Join me and my students from SVA’s Products of Design Program at Design for Climate Action @svaPoD for an evening of open innovation. Inspire a group of students who have the skills we need to start pushing the right levers of change (systems thinking, design, programming, communications, everything that I should have learned in grad
Google’s Dominant-Logic Problem Google has announced that it will become Alphabet, a conglomerate—that old-fangled complex corporate structure popular in the 1970s. Could the conglomerate structure, as Google is defining Alphabet, represent the boldest and most innovative move yet within the entire class of super-tech companies? Google is not the first company to confront the dominant-logic
Last class we did a quick tour of Paradigm Shifts, Deleuze and Guattari, and Passive House vs. LEED. Anti-Oedipus: A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia. We looked at Deleuze and Guattari as an exercise in mindset shift – there is nothing like Anti-Oedipus in the hands of a global group of makers who can manufacture
The past two weeks in class we spent time first paying attention to the Ebola crisis, then trying to map out the system as we understand it. While much of health technology has come to focus on in hospital systems, electronic health records, and chronic disease management, we wanted to see what we could envision
Rebecca Silver and I are evolving our Products of Design experiment. From… teaching sustainable design as a silo… to teaching social, civic, and environmental design into startups and entrepreneurship. Manifesto: Better by Measure: Becoming Better by Measure (Class 1, SVA Products of Design 2014) from Rebecca Silver Syllabus below: Better by Measure FALL 2014,
Have we reached the limits of growth: Bodies are in trouble right now – despite reaching the peak of productivity the US now leads the world in the rampant growth of chronic diseases that lower life expectancy, and reduce life quality. “People are living longer than projected in 1990 — on average, 10.7 more
A strange question started popping up in my classes at SVA PoD, NYU ITP, and in various apps and tech and data competitions: Is my concept best suited to become a company? Or a non profit? Strange, because when I graduated in the 90’s – this question might apply to one’s career path, but it was
When you are in a startup, under the gun, trying to execute – how do you find time for empathy? Lean launchpad simulates entrepreneurship by requiring founders to get out of the building…and into their customer’s world. Teams succeed when they start talking to people, and find the magic in actually validating their hypotheses with
Teaching Lifecycles and Flows with Rebecca Silver at SVA’s Products of Design – product backstories, systems thinking, life cycle assessment. Or, environmental accounting, taught to design students. With stunning results – Here is Emi Yasaka’s assessment of her REI backback
Happy to be at the inaugural second year for Products of Design at SVA. Following through on a promise many years ago to Allan Chochinov, I’ll be teaching Lifecycle and Flows with Rebecca Silver, and adapting a systems thinking approach to product backstories. Lifecycle and Flows will expose students to the hidden forces behind how consumer objects