The Smithsonian Design Museum Tells the Story of User-Centered Design Through 120 Beautiful Products

"Beautiful Users," a new exhibition at the Smithsonian Design Museum, tells the story of user-centered design through 120 objects. From Dreyfuss' Honeywell thermostat—his archives are housed at the museum—to prosthetic limbs and app-enabled air conditioning units, the products chart this history of designing with respect to human anatomy and behavior, up through the open-source, maker culture we see today. "The phrase 'designing for people' is giving way to 'designing with people' as creative teams seek more egalitarian relationships with an increasingly well-informed public," writes [Ellen] Lupton [senior curator of conteporary design at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum], in the exhibition catalog.

Steve Wozniak Debunks One of Apple's Biggest Myths

 For its 85th anniversary, Bloomberg Businessweek chronicles the most disruptive ideas of the past 85 years. In 1976, The Apple 1 computer goes on sale for a retail price of $666.66. Steve Wozniak, who co-founded Apple with Steve Jobs and designed that product, remembers the early days.

ROYGBIV: A Pixar Supercut

One oft overlooked aspect of filmmaking, whether it happens during production or post, is color. Sure, you grade your film to give it the look and feel you want, but how well are you utilizing color to tell your stories? Maybe we should refer to the storytelling masters at Pixar to find out how they put it to work in their narratives.

Paola Antonelli: Walk the walk

MoMA curator Paola Antonelli takes on the "good girls" of design by complicating commonly accepted notions of what design is and does in the modern world. With exhibitions on video games, violence, and the beautiful lethality of everyday objects, Antonelli shows us the primary job of the curator is to provoke, not comfort.

Advertising & The Great And Wicked Issues Of Our Day

Ernie Schenck in Communication Arts about Dr. Deborah Morrison:

Deborah Morrison is the chambers distinguished professor of advertising at the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communication. Recently, she wrote a piece for Co.Create in which she calls on advertising people to transcend the consumption cycle and train the full might of their creative firepower on what she calls the great and wicked issues of our day. You know the ones: Global warming. Hunger. Energy. Gun violence. Mass extinctions. Overpopulation. 

As I write this, Dr. Morrison and nine advertising students are in Alaska studying climate change. They’re learning how to find the stories in the science—stories that most of us would never see, and not because they aren’t compelling. On the contrary, they’re beyond compelling, the stuff of nightmares without end. The stories are there all right, but they’re mute and colorless and shapeless, entombed beneath a mountain range of data. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Data can do many things. It can prove theorems, send rockets to the stars and cure diseases of every stripe. What it can’t do is light a fire under the collective ass of society. Data can’t do that, but stories and ideas can.