I once heard the great Sara Little Turnbull tell my group of student design engineers at Stanford that the way to become a great designer someday was to be a great reader today.

As you can imagine, I liked what she was saying.

I also like this article titled "C.E.O. Libraries Reveal Keys to Success", though I wonder if it doesn’t confuse correlation with causation.  I think rich folks have big libraries for reading because they’re rich, not the other way around (your local library is a more eco-friendly way to enjoy the literary works of mankind).  But reading is certainly a fine way to understand the world, to develop critical thinking skills, and — perhaps most important of all — to grow one’s ability to recognize patterns in information.  That’s a key design thinking skill.  In that vein, I particularly like this quote in the article from Sidney Harman:

I used to tell my senior staff to get me poets as managers.  Poets are our original systems thinkers.  They look at our most complex environments and they reduce the complexity to something they begin to understand.

I’m going to need to read up a bit on that.

This latest Director’s Commentary on metacool is truly meta: it’s a designer being interviewed about what it means to design with simplicity in mind.  In this simply awesome interview, NPR’s Ira Flatow talks to Professor John Maeda about The Laws of Simplicity.

I truly appreciate any opportunity I get to listen to Professor Maeda talk about his approach to the process of designing things.  My favorite law of simplicty is Law 5: Differences.  This law can be stated as follows:

Simplicity and complexity need each other

Actually, that’s a big, fat lie on my part.  If I put on my professional hat, then my favorite law of simplicity is actually Law 7: Emotion, which is:

More emotions are better than less

If you decide to take a listen to Maeda’s interview, you’ll hear him talk about why desirability can make even a complex, cultish device such as the iPhone seem simple.  Wanting something makes it easier to use.  Think about that one next time you’re dealing with the Internal Revenue Service.  I’m a big believer in starting and ending with desirability when it comes to designing for success in the marketplace, so you can see why I like Law 7.

By the way, he wrote a wonderful book about the subject, too.  I highly recommend it.

Phil Patton has a nice story in the New York Times about the increasing recognition by the automobile industry that green cars more red, if you want them to be desired by a broad market:

Once Frumpy, Green Cars Start Showing Some Flash

"Whether in music or in fiction, the most basic thing is rhythm. Your
style needs to have good, natural, steady rhythm, or people won’t keep
reading your work. I learned the importance of rhythm from music — and
mainly from jazz. Next comes melody — which, in literature, means the
appropriate arrangement of the words to match the rhythm. If the way
the words fit the rhythm is smooth and beautiful, you can’t ask for
anything more. Next is harmony — the internal mental sounds that
support the words. Then comes the part I like best: free improvisation.
Through some special channel, the story comes welling out freely from
inside. All I have to do is get into the flow. Finally comes what may
be the most important thing: that high you experience upon completing a
work — upon ending your “performance” and feeling you have succeeded in
reaching a place that is new and meaningful. And if all goes well, you
get to share that sense of elevation with your readers (your audience).
That is a marvelous culmination that can be achieved in no other way.

Practically everything I know about writing, then, I learned from music."

– Haruki Murakami

The incredible, audacious, 1971 Mercedes-Benz 300 SEL 6.8 racing car by AMG

It’s red.