Pushing the Boundaries of Design

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SPECIAL REPORT

Inside Innovation

• Editor's Note
• New Innovation Tools and Trends Worth Trying
• Social Networking Graduates and Hits the Job Market
• Radical Collaboration
• Feeling Trashed on the Web?
• Six Sigma Kick-Starts Starwood
• A Formula One Designer Shifts Gears
• Pushing the Boundaries of Design
• Nokia's Global Design Sense
• Eco-Chic: How Hot is Their Air?
• September 10, 2007 Issue of BusinessWeek

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Recently, many designers have been drawing design into the realm of the public good. A design activist of sorts, John Thackara spearheads multidisciplinary projects such as Design of the Times (DOTT), a yearlong festival of social innovation and design taking place throughout Britain. Also in the realm of the public good, Cameron Sinclair's Open Architecture Network builds on architecture and open-source technology to create a global design platform that introduces a new intellectual property framework to the architecture world. And goloco.org, the new venture of Robin Chase, founder of ZipCar, sits at the cusp of networking technologies and transportation design—and has the potential to transform our cities' urban planning.

Such aggressive cross-category experimentation is also true of nondesign fields, and what was once regarded as dumb luck is coming to be seen as smart strategy. Today, Procter & Gamble (PG) actively cross-pollinates among traditionally divided business units, with results like Crest Whitestrips—a dental product based on the laundry division's knowledge of whitening agents.

Tomorrow's Frisbee

Smaller companies that don't have such diverse expertise in-house are often turning to open-source innovation networks such as NineSigma and InnoCentive, companies whose business is based on the idea that a solution won't necessarily be found within the walls of the internal R&D department. (See BusinessWeek.com, 6/11/07, "NineSigma: Nurturing 'Open Innovation'".)

In scouring the design scene for this year's 10 cutting-edge designers, we passed over established product designers like Jonathan Ive and Ross Lovegrove as well as talented, up-and-coming furniture makers such as Patricia Urquiola and the Campana brothers. And we considered designers from a wide variety of fields, such as Aimee Weber, who creates digital retail spaces and products for companies like Warner Brothers within the virtual world of Second Life, or the architectural firm Cook + Fox, the designers behind the soon-to-be-completed super-green Bank of America (BAC) building in New York and pioneers of eco-friendly corporate tower design.

All of them have raised the design bar in their use of new technologies and materials. But instead, we focused on designers pushing the edges of the field, and borrowing tools or techniques from other disciplines to create new solutions and greater possibilities. We looked, in other words, for the designers of tomorrow's Frisbee.

An edited version of this article appeared in the September 10, 2007 issue of BusinessWeek.

View profiles of all ten featured designers.

With Reena Jana and Helen Walters.