The Latest

The 2009 National Design Awards — the design world’s Oscars — presented Bill Moggridge, a founder of IDEO, with a lifetime achievement award. Sponsored by the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, the awards are now in their tenth year. A New York Times article offers more news about all the award winners, and the Cooper-Hewitt highlights Bill and his work.

Doug Solomon presented his talk, “Innovation and Economic Growth,” at the UN Economic Commission for Africa’s Committee on Development Information Science and Technology conference in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia on April 29, 2009.

At a New York workshop on April 23, IDEO took a hands-on human-centered approach to designing for customer loyalty. Click to read more about setting the stage for loyality or to download a worksheet from the event. Join the discussion on IDEO's “Big Conversations and Small Talk” on Facebook, or follow it on the event blog.

On Fast Company’s blog, Tim Brown will explore what he calls the Age of Involvement, the role of participation in an information society and how it leads to an expanded view of our economy. His first post, written to stimulate a conversation, asks if we can really spend our way out of this downturn and somehow magically create a post-crisis economy that is sustainable. Join the discussion here or read Linda Tischler’s introduction to Tim’s guest blog.

For the BBC’s “World of Business,” Peter Day interviews Tim Brown about creativity and “the difficult craft of thinking.” For more information on Peter Day’s program, click here. (On April 23, the broadcast will be replayed in the UK on Radio 4 at 20.30 UK time, repeated the following Sunday at 21.30 UK time.)

Listen to the podcast here or download an mp3 of the interview here.

For more about Tim’s take on design thinking, read his blog.

A domain co-lead for IDEO’s Connected Health, Arna Ionescu is a panelist at the Health 2.0: User-Generated Healthcare, in Boston. She’ll be on stage between 11 am and 11:30 am EST on Thursday, April 22. To follow the Twitter feed for anything related to Health2.0, click here.

After years of lagging behind architecture, industrial design begins tackling some of the world’s most vexing problems.

View the PDF

What if a doorbell could trigger the connection between scent and memory? How might traditional Chinese craftsmanship be paired with modern audio technology to demonstrate that “Made in China” isn’t always equated with “cheaply produced”? Could one person’s love of a material—specifically, cork—be exaggerated to elicit emotional response in others?

Chronicle Books and IDEO put together a 240-page glossy tome to answer these and other thought-provoking questions about what inspires designers to design. The authors, award-winning IDEO design director Martin Bone and IDEO materials expert Kara Johnson, complement each other’s thinking beautifully, approaching each design brief from the outside in and the inside out, respectively.

In a special report on health care and technology, The Economist interviews IDEO’s CEO Tim Brown for three articles. For an article about what “the rich world’s health-care systems” can learn from India’s entrepreneurs, click here. To read how technology is making health care more portable, precise and personal, click here. To consider how far interactive digital medicine can go, click here. To read Tim’s blog about design thinking, go here.

Reporter Linda Tischler writes about Gary Hustwit’s upcoming film Objectified, which both celebrates industrial design and asks viewers to contemplate the impact of ID. In the film and quoted in the article, IDEO’s Tim Brown, explains, “Most of what we design ends up in the landfill. We have to take that into account.” Other IDEO appearances in the film include David Kelley and Bill Moggridge.

Watch the trailer and read the article here.

To follow Tim’s thinking, read his blog.

The UK’s Design Council recently released the results of the i-team project, a pioneering effort that shows how the public sector can use cutting-edge innovation to create better, more sustainable services. Conceived by Forum for the Future, the i-team project was run as a collaboration with IDEO.

For more information about i-team, click here.

Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO, shows how the techniques and strategies of design belong at every level of business.

In April, David Kelley won the Edison Achievement Award for Innovation from the Thomas Edison Papers at Rutgers University. He received the award for his “pioneering contributions to the design of breakthrough products, services, and experiences for consumers, as well as his development of an innovative culture that has broad impact.” Past recipients include Ted Turner and Martha Stewart. For more about the awards, click here or to an article on Fast Company.