Business Week always has a great end of year review on business and design. This year Boeings new boss, Jim McNerney, received best start at a new company. It's always good to have a client on the list. Take a look at the links below, there is some really interesting stuff in them.
Leaders
Products
Ideas
LitFuse is an amazing interactive design firm, and it's here in Seatle! Check out their site, it is inventive and fun to explore. They do a great job of breaking the mold associated with traditional webpages. Make sure you check out the singing dolls and their portfolio, especially the Chevy Avalanche website.
Here are some great photos of the future of work environments. They are from the May issue of Interior Design--office: a space odyssey. A lot of the photos are reinforcing our belief of a collaborative culture. How do these new spaces change or empower a change in the way we work, other than space? As some of these are starting to feel more like home, does that make it easier to work longer hours or at your own times throughout the day? Check out the photos.
Business Weeks "IN" has a great article about the new innovative tools being used to create new and different products, alot of which are based around the consumer or user. How can we apply some of these materials to the architectural process and what would that mean for traditional architecture?
It also goes indepth with Ziba design, who is a research and design company from Portland. They recently won some big awards for Lenovo, who is one the best among its breed of computer companies.
Here is a great article about Jonathan Ive. For those of you who don't know him, he is a big reason why Apple has become the innovative empire it is today. Jonathan is the anti-superstar designer among so many of today's extravagant designers. He is a low key 39 year old that attributes much of Apples' success to their process of design and strength in collaboration.
Microsoft has unleashed a high tech school of the future in Philadelphia in collaboration with the Philadelphia School District:Students -- who are called learners -- use smart cards to register attendance, open their digital lockers and track calories they consume. They carry laptops, not books, and the entire campus has wireless Internet access. Teachers, or educators, rather than using blackboards, have interactive smart boards that allow teachers to zoom in and out, write or draw, and even link to the Internet.
