Does changing how you make things change the way you live? The answer is “yes,” according to Made in the Future, an experimental project I collaborated on with some colleagues at IDEO Boston. The Made in the Future website recently launched and it explores how today’s innovations in maker technolog...

I recently returned from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. The overall sentiment there was one of cautious optimism. While there is a long list of major problems to be tackled, the immediate prospects for the global economy seem reasonably good and there is a sense that most economies ...

Successful startups have a clear and defined purpose—an offering, product, or business model like no other. They also know when to evolve, redesign, or adapt, in sync with emerging market needs. But how? Arvind Gupta, a colleague in Shanghai, recently wrote about the importance of adaptive innovati...

If you talk to people at the Santa Fe Institute, or read any of their books, you'll learn that a key characteristic of a complex system is that the more complex a system is, the more information flows through it. If this is true, then we ought to be thinking more about these information flows when w...

A show curated by John Cary of Public Interest Design has just opened in San Francisco at the Autodesk Gallery. It is a must if you are interested in design and the social sector. The exhibit features many of the organizations that contributed to the design labs at this year's Clinton Global Initiat...

Like most designers, I am quite comfortable with the notion of designing simple things. I can pick up just about any object and tell you how it was made, and I could probably have a reasonable crack at designing an equivalent of it, even though I’m not a particularly technical person. That’s because...