Antiquarians and the origins of design thinking

A seminar of conversation, experiment and exploration with guests from the design world and the academic humanities, hosted by Peter Miller and Michael Shanks Fall 2014 Tuesdays 2 – 5 pm PST – first meeting 23 September What have the Humanities and Liberal Arts to do with design? How can contemporary design be made more…

Revs at Pebble Beach Concours

Yesterday was the culmination of ME200 – a class at Stanford concerned with the historical significance of things. With about 30 students last term Reilly (Brennan), Jon (Feiber) David (Kelley), and I explored how cars connect with history. The objective – to judge which of the cars entered for the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance was…

Tim Brown on LEGO and Vermeer | Design Thinking

I was quite impressed with the Lego movie and its celebration of creative play. Tim Brown thinks the same [Link] and makes some great connections with Tim’s Vermeer – the documentary that challenges our assumptions about the relationship between art and technology. (And following on David Hockney’s insistence that artists regularly used technical instruments –…

in design there’s never a clean slate

A thoughtful piece recently from Vlad Savov in The Verge – Retrovolution: mining the past to make the future. Anders Warming doesn’t like the word “retro.” Ever since taking over as Mini’s chief of design in 2010, Warming has had to wrestle with the term’s meaning and its application to his company’s cars. Because it…

ruins – thoughts on the aesthetic

An exhibition currently at the Tate in London is exploring British images of ruin since the 18th century. Ruin Lust, an exhibition at Tate Britain from 4 March 2014, offers a guide to the mournful, thrilling, comic and perverse uses of ruins in art from the seventeenth century to the present day. The exhibition is…