Design

A fully realised version of a home without stairs, Fujimoto's building is based on a thin, split-level steel frame...

The closer you are to your customers, the more relevant your product will be and the more likely you make it for people to choose you.

Moreover, by making real decisions we can really guide the user to whatever behaviors will ensure they have a great experience. If there are only a few options on the page and of those options they do 80% of what you're looking for, we can still capture that intent and use it to help make the product better for everyone. A lot of products fail to make strong decisions because each one they make clearly defines a product into a confined space, but when you provide too much choice another, far worse problem is created: you don't do anything at all.

Each of these main decisions really fell out of a single principle of keeping things as minimal as possible. It's not enough that the product is simple, but even the values and strategy underpinning it should be simple and straightforward.

Today, I’m happy to finally announce Fast Company’s first Innovation By Design Awards, which will celebrate the year’s best designs.

Q: Do consumers really care about good design?

A: One of the things we’ve really learnt over the last 20 years is that while people would often struggle to articulate why they like something - as consumers we are incredibly discerning, we sense where has been great care in the design, and when there is cynicism and greed. It’s one of the thing we’ve found really encouraging.

Q: Users have become incredibly attached, almost obsessively so, to Apple’s products - why is this?

A: It sound so obvious, but I remember being shocked to use a Mac, and somehow have this sense I was having a keen awareness of the people and values of those who made it.

I think that people’s emotional connection to our products is that they sense our care, and the amount of work that has gone into creating it

Design is shrinking the gap between what a product does and why it exists. Designing is not just about picking the right font or gradient. Stop thinking about design in terms of wire frames or visual style; it is about the product as a whole. Designing is figuring out the purpose of your product and how you orient everything else around it. And that means that everyone within a company plays a role in the design process. And that means that everyone in a company needs to learn design literacy. It’s a hard task. Everyone tells their MBA-wielding friends that they should learn to code: “Anyone can do it,” or “It’s going to be the new literacy.” People think code is the basis of a working product. But what about design? How often are people told that they should “learn to design”?

3XNs interior for NOMA Restaurant’s food lab unites the creative worlds of gastronomy and architecture in a modern expression of the Nordic aesthetic.

Contemporary art and lifestyle publication Whitewall Magazine recently produced a special feature with Nike CEO Mark Parker in their 2011 Summer Design Issue.

Hold on to your hats: An expanded patent application for the wedge-shaped aesthetic of the MacBook Air passed through the U.S. Patent and Trademark office

Mark Miner, the designer of three Nike Free running shoes launching April 2012, explores the creative process behind the collection.

Yves Béhar’s prolific industrial design studio Fuseproject has dropped its latest sparkler: a new soda maker from the Israeli home-carbonation company Sodastream called Source.Source is a minimalist, fizzy-drink fiend’s fantasy.

If you had to give an award for the year’s most breakthrough piece of consumer tech, there’s a good chance it would go to Lytro, a camera company which recently unveiled its first product. Unlike other cameras, you never need to focus it.

Sad news for Porsche lovers: Ferdinand Porsche, the creator of the iconic 911 sports car, passed away today, the AP is reporting.
Porsche, grandson of the company's founder, was 76. He died in Salzburg, Austria.
Known as F.A. to his colleagues, Porsche was head of the Porsche design studio in the early 1960s when the 911 was conceived, according to the AP.
Porsche's creation is a rarity that has been in continuous production for 50 years. And while a few aspects of the 911 have changed over the years, even more, like the location of the engine and the distinctive shape, have stayed the same.

In architecture, we laud the possible that looks impossible, the mind-bending sensation of looking at endless pools and the tallest skyscrapers. It’s beautiful design, made possible only by the latest science.

Located in the former vault of a historic bank on Rembrandtplein, the new shop will be a showcase for sustainable interior design and slow coffee brewing, with small-batch reserve coffees and Europe’s first-ever Clover, a high-end machine that brews one cup at a time. But the most radical departure is in the aesthetic: the multilevel space is awash in recycled and local materials; walls are lined with antique Delft tiles, bicycle inner tubes, and wooden gingerbread molds; repurposed Dutch oak was used to make benches, tables, and the undulating ceiling relief consisting of 1,876 pieces of individually sawn blocks. The Dutch-born Liz Muller, Starbucks concept design director, commissioned more than 35 artists and craftsmen to add their quirky touches to the 4,500-square-foot space.