Gretchen Chern | Design Research & Strategy

Designing A Difference: Smallbean’s Solar Suitcase

Design­ing A Dif­fer­ence: Small­bean Part 1 from Design Muse­um Boston on Vimeo. A team at Design Muse­um Boston is col­lab­o­rat­ing with Small­bean, a non­prof­it cor­po­ra­tion based in Boston, to devel­op the next gen­er­a­tion of Smallbean’s solar suit­case. This video doc­u­ments phase one of the redesign, which is still in progress. Phase one focused on under­stand­ing […]

Bring on the Learning Revolution!

I first watched this great talk by Sir Ken Robin­son a few months ago, and since then I’ve watched both this talk and his pre­vi­ous talk three times. Not only are his talks inspir­ing and thought-pro­­vok­ing, they are also very fun­ny. He is tru­ly a great speak­er.

We Need a Mind Shift

In this video, Lewis Pugh dis­cuss­es his jour­ney to com­plete a swim in a melt­wa­ter lake on the slopes of Mount Ever­est. This jour­ney taught him a rad­i­cal new way to approach swim­ming as well as a new way to think about glob­al cli­mate change.Pugh learned two impor­tant lessons on Mt. Ever­est: Just because some­thing […]

The Launch of OpenIDEO

Intro­duc­tion to OpenIDEO / OpenIDEO.com from IDEO on Vimeo. This week, IDEO launched an open idea gen­er­a­tion plat­form called OpenIDEO. It is a place where any­one, not just design­ers, can con­tribute ideas, become inspired and eval­u­ate the ideas of oth­ers. The thing I like most about OpenIDEO is the fact that it uses col­lab­o­ra­tion to […]

The Creative vs. The Marketing Team

The rea­son I like this arti­cle The Cre­ative vs. The Mar­ket­ing Team: Yin And Yang, Oil And Water — Smash­ing Mag­a­zine is because it breaks down the issues between cre­ative and mar­ket­ing teams and encour­ages design­ers to stand up for them­selves and their work. It is, of course, writ­ten from the per­spec­tive of a cre­ative per­son, but it doesn’t put all the blame on mar­ket­ing peo­ple. The author is real­ly seek­ing to have us all work bet­ter togeth­er.

Designer Salaries

This is a rant about an obnox­ious guy I met who, after ask­ing what I do for a liv­ing, said “Graph­ic Design­ers don’t make any mon­ey.” Also includ­ed is a link to the 2009 Coroflot Design­er Salary Sur­vey.