Toyota recently completely redesigned Toyota.com and launched an iPad app. Both are terrific.* Both allow you to explore the company, its many faces, and go behind the scenes (in addition to shopping for cars). One of my favorite aspects of both the site and the app is the coverage of Toyota’s design process. On the app it’s called “Behind the Design.” On the site it’s a closer look at Toyota’s CALTY Design Research, Inc., located …
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Innovative thinking. Human power. Sustainable energy. Endless possibility. Bicycles. These are a few of my favorite things. I have that in common with the folks at Toyota’s Prius Projects. There’s no question that Prius is an innovation that changed the world. A short digression by way of backstory that some may not be aware of. When Toyota debuted the Prius at the Kyoto Conference on global warming in December 1997, Detroit carmakers were taken by …
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In a forgotten corner of a shelf in a seldom-used media cabinet sit two 40-year old Japanese single reflex cameras (SLRs). One is a Pentax Spotmatic that I inherited from my father, circa 1974 (ish). The other is a Nikon Nikkormat my wife inherited from her father, circa early 80s. They’re heavy as lead, built rock solid. We’ll probably never get rid of them because of the memories and images they evoke. I used mine …
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One of the things I detest most as a consumer is inconsistency. Allow me to rant. Last year I purchased a piece of electronic equipment for my cycling habit, produced by Garmin, called the Edge 500 (pictured here). It’s a nifty little gizmo that mount on my bike’s steerer tube and uses GPS to track speed, routes, distance, incline/decline angles (allows me to brag that I defeated a 21% grade with ease), total ascent (another …
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A couple of years ago I published a little book, a fable, called The Shibumi Strategy, about a down-sized sales manager, Andy Harmon, forced to take a job in a car dealership in order to avoid disrupting his family. Andy was able to create a breakthrough in how people bought cars in his little part of the world. The story was based on an amalgam of true stories, and Andy was a composite character based on real …
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Nothing like a double whammy to start the week off right. In this case, it concerns my little fable, The Shibumi Strategy. First, my publisher informed me that it had won a gold medal in the Axiom Book Awards. Very cool. It may not have broken sales records, but a recognition of quality is always reinforcing, and I can now brag “hat trick,” since all three of my books have now garnered some sort of …
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Design Staff is a new blog devoted to helping startups design great products, and based on the two short months they’ve been posting, it’s a site you’ll want to follow if you’re a small business owner or startup. Design Staff was founded by the user experience team at Google Ventures, and headed up by Braden Kowitz, an interaction designer and partner at Google Ventures. Design Staff content contributors include an additional half dozen designers, researchers …
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I don’t list a blogroll on my blogsite, for the simple reason that I follow so many that the list would dominate the right hand column of my page. My RSS reader (Google Reader) delivers a few hundred articles and posts to my hand everyday (yes, most of my blog reading is done on my iPhone). Over the last week or so, however, I ran across a few creativity/innovation-oriented blogs I found interesting and definitely …
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I love when something new and inspiring comes my way. I have an open order with the universe for just that, and every once in a while the order is filled. Example: when Tanner Christensen sent me an email out of the blue with a link to seven awesome (and free!) iPhone wallpapers he designed, for my Lock Screen, each with an inspiring quote on creativity. He sent them to me a day before he released …
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