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Unabashed Gearhead Gnarlyness

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The new Ferrari FF and the return of jolie laide

Ferrari just announced a new, four-seat, four wheel drive car called the FF.  It sounds great and looks awesome:

The FF is the first design in a long time from Ferrari to break new aesthetic ground.  The recent 458 Italia is a truly gorgeous and wondeful car, and I'd love to have one waiting for me in my garage, but it represents the evolution of an idea which began with the 1963 250 Le Mans.  It is an almost perfect execution of an old idea. The FF, on the other hand, does not work from any proportional standards seen before from the folks in Maranello.  And I love it.  I love the roofline.  I love the way it hunkers over its rear wheels.  I love the way all of its visceral design elements combine to say... take me out for a drive.  Those wheels, those exhaust pipes, those side vents?  They're all whispering, "let's get out of here...":

And I love it because it dares to ignore classical standards of beauty.  Some might say it is downright ugly, but I would say it is unique and memorable, and perhaps a little beautiful-ugly.  Or jolie-laide, as my French friends would say.

As I once said about my favorite little puppy hearse, the BMW M Coupe -- to which the FF bears more than a passing resemblance -- why be beautiful when you could be interesting?

 

Amen.

metacool Thought of the Day

"I'm a designer. I'm a creator. I really like helping manage and lead a growing, profitable business. It's a design job."

- Alan Mulally, President and CEO, Ford Motor Company

metacool Thought of the Day

"Above all, think of life as a prototype.  We can conduct experiments, make discoveries, and change our perspectives.  We can look for opportunities to turn processes into projects that have tangible outcomes.  We can learn how to take joy in the things we create whether they take the form of a fleeting experience or an heirloom that will last for generations.  We can learn that reward comes in creation and re-creation, not just in the consumption of the world around us.  Active participation in the process of creation is our right and our privilege.  We can learn to measure the sucess of our ideas not by our bank accounts but by their impact in the world."

- Tim Brown

Truly remarkable: Kaz Yamauchi's Gran Turismo 5

This is what remarkable feels like

Original.  Creative.  Breathtaking.  Daring.  Singular.  Brilliant.  Artistic.  Practiced.  Considered.  Inspiring.  Flabbergasting.  Elegant.  Ingenious.  Astonishing.

Remarkable.

You can prototype anything: Ayr Muir-Harmony and Clover Food Lab

"I spent weeks thinking about and composing this. It’s very important to me, to the company, and I hope to all of you. This is a statement of the philosophy by which we are building Clover. We’re not coming to you with a product that is complete. Instead we’re hoping to engage you. We have big things we want to achieve and we’ll only be able to get there with your help.

Third, like most things Clover this wall is going to change. The white paint comes out in 3 weeks."

- Ayr Muir-Harmony, founder, Clover Food Lab

 

I'm a big fan of what Ayr Muir-Harmony has been doing with his startup Clover Food Lab over the past two years.  I'm jealous, even.  Ayr is incredibly gutsy, but also deeply thoughtful about how we goes about failing his way to success.  His venture is all about learning by getting out there and engaging with customers in an authentic, honest, and open way.  

Ayr lives Principle 5 better than just about any other person I've met.

More thoughts on the primacy of doing: Shinya Kimura, Jeep, Corvette, and the cultural zeitgeist of life in 2010

My last post on Shinya Kimura created some great discussions, both in email, on forums across the internets, and around my workplace.  That video certainly struck a deep chord with me, as it has with many other folks.  Kimura combines an extremely strong point of view with a strong bias for doing, and the combination is entrancing.  As I watched it again over the weekend, it made me think of two commercials which aired earlier this year, one for Jeep, the other for Corvette.

Here's the Jeep spot, which, if you listen carefully, sounds more like the manifesto for a social movement than it does an ad trying to hawk sheetmetal (and that's a Good Thing):

And then there's these amazing 45 seconds of brand building from Chevrolet:

Warning: rant approaching.

For me, the cultural zeitgeist of life in 2010 America is clearly saying "We need to start thinking with our hands again", and that we need at least to have confidence in our decision making as we seek to create things of intrinsic value -- be they forged in metal, hacked in bits, or whipped out of the air via meticulous planning and rigorous execution.  It's not difficult to get to a strong, compelling point of view.  That's what design thinking can do for you.  But in each of these videos I sense our society expressing a strong yearning for something beyond process, the courage to make decisions and to act.  Talking and thinking is easy, shipping is tough. 

I think that courage comes from foundational experiences messing with stuff.  We're still in hard times, undergoing a structural shift away from the economic flows which underpinned the 20th century.  The imagery expressed in the Jeep and Chevy videos is from that receding economic period, which still exists here in places, but which will continue to drain away unless we can grasp the essence of what those images are saying to us.  We need to start thinking with our hands again.  The Corvette piece pines wistfully for Apollo rockets and the like... and implies that we can't make them anymore.  Which is probably true.

However, we are indeed still creating Apollo-like icons for the future -- for example, Facebook, Google, and even the Chevy Volt -- but we certainly need more people who, like Kimura, can't keep themselves from hacking away at stuff.  Tinkering, hacking, experimenting, they're all ways of experiencing the world which are more apt than not to lead to generative, highly creative outcomes.  I firmly believe that kids and young adults who are allowed to hack, break, tear apart, and generally probe the world around them develop an innate sense of courage when it comes time to make a decision to actually do something.  I see this all the time at Stanford: people build their creative confidence by doing things which are difficult, rather than by mastering theoretical concepts, which, though complex and difficult in and of themselves, are not transformative in a personal sense.  In my training as an engineer, I took years of complex math, and it was incredibly useful to me as I applied it to thermodynamic and fluid mechanics issues I encountered as a design engineer, but nothing gave me the courage to act as the experience I had creating a casting pattern on a lathe and milling machine and then pouring molten aluminum in the negative space left by the handiwork of my mind.  It was my I can do this moment.  If we want more people to fall in love with the art and science of bringing cool stuff to life, we need to help them have that moment, wherever and however it may come.

Brian W. Jones left a wonderful comment under my Kimura post, one which I think sums it all up really well:

“The world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation. The hand is the cutting edge of the mind.”  - Jacob Bronowski

How will you grasp the world?  What can your hands tell you?  We need to start thinking with our hands again.

What can you ship today?

Shinya Kimura and the primacy of doing

My personal creative process is a source of great joy in my life.  The reason I do what I do is because when I'm working on creating something, I can more often than not get to a state of flow, and living in that state, even for a few minutes, is an amazing experience.  I can get there by writing a blog post, drawing up the organizational structure for a new venture, carving out a wicked reverse income statement on Excel, or improvising on my tenor sax.  The medium really doesn't matter -- only doing it does.

But if I'm not careful I can very easily psych myself out.  If I'm not mindful of my own process, I can think all I want, as long as I want, about how I might get traction with whatever blank sheet of paper is staring back at me, but all of that mental toil never gets me anywhere, though it is extraordinarily effective at keeping me up at night.  In my experience, there's nothing quite like getting started to get one tracking toward success, as trite as that might sound.  By not getting started, however, I tend to create a virtual cage for myself, a cell whose bars are made up of equal parts, fear of failure, lack of confidence in process, and a vague sense that this may finally be the time when when hard work does not suffice and my talent and years of training will finally fail me.  And yet, when I start, my own creative process -- which is a variant of the generic "design thinking" process, I suppose - never lets me down, because it is actually built upon a premise of iterative failing.  The only failure is to never begin.  Whenever I finally get down to starting, all of the fear and worry melts away.  Doing leads to flow and progress; thinking about doing locks one in stasis.

Over the past five years, I have been talking about the idea of design thinking, which in its essence is a repeatable, generative process focused on the creation of options.  Yes, design thinking is about thinking like a designer, but what is often missed about the concept is that the thinking that a designer does is not thinking done in isolation from other aspects of life and the world.  Rather, much of the thinking and processing done by a designer happens in the context of active exploration of the world, whether it be playing with metal or with piles of market data.  It is very difficult to imagine any worthwhile design thinking happening from the inside of a totally white isolation cell, or for that matter, from the circumference of a corporate conference table.  The critical factor is to do think while doing, and to do while thinking.

Enter Shinya Kimura, stage left.

I am always intrigued by the reflections of designers who think with their hands.  Kimura, in a Harley Earl-esque fashion, does not do many of the things we expect designers to do, process-wise:

"I have images but I am not inspired by any particular thing.  I don't draw, either"

Kimura, it would seem, does not have a premeditated game plan for the bikes he creates.  Instead, he sketches with his materials as they are, where they are, allowing his confidence in his point of view to guide him through to the final result.  I think his bikes are truly remarkable.  Their aesthetics, coupled with the story of their making, are inspiring.

From a standpoint of time and material intensity, Kimura's way may indeed be less efficient  than a more rational approach to prototyping, the kind I teach at Stanford.  There, I preach the wisdom of baby steps, of modeling quickly with cardboard if the end result is to be resolved in sheet metal, in Excel if the object is a viable financial process.  By the way, I do think this is the appropriate pedagogic approach given a room of neophyte designers, but perhaps the challenge for those of us design thinkers is to move beyond rote process; to paraphrase Charlie Parker, first you master the art of prototyping, then the design process, then you forget all that shit and just design.  In other words, once you know how to do, just do.  Pre think a lot less, do think while doing a lot more.  If the rapid asendance and spectacular triumphs of the Web 2.0 superstars -- the Zyngas, the Facebooks, and the Twitters -- tell us anything, it's that doing trumps planning more often than not.  It is far better to ship now and learn soon than to study for a while and ship... much later.

In doing there is knowing.  Doing is the resolution of knowing.  We learn via our mistakes, and we make many more mistakes of value when we take action.  Kimura is a wise designer.

 

By the way, this amazing movie is the work of director Henrik Hansen, and was brought to my attention by my good friend, the indefatigable Jim Hancock.

Pattern recognition: Juke is the New Saab

I have to admit, I'm more than a little enamored of the new Nissan Juke.  It's gutsy, like a little rally car:

I'm infatuated, even. 

And then it dawned one me: the Juke is but a modern take on the venerable, hallowed Saab 96:

Do you see what I'm talking about?  Both share that iconic Saab reverse swoosh...

 

... as well as a big-eyed face only a mother could love:

Automotive reincarnation.  It's a Good Thing.

metacool Thought of the Day

"I love efficiencies in design, but I love efficiencies in business even more."

- Gordon Murray

 

Innovation Principle 19: Have a point of view

Take a minute to scan the montage of images I've collected above.  What emotions do they evoke, and what thoughts do they bring to mind for you?

As I look at them, here are the adjectives bouncing around my head:  alive, vibrant, crisp, beautiful, engaged, dynamic, iconoclastic, memorable, deep, intriguing, ingenious, timeless. 

To pull this montage together, I made quick list of the people, ideas, and objects which have made an impression on me over the years, and then I selected a subset which represented the whole of the list.  If you ask me about any of them, I could spend the better part of an hour explaining how they've created meaning for me, how they've influenced the course of my life, how they represent what's good in the world.  Your list is undoubtedly different -- it should be different -- and you may question my taste (yes, I do have an abiding fascination with cars shaped like an Air Jordan shoe), but I'd encourage you to take five minutes now (yes, now!) and jot down your own list.

(tick tock)

Are you done?

I'd love to hear about your list.  Even without being able to see it, I'd argue the following:  every choice on your list represents a person who made choices.  A person who knew what they wanted and what they did not, what mattered and what did not, a person who was able to listen to everyone but then do what they thought was right.  In other words, a person with a point of view.

What is a point of view?  Simply put, it is a crisp accounting of what matters which allows one to say no.  In the process of trying to bring cool stuff to life, it is so easy to say yes to everything.  It's much harder to say no to the things that don't matter in the end, and that's where the art part of the equation plays out.  But I can say one thing definitively:  if you don't have a firm point of view about what matters, your chances of doing something remarkable drop to zero.  Great things happen when we make choices, and we make good choices when we know what we want.

Above all else, you must have a point of view.  Don't leave home without it.

This is number nineteen in a series of evolving principles of innovation.  As always, I humbly seek your feedback, critique, and better ideas.

Unabashed Gearhead Gnarlyness

The Leica M9, by Walter de'Silva

Where good ideas come from

The Five Ways of Pulse

I really like this overview of the creation of the Pulse iPad app.  Written by Lisa Katayama of Fast Company, it succinctly captures the big things you have to do to bring something remarkable to market.  I especially appreciate the second of the five ways noted in the article:

Define: Are you focused and open to what your team needs in order to thrive? Define your personal point of view in pursuing your venture, and then think about what your end user, your team, and your business need. Even if your end goal is to reach all 6.7 billion inhabitants of the earth with your product or service, key in on a niche user to start and identify what works best for him. By observing and empathizing with the tech geek, for example, Kothari and Gupta were able to define his need: a better way to catch up with older news and other treasures that might get buried in linear feeds like Google Reader or NetNewsWire.

Over the past year, I've outlined 18 of the 21 principles of innovation I've been hacking on.  The nineteenth principle happens to be "Have a point of view", and I think the expression of this principle above is just wonderful.  Knowing what you stand for, and what you don't, and what is important, and what is not, is fundamental.  Without that knowledge, I believe it is impossible to manage the tensions that come with bringing something new to life.  Having a point of view not only helps you make decisions, it helps increase the odds that you'll make good decisions -- at least decisions that will feel good to the people you're designing for.  I suppose I should get my act together and write up those last three innovation principles...

I also dig this article because of what it says about the Stanford d.school.  First, I have to give a tip of my hat to my friends and colleagues Michael Dearing and Perry Klebahn, who created and taught the Launch Pad class wherein Pulse was created and launched.  They're incredible guys, and I consider myself very lucky to get to learn from them on a routine basis.  Second, when George Kembel and I wrote up the "napkin manifesto" for the d.school back in 2004, we had a vision of using "... design thinking to inspire multidisciplinary teams".  We thought it would be cool if the next pair of Hewlett and Packard, Filo and Yang, or Sergey and Larry found each other via the d.school.  Now, I'm not saying the Pulse is the new Yahoo, but it's very satisfying to see people at the d.school meeting each other, learning with each other, and working together to bring things to life which make a real impact out in the world.

Now that's way cool.

Some sage thoughts from J Mays

I'm always looking for feedback on my evolving list of innovation principles.  What works?  What doesn't?  What's missing?

Last year Esquire ran this list of aphorisms from the mind of J Mays.  I've been holding on to this list since then, and this afternoon I took another look at it.  Seeing them afresh made me feel that a few fell naturally into some of my framework of innovation principles.  Is it narcissistic to take the thoughts of another person and put them into buckets of your own making?  Yeah, probably. 

Anyway, here I go... thinking by Mays, buckets by Rodriguez:

Principle 1: Experience the world instead of talking about experiencing the world

"A designer is only as good as what he or she knows. If all you know is what you've garnered from fifteen years of living in Detroit, it's going to limit what you can lay down. If you've had experiences around the world, you'll be able to design a much richer story for people to enjoy."

Principle 2: See and hear with the mind of a child

"If you go into a person's house and look at his surroundings, you'll see exactly who he is. If you look at the same person in his car, you'll see who he wants to be"

Principle 3: Always ask: "How do we want people to feel after they experience this?"

"What does the cutlery look like? What's the plate look like? How's the food laid out on the plate? Has the environment been completely thought through? Part of the reason I go to a nice restaurant is to get the entire vibe."

Principle 8: Most new ideas aren't

"There have been more not-quite-right Mustangs than Mustangs. It had gone a little bit off the rails in the seventies, came back in the eighties, and went a little off the rails in the nineties. We did a lot of research before we designed the 2005, and we came to the conclusion that the ones that were really important, the ones that everybody logged in their heart, were between '64 and '70. I wanted the 2005 to feel like we were picking up in '71. So I basically erased thirty-five years of Mustangs in order to get the story focused in everybody's mind again."

Principle 18: Learn to orbit the hairball

"Success has a lot of fathers."

"Clichés are more correct than we give them credit for."

Principle 20: Be remarkable

"Believe it or not, there's an art to plowing a field. My father had an exact way he wanted it done, a laser-straight line over the length of the field. I just had to train my eye. If you lay out the first line wrong, then all the other lines that you disc will turn out crooked. There was a precision in those fields that I took into automotive design."

Who says you can't prototype software?

Sometimes it's easy to dismiss the idea of doing some prototyping when the "thing" we're working on is as ethereal as a service offering or a software interface.  The usual suspect excuses are very predictable:

• We can't prototype it because prototyping it is tantamount to building it
• We need to design the entire interface if we're going to interact with it on the device, so why prototype it?
• We don't have an interaction designer
• We don't have a graphic designer
• It'll take a few weeks to mock up the interface
• We don't have time

But, as the video above shows, where there's a will, there's a way.  If you believe you can prototype it, you can.  Warning, shameless plug approaching: Elmo's Monster Maker was designed by some of my colleagues here at IDEO, and it's awesome.  Not only is it one of my kid's favorite apps, but it's one of mine, too.  It's fun, social, wacky, will make you giggle, and in the way of all good games, you just can't put it down. 

None of this happened by accident. Perhaps Mozart could dish out an entire perfect opera based on the music in his head, but for the rest of us, there's no substitute for getting something out quickly, and then improving it over and over and over until we have to ship it. Iteration makes perfect. Starting is the springboard to perfection.

Some relevant innovation principles:

• Principle 4:  Prototype as if you're right. Listen as if you're wrong.
• Principle 5:  Anything can be prototyped. You can prototype with anything.
• Principle 10:  Baby steps often lead to big leaps.

A conversation with Jörg Bergmeister about interface design, the new Porsche 911 hybrid, and making green more red

If nothing else, working on metacool over the past half decade has helped me meet a ton of people I would never have encountered otherwise.  And thanks to another friend I met via metacool, I recently had the great pleasure of meeting Jörg Bergmeister, one of the most talent racing drivers working today.

Those of you out there whose eyes roll back in your head whenever I talk about cars can rest easy (relaaaxxx -- let those eyes roll baaackkk), because when Jörg and I met, we didn't talk about automobiles so much as about human-machine interface design and how new technologies may reshape the dominant paradigms of automotive design surrounding us today.  Our specific topic of discussion was the amazing new Porsche 911 GT3 R Hybrid, and yes we did geek out a bit on gearhead stuff at the beginning of our interview, but on the whole I think we ventured in to some very interesting territory.  In fact, we touched on many of the themes I surfaced in this post I wrote a while back about making green red.

By the way, have I mentioned how totally gnarly Jörg's 911 looks?

My favorite part of our conversation came when I asked Jörg about how he stays inspired, and his answer was just wonderful:

Racing is the one thing I love -- well, not the only thing, but I've done it my entire life and it has been my hobby and I made it my profession. I'm very fortunate to make my hobby my profession. I think that's enough inspiration. I just love, love racing.

Words of wisdom.  Can you make your hobby your profession, and achieve a "cold fusion" state of permanent personal inspiration.  What a way to remain always inspired!  I love it.

By the way, have you ever noticed how much the nose of a modern 911 looks like the skull of the ur-land animal Tiktaalik? 

Yeah, me too.

Innovation Principle 18: Learn to orbit the hairball

If the process of bringing new things to life were a living, breathing organism, it would be a nasty beast!  It would be unpredictable.  It would consume as much as you dared to feed it.  Some days, it would really stink.  Yucko!  And it would have a tendency to chew up people and spit them out.  Most of all, though, it would hairy.  Really hairy -- think dense forests of tangly, greasy, matted, hair, the likes of which make people run for shampoo, scissors, clippers, straight razors, and a blow dryer.

However, if you shave a hairball, there's nothing left.  You know, it's just a ball of hair, right?  But in that fuzziness is an unpredictable wellspring of creativity, which -- if left to do what it will in in its own nonlinear way -- is the source of the new and the wonderful.  Consequently, one must never give in to the temptation to shave the fuzzy hairball that is innovation.  As institutions and individuals, we have to learn how to live with the hairball and respect it.  If we get enough mileage under our belt, we may even come to relish being in situations of great ambiguity and fuzziness.  I know that I can't get enough of being there, which is why I do what I do. 

Organizations need to find a way to let the hairball be a hairy mess. The fuzziness of the innovation hairball makes its very presence uncomfortable for mature organizations.  Successful organizations have gotten to where they are by being able to sell, ship, and support things on a regular basis.  If the honest answer to the question "When will this be done?" is "We have no idea!" (which is what the hairball always says), a mature organization will be sorely tempted to lend clarity and structure to the hairball.  "Let's put you on a firm schedule with staged checkpoints!", it says.  "Here, let me clean up that mess of hair."  Instead, we have to be able to let the hairball be greasy and stinky, and learn how to celebrate it.  This is a hard thing to do, as leaving a pool of ambiguity unmopped rarely not squares well with meeting your quarterly numbers.  As to where and how to do that, well there are many books written around those subjects, so let's just leave it that we need to let the hair be fuzzy.  Don't shave it.  Find a place for it to grow.

To that point, my friend Bob Sutton wrote a wonderful post about his own experience of learning to respect the fuzzy front end.  In it he quotes Bill Coyne, who led innovation efforts at 3M for many years:

Finally, don't try to control or make safe the fumbling, panicky, glorious adventure of discovery. Occasionally, one sees articles that describe how to rationalize this process, how to take the fuzzy front end and give it a nice haircut. This is self-defeating. We should allow the fuzzy front end to be as unkempt and as fuzzy as we can. Long-- term growth depends on innovation, and innovation isn't neat. We stumble on many of our best discoveries. If you want to follow the rapidly moving leading edge, you must learn to live on your feet. And you must be willing to make necessary, healthy stumble.

I really like Bob's post because of the way he relates the need for organizations to build up muscles around grappling with fuzziness with his own personal journey as a design thinker. 

As I've said earlier, at a personal level, being comfortable with the innovation process is largely a matter of learning by doing.  The more you're in hairy, fuzzy situations, and the more you find your way out of them, the more your confidence in your own creative process will grow.  At an individual level, if you want to be able to live in more innovative ways, you need to learn how to orbit the hairball.  That phrase, of course, is the title of Gordon McKenzie's masterpiece Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool's Guide to Surviving with Grace, which occupies a hallowed spot on my bookshelf.  For me, McKenzie's masterpiece is a valuable personal "owner's manual", as it helps you find your own ways to avoid the temptation to shave the hairball.  It teaches you instead to find ways orbit it when necessary (which may be almost all the time for some folks).

Know thyself.  Understanding how to deal with ambiguity at a personal level is the key to unlocking one's creative confidence.  An organization which understands how to resist shaving the hairball, populated by people who know how to orbit the hairball, will be capable of bringing amazing things to life.

Know thyself.

This is number 18 in a series of principles of innovation.  It is an evolving work.  Please give me your thoughts, suggestions, and good ideas. 

Do both, and focus on everything

Joi Ito has taught me so much since I started reading his writing around seven years ago.  More recently I've been able to collaborate with Joi on some stuff, and I can now safely say that the only thing better than Joi on the web is Joi in real life!

Recently at IDEO we've been talking about the difference between having a vision and having a purpose.  A vision is something you shoot for, a point in the future, while a purpose is a point of origin, something that guides you.  We're of a belief that visions are tough to go after when you desire innovative outcomes because they tend to reduce emergent behavior and serendipity.  A single, defined point in the future may be better suited to a top-down, variance-eliminating organization trying to reach a single goal, rather than for one trying to exist in certain way, believing that a guiding purpose will ensure that the outcomes that do arise will be not only appropriate, but likely extraordinary.

Against that context, I just read Joi's latest blog post, Focusing on Everything, which is just wonderful.  Here's an excerpt:

One of the great thoughts in the book is the idea that you should set a general trajectory of where you want to go, but that you must embrace serendipity and allow your network to provide the resources necessary to turn random events into a highly valuable one and that developing that network comes from sharing and connecting by helping others solve their problems and build things.

I heartily recommend reading the rest of Joi's post -- it is powerful stuff.  As someone who took John Maeda's advice to "do both" to heart a few years ago, I find Joi's philosophy of life very reassuring. 

Focus on everything.  Yes, I think I will.

photo credit: Mizuka

Bill Moggridge, blogger

Bill Moggridge, Director of the Cooper-Hewlitt, is blogging about his experiences there, and it's fascinating stuff.

Bill combines an effortless writing style with a keen eye for details and a warm sense of humor.  I particularly like his post A Car in the House (but then, I would, eh?).  Here's a charming video vignette about what it takes to put a Nano in the Cooper:

What a wonderful opportunity to see the world through the eyes of a truly great designer!

When in doubt, just do good stuff

I found truth in a cup of yogurt today.

I was fortunate to have breakfast with my friend and collaborator Ryan Jacoby today, and he reminded me that, at the end of the day, it's all about making good stuff.  Yes, everything else in your business ecosystem has to be in place, but you need to sell good stuff.  An Apple Store without Apple products would be... not so good.

Back to the cup.  Having intended to purchase a cheap(er) lunch, I just walked out of Whole Foods with a more expensive lunch, natch.  Actually, at around six bucks for a frozen burrito and a couple of yogurts, it is not bank-breaker meal, but I am a semi-Mid Westerner and have a kids to send to college and I'm living in the land of massive taxation... but I digress.  Back to the cup: while wandering the isles, I fell prey to a pricing promotion, and though I can never justify a container of Siggi's yogurt at $2.49 per unit, I certainly was up for two of them being promoted at $2.00 a lid.  Yes, it would seem that I need to turn in my MBA, but I am not a perfect person nor do I want to go through life making rational purchase decisions.

And how very happy I am right now with spoon in mouth and a wallet $4.00 lighter.  Siggi's, for those of you who have not had the pleasure of sampling yet, has exquisite mouth feel.  It is thick without being clompy, smooth without feeling excessively processed.  It comes in some of the standard yogurt flavors -- vanilla, blueberry, etc -- but also in some unexpected ones, like grapefruit.  Love that grapefruit.  And none of the flavors feel like they feel off the back of a truck destined for IHOP; they are light and complex, not syrupy and bright.  There's a wonderful backstory to Siggi's, too:  the company is led by a passionate, entrepreneurial Icelander named Siggi who is crazy about his native skyr yogurt and so found a bunch of wholesome cows in New York and started cranking out skyr.  The packaging is eco-friendly and the graphic design meets my psychographic needs.  With all of this, $2.49 starts to feel reasonable.

There's no big punchline to this post.  Just do good stuff.  Just do good stuff.  When in doubt, repeat that under your breath:  Just do good stuff.

A conversation with Michael Mauer

Earlier this year I was very fortunate to have a conversation with Michael Mauer, Porsche's head of design.  You can read the complete interview here at Aol Autos.

I thought this thought from Mauer about creative leadership was particularly interesting vis a vis Innovation Principle 12, Instead of Managing, try Cultivating:

... at the end of the day, I do not tell them to move a line exactly 50 mils lower or higher or more to the left or more to the right, because if the boundaries are too narrow you really kill all the creativity. I try to motivate people to think for themselves about the solution and how they could achieve the goal... Even if I have a solution in my mind, it is just one possible solution. There might be ten other possible solutions that are maybe much better, but by giving a direction that is too detailed or showing a solution, a way to the solution that is too detailed, I kill all the creativity. One of my major goals is to give the team freedom in order to have a maximum of creativity.

This feels very much to me like a "cultivation mindset".  Instead of trying to push his ideas through the system at Porsche, Mauer is trying to develop the ideas of others.  He is a curator, a director, a cultivator.  As you can see from the stunning new Porsche 918 Spyder pictured above, his approach speaks for itself.

Unabashed Gearhead Gnarlyness

Finally got me a proper racing helmet!  A boyhood dream come true.

Many thanks to everyone who helped me pick the right one and get it set up with graphics: Jeff, Katie, Gerry, Diem, David, and Helen.

And I'd like to thank my sponsors, blah blah blah blah metacool.

Liu Lecture Series in Design at Stanford

Update: My Hipster Doofus Dutch Bike Project, or another episode of Unabashed Gearhead Gnarlyness

I bought a Breezer bike last year, and was really happy with it, but as I just can't leave well enough alone, I took to tweaking it.  My objective?  To turn it into a true object of hipster doofus lust, to make it a stealthy mountain-urban bike in Dutch city bike's clothing.

I'm kicking myself for not taking a "before" photo, but trust me when I say that the bike looks much better now: I've swapped out the stock seat, handlebars, and grips for some much tastier items from Brooks, Nitto, and a Portuguese cork farmer.  And the grips are shellacked, natch.  I'm still not totally satisfied with the seating position, however.

I took this quick photo today over at Stanford and felt like sharing it, ergo this Unabashed Gearhead Gnarlyness post.

Join the conversation at Living Climate Change

I'm really happy to be able to point you to Living Climate Change, a conversation that we're hosting at IDEO. 

Our goal with this new site is to expand and enhance the debate about climate change, and also to show what might be done about it using design thinking.  While I didn't have a direct role in producing any of the video scenarios on the site, I did a modicum of work to support them coming to fruition (Principle 12), and I'm really happy with where we are with this rollout.

There's a lot more to come.  Believe me, there's a lot of interesting stories and visions coming to the sight over the next few months!  Most important, though, will be your contributions.  If you're interested, please take a minute to subscribe to updates from the site, and contribute your thoughts and feelings here.

5Q4....

BusinessWeek has a nice series called Five Questions For... (or 5Q4) where you, the reader/audience/world citizen get to submit a question, and then someone like Helen Walters asks your very question of a luminary.  For all of us who think of calling in to a NPR talk show while driving but never do it, or who do call in to something like Car Talk, but never make it on, 5Q4 is a dream come true.

Are you getting the picture?  My question got asked.  I feel like a bouncy kid right now because Helen Walters asked Danny Meyer to answer my question.  I love the web.

Here you go, Five Answers from Danny Meyer:

And do check out 5Q4.  Lots of great interviews on there with people who make dents in the universe.

Director's Commentary: Adrian van Hooydonk

I really enjoyed listening to this interview of Adrian van Hooydonk by Tyler Brule of Monocle.  It's a wonderful Director's Commentary, because in it van Hooydonk explores many themes that are relevant far beyond the world of BMW.  Anyone engaged in the art and science of bringing cool stuff to life will get a lot out of this video.

Some of the high points for me were:

• his thoughtful exploration of how the 2009 financial crisis will shape user behaviors in the future
• his thinking on what it takes to design remarkable experiences, and his emphasis on the importance of having a strong point of view.  When he says that the BMW Gran Turismo is about "traveling in style", I really get what the car is all about.  By the way, the Gran Turismo has officially replaced the Honda Ridgeline as the focus of all my automotive fetishistic energy (but Honda, if you're listening, I'd still be very happy if you delivered a Ridgeline to my house one Saturday morning.  With a bow on top).
• his clear focus on user experience as the wellspring of compelling designs.  This worldview, of course, is what Principle 3 is all about.

My favorite part of the interview comes near the end, as Brule and Hooydonk discuss what it is like to bring designs before the board of BMW for approval.  Here's an excerpt:

Design is an emotional thing.  So, as a designer, I will lean to one or the other design in the final stages, and I can't completely explain why.  But my responsibility is to advise the board on which design we should go with, and they don't even expect from me that I can explain it to the last millimeter.  In a way, there has to be trust between a board of management and the chief designer.

I could not agree more.  In my experience, trust in the informed intuition of talented designers is what separates the great brands from the also-rans.  Informed intuition is what allows designers to make good decisions regarding intangibles.  In the absence of trust in informed intuition, organizations are tempted to decode intangibles via metrics, surveys and other algorithmic devices, and all the poetry gets trampled.

Could trust be the killer app?

metacool Thought of the Day

“I make all my decisions on intuition. But then, I must know why I made that decision. I throw a spear into the darkness. That is intuition. Then I must send an army into the darkness to find the spear. That is intellect.”

- Ingmar Bergman

source: Breathing on Your Own

Designing at the Boulder Digital Works

I'm happy to announce that I just joined the board of the Boulder Digital Works (BDW).  At this time back in 2004, I was busy helping the Stanford d.school achieve lift off, so it's really cool now to be part of another design education startup.  And now the idea of a design curriculum combining business, technology, and human issues is much more accepted in the mainstream, which to me makes the focused mission of the BDW even more exciting.

As John Maeda recently noted, the missing partner to STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) is IDEA (Intuition, Design, Emotion, Art).  As a person who was trained on both sides and now works and plays across STEM and IDEA, I feel strongly that our education programs need to combine both in order to create the T-shaped people that can go out and make a difference in the world (Principle 6).

Finally, as a native of Boulder, BDW gives me another excuse to get back to the place where I came to love and admire the fine art of driving in the snow.  Can't wait.  Hope the board meetings are in February!

Who designed the Porsche 917L Martini "hippie" car?

This Porsche raced at Le Mans in 1970 and captured my imagination as a boy like no other race car.  Beyond being a member of the ultra-gnarly 917 family of Porsches, this car sports a paintscheme like no other.  Campaigned under the brand umbrella of Martini, those iris swirls were as arresting then as they are now, and are what lended this particular car the sobriquet of "hippie". 

It's a beautiful design that's stood the test of time, and I'd wager it is a flexible one, too; if this pattern were printed on the side of resuable shopping bag from Whole Foods, none of us would bat an eye.

Here's where I need your help: I know that the design team behind the hippie graphics was headed by Anatole Lapine.  Somewhere in the cobwebs of my memory I have a vague recollection of reading that a member of his design team was a graduate of the Stanford design program.  If you have any information about this, could you please send me an email or leave a comment below? Design mysteries are few and far between, and this is a fun one.

By the way, it's Porsche Week over at Unabashed Gearhead Gnarlyness.

photo credit: Kelzone

Deep Glamoring...

I just posted a piece over at DeepGlamour:

Top 10 Most Glamorous Cars, 1945 - present

I have a feeling not everyone will be happy with my opinions, so please don't slash my tires.  But don't fret, there's no M Coupe on the list. 

Let the debate begin!

How will it look through time?

I love this video because of the way it illustrates the necessity of considering the passage of time as we think about bringing new things in to the world. How will it look through the day? How will it look after 10 years? 20? 50? 200? How might future generations feel about the work we've done today?

As this video aptly shows us, Philip Johnson considered these questions in the design of his Glass House. For me, this is further validation of the importance of Innovation Principle No.3.

Once again, why having a point of view matters

For an wonderful example of why it is so important to have a distinct point of view when one is trying to bring something new to life, look no further than this: 

Never barefoot

It's a daily dose of chutzpah, wit, and inspiration.  The depth and breadth of expression to be found in the design of something as familiar as a pair of shoes provides this challenge to all of us:  couldn't that thing you're doing be made even just a little better or more meaningful?  Why keep doing the same thing without first asking why?  Why look like everything else on the market?

Paul Bennett & Egill Helgason on design thinking, Iceland, the future of the world economy, and a whole bunch of other important topics

I'd be posting these videos even if Paul Bennett and I weren't colleagues at IDEO, so rich and fascinating is this conversation between Paul and Egill Helgason, the host of the Icelandic show Silfur Eglis.  Design thinking is a central theme of their time together, and they touch on many important topics of the day, including transparency, community, and how we might move ourselves out of this mess.  It's definitely worth a listen.

And don't worry -- it's all in English!  Enjoy.

David H. Liu Memorial Lecture Series in Design at Stanford

The David H. Liu Memorial Lecture Series in Design starts up again next week.  The speaker roster is truly amazing, and they should be an awesome experience. 

If you're anywhere near Stanford on these dates, I highly recommend stopping by.  Do check the series website for any room or date changes.

Simple Pleasures

In this age of economic swirl and uncertainty, quality is more important than ever.  As people decide where and how to spend their precious dollars, I think they're going to vote in favor of things of high quality, and hence greater meaning.  It's a good time to be a design thinker who intuits quality, and the great news is that lessons in the do's and don'ts of quality surround us each and every day.  It's relatively easy to enroll in a continuing education course in the art of bringing good stuff to life -- all you have to do is to be mindful in your daily journey.  They constantly surround us, these simple pleasures.

When I feel something is of high quality, I literally feel it -- my world calms down, and I experience an emotional response which is not unlike the feeling you get upon settling in to a champagne jacuzzi.. ah, this is nice, this is good. I can look at a high-quality object for unreasonable amounts of time, entranced by the quality of the details that make up the whole, as well as with the whole itself. Paying attention to quality is of prime importance to those of us dedicated to bringing cool stuff to life; knowing what goodness feels like is a key enabler of having a strong point of view, and it also keeps us from settling on the mediocre or the convenient. It's good to look and to know.

And what do I mean by quality? I'm not talking about process control and six-sigma methodologies, as much as respect them when used at the right time and place. Nor am I conflating quality with high prices; the realm of yuppie-driven quality is a place where price and opinion leaders combine to dictate what's hot and what's not to a club of self-selected consumers, and the value proposition there is nothing if not hollow. The quality I speak of has to do with materials, fit, proportions, workmanship, and care of assembly and upkeep.  It is unavoidably a function of what something is in the world.  In short, it has much more to do with the visceral (it looks and smells right)  and behavioral (it works right) elements of design than it does the reflective (the meaning is right).

Taken in mindfully, life offers us a continual flow of lessons in quality.  No matter if you are experiencing the built environment or nature, taking the time to really look around will deliver a constant stream of opportunities to think about quality.   Because this isn't about money, I don't think you have to be in a high-zoot environment to see interesting stuff.  Sometimes a lack of quality can be as instructive as its presence.

Just the other weekend I made a quick trip to my local grocery store, and happened across two wonderful chances to feel, hear, and see quality at work. 

The first was this charming 1959 Porsche 356: 

It was in beautiful shape, likely restored, but not over-the-top perfect.  I spent a few minutes sitting across the street so that I could admire its proportions in profile.  Why am I the only person admiring this thing?  Come on, people!  An open driver's-side window allowed me to admire the deep red leather interior, as well as the creamy steering wheel, a color combination which works wonderfully.  I waited long enough for the owner to come out (by which time I was distracted by the bike below) so that I could hear the motor start up.  It cranked up immediately, with zero smoke or stumbling, and its exhaust note was a smooth mix of metallic crispness and baritone song.  It's educational to experience a machine in good tune.  Quality.

Parked right across the street was this bike:

What sublime aesthetics.  I love the way the metal fenders exactly match the arc of the wheels, the artful way the side marker lamps are positioned, and the highly considered color scheme.  Everything is just so.  I find bikes fascinating because they are endlessly customizable.  Cars, and to a lesser extent, motorcycles, must meet regulatory concerns to be considered roadworthy, but with a bike, you can go to town and make it just as you see it in your mind's eye.  Without any badges in evidence, I couldn't ascertain the make of this bike, but looking at the compontents and accessories, I'd wager that the owner is a frequent shopper at Rivendell and Jitensha, both local purveyors of (extreme) quality bicycle paraphernalia.

The simple pleasures of quality: feel it, imbibe it, know it.

Director's Commentary: Elizabeth Gilbert on the creative process

Here's a fabulous talk from last week's TED conference.

Listen as Elizabeth Gilbert provides us with a Director's Commentary about her own creative process, and then shows us why we might be better off if we thought differently about where creative leaps come from.

Objectified trailer

This should be a really interesting movie! Comes out later this year.

And be sure to catch Helvetica tomorrow night on PBS.

Designing is...

... creating choice out of constraints

... linking needs with desires

... moving the baseline with intent

More?  What do you think?

Quality in a switch

Sure, you can call me anal-retentive (which I'm not -- I think "perfectionist" is a more accurate term, but without the connotation of stasis that comes with it), but I love what I see in the photo above. I took it at a hotel I visited recently.

What do you see?

I see the mark of someone who cared. I see someone who was paying attention. I see a belief in quality and the pursuit of perfection.  I see a work culture where people are able to exercise their need to do good work.

All this in eight screwheads aligned on the same plane, plus four switches located correctly within their assigned cutout (if you've ever put one of these panels together, you know how hard this is to do).  Quality experiences and offerings are fractal in nature, and rely on the largest and smallest elements to all be in sync.  Being a guest at this hotel -- from the bed to the room to the food to the views -- was a marvelous experience, and looking at this panel none of that news should come as a surprise.

Again, everything matters.

On Anathem and points of view

Exactly: a point of view is the set of conscious constraints a design thinker adopts in order to make a specific statement.  In the case of Anathem's Millenium Clock, it is about a design which can be complex and nuanced because of a ready supply of labor to run and maintain its myriad mechanisms.  Another point of view could have been to design a very simple clock with few moving parts, the extreme version of this point of view being a sundial.

I submit to you that, as a rule, things that are remarkable are born from a strong point of view.  Those that are not remarkable are often the result of a muddled point of view, or no point of view at all.  Having a point of view requires making choices among many possible alternatives.  Having a point of view means having a vision of what good looks like as a means to make those choices.  You can feel it when something was created with that vision in mind.  And when that vision was not in play, you can feel the lack of it.

Design thinking in the New York Times

The New York times ran a great article yesterday called "Design is more than packaging".  Of course, if you're part of the metacool community, you already know that.  But it is great to see this meme getting out there and sticking.  I'm very happy to see that the article was published in the Business section.  Cool!

Among others, the article mentions IDEO, my employer, and the Stanford d.school, my other employer.

A couple of quotes.

Tim Brown:

Design thinking is inherently about creating new choices, about divergence.  Most business processes are about making choices from a set of existing alternatives. Clearly, if all your competition is doing the same, then differentiation is tough. In order to innovate, we have to have new alternatives and new solutions to problems, and that is what design can do.

George Kembel:

It would be overreaching to say that design thinking solves everything. That’s putting it too high on a pedestal.  Business thinking plus design thinking ends up being far more powerful.

Well put, gentlemen!

What's on Dieter Rams' iPod?

Check out Gary Hustwitt's cool new blog Objectified.  The blog is about his upcoming movie by the same name.  Here is what it is all about, in Gary's words:

One reason that I’m delving into the world of objects in this film is that I, admittedly, am obsessed by them. Why do I salivate over a shiny new piece of technology, or obsess over a 50-year-old plywood chair? What does all the stuff I accumulate say about me, and do I really need any of it in the first place?

Those of you who followed the making of my first film, Helvetica, know that the reason I make these films is not that I have a comprehensive knowledge of the subject matter. I wasn’t an expert on graphic design, and I’m certainly not an expert on industrial design. But they’re both fields that fascinate me, and that I want to learn more about. I’m interested in industrial designers because their work influences so many aspects of our world yet most of the time it’s taken for granted. And I think that, especially today, it’s crucial for us to re-examine how we make and use consumer products at every level.

And if you could get all of these designers and design experts together at a dinner party, what would they talk about? This film will hopefully represent that conversation. I’ve been lucky to be able to include an amazing group of participants in the film so far, and I sincerely thank them all for their time and knowledge.

The term objectified has two meanings. One is ‘to be treated with the status of a mere object.’ But the other is ‘something abstract expressed in a concrete form,’ as in the way a sculpture objectifies an artist’s thoughts. It’s the act of transforming creative thought into a tangible object, which is what designers in this film do every day. But maybe there’s a third meaning to this title, regarding the ways these objects are affecting us and our environment. Have we all become objectified?

About Dieter Rams: nothing.  What's cool is what is on his reel-to-reel.  Man, that thing is awesome.  If Apple sold one, I'd buy it in a second.
 

My new car is a...

... bike.  In fact it's this tasty number made by Breezer:

I've had the bike for about three months now, and have grown to love it on several levels:

• It's an integrated experience:  I could have spent a bit less money by cobbling together an equivalent bike from bits and pieces, but the Breezer works really well as a unified whole.  Its designer, Joe Breeze, has a strong point of view on what makes a good bike, and I can feel that as I ride it.
• It's fun:  I spent a significant percentage of my childhood free time messing around with bikes.  I lived for my BMX bike.  I was either jumping it off of tall things, riding it through deep pits of mud, fixing it and cleaning it due to the previous two activites, or finding a way to get moneoy tobuy upgrade parts.  Over the course of about six years I took it from being a $80 Huffy to being a mean, lean, nickle-plated jumping machine.  A Mongoose that flew through the air and even landed safely more often than not. By the time I was done modifying it, the only original parts left were the wheels (the original ones ran strong and true), and the chain.  I'm looking forward to hacking on this bike (because as Facebook has taught us, it's all about user-hackable platforms), and I just love the feel of the wind through what is left of my hair.  Fun fun fun.
• It looks killer:  Amsterdam is the New LA.  Or Paris.  In other words, the cool look these days is fenders plus bells plus black paint.  Forget spandex and your aero tuck on that carbon fiber frame; sitting upright and maximizing your coefficient of drag is the way to go.  Admittedly, I've been unduly influenced by the editors of Monocle on this dimension, but I see the general rise in popularity of the Dutch bike aesthetic as a search for consumptive sobriety for sombre times; the Prius is statement about remorse for over exuberant car-ness, and I think black bikes with fenders are like wearing Timberland boots in a world of Blahniks -- the durable, practical,sensible choice.  That happens to also look killer in its own way.
  

Is the commuter bike the new Prius?

Yes.

More simplicity from the Glass House

Here's a video overview of the Simplicity Conversation I had the pleasure to be a part of earlier this year. 

Enjoy!

There's something about GINA.

I've received a large number of emails from folks asking my opinion of the BMW GINA concept car.

Here's what I think:

• GINA is about being remarkable.  And being remarkable, whether it be in the domains of design, engineering or marketing, takes guts.  BMW excels across all three of these domains, and does so in no small part due to having the courage of its convictions.  Sometimes these convictions are too strongly held, witness iDrive in all of its befuddling infamy.  But from iDrives to flame surfaces to Bangle Butts, BMW seems to be a place where errors of commission are forgiven.  It's about guts, in other words, and GINA is an tangible expression of those held by the brave folks from Munich.
  
• GINA is about a return to a paradigm of flexible, articulating structures.  GINA's anthropomorhpic nature is quite sticky from an emotional point of view, but I find it most interesting in terms of a return to a structural paradigm used by early aviation pioneer such as Louis Bleriot.  Being covered with a fabric is not a new idea -- many cars used to have leather bodywork (and we still have lingering fabric convertible tops out there) -- but combining that fabric with an articulating structure is new for automobiles.  The wing of a Bleriot monoplane flexed in response to pilot control inputs.  To see that wing in motion is to see organic motion very different to the mechanistic slides and pivots that characterize modern airplanes.  When the light hits it just right, there are few mechanical structures more beautiful than a semi-translucent Bleriot wing.
  
• GINA is a platform for a new age of open innovation and co-creation.  As Chris Bangle states in the video, attaching the fabric covering to the space frame does not require a great deal of time.  Imagine the cool stuff that could happen if BMW enabled "civilians" to riff on their own fabric covering patterns.  Or perhaps non-structural elements of the space frame could be easily modified within specified parameters to allow for surface improvisations.  And even the parameters controlling the wink of GINA's eyes could be made available for public hacking, so that you could upload new software routines and choose to have a sleepy car or a caffeinated autobahn stormer.  Most BMW's, I'd wager, would be the latter.
  

I'll take mine in a matte finish.

Glass Houses

A pretty good Billy Joel album, and a simply great day of design thinking I experienced just the other week at the Philip Johnson Glass House.  I was fortunate to take part in a Glass House Conversation hosted by John Maeda on the subject of Simplicity.  Keen readers of metacool will no doubt recall that Professor Maeda's book The Laws of Simplicity is one of my all-time favorites (be sure to watch his brilliant TED talk here).  His thinking has had an enormous influence on my work.

Each of the attendees were asked to be the guru for one of the ten laws of simplicity.  I chose the 5th law, Differences, which states that simplicity and complexity need each other.  I spend a lot of my time designing and implementing organizational systems which enable people to do things they otherwise couldn't.  I find time and time again that solutions that aspire only to simplicity tend toward the simplistic, and those that embrace only complexity veer off toward a morass of complexity.  Balancing the two, and figuring out where to place the complexity so that it creates value, and how to position the simplicity to extract that value, is the art.  Here's the illustrative example I brought with me to the Glass House, a snapshot of the dashboard from a Toyota Prius (you were expecting something other than a car from me?):

The cockpit of the Prius is one of the simplest on the market.  A digital readout replaces traditional gauges, buttons are few in number and highly considered in placement, and even the gearshift is just about going foward or backward or not.  And yet the Prius is arguably the most complex car you can buy.  Its gas-sipping nature stems from having not one but two motors, connected to the driving wheels by a fiendishly clever transmission orchestrated by a suite of chips of immense processing power.  All of that complexity without a mediating layer wouldn't be the car that non-car people love to own and operate.  The Prius is a great example of the 5th law.

I saw the law of Differences in action at the Glass House.  Having only ever seen the Glass House in history books, I didn't have a feel for the complexity of the campus on which it stands.  Over time, Philip Johnson built a family of structures which work together in quite interesting ways.  For example, did you know that the Glass House has a sister structure in the Brick House?  Here's a view of the two of them:

All of the mechanical needs of the Glass House are met by the Brick House.  An underground umbilical shaft connects the Glass House to a feed of heat from the Brick House.  The Brick House also contains a bedroom for those times when one might like to engage in... er, some more complex acts of human nature than would be appropriate in a public setting.  A Glass House without a Brick House to power and feed it would be untenable.  Even from a purely formal aesthetic sense, the two houses work better together than apart.  Simplicity and complexity need each other.

I really enjoyed the afternoon of conversation on design, business, technology and life.  I've had a fortunate life of exposure to some pretty amazing people and experiences, and this was right up there.  I'd like to show you some photos, not to gloat, but to share some fun stuff from the day in the name of creativity and openness. 

An amazing group of chefs prepared a meal for us in the Glass House.  It centered on themes of simplicty.  Wine was served.

We sat at table together and talked and ate and watched the weather go from stormy to sunny and back again.  You can't help but be immersed in the weather in this architecture.

We had assigned seats.  I sat in a white chair and ate more than my fair share of the edible centerpiece, which was quite tasty in its own right.  This is my favorite photo from the day:

It's in the mail...

I feel blessed to live with four Eames-authored items in my household.  Especially my book-laden nightstand,  which means a vision of Eames is the last thing I see before shutting my eyes.  That little Eames wire table is the first thing I bought after getting a real job out of college.

Simple pleasures.

Speaking of which, these lovely stamps, to be issued this summer, will be a nice way to send a friend a little kiss of design thinking at its best.