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.

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 …

How do you determine if your food is fresh? Our expectations of fresh food seem to have extended beyond live animals to expiration dates, and now, see-through packaging of dried food. In the home of instant noodles, cup noodles with clear caps are not yet the norm. But with the option of looking into a cup of dried noodles, what exactly would you be looking out for? Freshness? The correct number of condiment packets?