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?

McDonald’s is an interesting place. The one on Rue de Passy, in the 16th arrondissement of Paris where old money lives, fascinates me. During winter, the seating area in the basement of this McDo—as the French call it—turns into a social space that usually does not exist in this wealthy neighborhood. Young children drag their grandparents who are dressed in thick fur coats into the fast-food chain; youthful backpackers tap into the free WiFi to check their emails and itineraries; and in the corner, a small group of homeless people …

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 …

A year after blogging about the usefulness of honks in India, the quietest of motor vehicles may soon come with an added safety feature. (I’m in no way inferring causality here. These are just two blobs on my event calendar.) This piece of news fascinates me in that it reflects our dependency on the sounds around us—we have grown reliant on the purring of a car motor as a gauge of its distance to us.
I remember that as a kid, one of my daily games was to guess who was …