This is the third interview in Chapter 2 in my new book, Designing Media Tim Westergren, February 2009 In 2000 Tim Westergren founded Pandora, the personalized Internet radio service. Based on his Music Genome Project, Pandora selects songs and artists with similar musical qualities to a sample chosen by the listener and creates a “radio...

This is the second interview in Chapter 2 in my new book, Designing Media Craig Newmark, December 2008 Who hasn’t heard of Craigslist, the Web site that has dramatically altered the classified advertising universe with its largely free want ads and for-sale postings? At the end of 2008, the site operated in 55 countries and...

This is the first interview in Chapter 2 in my new book, Designing Media Jimmy Wales, October 2008 Jimmy Wales founded Wikipedia in 2001, harnessing voluntary contributions from anyone with sufficient interest and time to create the world’s largest encyclopedia. I was surprised that the first email that I received from him was signed Jimbo,...

This is the seventh in a series of posts about my new book, Designing Media DJ Spooky, AKA Paul D. Miller, October 2009 Paul Miller may seem a less interesting name than DJ Spooky: That Subliminal Kid, but he makes up for it with his erudite conversation, informed by his background in philosophy and French...

This is the sixth in a series of posts about my new book, Designing Media Neil Stevenson, March 2008 Neil brought a breath of fresh energy to IDEO when he joined in 2005, after editing the London based magazine, The Face. He assembled an amusing presentation about the history of the people behind the ideas...

This is the fifth in a series of posts about my new book, Designing Media Chris Anderson, November 2008 I interviewed Chris Anderson in the offices of Wired magazine in San Francisco. He had taken the job of Editor in Chief just before the crash in 2001, so he was faced with hard choices about...

This is the fourth in a series of posts about my new book, Designing Media James Truman, December 2008 I was lucky to be able to interview James Truman in Napa Valley, not so far away from my home base, where he was staying in a visitor’s cottage on the Francis Ford Coppola estate. He...

This is the third in a series of posts about my new book, Designing Media Paul Saffo, July 2008 I put the interview with Paul Saffo at the beginning of the book because he gives such an erudite overview of the changes in media and the challenges faced by the people involved its creation and...

This is the second in a series of posts about my new book, Designing Media Mark Zuckerberg, November 2009 Mark stares at you from the cover of this week’s Time Magazine with intense green eyes. Here is Time’s accolade: “For connecting more than half a billion people and mapping the social relations among them; for...

Designing Media, a Book, DVD and Website from The MIT Press I was working on Designing Media for a couple of years while I was still at IDEO, before coming to the Cooper-Hewitt. It’s a partner volume to my first book Designing Interactions in that it combines the book with a DVD and a website,...

Mainstream media, often known simply as MSM, have not yet disappeared in a digital takeover of the media landscape. But the long-dominant MSM-television, radio, newspapers, magazines, and books-have had to respond to emergent digital media. Newspapers have interactive Web sites; television broadcasts over the Internet; books are published in both electronic and print editions. In...

  The evening of May 19th capped off a three-day residency at the Cooper-Hewitt for Natalie Chanin, founder and designer of the design studio Alabama Chanin. Chanin, one of the founders of the burgeoning “slow fashion” movement, followed up her two-day Design Directions workshop for teenagers with an hour-long public lecture and book signing. “Lecture”...

  Yesterday I read a succinct little book called Which “Aesthetics” do you Mean? – Ten Definitions by Leonard Koren, in which he discusses alternative ways of understanding the meaning of aesthetics. I was fascinated by the hybrid-functionalist definition, saying that an art object is always “about something” as opposed to just “being something.” Leonard...

A picnic in the park as a starting point. This is the first of the grand challenges posed by Secretary Wayne Clough for the new strategic plan of the Smithsonian. Here’s the explanatory sentence: “We will continue to lead the quest to understand the fundamental nature of the cosmos, using next-generation technologies to explore our...

Ted Muehling Expounds Ted hosted a group of Cooper-Hewitt members at his studio and store in SoHo this week, as you can see from the Monday at Muehling’s post, giving them a peek at his wonderfully creative environment full of glass, emotive sculpture and creatures from the natural world. He is also the guest curator...