New health technologies raise complex economic, social, environmental and safety concerns. Just as greenwashing tarnished sustainability efforts, ‘responsibility washing’ threatens health innovation.
During the brainstorming stage of the design process, AI-powered image generation programs can open creative doors that may have otherwise never been accessed.
In everyday life we are surrounded by a dizzying array of technological gizmos. The ones we love and use the most are often the ones that have been designed with humans firmly in mind. Those that aren’t…
In 1982, I wrote an introduction to a survey exhibition of the work of Western Australian furniture designer David Foulkes Taylor lamenting that so little attention had “… been directed towards the recording…
Designers aim to change peoples’ lives, ideally for the better. The American co-founders of design and development company KickStart, Martin Fisher and Nick Moon, set themselves a particularly difficult…
We are more likely to thump this instantly recognisable design, on a daily basis, than to give it much thought. The PB/5 pedestrian button, a type of “Audio-Tactile Pedestrian Detector” (ATPD), is a successful…
The classic sound many of us imagine when the word synthesiser is mentioned is the sound of the Moog – the warm, solid propulsive groove of its bass sound and the distinctive sweep of its patented lowpass…
The surfboard industry remains a paradox – existing in a shared but parallel world of high-tech and traditional design and production practices. At once surfboards can be high-performance and nostalgic…
Designers today are impatient for their work to expand into a larger world. They are testing their expertise in complex and non-traditional fields such as finance, conflict, health and disease; growing…