus group have given an architect enough insight to lead to such a door? If you’ve also been thinking about the issues of democratic design vs. monarchical design, I highly recommend Verganti’s book. His work is a result of soaking himself in the Italian design …

What are the limits of modifying a shared object or a rental product? Besides thinking about the value of common property as directly proportionate to its newness (Take that Vélo! It looks new!), under what circumstances can preceding uses add value for the next user?

Digital price labels can be updated quickly, but the speed of information change is sometimes less important than drawing attention to the comparison. Given the constantly shifting grounds of nutrition science and food safety, to what extent can this combination of mixed media be stretched? Can real-time web-based/social-media information be fed into the system? If this were a fixed-price store, what other information could digital labels carry?

Conventional sale labels tacked onto the new medium provide a comforting transition for grocery shoppers. The opposite—price jack-ups—will probably still remain quiet affairs.

Sharing shoulders: the latest Trump International Tower & Hotel and the stately Wrigley Building

A few days ago, I learned a new fact about the skyscrapers along the Chicago River downtown. Many of the architectural landmarks have been designed to relate to the river and their neighboring buildings. Roof lines of older and shorted buildings are picked up by the mid-section of their tall neighbors; curved green glass panels wrap softly around a convex facade that follows the river bends. To the uninitiated, this silent conversation lends an air of …

Humor with honest undertones?

Having been trained as a historian, I inevitably found myself thinking about the role of history in the practice of design and innovation. Design thinking, as we know it today, is largely an amalgamation of perspectives of psychology, anthropology, engineering, architecture, art, economics, and business strategy; to include history, seems to be going against the grain of innovation. If innovation is about the creation of a better tomorrow (because yesterday wasn’t good enough), can history be useful? Beyond drafting a timeline with the history of innovation …