Product Design

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Art Director Ken

Art Director Ken © Mattel, 2003.Ken, who turned 46 yesterday, shares a birthday with eighteenth-century chemist Joseph Priestly, nineteenth-century astronomer Percival Lowell, and twentieth-century singer songwriter, Neil Sedaka. (And …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

My Cup Holder Runneth Over

Mini-Cooper Cup Holder Console Set,  ©2005, Mini-Stuff, Inc.Glance through the door of any of the countless nail salons sprouting up on virtually any city block, and you'll see numerous women (and a fair number of men) getting …

David Stairs|Essays

Charles Eames Among the Bullrushes

What interests me is the tendency for even uneducated Ugandans to observe and learn from their surrounding world, a fundamental hallmark of design thinking.

William Drenttel|Slideshows

Dangerous Beauty: The Art of the Shiv

A shiv is a weapon crafted from the limited resources of a prisoner's closed world. Crudely constructed from such things as spoons, shoelaces and upholstery tacks, shivs lie somewhere between the graceful and the grotesque. They're …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Crafting All The Way To The Bank

Craft is a tricky word. When we feel ourselves pulled in by the unforgiving vortex of digitized everything, we plead for craft, throwing it out like a life preserver — a desperate appeal to the forgotten soul. In those moments, it …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Separated at Birth: Method? Or Madness?

Left: Packaging by Karim Rashid. Right: Unknown.method© was begun in 1999 by a chemical engineer and a graphic designer, with an aim to create totally biodegradable, environmentally sound cleaning products. With packaging designed by …

Michael Bierut|Essays

Innovation is the New Black

Innovation is the latest buzzword to overtake the design profession. What does it mean?

Alexandra Lange|Essays

Married with Tchotchkes

For many design-obsessed couples registering at Moss requires more strategy than playing the stock market.

Rick Poynor|Essays

In Memoriam: My Manual Typewriter

The fully evolved typewriter is a 20th-century industrial archetype. It feels inevitable, almost elemental, like one of those object types, such as a chair or a fork, that simply had to exist in this universe of forms.

Adrian Shaughnessy|Essays

The Designer as Buffoon

"Elite designer" Van den Puup from Ikea's UK advertising campaign.I recently attended a publisher's party. In a room above a smart London restaurant I spent a pleasant couple of hours drinking lukewarm Chardonnay and chatting about books …

Michael Bierut|Essays

Homage to the Squares

The Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum's exhibition Design is not Art provides a useful contrast to an simultaneous exhibition of the work of Josef and Anni Albers, and demonstrates differences between art and design.

Rick Poynor|Essays

The Ikea Riot: Unsatisfied Excess?

When Ikea threw open the doors of a new store in London, the result was mayhem as customers stampeded. Evidence of social breakdown, or a sign that the utopian argument for low-cost modernist design has been won?