I’ve been thinking for a while about the perfect physical space for innovation. When we work with our clients we often are asked to help design a physical space for the team to work in. This should be a space that is open, colorful, inviting and really different from the regular work environment. The space needs to remind the people ...

Being a sometime pencil sketcher, I’ve been a fan of the Wall Street Journal pen and ink stipple portraits, also known as a hedcut (that’s not a typo) since I started reading the journal in 1982. I love the fact that the portraits are most whitespace with artfully placed dots and dashes — pure black and white — and the ...

William Bostick over at Core77 wrote a terrific post called “How (Not) To Write Like a Designer.” Design thinking is how I prefer to think about my style of problem solving. I’m not alone…IDEO and Stanford’s D School coined the term, and Tim Brown’s blog is all about it. But what I liked about this particular post was that it ...

by Matthew E May My father’s 78th birthday would have been this year, had he lived to see the day. It’s been ten years since his passing from complications arising from a rather rare blood disorder called polycythemia…too much blood. In honor of the decade without him, I thought I’d post part of my book that did not make the ...

I was pondering recently why it can be so hard for a large firm to innovate successfully. Too often it seems we are trying to graft an innovation capability or process on top of existing teams and workflows. While these grafted processes can work effectively for a short time, while the white hot focus of management is felt, often these ...

by Matthew E May Just a quick weekend note. The idea behind the elegance element of seduction is very simple: limiting information creates intrigue and engagement. Why? Because not having the whole story leaves us without the symmetry we naturally seek. So our curiosity is piqued and our imaginations sparked, and off we go to chase closure. My friend Iain ...

Scion Exile Concept Sketch by Matthew E May I’m fortunate enough to count car designer Kevin Hunter, president of Toyota’s CALTY Design Research, among my board of muses. CALTY (California+Toyota) is one of Toyota’s most influential design centers, located in Newport Beach, CA. CALTY is involved in nearly all of Toyota’s major vehicle design programs. According to Kevin, Toyota wants ...

You may or may not know this: Art has its foundations in utility. Great works of earlier centuries were never meant to hang in museums and adorn private collections any more than elegant Egyptian hieroglyphics were meant to simply beautify crypts, wooden totem poles to garnish the forest, or coarse images of the hunter’s kill to decorate the walls of ...

Lots of bad stuff happening in China right now. So let’s talk about some good stuff. Like the design coming out of Shanghai. Innovation, no matter where it occurs, always begins with a burning question (or questions), centered around “Is there a better way?” Artist-turned-designer Lu Kun has almost single-handedly put Shanghai on the international fashion map by pursuing three ...

In the race to create a sustainable world, designers will be key players. I’ve always been a big design fan and I salute the new sense of purpose now apparent in every aspect of this industry. It’s becoming more experimental, more challenging, more ethical, and more exciting without losing its core functions – to stimulate ideas, change behavior, and offer ...