For context on Hartmut Esslinger, check out this article on him via the Verge, or visit his portfolio on Behance.


Wow, you know things are at peak ? when one of your heroes like Hartmut Esslinger is coming after you …

Hartmut Esslinger is the visionary founder of international design consultancy frog. I did a book review for the WSJ on his book alongside the Jony Ive book back in 2013 — if you’d like to read up more about Hartmut and how he introduced industrial design (aka “product design”) to the tech industry via his early work for Apple.

As a result, I’ve shared with Hartmut a pointer to my real response. It appears he may have only read the clickbait headline from Fast Company. Twitter tends to bury important details …

My guess is that the next few weeks will be about hearing from more consultancy folks because there was a big design event in Singapore recently. So let’s see how far this all goes …

In the meantime, I can see that an alternative viewpoint is rising right now as well. Like with Hartmut, Lex Roman is one of my new heroes, too, so I’m curious where this direction will lead. It’s what the FastCo interviewer interpreted me as saying — and I didn’t say that exactly but I thought Katharine gathered a variety of my ideas in a professional, concise, and cogent piece not unlike late FastCo writer Linda Tischler could do so effortlessly back in the day.

https://twitter.com/calexity/status/1109488445456420865?s=20

Hmmmm. Now Mike Monteiro’s adding gasoline to the ? …

Mike’s got an important point about the education industry — which is something I’ve been pointing to since the 2016 Design in Tech Report.

A majority of design students surveyed in 2016 weren’t getting the education they needed — which maps to what many designers in tech have been saying all along.

I’m actually writing something for Quartz right now that addresses this point, in part. I attribute it to the lack of a Bauhaus moment like we experienced back in the early 1900s. Let me get back to writing that piece up ….

My best answer to a lot of what is being said out there online is the book I’m trying to finish right now. It’s called How To Speak Machine — and I realize that if I answer every person online I’ll never get to finishing it.

So please excuse me while I switch modes. And feel free to add a comment to this blog post or onto this Twitter strand (so I don’t lose it — because Twitter can be like Slack where I can’t keep track of all the messages). Thanks! —JM


Published by John Maeda

I'm a learner.

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