A Visual Gallery of concepts & methods of story in Interaction Design What’s a story? How do stories work? How do stories communicate, build empathy, connect and inspire? And how can stories help designers create meaningful interactive products? In this poster gallery, designers in the Interaction Design program at California…

A personal morning practice synthesized from a bunch of awesome thinkers & do-ers. I recently started a new practice: the early-morning Power Hour. It’s inspired by an article in Success Magazine about Robin Sharma’s 5-am club and 20/20/20 formula (note: I don’t get up at 5am. Turns out 6:45am is the best I can do.) The journaling portion dovetails nicely with the Minimalist…

For years I’ve carried a full set of Prang watercolors for field sketching…but now it feels cumbersome. So in keeping with the idea of Lean Startup, I set out to make a Minimum Viable Watercolor Field Kit. I asked…

The 2018 Creative Founder experience has come to an end. The semester-long Night Cap incubator finished with Pitch Night, where the three teams pitched their businesses to an expert group of reviewers. Pitch night was well-attended: 11 fabulous reviewers assessed the teams and provided feedback, and 15 wonderful friends, family…

Quick tips for appropriately linking to external resources in blog posts. This is not a full-citation guide. There are many of those out there. This is for more casual posts where you want to be helpful to the reader, but you don’t need to comply with rigorous academic standards. Books: List the title and the author. You can also add the…

On September 7th, we launched NightCap — the Fall 2018 cohort of the Creative Founders class at California College of the Arts. A designer has never had more opportunity in the world of business to create impact. Many venture capitalists today understand the value and are demanding that design be…

The following is a short talk given to the 2018 class of Masters of Interaction Design at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, CA. As a new adjunct faculty member, I was invited to speak to the graduating class. Graduating is a big deal. I know you've…

What can we illuminate by replacing a debated term with an accepted term? — In December 2017, Lee Vinsel, educator in Technology Studies at Virginia Tech, published Design Thinking is Kind of Like Syphilis — It’s Contagious and Rots Your Brains. It a long piece, fitting the technical definition of a screed. At almost 9,000 words and 134 paragraphs (it’s a 36-minute read, according…

It’s not a euphemism. I’m seriously obsessed with drawing beautiful baskets. For a long while I’ve wanted to do a project featuring the art of native Southwesterners. The indigenous peoples in (now called) Arizona create dazzlingly beautiful crafts. As a child in Tucson, I grew up surrounded by these artifacts…