The violin and the cyborg

February 16, 2015 by Neil Goldberg

My morning newsfeed presented this Christian Science Monitor story on the work of MIT professor Nicholas Makris – titled “Study reveals the accidental origins of the violin”. Accidental, my arse! My lazy Sunday morning breakfast of fatty fried egg on toast with herb cracked olives was disturbed. I was moved to respond.

Just because an MIT professor of Mechanical and Ocean Engineering found after-the-fact scientific explanation (see below*) for the evolution of the “f” shaped holes found in most violins, how on earth does the author of the article, Joseph Dussault, arrive at the absurd conclusion that “the violin’s distinctive, f-shaped sound hole came not as a result of human ingenuity, but rather a series of random mutations”. Really!? There is nothing “random” about intuitively driven design decisions! They are the epitome of human ingenuity!

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Word Play : Design

December 13, 2014 by Neil Goldberg

I’m fascinated by words. Word origins and derivations reveal an essential meaning often missed in common usage.

Take the word design.

I love design. What it is, how it is done, what it produces, and what it contributes. As a designer, the origins of the words design and designer tell me who I am.

Design first appeared as an English verb in the 1540s from Latin designare – meaning to designate, devise, appoint. The Latin designare is a mashup of signare “to mark” with the prefix de, meaning “out.” Mark out.

Why did we only get a word for the way we create the world 500 years ago, when we’ve been doing it since the beginning of time. What does design have to do with designation and marking out? [Read more…]

Re-thinking design. My Story.

August 5, 2014 by Neil Goldberg

This is the original version of the story of how I came to reframe the work I do from doing design to thinking about, writing about and teaching design consciousness – the internal structures of our mind and soul that compel us to create a layer of reality on top of what nature has managed to do on it’s own. As I prepare this website and blog for a series of essays and a book I plan to write I have rewritten and expanded this story – and put it on the “Who I Am” page to introduce visitors to my project – and me.

[Read more…]

Design Framing: A Tale of Two Electric Cars

May 24, 2013 by Neil Goldberg

A recent article compared Tesla, the innovative electric car company based here in Silicon Valley, with Kandi Technologies, the upstart electric vehicle company in China. It got me to thinking about frames – lateral and vertical. A case of two little guys: one innovating laterally and the other vertically.

Frames, or the act of “re-framing”, are fundamental to innovation leadership. For example, when you choose to design a better light-bulb, you will likely miss the opportunity to cast light in dark places with no electricity, using little more than a soft drink bottle filled with bleached water.

The frame is the box that we’re always trying to think outside of – no matter how creatively we think, how much we open our minds, all ideas ultimately live in boxes of their own – we’ve just reframed. [Read more…]