Year: 2019

  • Podchain, ownership and usership

    Car ownership was a fundamental idea of progress since Henry Ford came up with his Model T in the early 20th century. During America’s golden years, roughly from the nineteen- fifties until 9/11, owning a car was the first thing on every teenager’s mind. It was a sign of freedom and independence, the visible expression…

  • On mental models, refusing a five billion dollar offer, and petting a cobra

    Mental models are ideas of how things are. They are not about how things are in reality – they are beliefs about how things work or should work. People’s mental models can be wrong. If they are, they tend to be persistent, creating problems and at the same time impeding the ability to fix these problems.…

  • Innovation starts with concepts

    Organisations often struggle to change. One fundamental hindrance are tacit mental concepts, the foundation for both daily decision-making and the long-term strategy formulation of organisations. Once mental models have become taken for granted, they are held implicitly and can be barriers to novel thinking around a common aim.

  • Social consciousness and design

    Larger shifts in social consciousness offer chances for new product concepts. The green movement, the emerging consciousness of our environment, is a long-term influcence which in the nineteen-nineties gave way to concepts such as Body Shop, in the early 2000’s supported the emergence of organic and fairtrade food, and  in the late twenty-tens leads to the…

  • Why your design doesn’t work

    Companies can find that although they invest into design development, the results they get back don’t capture the hearts and minds of contemporary consumers. What can be done?

  • A new look at “Ornament and Crime”

    Adolf Loos’ “Ornament and Crime” is still regarded by some as an important manifesto of modernist architecture. But it has been strangely overlooked that it was also a manifesto for a dangerous notion of “cultural superiority”.

  • From Photoshop to Artificial Intelligence

    President Trump recently tweeted about allegedly photoshopped pictures of Melania. It shows that in our social media age, the task of editing images becomes increasingly important. The current market leader in image manipulation is Adobe’s Photoshop, namesake of the now common verb “photoshopping”. Photoshop is part of Adobe Creative Cloud, a subscription service for image software which…

  • In Memoriam Alessandro Mendini

    In European living spaces, the classical credenza was an important interior object full of meaning. Depending on the household, it was in the the kitchen or in the dining room, containing objects which could reveal the status, memory and history of a family – plates, cutlery, candlesticks.