Archives for January 2014
[Business Today] Taking Flight: Your Aviation Wingman
Industrial Design: Very Good For Business!
by Vincent Teh
“Good design is good business” said Thomas J. Watson, the former CEO of IBM. And he is right. From the time in the Pleistocene when our evolutionary ancestor took a branch and fashioned it into a stick to fish for juicy termites, to the time our ice-age forefather hunted mammoths with his intricately crafted flint-tipped spear; and from the time in 1925 when 10,000 Ford engineered Model Ts rolled off the assembly line every day, to the time when Steve Jobs stood on a stage in his black turtleneck sweater with the world’s first iPhone in hand, design has been good for business.
So why is design good for business? For thousands of years design fulfilled a utilitarian role. Designs were solely dictated by function. The stick has to be straight and thin to reach into the termite hills, the spear has to be sharpened and aerodynamic to increase its velocity, accuracy and penetration when it hits the target. For centuries, this was enough for us. We chose our tools based mainly on how functional they were and not how good they looked. In 1909, Henry Ford told his management team that “Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black”. So between 1914 and 1926 all Ford T models were painted black due to the cheap cost and durability of black paint. And yet, in 1918 half of the cars in the US were Model Ts.
[The Petri Dish] Stem Cell Research: Embryonic vs Non-Embryonic
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