"design inspiration" entries
Fairy tales and pop culture as inspiration for design innovation
In this O'Reilly Radar Podcast: David Rose on fairy tale inspiration, and Simon King on designing for future context.
In this podcast episode, David Rose, an instructor at MIT’s Media Lab and CEO at Ditto Labs, sits down with Mary Treseler, O’Reilly’s director of strategic content for our design space. In the interview, Rose defines his mission: “to make technology more elegant, more embedded, and hopefully, more humane.” Technology itself isn’t what drives Rose — he’s looking for inspiration in places that have captured and fueled our imaginations for centuries:
“I’m trying to be very, sort of, fairy-tale driven rather than tech driven. In the book [Enchanted Objects], I go back to some of the patterns that are revealed through Hans Christian Andersen or the Brothers Grimm or other pop culture, like spy culture or Harry Potter or Frodo, and I try to think about what those technologies are or how those services are transferable from one person to another.
“Super powers like Superman’s ability to fly don’t count because he can’t give that to anyone else, but if it’s boots that allow you to walk many miles that you wouldn’t otherwise be able to walk or a purse that replenishes or a magic carpet that could transport anybody, those qualify because those are objects that can be used by many people. I have gone back, studied these crystal balls and other objects of enchantment and magic, and think about how those could be used as a way to inspire the inventors of The Internet of Things today.”