Dine. Travel. Design.

Do You Matter? won’t exactly be an eye-opener for most industrial designers. Indeed the author podcast makes it clear that business leaders are the target audience. Fortunately for Core’s readership, from a personal perspective, the answer to the title question is a resounding yes. Brunner and Emery have literally written a book saying that industrial designers are the answer to corporate irrelevance! So while designers may not learn much from Do You Matter?, it would be in all of our best interests to get a copy in the hands of senior managers everywhere.

read more at BusinessWeek

via Core77

It’s good to see that ethnographic research is not just something learned in school. Some companies/people do practice and believe in its benefits for the design process!

Design Research
Nokia in NY Times

On the flip side, read what world acclaimed designer Philip Stark has to say about design being a waste of time.

Everyone should take a look at this site, storyofstuff.com. A great, simple way of exploring and explaining how we are all affecting and being affected by the consumer world we live in. Where does all this ’stuff’ come from? and how does it get here? Where does it go?

Really, how is it that we’ve become such a consumerist society. Just the other day, my co-worker and I had a brief conversation about what happened to the day when everyone knew their neighbors and knew what was going on- the gossip in the small town sort of feel. Today it seems like we’re locked up in our houses, often afraid to or too busy to talk to our neighbors, let alone strangers.

I’m off on a tangent. Just go ahead and take a look (and listen) to the site.