Design

Innovation 1-on-1: Willem Boijens

In this series of interviews with innovation thought leaders we reach out to innovators in marketing, design, strategy, and operations -- from start-ups, small-medium sized business, Fortune 500 companies, academia, to non-profits -- and asked them to answer the same set of questions.

In this installment, Willem Boijens, Senior User Experience Manager at Vodafone in Dusseldorf, Germany, takes on the questions. Willem has had a wide variety of roles at Vodafone and has seen the large wireless services company from many angles. In his current role he aims to make experiential design a catalyst for innovation, ensuring that customer needs … Read more

PhotoScape makes editing easy and free

If you're looking to put together a Valentine's Day collage for your sweetie, it's mighty late to be worrying about creative gifts from the heart. So get a jump on that photo mashup (or is that car crash?) you've been planning for next year's Valentine's Day with PhotoScape, a freeware image editor that's surprisingly feature-rich.

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Make your own Valentine's Day cards

If you think you've got it tough on Valentine's Day, consider your poor, humble Download.com editor. My wife's birthday is on Valentine's Day! Luckily, we've been together long enough that I don't have to impress her with dozens of roses, buckets of chocolates, and the rest of the conventional commercial holiday paraphernalia. However, a homemade card is always a great way to demonstrate my love.

Creating your own Valentine's Day cards with commercial design software like Adobe Photoshop or CorelDRAW will provide you with a wide array of options for tweaking your … Read more

A hard look at digital picture frames

David Pogue has written up a review of seven LCD picture frames (you know, the kind that sit on a desk or mantlepiece and have pictures you've taken pushed to them by various means), and his critique is not pretty. He lays into most of them pretty harshly and concludes that most have had some very basic things screwed up by inattention to the user experience. Why, he asks, can't the manufacturers be bothered to do what's right?

I'm sure they have all kinds of excuses for compromise: "That would cost money," "That … Read more

Innovation 1-on-1: Manoj Kothari, Onio Design

This is the first in a series of interviews with innovation thought leaders. We've reached out to innovators in marketing, design, strategy, and operations -- from start-ups, small-medium sized business, Fortune 500 companies, academia, to non-profits -- and asked them to answer the same set of questions.

We're kicking the series off with Manoj Kothari, founder and managing director of Onio Design, one of the leading design and innovation consultancies in India. A graduate of IIT Bombay and the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad, Manoj orchestrates trend research, strategic consulting, and design management practice at Onio. Manoj … Read more

Aston Martin couch takes a back seat to none

An ejector seat might be a fine way to get rid of the boss, but let's be serious--it isn't exactly something you'd find showcased in Architectural Digest. Aston Martin's "DB6 Couch" might not be either, but at least it doesn't threaten to send you flying out a window.

This limited-edition piece, from Aston Martin Heritage Designs, is an exact replica of a DB6 model's rear end with and is available in custom colors. Also true to the real thing is the price: $7,300, according to OhGizmo, and that doesn't even … Read more

Collect the Web with Ript

Ript is a new, free software application in beta development that lets you collect images and text from the Web, then compile and arrange them into pages you can print or share with friends and family. It's a simple freeware idea that makes sense...and it's from Oprah? Well, sort of. The publisher is the Oprah Winfrey-founded Oxygen Media, recently acquired by Universal.

Ript works via an overlay "Pile"--representing by a stack of documents--that sits on a layer on top of all your applications. You can work with your programs as you normally would, and … Read more

Smaller, further, faster: the viral power of mini-objects

Jan Chipchase, a researcher for Nokia, observes how small things are likely to spread more rapidly than big ones, resembling ideas rather than things:

"Today we're comfortable with the rapid dissemination of information and ideas from one side of the globe to the other. What's in Tokyo today can be in Tehran tomorrow and vice versa. When physical things reach a certain size -- being pocketable seems about right, their ability to be picked up and moved around increases considerably. All things being equal small objects much like ideas, travel further, travel faster. They are put into … Read more

After a reboot, does my e-vote count?

With all things touch-screen in an increasingly touch-screen centric world, I was given the "plastic or paper" option for casting my vote in the California primary on this most super of Super Tuesdays. So, not liking the marker fumes and being used to touching everything on the iPhone anyway, I opted to vote "plastic."

The polling place had 10 conventional optical-scan voting stations with real paper ballots, but only 1 digital voting machine. San Francisco uses the Sequoia voting machine and, well, here's my story:

The clerk handed me a plastic card to insert into … Read more