Warren Berger
author & journalist
The Glimmerati
Deborah Adler (Chapters 1, 3) designed the ClearRx prescription medicine packaging system used by Target stores, the first major redesign of that type of packaging in the past 40 years. She has worked as a designer at Milton Glaser Inc. and recently launched her own independent design operation, focused primarily on designing for healthcare needs.
Irene Au (Chapters 5, 6) is Director of User Experience at Google, where her team is responsible for design and user research for Google’s products worldwide. Prior to Google, she spent eight years at Yahoo! where she was vice president of user experience and design.
Shigeru Ban (Chapter 8) is an architect and designer known for his use of eco-friendly and economic materials such as cardboard and paper, which he has used to construct, among other things, emergency shelters in Rwanda and a church in Japan. Ban has studios in Tokyo and New York.
Yves Behar (Intro, Chapters 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10) is an industrial designer and founder of fuseproject, the San Francisco–based firm he established in 1999. He is the chief industrial designer of One Laptop Per Child’s XO laptop computer, and is working on a sequel. Other clients include Birkenstock, Bluetooth, Mini, and Herman Miller.
Janine Benyus (Chapter 8) is a pioneer in the field of biomimicry, which studies natural design and tries to extract lessons that can be applied to man-made design. Benyus is the author of Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature. Her company, the Biomimicry Guild, offers biological consulting, and her website AskNature.org answers questions about natural design.
John Bielenberg (Chapter 7) is a designer, educator, and founder of C2 Design in San Francisco and the Bielenberg Institute at the Edge of the Earth in Belfast, Maine. He also directs “Project M,” a program that strives to inspire young creative individuals that their work can have a significant and meaningful impact on the world.
Michael Bierut (Chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, 9) is a graphic designer, design critic, and a partner in the New York office of Pentagram. Bierut is one of the founding editors of the influential blog Design Observer. His work is represented in the permanent collections at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and at the Cooper-Hewitt.
Alex Bogusky (Intro, Chapters 5, 10) is a partner and creative director at Crispin Porter + Bogusky, an ad agency with offices in Miami and Boulder. CP+B is responsible for a number of innovative campaigns that have fused advertising and design, including work on the teen anti-smoking campaign “Truth” and the U.S. launch of the Mini Cooper.
Kathleen Brandenburg (Intro, chapters 3, 4, 9) is director of design strategy and cofounder along with creative director Dan Kraemer, of the Chicago-based IA Collaborative design firm. The firm’s clients include Nike, Hewlett-Packard, and the Nutrition Rich Foods Coalition, for whom IA Collaborative is currently developing a new way of presenting nutritional information designed to help people eat more healthily and more judiciously.
Tim Brown (Chapters 1, 3, 4, 5, 10) is the CEO and president of the design firm IDEO. He speaks, writes, and blogs regularly on the subject of “design thinking” and its relationship to innovation in business. Brown also has a special interest in the ways design can be used to promote the well-being of people living in emerging economies.
Valerie Casey (Chapters 1, 6, 8) heads a global practice at IDEO, where she designs socially and environmentally sustainable products, services, and business models for organizations around the world. In late 2007 Casey founded the Designers Accord, a call to arms for the creative community to reduce the negative environmental impact caused by design.
Lee Clow (Chapter 6) is chief creative officer at TBWA Worldwide and has overseen many of the marketing campaigns for Apple and other top brands. Clow believes that marketers must move beyond ads to actually design the ways they behave, as evidenced in the cultural redesign of the Pedigree dog food company.
Brian Collins (Intro, chapters 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 10) headed the Brand Innovation Group at Ogilvy & Mather before launching his own experiential branding firm, COLLINS:, which is doing work for Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection. Collins also teaches design at the School of Visual Arts and oversees the annual forum Designism: Design for Social Change, sponsored by the Art Directors Club of New York.
Hilary Cottam (Chapters 7, 8, 9, 10) is a founding partner of the London-based firm Participle, which is attempting to redesign social services in the UK by developing fresh approaches to education, caring for seniors, and other services. Cottam has also worked on the redesign of prisons. In 2005 she was named UK Designer of the Year.
Marianne Cusato (Chapters 7, 9) is the designer of the “Katrina Cottage,” conceived in 2005 as an alternative to the FEMA emergency trailers supplied to survivors of Hurricane Katrina. The Katrina Cottage won a National Design Award in 2006. Cusato, based in Miami, runs a design firm that bears her name.
Martin Fisher (Chapters 7, 8) is the cofounder of KickStart, which has developed innovative water pumps and other low-cost tools aimed at increasing productivity of small farmers in Africa. More than 50,000 new microenterprises have been started using KickStart equipment. Fisher continues to direct a team of designers and engineers in Kenya.
Heather Fraser (Chapters 4. 6) is director of Designworks, a center for design-based innovation and education at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. Fraser helped develop the Three Gears of Design model that is featured in this book.
Milton Glaser (Chapters 1, 2, 3, 6, 7, 9) is among the most celebrated graphic designers in the United States and a recipient of the lifetime achievement award of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. As a Fulbright scholar, Glaser studied with the painter Giorgio Morandi in Bologna. He opened Milton Glaser, Inc. in 1974, and is an articulate spokesman for the ethical practice of design
Michael Graves (Intro, Chapters 1, 5) has been at the center of the democratization of design owing to his successful collaboration with Target stores. Graves is famous for designing stylish teakettles and other household objects, but he has also been an influential architect since the 1960s, known for designing the interiors of his buildings down to the furniture and lighting fixtures. In recent years, Graves has begun to focus on “universal design” for the physically impaired.
Bob Greenberg (Chapter 5) is founder of R/GA, a leader in interactive marketing design. His firm helped design the NikePlus system, which serves as a model of how a product can be elevated to an experience that helps build a community. Greenberg is an outspoken critic of conventional advertising and advocates for a new marketing model with design and technology at the center.
Fritz Haeg (Chapter 9) divides his time between his architecture and design practice Fritz Haeg Studio, the ecology initiatives of Gardenlab (including Edible Estates), and other various combinations of building, designing, gardening, exhibiting, dancing, organizing, and talking. In 2006 he initiated Sundown Schoolhouse, the self-organized educational environment based in his geodesic dome in Los Angeles.
Alexander Isley (Intro, Chapter 1) runs a Connecticut-based design studio bearing his name and specializing in brand development and communication design for organizations involved with culture, fashion, and retail. Isley first gained recognition in the early 1980s as the senior designer at Tibor Kalman’s influential M&Co. He also served as the first full-time art director of Spy magazine.
Dean Kamen (Intro, chapters 1, 2, 3, 7, 8, 10) is an inventor and designer who holds more than 400 U.S. patents. His company, DEKA, has produced the Segway, the iBOT walking wheelchair, and the Slingshot water purification system. Kamen also founded FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology), which sponsors science competitions for high school students.
Larry Keeley (Chapters 4, 5) is an innovation strategist and cofounder of the Doblin Inc. business consultancy. He is a board member of IIT’s Institute of Design. Keeley is known for deconstructing different kinds of innovation and for creating three-dimensional “innovation landscapes” in presentations to clients. He also developed the Compelling Experience Framework featured in this book.
David Kelley (Chapters 4, 10) was an unhappy electrical engineer when he enrolled in Stanford University’s design program. He subsequently founded a design firm in 1978 that became IDEO (Greek for “Idea”), now with 400-plus employees worldwide. He has helped design some of the icons of the digital generation—the first mouse, the Palm Treo, the Leap chair. Kelley also has taught design at Stanford for the past 25 years.
George Kembel (Chapters 6, 8, 10) is cofounder and currently executive director of Stanford University’s d.school, which has emerged as a leader in the teaching of “design thinking.” Kembel heads up a graduate program that teaches a highly structured design methodology to business, engineering and design students.
George Lois (Chapters 1, 2) is an award-winning art director and designer, and one of the original “Mad Men.” Known for the striking graphic covers for Esquire magazine that he designed during the 1960s, Lois also was a partner in several ad agencies and was a pioneer of the “creative revolution” in American advertising. His breakthrough ad campaigns included “I Want My MTV” for a then-struggling MTV.
John Maeda (Chapters 1, 3, 7, 9) is president of the Rhode Island School of Design. A renowned graphic designer and computer scientist, Maeda was originally a software engineering student at The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) when he became fascinated with the work of Paul Rand and Muriel Cooper, and he eventually completed a PhD in design. He is the author of The Laws of Simplicity.
Roger Martin (Intro, Chapters 2) is dean of the Rotman School of Management in Toronto. Named one of the 10 most influential business professors in the world by BusinessWeek in 2007, Martin writes extensively on design and innovation, and has a special interest in “integrative thinking,” which he explores at length in his book The Opposable Mind.
Steve McCallion (Chapter 5) is creative director of Ziba Design in Portland, Oregon, which has been a pioneer in using design research for major companies. McCallion launched Ziba’s consumer insights and trends group, using a blend of ethnography and “cool hunting” to anticipate what people are looking for next. His work for Umpqua Bank is featured in this book.
William McDonough (Chapter 8) is the founding principal of William McDonough + Partners, a design firm practicing ecologically, socially, and economically intelligent architecture, and is also principal of MBDC, a product development firm assisting companies in designing eco-friendly solutions. McDonough and partner Michael Braungart co-authored the groundbreaking Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things.
Clement Mok (Chapters 1, 3) is a designer, digital pioneer, software developer, and former creative director at Apple who helped design its early graphic interfaces. Since then, Mok has founded several successful design-related businesses: Studio Archetype, CMCD, and NetObjects. He has served as chief creative officer of Sapient and as the president of the AIGA design group.
Gordon Murray (Chapters 2, 8, 10) is a renowned designer of Formula One race cars and the famous McLaren F1 “supercar,” though currently his design firm (Gordon Murray Design Ltd in Surrey, England) is focused on creating the prototype T.25 city car—which is smaller than a Smart car and incorporates a cradle to cradle design featuring flexible architecture and a reusable body and chassis.
Donald Norman (Chapters 1, 4, 5) is a pre-eminent author on the subject of design, whose influential books include The Design of Everyday Things and The Design of Future Things. A cognitive scientist who first became interested in design while researching the Three Mile Island disaster, Norman is a veteran of Apple, and now runs the Nielsen Norman Group consulting firm. He is also a professor at the University of California and at Northwestern University.
Bruce Nussbaum (Chapters 2, 4, 10) has been a leading voice on the growing role of design in business while serving as an editor and writer at BusinessWeek magazine. His blog, NussbaumOnDesign, offers daily scoops and case studies on innovation and design thinking. In 2005, he was named one of the forty most powerful people in design by I.D. Magazine. Nussbaum is also a professor of innovation and design at The New School.
Van Phillips (Chapter 2) lost his foot in a water-skiing accident in 1976 and spent the next two decades designing the Flex-Foot, a high-performance carbon composite prosthetic foot manufactured by the Ossur company and sold under the name of “Cheetah.” Currently, more than 90 percent of Paralympian athletes use Cheetahs. Phillips also founded the Second Wind Foundation to help amputees by providing inexpensive and virtually indestructible prostheses.
Emily Pilloton (Chapters 7, 10) is founder and executive director of Project H Design, a San Francisco–based charitable organization focused on sociallyconscious design initiatives for “Humanity, Habitats, Health, and Happiness.” Trained in architecture and industrial design, Pilloton has also taught design theory, and she lectures internationally about design activism and humanitarian product design.
Stefan Sagmeister (Chapters 1, 2, 10) studied design in Vienna and launched his New York–based design firm, Sagmeister Inc., in 1993. He has done branding, graphics, and packaging for clients as diverse as HBO and the Guggenheim Museum, and also has designed iconic album covers for Lou Reed, the Rolling Stones, David Byrne, and Aerosmith. Sagmeister’s most recent book is Things I Have Learned in My Life So Far.
Paula Scher (Chapters 1, 2, 9, 10) has designed corporate identities, posters, environmental graphics, packaging, magazines, public spaces, and just about everything imaginable. Her images, including those created for the Public Theater, have come to be visually identified with the cultural life of New York City. A partner in Pentagram since 1991, Scher is a member of the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame and was awarded the profession’s highest honor, the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) medal.
Edwin Schlossberg (Chapters 7, 9) was a protégé of Buckminster Fuller and worked on Fuller’s groundbreaking 1969 World Game. Schlossberg went on to found ESI Design, a leader in experiential design. He designed the Brooklyn Children’s Museum, one of the first interactive learning environments, along with other innovative museums, parks, retail environments, and public spaces, including, most recently, the Action Center to End World Hunger.
Cameron Sinclair (Intro, Chapters 7, 8, 10) is the co-founder, along with Kate Stohr, of Architecture for Humanity, a charitable organization based in San Francisco that seeks design solutions to humanitarian crises. Sinclair and Stohr recently launched the Open Architecture Network, the world’s first open source community dedicated to improving living conditions through innovative and sustainable design.
Philippe Starck (Intro) is a French product designer whose work ranges from spectacular interior designs to toothbrushes and chairs (his Louis Ghost chair is a design icon). Starck is associated with high-end, stylized design, but recently, in announcing plans to focus more on socially responsible projects such as designing windmills, he declared: “Everything I designed is absolutely unnecessary.”
Davin Stowell (Chapters 1, 4) co-founded Smart Design with partner Tom Dair in 1980, after he and Dair graduated from Syracuse University. Early on, the firm was approached by an entrepreneur seeking to make a potato peeler that his arthritic wife could easily use; hundreds of prototypes later, the OXO Good Grips peeler emerged. Smart Design has gone on to help create many other innovative products, including the Flip camcorder.
Jane Fulton Suri (Intro, Chapters 4, 10), as partner and creative director at IDEO, leads human factors design and research at IDEO. Early in her career, she used her background in psychology to help the British government as it tried to determine why people were injuring themselves using certain products. She then became a pioneer in bringing psychology-based research into the field of industrial design. She is the author of Thoughtless Acts?, about the subtle and amusing ways in which people interact with the world.
John Thackara (Chapters 2, 7, 8) is a former London bus driver who is now focused on driving social change by way of design. A self-described “symposiarch” (someone who designs and produces collaborative events, projects, and organizations), he served as director of the Netherlands Design Institute and also founded the international design conference Doors of Perception. In his book In the Bubble, Thackara coined the phrase “smart recombinations.”
Greg Van Alstyne (Chapters 3, 4, 9) joined Bruce Mau Design in its start-up days and later headed up Mau’s Institute Without Boundaries educational program the Massive Change exhibit. He also founded MoMA’s Department of New Media. Today he heads the Strategic Innovation Lab at the Ontario College of Art & Design, where he has done extensive research and writing (with coauthor Robert K. Logan) on the subject of “designing for emergence.”
Massimo Vignelli (Chapters 1, 2, 3, 7) is a world-renowned designer whose work has ranged from corporate identity, package and furniture design to the creation of a version of New York City’s subway map that is no longer used but is still revered. Born in Milan, Italy, he runs his New York–based firm, Vignelli Associates, with his wife and business partner, Lella.
Patrick Whitney (Chapters 4, 6), director of the Institute of Design at Illinois Institute of Technology, is known as a prominent advocate of human-centered design. Whitney has published and lectured throughout the world about how to make technological innovations more humane, as well as on the link between design and business strategy. In Chapter 4, he explains his concept pertaining to the “innovation gap” (and how to close it).
Richard Saul Wurman (Chapters 3, 9, 10), architect, graphic designer, and author, is considered a pioneer in making complex information clear. His eighty-plus books include Information Anxiety and the award-winning Access travel guides. He coined the term “information architecture,” a notion that holds that the explosion of data requires systemic design to make it understandable. Wurman also is the creator of the highly-influential TED conferences, uniting the themes of Technology, Entertainment, and Design.
Gianfranco Zaccai (Chapter 6) is cofounder and president/CEO of Continuum, an innovation consultancy that uses design research to identify compelling business opportunities. Continuum has played a key role in the development of breakthrough products such as Procter & Gamble’s Swiffer. Zaccai and Continuum are also dedicated to exploring the power of design in relation to developing nations.
