Targus recently launched their first-ever line of Mac accessories. I bet you are thinking, “Wait…Targus…I know them, don’t I? Laptop bags right?” Well, you’d be correct in this thinking and as it turns out, they have expanded their business into several other areas.

Targus is a major global supplier of mobile computing cases and accessories (Targus’ own words – from their website). When I first checked out their website I was amazed by the number of different computer peripherals they offer. The next time I was in Best Buy (I seem to often find myself aimlessly wandering their aisles); I couldn’t help but notice that Targus was getting great placement alongside some impressive names like Kensington, Microsoft and Logitech. Who knew this relatively quiet “laptop bag” company had such a significant presence in this category?
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During a recent trip to Chicago, I stopped by Oak Park to tour Frank Lloyd Wright’s home and studio. Built in 1889, this estate set the tone for Wright’s long and successful career. Wright started working as an independent architect here and it was here that he began developing his famous prairie style.

I always knew that Frank Lloyd Wright was a great architect; what I realized on the tour was that he was also a savvy experience designer, even if that term wasn’t around in the late 19th century. Every aspect of the buildings he designed was part of an integrated vision intended to impart his values and convey a particular experience.

As an unconventional architect, Wright was looking to cultivate clients that would be receptive to his work. And he communicated his values to the potential clients before they ever entered his work space.  He designed for people who were curious, so he made his studio entrance hard to find.  If they were tenacious enough to explore the façade and find the door, they were a step closer to becoming Wright’s client. If they gave up looking, they didn’t have a high enough tolerance for uncertainty to be the right clients for him.

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We’ve just finished our third revision to our 2007 Baseline Environmental footprint. Finding resources that made sense for our company and our size was an interesting challenge, but we discovered some that worked well and are worth sharing.

To arrive at a baseline footprint we are confident is accurate, we used the 123 page Climate Registry General Reporting Protocol.  With a bit of effort, we felt like we had a complete view of our footprint.  Since then, we discovered the US EPA Climate Leaders program at http://www.epa.gov/stateply.   This has proven to be a good resource for us.  They offer guidance and simple calculators that can help establish your baseline protocol and a tool to help companies track their progress over time.

After we determined our footprint we were able to move forward on reduction plans and efforts to offset some of our impact.

We purchased 100% windpower offsets based on our electricity use for 2008.  Check out Renewable Choice Energy  for help in understanding renewable energy credits and how to purchase them. We’ve decided to offset half our business air travel with carbon offsets through Las Gaviotas.  A group we think is not only doing a good job in restoring the environment but also seems to put a high percentage of the offset money directly into the projects.

Any other recommendations for great resources to help others “green” their corporate environments? Please share.

We approach every project as an opportunity to improve people’s lives in tangible and significant ways. It was no different when our Milan team set out to design the new “Acuity” chair for Allsteel, three years ago.

This was the first time that Continuum was involved in designing an office seating project, so we came to it with a fresh perspective. A few months into the project, we identified some significant opportunities to improve the user experience—in general we found that most Task Chairs were complicated and did not provide the user a seemless experience on various levels. Users had a number of concerns: they often found the chair initially uncomfortable to sit on and the seating controls (under the seat) difficult to locate and operate. As our research revealed, the chair felt uncomfortable initially, because it didn’t automatically adapt to each user’s personal body mass, build and intended work activity.

So, the big idea was to create a new chair that embodied EASE of ACCESS and COMFORT… with the help of intuitive adaptive ergonomics. Foremost, we focused on designing a chair that automatically adjusts to each individual body type (taking advantage of the user’s body mass as the key component in the kinetic system) to facilitate the chairs ability to immediately fit and function correctly for the widest variety of physical builds and work activities. Likewise, we chose to limit the number of controls and designed them to be completely accessible and to operate intuitively, so as to allow the user to easily fine-tune the chair to support the specific task at hand.

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What happens when you put twenty-five Boston designers in a room with Massachusetts state officials to talk about the design industry? Throw in a few state representatives and the former deputy mayor of London and you’ve got a pretty lively discussion going. Neither side knew what to expect, when congregating at Continuum on June 10 for a design industry roundtable with the Undersecretary of the Mass Dept of Business Development and the state’s newly appointed Creative Economy Director. The government people wanted to hear from designers about what the state could do to help them grow their businesses.

So, what do design firms want? More than anything, they want an upgrading of Boston’s image as a center for good design. The coolness factor came up again and again (“Boston is politically liberal but architecturally conservative.”). They want a re-branding of Boston as a hip design place, so that design talent will move to Boston–and stay. They want a design community (witness Pink Comma gallery) and more access at a younger age to local commissions (a la European young firm design competitions.) They want greater visibility for their work (maybe a Design Expo?) to open up local markets and to create demand for Boston design.

The view from London is that Boston has unrivalled education, technology and design talent. The state and the designers just need to connect the dots and get everyone working together. Large and small companies want to expose young people to design careers (note AIGA’s Youth Design Boston) and better synch up design education with industry needs (design and business. . . or engineering or social sciences.) Design incubators, bank financing, small business development support and manufacturing capability also came up.

So, what can the state do? Maybe start by walking the talk. Redesign the state’s letterhead and business cards; hire good designers to fix the lousy signage. How about acting like the huge client that it is and open up public design bids to young architects?

Use the designers, promote them, connect them–and in the end, remember that design isn’t just an industry–it’s a way of thinking.

Beate Becker
Director
Designing an Industry/Designing the Future
(781) 789-8919
beatebecker@comcast.net

The meeting was put together by MassArt’s Designing an Industry/Designing the Future, a project that brings together designers to think and act collectively as an economic sector with voice, visibility and economic value.

The Boston Globe recently ran a story about how the design sector and other segments of the creative economy can stimulate Massachusetts’ economy.

I began this week with the new album from Gregg Gillis, or Girl Talk, a mash-up master who uses parts and pieces of tunes with seemingly no value judgment and often a tongue in cheek (Yo La Tengo + Missy + Cat Stevens + Timbaland). I love the album. I love that he knits an entirely new piece of music out of collected scraps even more.

It strikes me that we do this in other parts of our creative world these days too, using already manufactured goods as raw materials. In his Smoke Furniture, Maarten Baas uses controlled burning and finishing to “process” antiques into pieces with new layers of meaning. Tobi Wong has made a career of this, including on his bill of materials everything from MacDonalds coffee stirs to Alvar Aalto Savoy vases to the dollar bill.

The means for reediting our consumer world are handed down to us common folk as well. There is a whole website dedicated to hacking IKEA products into new objects. And Make Magazine presents us with dozens of ways monthly to rejigger the things around us.

Is this the privilege of an uber-consumer society? Indulgence, intelligent reuse, appropriation? I don’t know, but it does have a groove.

On Friday, Samsung introduced its latest wireless marvel, the Instinct phone–and marvelous it is. The company is known for introducing quality phones, but with the debut of the iPhone, Samsung and the entire industry were set back on their heels. Not for long, it seems. This new phone is Samsung’s haptic touch screen retort to Apple’s hand candy. While the Instinct is similar to iPhone in many ways, its new force feedback feature is completely unexpected and delightful.

Force feedback is not new. It was first introduced through video games years ago. It’s the rumble you felt through the steering wheel, when you trashed exotic racecars on your PC. Now thoughtfully reapplied, the Instinct brings back a wonderful tactile feedback that emulates the gentle clicking of a roulette wheel, as you scroll through your contact list. You have to feel it, to believe it.

Many of us pursue design partly because we wanted a life of creativity, and partly because we had our dreams of being a doctor crushed out of us by the first chemistry class in college. That nagging desire to do good in the world doesn’t have to go unfulfilled just because we chose to push around pixels and prototypes for our professional career. These organizations do a good job of helping designers find out how to do the right thing, by connecting them to causes and people in desperate need of a little design. Check them out, then use your creative powers for good.

http://www.designcanchange.org
http://www.design21sdn.com
http://www.themightyodo.com

I’m a few weeks behind but have been letting all I saw at ICFF fully soak in and am finally ready to report. This was an odd year, I thought. Unlike the strong and new themes that emerged last year, 2008’s crop felt a bit more mild-mannered, honest, retrospective. It lacked some of what I interpreted as bleakness last year, and I appreciated the positive, straightforward quality to the work I saw.

Among the things I noticed were:

• A hyperactive take on craft. DIY is far from new, but the – shall we say – enthusiasm with which I saw designers embrace it was notable. Embroidered wood chairs, popsicle stick lamps; it was just shy of a ceramic ashtray to bring home to dad for Father’s Day.

• Wood love. Sure, wood’s been around for a while, but it made quite a showing this year. The wood radio has been a popular and extreme example, but there was also plenty of end grain to be ogled in chairs, headboards, lamps, credenzas, calculators…My favorite was actually a hefty wood coffee table coated in silver. It’s taken a lot of flack for immodesty of concept and price, but my feeling is this is just two years ahead of the curve. They’re so far over wood, it’s metallic.

• Muted colors. That hot pink keeps sticking around, if only to keep Karim from needing a new wardrobe, but the colors that caught my attention were not so eye-popping, namely flat grays, moderate purples and a putty here or there.

• The big reveal. Lots of furniture was unabashed in sharing details of its construction, from leather chairs that took their form from simple perforation patterns, to more literal examples of exposed screws, joints or actual construction materials.

• My long shot is what I’ll call global localism. This is a thin thread, but I have a hunch it’s worth commenting on. When two of the big guys cross brainstorms, something may be happening. Tord Boontje showed Witches Kitchen at Artecnica, a reinterpretation of South American cooking vessels. Meanwhile on the glam side of the aisle, Tom Dixon added to his spectacular repertoire of lighting with a series of beaten copper pendants with a sort of Moroccan mid-century flair. First-world fabu but for me the shapes had that we-love-the-(rest of the)-world vibe of Paul Simon in the 80s. We’ll see what comes of it.