Category: design

design, GEL, GEL conference, gel2008, innovation, new product development

Repost of Alex Lee from OXO

Christa Avampato

Last Spring I was fortunate to be able to attend the GEL conference in New York City. One of the people on the slate of incredible speakers was Alex Lee, CEO of OXO. The fine people at Good Experience who organize the conference sent me a link to a video that is now posted to highlight Alex’s talk. I wanted to repost my article, now complete with video, so you can enjoy on the great talk that has had me thinking intently about functional design ever since! Cheers (and thanks to Good Experience!)

You may not know the name “OXO“, though you undoubtedly have seen their products in the kitchen gadget aisles. And their anonymity shouldn’t surprise anyone – after all, their CEO, Alex Lee, believes that designers should be overshadowed by the simplicity and beauty of their own designs. Whether it’s making an incomparable salad spinner or an ingenious measuring cup, the reaction OXO is always looking for from users is their lack of notice of the object. It should be so intuitive and easy to use that its use should go unnoticed, like walking, like breathing.

Alex also made several points about dignity. OXO seeks to design products that are usable by the greatest percentage of the population possible. The goal is to design beautiful products without increasing cost, while maximizing functionality, and never making a user feel like “I’m using this easy-to-use product because I am unable to use another one that is more complicated.”

He and the talented design team at OXO have several axioms that they work and live by. Products should be:
Easy to use
Easy to understand
Use honest language
Instructions not required

As far as finding inspiration for worthy design projects, OXO also makes that search simple. They find objects that cause people some sort of pain or frustration, even if they don’t know that they are frustrated. And then they develop a design remedy to alleviate the pain. For example, why should I need to get my eyes down to counter level to observe a meniscus to see if the liquid I’ve measured is at the right level? I should be able to comfortably observe it from overhead. I didn’t realize that, but OXO did. Design so brilliant you wonder how you ever did without it…

Alex Lee at Gel 2008 from Gel Conference on Vimeo.

cancer, charity, children, cooking, design, food, philanthropy

Cupcakes for a Cause

Christa Avampato

That delightful time of year has arrived again: the leaves are changing, the air is crisp, and we can stuff our faces with the sweet, yummy goodness of cupcakes while doing some good in the world. The annual celebration of Cupcakes for a Cause kicked off today to benefit Cancercare for Kids. For the remainder of this week you can help the organization by picking up the goods at local bakeries around the country, all conveniently listed by state on the causes’s website.

Watching your diet? No problem. For every e-cupcake you send through the site, $1 will be donated to the charity, up to a cap of $10,000. You have some controlled functionality to design your own virtual cupcake or choose from a selection of beautiful stock designs. I’ve been happily sending them out this evening to family and friends and it’s almost as much fun as baking them myself.

So what are you waiting for? No time like the present to gobble up some cupcake goodness and help a worthwhile charity, all in one delicious bite.

business, corporation, design, marketing

The goal of all designers: create conversations

Christa Avampato

Tim Lebrecht at frogDesign wrote a post earlier this week about the earliest stage of ideation. In this age of user-generated design, he questions whether designers are really going about their work in the correct way. He challenges designers of all levels to consider that whatever the end product of their design, they should seek to create conversation.

I was a bit confused by this for a time until I considered an art exhibit I saw a few years ago at the Phillips Collection in DC. The exhibit featured works by Joan Miro and Alexander Calder. The created their art as a conversation; this is largely because they did not have a common fluent language. Miro would create a piece; Calder would answer it, and then add another idea for Miro to comment on. And so it went, for many, many years. Across decades, across oceans. They transcended language with design.

So what if companies like Coca Cola or Target took the design POV that they were creating conversations with their customers, rather than creating products? How much richer and more relevant could their designs be? How much loyalty to their brands could they generate?

Pictured above is Joan Miro’s “Garden”

art, design, GEL conference, gel2008, Terry Borden

GEL 2008: Terry Borden and Bent Objects

Christa Avampato

I have a fondness for wacky art and the minds that create that art. I’m especially appreciative of wacky art that makes me laugh out loud. Terry Borden is one of those people.


About halfway through Day 2 of the GEL conference, Terry took the stage and talked openly and honestly about all of his failures as an artist. And then he hit upon an idea of Bent Objects, using items found around the house and then making them into “people” with bent wire arms, legs, and accessories, then placed in vignettes. He didn’t, and maybe still doesn’t, have much money so he has to create each art piece for only a few bucks apiece. And that constraint has placed the spotlight on his humor and ingenuity. Again, I am reminded that what makes good art brilliant is the need to work within constraints.


I’d describe them verbally, though the laugh is much more easily shared by just visiting his website. http://www.bentobjects.blogspot.com. One of his works “Paying Respects” is pictured above. Several peanut-people bringing flowers to a jar of Jif. I love this guy.

design, GEL conference, gel2008, Oxo

GEL 2008: Alex Lee, President of Oxo

Christa Avampato

You may not know the name “OXO“, though you undoubtedly have seen their products in the kitchen gadget aisles. And their anonymity shouldn’t surprise anyone – after all, their CEO, Alex Lee, believes that designers should be overshadowed by the simplicity and beauty of their own designs. Whether it’s making an incomparable salad spinner or an ingenious measuring cup, the reaction OXO is always looking for from users is their lack of notice of the object. It should be so intuitive and easy to use that its use should go unnoticed, like walking, like breathing.

Alex also made several points about dignity. OXO seeks to design products that are usable by the greatest percentage of the population possible. The goal is to design beautiful products without increasing cost, while maximizing functionality, and never making a user feel like “I’m using this easy-to-use product because I am unable to use another one that is more complicated.”

He and the talented design team at OXO have several axioms that they work and live by. Products should be:
Easy to use
Easy to understand
Use honest language
Instructions not required

As far as finding inspiration for worthy design projects, OXO also makes that search simple. They find objects that cause people some sort of pain or frustration, even if they don’t know that they are frustrated. And then they develop a design remedy to alleviate the pain. For example, why should I need to get my eyes down to counter level to observe a meniscus to see if the liquid I’ve measured is at the right level? I should be able to comfortably observe it from overhead. I didn’t realize that, but OXO did. Design so brilliant you wonder how you ever did without it…

Alex Lee at Gel 2008 from Gel Conference on Vimeo.

creative, creativity, design, Janet Grace Riehl.

What does "Curating a Creative Life" mean?

Christa Avampato

Many, many thanks to Janet Grace Riehl who left a comment on my recent post about how music and art can tap into a part of the mind that has been damaged to “re-teach” it. That post deals with a kind of therapy known as melodic intonation therapy. In a nutshell, the therapy teaches people to speak after a stroke by teaching them first to sing. Janet shared a very personal story about her mom, and I am very grateful for her comment.

She also asked if I could say a bit about the subtitle of my blog “Curating a Creative Life” and I realized that I may have always talked about this in a round-about fashion though never specifically discussed my philosophy on it. When I first moved to New York City over a decade ago, I was entranced by the window dressers of the department stores. And I was taken by set designs I saw in the theatres I worked in and by exhibits in so many of the incredible museums that make their home in New York. I wanted so much be someone who designs and chooses what goes where and how it all hangs together. I wanted to be a curator.

I went about my professional life thinking that design was beyond me, something that only the elite had a right to do as a profession. So, I put my business skills to work and toured with theatre shows, and later got into fundraising. I went to business school for my MBA, and now work for a toy company. All the while, I have been meeting interesting people in interesting places all over the world, and collecting their stories and my reactions to their stories. I recorded them in a journal for a very long time and now I write on this blog. In addition to my interest in curating, I am also intensely interested in narrative and story lines. I am a writer. And now I curate that writing.

“The hardest thing in the world is deciding what matters,” says Susan Monk Kidd in The Secret Lives of Bees. She right; it is always hard to choose. There are so many amazing things to do and see and be in this world. Our job, our only job, is to choose which experiences, places, and people are the ones most deserving of our time. We are choosing, and therefore curating, the different pieces of our lives. Our lives are creations always evolving, morphing into something different than they were yesterday. With every new interaction, there is a new learning and we incorporate that, somehow, into how we approach the next interaction, and so on.

Like a museum curator chooses what to put in the exhibit and where to put it, we all choose where and when and with whom to place the events that make up our lives. We are all creatives, carefully weaving a tapestry of the events, people, and places that make up our lives, designers of the highest order.

Thank you, again, Janet!

The photo above can be found at http://www.fotosearch.com/thumb/UNN/UNN256/u10097124.jpg

creativity, design, human factors, technology

Can technology self-adjust?

Christa Avampato

My friend, Jon, recently sent me an article from The Telegraph on websites that “grow and develop”, just as humans due, raising the question of whether or not technology can abide by the laws of Darwinism. Can websites be programmed so the ones that are most adaptive to change survive, and those that are rigid and “set in their ways” perish? This takes the idea of user-generated content to a whole new level.

Human creativity, collectively, is able to alter technology over a number of iterations with these websites. The colors, fonts, and usability changes as the technology collect information by users of what they found appealing or unappealing, the links they clicked (or didn’t click) on. Think of what this could do for blogs or mass media information sources? Bloggers and reporters are constantly guessing what type of content would be most interesting and provocative to readers. Imagine if the readers could play direct hand in the alterations?!

This technology is in its early stages, though it’s easy to imagine all the different paths this type of innovation could create for us, or rather the paths we would be able to create for ourselves. What technology could human creativity synthesize using the same process that nature has followed for so many centuries? This invention could be the very height of biomimicry. Learn more at about the project and Matthew Hockenberry, the director of the Creative Synthesis Collaborative at www.creativesynthesis.net.
art, creativity, design, innovation

Why good curation matters

Christa Avampato

Today I was reading Bruce Nussbaum’s blog, http://blogs.businessweek.com/innovate/NussbaumOnDesign/. I have a tremendous amount of respect for him as a journalist, blogger, and innovation guru.

Today he wrote a post that truly impressed me – very simply he opened the post discussing his changing role as a journalist, moving from being a Voice of Authority to a Master Curator.

I know that many times the content of a discussion, presentation, or art exhibit for that matter, overshadows the design and organization of the exhibit itself. Curating is as much an art as being a content creator.

If an event or exhibit is curated well, the content takes center stage, with the curating barely being noticed. If it’s curated badly, the whole things falls into chaos. Good curating is very much like good management – if its competent, the content (the team’s work) shines. So if we aspire to be truly great curators, great managers, then we need to aspire to go unnoticed.

The photo above can be found at http://www.bibi.org/box/2006/03/Jere_Smith.jpg

apple, creativity, design, Mac, retail, technology

Meet Mac

Christa Avampato

My new love – my Mac. After months of trying to justify the cost of a new laptop, even though my current laptop works just fine (most of the time), I took the plunge. I’d done my research, I’d attended some workshops, and finally made an evening appointment with the Mac concierge service. They were waiting for me when I arrived and I was out of there in 15 minutes with my new Mac in hand, plus a free printer / scanner / fax/ personal assistant to make me breakfast in bed. 

Their reputation for excellent service is well-deserved. Paul, my Apple guy, was friendly, funny, and best of all, honest. I happily wrote him a note and one for his boss on his behalf as soon as I arrived home. It was the best retail experience I’ve ever had – and I am a very tough sell when it comes to service. In just minutes I was up and running. 
It is amazing what I can now do with photos, my music, personal websites. Even powerpoint presentations are a joy to build. This is the ultimate toy. And it’s so intuitive that I find myself having to unlearn all of the work-arounds I’ve had to learn over the years to operate a PC. I almost have to be re-trained to think naturally about how a machine operates.  
My Mac is also affording me the opportunity to learn design skills and expand my creativity to movie making and original music. I could go on and on, but I really need to get back to Mac. He’s got a lot to teach me. 
design, environment, green, New York

Biomimicry – creative inspiration for designers

Christa Avampato

If we, a designers, truly inspect and respect what nature has to teach us, then the creative inspiration around us is limitless. Business Week’s Green Design blog has recently published an enormous amount of new information, largely through pictures, to its site. No doubt that the contents are getting increased attention due to the U.N. General Assembly discussions this week around climate change.

The most fasincating posts to me are those relating to biomimicry, a new discipline that studies intently studies nature and then mimics nature’s designs and processes to solve human problems. How much time do we spend trying to reinvent the wheel, and then in the process chase our own tails? We need look no further than out our own windows to be inspired by new and innovative thinking.

Finally, these sets of articles and the principles of biomimicry have provided me with the vocabularly to articulate why the environment is such a precious resource and why I am so passionate about its protection. To lose any part of it, be in flora or fauna, is to lose hundreds of thousands of years of design study. The wisdom encapsulated in a snail shell or the leaf pattern of a maple is irreplaceable. To lose that wisdom, in my eyes, is an awful as book burning or the banishing of the freedom of expression. As Mayor Bloomberg intimated this week, to not protect the environment is tantamount to terrorism.

Have a look at the Green Design site at http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/di_special/20080211sustainable.htm