Technology

Michael Bierut|Audio

Episode 92: Polite Sociopaths

The Design of Business | The Business of Design conference, Apple CarPlay and talking cars, HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey, Justin Timberlake, dogs watching TV, Visual Capitalist

Jason Tselentis|Essays

The Annals of Smart Speaker Advertising: Overused Advertising Copy

Amazon, Google, and Apple promise that each of their smart speakers will do what you want and get what you need. And they all promise it using the same language.

Ken Gordon|Books

AI + Designers = ?

AI is a tool, a really powerful one, for designers to use; not an alternative to designers.

Alexandra Lange|Essays

The Critical Olympics

What the best sports commentary does is just like criticism: it makes you care about the previously abstract.

Lilly Smith|Interviews

Chain Letters: Briana Como

“We make an effort to be aware of and remove bias by focusing on behaviors instead of demographics when creating distinct personas.”

Lilly Smith|Interviews

Chain Letters: Sarah Doody

“With anything we create, the first step in the design process must be to understand. This happens through research.”

Lilly Smith|Interviews

Chain Letters: Richard Ting

Richard Ting, Global Chief Experience Officer at R/GA, continues our Chain Letters interview series.

Michael Bierut|Essays

Vladimir Nabokov: Father of Hypertext?

The innovative narrative technique developed by Vladimir Nabokov for his 1962 novel Pale Fire—essentially a single epic poem with footnotes and commentary—anticipated hypertext, the internet, and the interconnected world of …

Lilly Smith|Interviews

Chain Letters: Jessica Gaddis

This interview is part of a new Design Observer series, Chain Letters, in which we ask leading design minds a few burning questions—and so do their peers, for a year-long conversation about the state of the industry.

Michael Bierut|Audio

S3E1: Giorgia Lupi

Giorgia Lupi is the co-founder and design director of Accurat, a data-driven studio, and an artist whose work is at MoMA.

Helen Armstrong|Essays

Virtual Reality. No One Can Tell You, You Are Doing It Wrong. Yet.

For better or worse, we know how to interact with web and mobile. We understand how to design for screens. What we don’t yet know is how to engage with VR.

Kathleen Meaney|Essays

Greening the Grocery Store

It turns out that the recycling symbol at the bottom of my yogurt container had nothing to do with its recyclability. So why was it there? My curiosity led to findings around which I built a design class.