Book Review: Priceless, by William Poundstone

One might hope that the real estate bubble and 2008 bust might shatter once and for all the myth of the rational consumer, but unfortunately our profligate ways don't show any signs of slowing. John Stuart Mill coined the term homo economicus, to refer to an idealized human consumer who always behaved with rational self interest. Salespeople,...

Book Review: Change by Design, by Tim Brown

About halfway through Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation, Tim Brown repeats Tom Peter's much cited comment that "the MFA is the new MBA." In doing so, however, he doesn't fully endorse the sentiment. Instead Brown observes that the dynamic skills required in business share as much in common...

Design of hard drives seeks to disappear

One of the things they taught us at ID school was that a product about to go extinct will, in its dying design throes, begin to resemble its successor; its designers will fruitlessly mimic the look of the incoming technology in a bid to prevent the incumbent from being eclipsed. Thus landline phones, the thinking goes, will in their last...

Infectious Ideas: Using Antimicrobial Copper Alloys in Hospitals, by Alice Ro

Top: Hospital room with sani-station and touch-point hardware: grab bar, faucet, and light switch. Bottom: Sani-station in hospital lobby.Copper Touch is a system of antimicrobial touch-point hardware and sani-stations (alcohol gel dispensers) designed to be deployed in hospitals to reduce infection. The system kills germs in areas people...

New 1 Hour Design Challenge Launches TODAY! Theme: Gestural Interfaces

In our newest 1 Hour Design Challenge, Core77 and Seattle-based design firm Teague ask you to design a provocative gestural interface, using an everday object as a starting point. Teague will donate $500 in the name of the first place winner to NPower Seattle and in the name of the second place winner to Project H Design. The first place...