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  • 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.

  • FUTURE CITY at MAK Vienna

    For the event FUTURE CITY at MAK Vienna, I invited three creatives to collaborate and show perspectives for the future of cities. I asked: In the not too distant future, how will we get from home to work? How will we dress and express ourselves? How will we nourish ourselves?

  • Form learns Function: Machine Learning for Design

    Form follows function: The most famous slogan in design. First formulated by Louis Sullivan in the late 19th century, it became a basic principle for rationalist design in the sixties of the last century. With machine learning, ‘form follows function’ turns to ‘form learns function’.

  • Emotibot

    The Emotibot concept by Mario Gagliardi was published in Green Newspaper, the leading Technology News in Korea.

  • Design is a conversation with a situation

     

  • Interactive Environments

    4 interactive environments by Mario Gagliardi to experience in your browser.

  • Like friends, follow uses

    Digital machines such as smartphones frame behavior and instill new cultural and social practices. ‘Liking’, ‘sharing’, ‘following’ are relational activities which have been defined by social media and established as new normal in the shaping of human relationships. The phenomenon of communication devices prompting new behaviors and expressions is not new: for instance, the word “hello” did…

  • Carbonara and Creativity

    Carbonara has become a global phenomenon and at the same time a very misunderstood work of culinary art. We perhaps need a new cookbook which lists all the ingredients not to use.

  • Why we fear community tables but not social media

    When fast food chain McDonalds installed community tables in some of their outlets, they had two goals: bring people together who would otherwise eat alone, and save space.

  • Digital fashion

    Three ideas for digital fashion:

  • Design DIY

    Until the late 20th century, the process of design was mainly top-down: design was being made by designers, produced by manufacturers, and branded by corporations. In the 21st century, these processes of production and consumption are being rethought. The design process has to become circular.

  • Three approaches to the design process

    The design process as it is usually taught and applied at the beginning of the 21st century is concerned with goals, aims and targets. It is dealing with business and industry, target groups and financial targets. It is looking at the often “wicked” problems found in all areas of life. It is, in general, working…