Wed, 02/09/2011 | Co.Design: business + innovation + design

February 09 2011

The Seven Deadly Sins That Choke Out Innovation

In most companies, there's a profound tension between the right-brainers (for lack of a better term) espousing design, design thinking and user-centered approaches to innovation and the left-brained, more spreadsheet-minded among us. Most C-suites are dominated by the latter, all of whom are big fans of nice neat processes and who pay good money to get them implemented rigorously. So often, the innovation process is treated as a simple, neat little machine.

Typography Legend Erik Spiekermann, On How He Works [Video]

This little film is a must-see for anyone who is in/ obsessed with/ remotely interested in design. It's a sneak peek inside the mind of Erik Spiekermann, cofounder of both MetaDesign and FontShop (the world's first distributor of digital fonts), and all around typography demigod.

Infographic of the Day

Wanted: Prints That Visualize 20 Years of New York Times Stories

Here at Co.Design, we're infographic freaks. We're also avid New York Times readers. Which has us convinced that Jer Thorp -- data artist-in-residence at The New York Times -- created these gorgeous data visualizations exclusively for us.

Inventing a Digital Camera for Lo-Fi Freaks

Holga. D bills itself as the perfect camera for people who are nostalgic for the blurry, leaky, yellowy photos of yore, but still attached to some of the conveniences of digital technology, which is pretty much everyone over the age of 20, right?

Designed by Finland-based Saikat Biswas, Holga. D mimics the original Holga -- that crappy, bare-bones, made-in-China toy camera that can't take a decent picture to save a life -- in nearly every way, except that it's rigged to download images.

MTV’s Grown-up Headquarters in Berlin [Slideshow]

MTV’s Grown-up Headquarters in Berlin [Slideshow]

We always figured if any company were to build itself a horrifyingly wacky, big-kid playhouse of an office -- the sort we've been seeing up and down lately -- it'd be MTV, the network that gave the world Jersey Shore and Dan Cortese. Well, silly us, because MTV has gone and done something far more shocking: Commission a low-key office. And a tasteful one at that.

Infographic of the Day

Infographics of the Day: Which Countries Are Best for Women in Business?

What do PowerPoint presentations have in common with the economic prospects of many women worldwide? Overall, they're both kinda crappy. The Economist Intelligence Unit generated a 150-page report drilling into the latter fact (entitled, appropriately, the Women's Economic Opportunity Index). To get around the Powerpoint problem, they hired the data-visualization experts at Jess3, who turned a stack of ho-hum charts and graphs into a slick six-minute animation/presentation. Check it out:

Performer: A Stunning iPad App Puts Daft Punk to Shame [Video]

Making decent synth music is not as easy as it looks. But that may change with the release of Performer, an iPad app from Konkreet Labs that lets would-be Daft Punks use their fingers to make techno soundscapes. Think of it like your iTunes screensaver in reverse: instead of turning your music into beautiful abstract shapes onscreen, Performer lets you drag and skew the shapes to make music.

Infographic of the Day

Infographic of the Day: The Hilarious, Befuddling Charts Of The U.S. Congress

Innovation by Design

The Amazing Judges For Our 2013 Innovation By Design Awards

From the Editor

Thanks for stopping by Fast Company’s Co.Design. If you’ve been a reader for some time, you’ll notice that we’ve just unveiled a brand-new redesign. You can read about the thought process behind it here. Our content, of course, will be the same: Our focus is on highlighting the world’s best examples of design and innovation, working in concert.

We started this site with a few simple premises in mind. First, design is a window onto the world at large, and the culture we live in.

Continued