Andy Polaine
Printing Your Toast
Congratulations to one of my MA students at Luzern, Othmar Mühlebach, who has just won the second prize at the Berner Design Awards for his toaster re-design. …
Writing & Thinking
A mix of essays and commentary about design, innovation, technology, society, coaching, personal and leadership development. Since 1996.
Interviews with Nik Roope, Troika & Mark Hauenstein
Most of the interviews we shot for COFA Online have now gone online. A few others with Jona Piehl from Land Design Studio and Nik’s brother, Tom Roope …
Interviews with Brendan Dawes and Simon Waterfall
A few months ago I trekked around London with my filmaker and editor friend Rachel to shoot a whole load of interviews with designers and artists for …
Your Failure of Service Is Another's Opportunity
Some of you have no doubt read Dustin Curtis’s post about the incompetence of American Airlines & The Fate of Mr. X. American Airlines fired Mr. X …
Photosketch
Photosketch: Internet Image Montage provides a simple way to make image composites by doodling a picture, adding labels and then letting the engine scour the …
How much is good service worth? £25m for Amazon UK.
(Photo credit: xrrr on Flickr) Amazon’s entire offering really boils down to two things. The first is to facilitate a person in a warehouse somewhere …
Teaching Service Design at Lucerne School of Art and Design
Regular readers of Playpen may have notice things have been somewhat quiet around here recently. There are two reasons for this. One is that Twitter has made an …
How Can Graphic Design Help Save The Planet?
I’m very pleased to have been asked by AGDA to speak at the first Design A Better World conference in Sydney with the tricky topic, “How Can …
Sparks - Playful Innovation
Philips Design has created a boardgame called Spark to help generate insights. It looks like it is a pretty simple premise – there are a set of characters …
Confusing Information with the Form
Lovely video from design and research consultancy MAYA on the difference between information and the form we give it. I came across this on David …
The Little Man in the Box
All of us anthropomorphise our machines, perhaps no more so than the car and the computer. Hi, A Real Human Interface from Multitouch Barcelona (an interaction …
Schematic and Public Multitouch Social Interaction
Joel Johnson’s exclusive (on Vimeo?) video and interview with the folks at Schematic about their new touchwall shows them dealing with some interesting …
Social Play
I’ve just finished up a chapter in my PhD about social play. Most of it is about online interaction, but quite a bit is about how to bring strangers …
Don Tapscott on the Demise of the University
Don Tapscott has a piece in Edge today called The Impending Demise of the University. In it he takes the same line that I have been for some time in Designing …
Time Bomb - Interactive Graffiti
Graffiti and technology are all the rage these days. Holler’s Lukasz Karluk and Sydney sculptor/painter Maddi Boyd (KissKiss) have created a work for …