Looking at the life, market, and cultural influence of M.F. Husain

It’s so gratifying as a writer to see many of your personal and professional interests come together in a story.

This happened to me when I recently wrote a piece for the magazine Art & Auction on the late Indian artist M.F. Husain (it appeared in the December issue of the publication).

Yes, it did primarily look at the market for his work (I am interested in creative and cultural industries), but the interviews I had with collectors and specialists at Christies and Sotheby’s also helped contextualize his imagery in the light of modernity in India in the mid 20th-century.

In addition, the art historians I talked with pointed out how Husain’s iconography (often controversial when he was alive) relates to centuries of traditional and even ancient South Asian art, as well as the styles of European and global modern painters (I’d studied South Asian art history in grad school and written on contemporary art for years).

If you’re interested in these ideas, too, here’s a link to a PDF of the article.

Defining “resilience” at PopTech (a report for CBS Smartplanet)

CAMDEN, ME — On a chilly October day, a stone’s throw from a postcard-perfect New England harbor and across from an adorable town square, a group that included chief executives, grad students, physicians, public-school educators, activists, scientists, and artists gathered. Some members of this diverse crowd, assembled for the annual PopTech conference from October 17-20 at the Camden Opera House, were from large companies such as Nike, Google, and Procter & Gamble. Others were the twentysomething founders of start-ups that no one has ever heard of–yet. Or they were academics, investors, designers, engineers.

They came to listen to, and mingle with, the head of a public school for pregnant girls in Detroit; a Paralympic World Cup snowboarding gold medalist; an Icelandic childcare specialist; and a bank robber/hacker turned neuroscientist, among many others. While this roster is only a tiny sample of the PopTech speaker list, it offers a taste of the broad spectrum of voices and stories presented on the Opera House stage. As varied as they are, they all share the common theme of “resilience.” It is a topic that is gaining momentum not only as a coping strategy in an age of economic uncertainty and dramatic natural disasters, but also as an innovation strategy, too. And the first day of PopTech offered a number of lenses from which to understand the concept, which is also the conference’s theme.

“Resilience is the ability to recover, persist, or even thrive under disruption,” Andrew Zolli, curator and executive director of PopTech, said in his opening remarks.

“It’s not the same thing as robustness. It’s not the same thing as redundancy. It’s not about reserves. And it’s not about real-time information,” Zolli continued.

WHEN BAD THINGS HAPPEN

What the speakers shared in common on the first day of the conference was the view that individuals, organizations, and communities may be able to come up with inventive solutions to difficult challenges by simply first acknowledging that they will face adversity at some point, in some form.

“We’ve ingrained in our minds that bad things happen to others,” Sandro Galea, a doctor and chair of Epidemiology at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, said on the PopTech stage. He went on to say that resilience may be a path that people can choose to take, instead of resistance to trauma or, sadly, dysfunction after being traumatized. The big question for innovative thinkers: how to come up with ways to maximize the number of people in our communities or organizations who can “bounce back” from difficulty, as Galea defined resilience.

This can likely be achieved by improving our environments, he said. (This could mean designing cities or neighborhoods where people could walk more to reduce obesity and improve their health, for instance.)

The day was also filled with heartfelt stories of bouncing back; these narratives were shared by speakers who embodied resilience. Seventeen-year-old Olympic boxing champ Claressa Shields discussed how she overcame a past of poor anger management while she was a taunted child in blighted Flint, Michigan. Double amputee Amy Purdy, an “adaptive” snowboarding champion with prosthetic legs, discussed not only her own accomplishment of overcoming her physical challenges, but also how she has co-founded an organization, Adaptive Action Sports, that encourages amputees to engage in competitive play.

Others told of observing and helping others experiencing severe trauma and how they worked to regain a sense of normalcy and functionality in their lives, from people forced to migrate for political and other reasons, to children in resource-challenged areas who seek education. In each of these presentations, more definitions of resilience emerged. Jennifer Leaning, a physician and professor at Harvard’s School of Public Health and who has worked in Afghanistan and on the Chad-Darfur border, described resilience as “the capacity to return to a prior state of balance…with a positive sense of self…and a sense of the future.”

NOT WITHOUT WARNINGS

Despite the focus on resilience as a tool for inventive new services, products, and design, PopTech’s first day also offered helpful warnings to anyone interested in pursuing the path to resiliency. Galea, for instance, said that “we should not lose sight of resistance in the discussion of resilience.” In other words, although it’s great to plan for things to go wrong, from tsunamis to stock market crashes, and then learn how to cope, it is still very valuable to prevent future difficulty as well. How? By learning from what to avoid, too, along with reacting to it.

John Doyle, a well-known systems scientist and CalTech professor, offered a specific warning. ”Watch out for biomimicry,” he said in an onstage question-and-answer period after his talk, referring to a popular innovation tactic of copying nature for design and engineering inspiration, often discussed in the context of resilience. His statement could be interpreted as cautioning the audience to realize that even the recipes for resilience may not always be easy solutions.

And Bill Shore, chief executive of Share Our Strength, a non-profit organization that aims to end childhood hunger, offered perhaps less of a warning and more a bit of advice. “Don’t be afraid of breaking rules,” Shore said. “It’s a strategic necessity…in social innovation.” He said that notplaying by the book allows people to move more quickly; when dealing with hunger, poverty, disaster relief, disease, violence, and other humanitarian problems, efficiency and speed can be more important than following any sort of bureaucratic standard procedure.

To read the entire report, click here.

Images: Thatcher Cook for PopTech/Flickr

A look at the life, work, and market of Alighiero Boetti

I’ve been late in sharing a piece on the late artist Alighiero Boetti that I wrote for Art + Auction magazine this summer. His retrospective at MoMA closed recently (October 1), but he was a brilliant artist and is likely to keep gaining much attention after this exhibition.

Here are the opening paragraphs of my piece on Boetti’s work, life, and market, to give you a taste:

In 1968 Alighiero Boetti created a haunting yet playful image titled Gemelli. The dreamlike work features two likenesses of the artist, then 28 years old, shaggy of hair and slim of silhouette, as rebelliously sexy as a Rolling Stone. The two pictures were taken minutes apart and, decades before Photoshop, assembled in a photomontage to create the effect of Boetti walking hand in hand with himself. Around the same time, the artist began to experiment with ambidextrous writing; a few years later, he sandwiched the letter e — Italian for “and” — between his given name and his surname, essentially splitting his identity in two.

The doubling spills over into the rest of his oeuvre. As Mariolina Bassetti, international director of postwar and contemporary art at Christie’s Rome, says, “There are two kinds of art by Boetti.” On the one hand, there are the Arte Povera-associated artist’s highly conceptual works, which deal with temporality and the absurdity of life; see, for example, Niente da vedere nulla da nascondere, 1969, a plain grid of glass panes that, as the title goes, has “nothing to show, nothing to hide.” On the other hand, he also made unabashedly bright embroidered pieces as well as subdued yet elegant Biro, or ballpoint pen, drawings on paper, such as Aerei, 1983, which fetched €63,150 ($85,000) at Sotheby’s Milan last November. The latter two bodies of work are particularly sought after; with simple imagery rendered in everyday materials, they are pleasing and instantly familiar. “Boetti is a very interesting artist,” says Claudia Dwek, cochair of Sotheby’s Europe and senior specialist in contemporary art. “He is both conceptual and fun.”

You can continue reading here; see how it looked in print here (a PDF).

New column on PSFK: Mindsharing

Here’s my new column, featuring conversations with C-level executives on current topics related to innovation and design. It will appear monthly on the trend-watching site PSFK. Very excited about it!

Speaking one-on-one with Wim Elfrink, the first Chief Globalisation Officer to be appointed at software giant Cisco, is always a delight. I must confess that I’ve only had conversations with him via Cisco’s high-end telepresence system at the corporation’s One Penn Plaza offices in Manhattan, when it’s been morning in New York and evening in Bangalore, where Elfrink often works. As he said the last time we spoke, “sometimes it’s hard to remember if I meet people in person or on telepresence,” and this is true about our own meetings. Our chats have been so vibrant, so warm, and so engaging that we may as well have been talking at a dinner party. This is testament to Cisco’s telepresence equipment, of course, but also more exemplary of Elfrink’s dynamic mind and lively, affable personality. It shines through, no matter what the forum.

Recently, we talked about the future of cities: how they can best leverage exciting new technology possibilities in terms of becoming “smarter,” via connecting people more quickly online or via mobile devices, and processing real-time data from sensors and other equipment. In other words, we explored how urban communities can better use social networking, sensors, Big Data, and sophisticated information technology infrastructures to evolve and prosper. Here’s our edited conversation.

Why are cities such a focal point for anyone interested in inspired innovation today?

Cities have always attracted people by offering three things: security, prosperity, and quality of life. Because of those three things, innovation takes place in cities. There has long been a misconception that cities aren’t safe, that they are filled with poor people, that it is hard to live in cities.

But today, security is not about brick and mortar safety, it is not about walls. Surveillance has changed that.

Cities offer more opportunities for people to improve their lives than in smaller towns, so even if they attract people who are challenged by a lack of resources, they have better chances of becoming more prosperous.

Telepresence will also help the poor have access to cities, perhaps bring them the education, work, and even healthcare possibilities that they didn’t have before, and in a way, make them part of cities.

Also, we must remember that great cities have souls. Think of what they are known for: Paris, for art. New Orleans, for music. San Francisco, for high tech. What is so promising about social networking is that in the future, we’ll be able to connect more people with each other around these aspects of cities while we are in them—or away from them.

Finally, we should consider that the future of competition is between cities, whereas it used to be between nations. Many people today identify themselves as what city they are from, versus what country. If cities do not work to become smarter, in all aspects of the word, they will lose the competition for visitors, industries, and revenues.

I know Cisco has been working on what is a start-up city, a city made from scratch, currently being built in Songdo, South Korea. But sometimes people are skeptical about new cities. They wonder, will they lack personality, will they be built so quickly as to be unsafe? So–what are the advantages of building a city from scratch?

In Korea, Cisco is the master ICT (information and communication technology) planner for this new city, which is being built by Stan Gale near the site where General MacArthur landed. The entire new city is designed from a sustainability point of view. There’s a waste management system underground. There is a central park that is walkable from all areas. The design of this city reflects the idea that all vital parts should be reachable via foot in 10-15 minutes. There is passive water, electricity, gas. And ICT is, we believe, the 4th utility.

The advantage of such an innovation and design project is to create an entire infrastructure that works together very well. It has a destiny and a purpose.

So what about older cities: New York, London, Delhi? How can they benefit from the new smart-city technologies out there?

Older cities are reinventing themselves. They will succeed when they find a newdestiny and purpose. There are two factors to keep in mind: We’re in a service economy, and sustainability is driving the agenda.

Think about some European cities and how they have reinvented themselves: Barcelona and Amsterdam, for instance, have always been very charming. And today, both of those old cities attract artists and creative companies. Barcelona took old centers where manufacturing once took place, and after 1992, they began to transform these old sections into clusters of art-centered neighborhoods. The revitalization of older cities comes in clusters. It brings together people with common interests.

Also, cities should consider that there are new patterns of work practiced around the globe, and many workers are virtualized. The effect of this virtualization is that people are attracted to more iconic centers. It’s the opposite of what was predicted. They work perhaps in the outskirts, but still live close enough to go into the city for food, sports, music.

Yes, many cities are finding new ways to revive their economies, but many large cities have urgent urban problems, from poverty to crime. How should these communities tackle them?

They should begin by asking what is the most imminent need. It’s very specific to each city. In India, the need in many big metropolitan areas is to improve slums, to offer more access to electricity and clean water. In Detroit, it’s to spark innovation, to get investors to bring businesses back to the area. It’s possible to revive a city relatively quickly if there is a focused goal. Think of how New York City turned itself around by focusing on its need for security twenty years ago, and then again ten years ago.

But there must be some shared challenges that all cities can tackle immediately and efficiently.

Yes. Energy management is one of them. Big buildings are so inefficient. The statistics are striking: 75% of the world’s energy is used in cities. Besides energy conservation, water conservation is another area that could be improved. Singapore has reached water neutrality. They have a saying, “from toilet to tap”—I’m not sure it’s great for marketing, but the initiative proves that even a large city can remake itself by focusing on an urgent environmental need.

Cities can do a lot to alleviate traffic problems. For instance, in the U.S., a big irritation is going to visit the DMV. Why not set up the process to renew drivers’ licenses so that it happens virtually? In Paris, the average citizen spends four years of her life looking for parking. If there were parking reservations online or other such programs, it would have an enormous effect on traffic and pollution. Not to mention quality of life.

So how can cities actually begin to address these problems?

One way is to create an integrated operation system. All utilities could come together. I have to say that this is not just an ICT issue. Another 50 billion devices will be connected to the Internet in the next decade, and we will be able to get massive amounts of data, from sensors. Every gadget or appliance or auto you can connect to the Internet, will provide information on people’s energy usage and other habits. Then we can create really targeted solutions.

So often, city planners and tech companies alike think that such a plan, such a focus on one big connected, data-driven urban system would be about hardware, primarily. It seems like there’s a lot of room for creative innovation, namely in new services. What’s necessary to push people beyond idea that ICT is not end but start, right?

People need to realize the future of cities is not about devices! We always say that one day, technology will be built into cities, you’ll get ICT systems from the beginning, as in the city we talked about in South Korea.

But it’s really not about equipment—it’s about services.

Still, cities need to understand that a common tech infrastructure makes a city more competitive. For citizens: the quality of life is better. They can get online, make use of smart technologies, and enjoy their social networking or other online services when they have an ICT system that works really well.

Urban planners so often get excited about creating new, iconic buildings, and then worry about bringing in the technology later. We suggest that architects and city officials think about the technology from the beginning. Embrace technology in your integrated urban or building plan as just another utility. The network can only do what the network can enable. How great will it be when anyone can assume their iPads will work anywhere and everywhere. Plus, there will be an explosion of services that will come with the coming deluge of big and open data.

What key concerns are emerging for industrial and interface designers and those in other creative industries, specifically, as cities evolve? And what new types of devices and services would you like to see?

I’d advise for designers to embrace technology in their concepts, just as architects and city planners should. They could ask, how to include technology in design? It’s fascinating to see how technology is integrated or not in various products today. A big concern, I believe, is how to make new, smart technologies more accessible, warmer. Clean tech has a lot of design challenges, from an infrastructure point of view.

But there is hope. A good precedent is television; TVs in the past were ugly. Now, they are designed to be integrated beautifully into spaces. The emergence of the flat-screen TV dramatically changed the experience of monitors in any kind of room.

I would love to see designers and engineers play with the whiteboard concept…imagine interactive whiteboards set up in communities around the world. We could see creative conversations happening in real time between friends in San Francisco and Sao Paolo, and not just within offices. From a design point of view, it would be great to see an evolution beyond just a clean, cool screen, generally speaking.

Also, I think sound is very important as we move forward with new communication technologies. We learned this when we developed our telepresence systems—any delay in sound makes the experience unbelievable. If you can’t interrupt in real time, or sing together, it’s not a real enough experience. So I’d love to see designers and architects keep sound quality, video quality in mind as they integrate communications tech in new cities, and think of the urban environments they design as a work of art—in other words, a wonderful human experience.

Mindsharing is a new, monthly column on PSFK, featuring conversations on timely topics with C-level executives around the world. The Q & As are conducted by Reena Jana, executive editor at frog, a design and innovation consultancy, and former Innovation Dept. Editor at BusinessWeek. Click here for more inspiring ideas from frog.

A quick report from TED Global 2012: four key themes

(This post was originally posted on my blog for frog — The Editor’s Notebook.)

Not so long ago, in the mid-2000s, many conversations in offices, schools, and even parties centered around the exciting concept of radical openness made possible by then-new social media. But now, as the 2010s are in full swing and social media are established, dominant platforms, how can we—as designers, strategists, organizations, consumers, and individuals—best harness the widespread acceptance of radical openness? The recent TEDGlobal conference in Edinburgh, Scotland, offered a fascinating and widely varied lineup of speakers who, collectively, helped to answer this question. Or at least will help propel the discussion forward, long after the conference ended on June 29.

Four main themes emerged across five days of talks both on the TED stage and impromptu conversations around Edinburgh, among speakers and attendees. From the lips and minds of neuroscientists to educators, artists to activists, musicians to political theorists, the key points to emerge were:

- The act of making is a powerful learning process—for individuals and organizations. Making—as practiced in the truly do-it-yourself sense—can encourage people to better understand how the world works and consequently articulate their needs. The DIY movement is likely to result in more informed consumers who demand better products and services. Otherwise, they just might create them and compete in the marketplace themselves. And, may I add, makers often create cool, playful stuff quickly, because most DIY projects must take place urgently, in spare hours and minutes outside of official “work” time. Passion is essential, and that’s always been the fuel for the most exciting new objects and ideas.

This idea echoed throughout a focused session on June 26 called “Tinker Make Do,” featuring speakers such as Arduino creator Massimo Banzi and smart materials expert Catarina Mota, as well as in numerous other presentations. Ramesh Raskar, a researcher of camera technology at MIT’s Media Lab said that he hopes “DIY will show us…the next dimension in imaging,” for instance. Scarily, the world’s criminals are using the maker’s sensibility in very sinister ways to harness new technologies to cause mayhem and even kill—but acknowledging this phenomenon can help authorities outsmart them, said future crimes expert Mark Goodman. The power of making, empowered by online commerce, can be seen more abstractly in the idea of “Peers, Inc.” presented by Zipcar and Buzzcar founder Robin Chase, who discussed how people are launching new DIY businesses among their friends to fill gaps not met by traditional companies, as well as profit from them as their personal networks are amplified thanks to social media.

- Play is a key ingredient to achieve success across nearly any discipline. Whether the goal is to overcome a personal health crisis, to conduct breakthrough scientific research, or to conceive and launch compelling design projects, approaching a desired outcome with a sense of humor and a dose of healthy competition is an advantageous strategy. Educational researcher Beau Lotto said in his talk that the best psychological and other experiments “are games,” essentially. Harvard Business School professor Amy Cuddy discussed how “power posing”—or copying confident body language similar to that of Wonder Woman or Superman— is proven to help in job interviews or sales meetings. Jane McGonigal, a game designer, discussed how she turned away from her own suicidal thoughts after a serious concussion by creating a game to beat the “bad guy” of her brain injury. John Maeda, president of the Rhode Island School of Design and a respected media artist and designer, discussed how executives can learn from the playful thinking of artists to re-think management in an era of heterarchies, not hierarchies.

- The ability to successfully manage change is one of the most valuable new skills for human beings, nations, and businesses to master in coming years. In a world with rapidly changing rules and a dramatically bumpy economy, not merely acknowledging change but learning to practically deal with it will become ever more important. Educational researcher Andreas Schleicher discussed on the TED stage how “success depends not on what we remember from school, but how prepared we for change.” A similar point was made by business educator Eddie Obeng, who runs an online management school and cites IBM, Microsoft, Citigroup, and numerous other companies as his corporate clients. Organizations and individuals reluctant to change from yesterday’s model of protecting intellectual property or keeping information private will struggle, unable to embrace the power of crowds and collective thinking, as Don Tapscott discussed in his talk.

- Openness is a starting point, not an end point. While the conference celebrated the promise of radical openness, many speakers discussed that it shouldn’t be merely a noble final goal, but the beginning of an era of constantly improving communication, governance, science, medicine, culture, and business. Openness, many speakers suggested, has always been a human pursuit throughout history, and it has to be carefully analyzed and executed to be fruitful.

“Openness alone can’t drive change,” as Margaret Heffernan, management expert, said. “Constructive conflict is necessary…we must be willing to change our minds.” Fascinatingly, design curator Deyan Sudjic presented a lovely talk in which he discussed how the concept of opacity in architecture may be a more appropriate physical metaphor for openness today than full transparent glass. Opacity, he stated, offers a “sense of possibility, with some ambiguity.” Social media guru Clay Shirky weaved in and out of media history to discuss how radically open platforms, including Gutenberg’s printing press, give new voice to the masses—but it’s not always immediately a constructive phenomenon. Even back in 1499, erotic novels were published as books, a startling 150 years before the first scientific treatises were printed and distributed, Shirky said. “More media means more argument,” Shirky also observed, acknowledging that instead of the “world peace” that the telegraph, the radio, and TV promised, the opposite (at least in terms of heated debate) followed nearly every new communications medium of the last century or so. And in a talk that’s likely to be argued in lively debates, filmmaker Kirby Ferguson likened copying to the act of invention itself, suggesting ideas are meant to be shared, and those that are borrowed often are dubbed the best. Bob Dylan and Steve Jobs, he pointed out, were masters of re-interpreting the ideas of others. “Our creativity comes from without, not from within,” he said—implying creation may just be a team sport.

On that note, it will be fascinating to see how these ideas and the many, many others presented and discussed at TED Global 2012 will spread, mutate, blossom, inspire, and transfer into fresh new projects and products, as well as address existing challenges. For the beauty of such a conference as TED is that it exemplifies the very themes it presents and promotes—game-changing concepts that its organizers, speakers, attendees, and extended community online believe can, and will, improve the world. 

Pictured, from top: Clay Shirky, Catarina Mota, John Maeda, Kirby Ferguson. All images: TED Conferences/Flickr

Yeah, another Facebook story: this one’s about their design strategy

You are probably sick of Facebook stories today of all days—as FB goes public. But I thought it might be fun to look at a piece I worked on last year, for frog’s Design Mind magazine (and it later was republished by Fast Company). It went behind the scenes at FB, looking at how the company views design as a strategy. 

Facebook’s Design Strategy: A Status Update

By Reena Jana

It seems odd, if not entirely counterintuitive, to find any building on Facebook’s main campus devoid of devices connected to the social-networking site. But inside the slightly grungy old warehouse that houses the company’s Analog Research Lab, there isn’t a single computer in sight. Instead, the space is filled with power saws, silk-screening gear, a small letterpress, and an industrial paper-cutting machine that slices through dozens of sheets at once, as swiftly as a guillotine. These tools are ideal for making what, exactly?

Apparently, they’re for making stacks of postcards with the word “poke” (a riff on the virtual act of “poking” someone) printed in inky red letters on one side and lines for a hand-written address and a postage stamp on the other. The cards are available to any Facebook staff member who wants to use them as personal stationery for keeping in touch with friends and family the old-fashioned way.

You see, Facebook’s creative leadership prefers to develop new features and products based on people and their online behavior, not technology and algorithms—an approach the company calls “social design.” Christopher Cox, vice president of product, defines the concept as improving how people build human-to-human, versus human-to-interface, connections online. Facebook’s social network, he says, is the virtual equivalent of an actual space in which people regularly gather to converse, play, collaborate, and share.

This starts to explain the postcards and the lab’s adorably anachronistic gear and comfy furniture. Two Facebook communication designers, Ben Barry and Everett Katigbak, transformed the space in their spare time about a year and a half ago. Beyond such old-school items as a photography darkroom and racks where wet prints can dry, there are soft chairs to sink into and a fridge filled with beverages. The business reason why the lab exists is to provide a space for communication designers like the lab’s co-founders to create branded marketing materials—T-shirts, for instance—for developer conferences and other Facebook events. It’s also where designers experiment with simple fonts and sleek iconography that will eventually influence what appears on the Facebook website. With its laid-back playful vibe, the Analog Research Lab has also become a place where Facebook’s growing design staff—which has more than tripled in size in less than two years—gathers for frequent happy hours.

Design is such an influential part of Facebook’s strategy that Cox and 64 other members of the design staff occupy desks that form a U-shape around founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The emphasis on building the notion of “social design” is so important that, when asked about its controversial privacy policies, Facebook’s in-house counsel invokes the “d” word: Earlier this year, a privacy and product attorney at Facebook was quoted in the Wall Street Journal as saying that the company would “apply the Facebook design experience that we bring to everything we do and extend that to our privacy policy.” After all, to users of the site, finding the controversial privacy policy and adjusting the settings is really a user-interface issue—and, ultimately, a design concern.

“Everything Just Is”

Despite its pivotal role in the company, the lab typically gets left out of media profiles and Hollywood portrayals of Facebook. Those tend to focus on the website’s phenomenal popularity (more than 685 million active users worldwide at this writing) or the controversies surrounding the company, from privacy issues to its rivalry with Google. Cox is quick to point this out as a major oversight, because the lab is shaping Facebook as both an organization and a social-networking platform.

“You can learn a lot about a company by what’s literally on the walls. We don’t have clinical-looking logos on ours. They’re adorned by stuff designers have made in the analog lab and that people have put up, with no direction from me,” Cox says effusively. “We have a rogue, emergent, generative culture. We show people that when they come into Facebook, they start creating.”

This is also true of users when they log on to Facebook.com, he says: they can post whatever they want on their virtual walls. Indeed, company data shows that the average user creates 90 pieces of content per month, contributing to more than 30 billion pieces of shared content—everything from photos to Web links to posts—across Facebook’s social network during that time. Every day, some 20 million installations of third-party applications further customize Facebook accounts.

Kate Aronowitz, Facebook’s director of design, says the lab also provides a place where employees “come up with expressing who we are.” The company won’t disclose how much it has invested in the lab, or its budget. There are no staff members who work full-time in the lab; instead, the resource exists to encourage designers to play and create with non-digital tools, which, Aronowitz says, is a powerful tactic to help inform how Web design is effectively executed today. “Today, Web designers are returning to original design principles—simple shapes, contrasts, and colors. It’s not like 10 years ago, when it was all about what tools you could use to create animations on a Web page,” Aronowitz says. “At the lab, we have this extra-creative outlet, where designers can get back to basics. Sometimes people bring in old book covers, or go there and sketch. The printing press forces them to play around with super-simple typography, things that aren’t overly decorated or complicated.”

Heavyweights in the design world—museum curators and executive creative directors of well-known firms—have been largely unimpressed. They question the effectiveness of Facebook’s so-called “social design,” often using adjectives such as “cold” and “unengaging” to describe the social network’s aesthetic to publications ranging from the Washington Post to Advertising Age. Paola Antonelli, curator of design at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, seems to concur. “The awesome designers, engineers, programmers, executives, and thinkers behind Facebook—who all have my eternal admiration—have designed a unique system, but the result is not an example of design,” she observes. “Let’s assume every interface is a design: Some are good. Some are bad. Some are neutral. Facebook falls in this latter category. It is not offensive, and it leaves room for people to do their own thing.”

Facebook’s plainness, Cox and Aronowitz argue, is the key to the success of its design strategy, which targets a potential 1 billion users worldwide, appealing to people ages 13 and up, with diverse cultural backgrounds in more than 70 languages. “Yes, we’ve had negative press, in terms of our ‘lack of design,’” Aronowitz says. “But honestly, when we’re doing our jobs right as a design team, we do not want people to remember interactions with our brand; we want them to experience real connections with each other and with content. That is most important.”

As an example, Cox cites the names of Facebook features. “In 2005, we decided to create a photo product that we called Photos. Other people at the time were using names like Flickr, Picasa, Photobucket, right? Very niche-y,” he says. “Instead, we use common words. We recede into the background. We design a place where there aren’t new objects to trip over. Photos are photos. Chat is chat. Groups are groups. Everything just is.” To directly address criticism of the site’s design, he recalls his comparison of Facebook’s virtual space to physical space. “Look, you can design a place with the coolest-looking windows or the most beautiful archways, but that doesn’t mean people will want to sit down in those spaces and stay there,” Cox says. “The problem or challenge that we face with creating social products that work online is that the subtlest of gestures are what makes them comfortable.”

Click here to read the rest, along with photos of the Analog Research Lab.

An outtake from my latest Fortune.com piece

Last week, Fortune.com published a feature I wrote on a digital agency, Fjord, which has been working to design iPad apps — and other projects — for big banks such as Citi. There was one fun detail we snipped out, mainly to keep the piece flowing and short and sweet. It was an anecdote from Fjord’s CEO, Olof Schybergson, on how the agency’s annual outdoorsy trips—on which they bring all 200 employees to exotic locales (Crete, Mallorca)—is justified as a business expense. Here’s the paragraph we cut:

“Once I was with a group who didn’t know each other before, and we all got stuck in our kayaks,” Schybergson recalls. They couldn’t cross a body of water safely because of foul weather, so they “had to talk and listen, analyze the environment, and let our senses alert us to different conditions before we could make a plan together for what to do,” he says. Yes, they became closer, personally, during this experience. But they also learned to how to collectively manage a sudden crisis and come up with creative solutions to a pressing challenge together, with strangers, skills that can come in handy in the office and when dealing with clients, too.

Yeah, there is a lot of belt-tightening these days, and for good reason. But the personal bonding and trust and collective problem solving that occurs when teams meet up in person is pretty valuable. And even if team members realize they can’t figure out how to get out of a bad kayaking situation together, isn’t it worth it for everyone to realize that the team might need to work on their communication skills…or restructure so that everyone finds a way to work best together?

The basics of biomimicry: A “cheat sheet” for executives interested in biomimetic design

Archives of recent stories

My ambitious plans were to write a background post on many of the stories and posts I write. To catch up, here are links that will lead to archives of recent pieces:

For CBS Interactive’s SmartPlanet.com, for which I now blog on design as a Contributing Editor:

http://smrt.io/ouY6Cc

For Fortune.com/CNN Money, for which I’m now writing regularly:

http://cnnmon.ie/tUO7v2

Thanks for reading, and I’d love to hear from you on suggestions for future stories.

An interview with (and inspiration from) “a walker in L.A.”:

I recently interviewed design writer Alissa Walker for The Inside Source (http://www.theinsidesource.com), a fashion and lifestyle site published by eBay, for whom I get to talk to such cool people as Samantha Bee of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, architect David Rockwell, Kartell CEO Claudio Luti, the Today show’s style editor Bobbi Thomas, and numerous others. It was particularly fun discussing design and doing good with Alissa, whose sunny outlook and writing I have long admired. If you haven’t checked out her posts on her blog (http://www.gelatobaby.com), or her pieces for Fast Company, GOOD, and numerous other pubs, do. She’s got a distinctively optimistic voice and an inspiring life. Yes, she is devoted to writing about sustainability. But I really love her focus on fun and how she clearly enjoys sharing smart ideas about green living, building communities offline and online, and just spreading a sense of joy in her home city of Los Angeles…and beyond. There’s humor and authenticity in her work, and she’s got a terrific personal brand. See the link below for the interview.