Do manufacturers ever open their own packaging?
My friend Aaron Oppenheimer has taught me a lot about the end-to-end product experience, for a consumer, through our conversations and his weekly blog postings. It’s…
Three quick weekend recommendations
Two plays and a museum exhibit, in order of preference and urgency: “The Clean House” –a comedy at the Arsenal Center for the Arts, in Watertown.…
My dog is for sale
I love the custom manufacturing business models of Zazzle, GoodStorm and CafePress. They blend made-to-order JIT manufacturing with UGC, seemingly as effortlessly as ABC. Example: upload…
First visit to IKEA
“Mom, I need a modern room.” I first heard those words about nine years ago when our oldest son was inhabiting the former baby nursery (think periwinkle…
Raymond Loewy: Father of American industrial design?
There’s a great exhibit at the National Heritage Museum in Lexington; “Raymond Loewy; Designs for a Consumer Culture.” It’s full of visual interest (it’d be a…
BusinessWeek and Fortune re-designs
Is it just me, or has the new BusinessWeek design suddenly made the publication look like it is nothing but advertorials? (New cover is on the…
Design School must mean something different to BusinessWeek
I’m really astonished at BusinessWeek’s current global survey of the best design programs in the world. (The Top Design Schools) It does indeed include many of the best,…
The less buttons the better
In today’s NYT, David Pogue extolls the virtures of the new at-home movie box Vudu. He writes, The remote rocks. It has only four buttons……[it] is…
Startup founders who “get” design
In my last post I whined about business people not understanding what industrial designers do. The corollary is that design is undervalued as a strategic tool.…
People still think we design factories?
As a young industrial designer, my colleagues and I were used to explaining what we did–to our friends, siblings, parents, and virtually everyone we met. “Well…
Jules Pieri 