Author Archives: Jacqueline Ashby

After my trip to Little Italy this past weekend, I had to post this video. There’s a simple recipe to a happy and fulfilled life. Live your passion and find the beauty in what you do.

Architecture should be rooted in the past, and yet be part of our time and forward looking. ~ Moshe Safdie

 

I’ve been closely following the Design Council’s Knee High Design Challenge. The challenge consists of  a series of teams working to “improve the health and well-being of children under five and their families.” At this stage, the teams have designed and implemented their programs and are now gathering data/feedback to better understand the impact that these activities have in their participants’ lives. Evaluation is such a key component in the design process and its certainly emphasized in the short clip above. In this case, program designers realized that the walk to and from their destination was as important to the children as the destination itself. It was from this information, designers heightened their participants’ experience and engagement by creating innovative, exploratory paths for children and their parents to venture through. And as I watched the children walk hand in hand to the park, a verse from The Road Not Taken came to mind. It’s all about the journey folks! Even for the wee ones!

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Even if you’re not interested in typeface development, I think you’ll appreciate the relationship between partners Hoefler and Frere-Jones and their desire to design beautiful work. My takeaway from this:

1. Grab the reigns and innovate if what you want or need fails to exist.
2. Work intimately with those that “consume” the product as it helps to feed the creative process.
3. Interrogate the micro and macro perspectives.
4. Remember that design decisions influence other aspects of the product including its relationship to the user.
5. Great collaboration requires a sprinkle of tension even if it’s as simple as an ongoing debate over the height of the lower case t.

Enjoy!

Inventor Portrait with Steven Sasson. My design takeaway: “The key is when you are putting across an idea, you have to understand the culture you’re dealing with first and foremost…”

Hans Rosling…he’s like the Superman of Statistics…fighting ignorance one line graph at a time!

Every time I watch French designer Jean-Yves Blondeau aka “Rollerman” fly down a mountain head first, I get this crazy itch to add a couple more wheels to my Samsonite and ride it.  Do not try this at home, unless it’s mine.

Steelcase launched the NEXT Student Design Competition to encourage the creation of innovative learning environments. The winner will receive $1,000! Entries are due November 21, 2014. To learn more and apply, click here!

“Surfing’s one of the few sports that you look ahead to see what’s behind” ~ Laird Hamilton