Innovation Blog

A cross-functional product innovation team is doing a planned “Yoga interruption” to help the creative inspiration flow in a special Innovation workshop. After all you can't be creative for 6 hours straight in a ten-hour workshop, I've found that something like the Yoga thing pays huge dividends. The team has been assembled to solve a Big Problem for a Major Brand. The Innovation process being followed dictates that all disciplines from the client and consultant organizations are represented. One of the client's manufacturing engineers from supply-chain, a guy who probably hasn't seen a gym since '65, is struggling to balance in what our instructor refers to as the “Warrior II Pose”. At that moment I look over and can read his mind. He's saying to himself, “What the *&*+% am I doing here?”

Here's a blast from the past. The Sedgwick Virtual Theater is showing An American Look, a 1958 film highlighting the importance in America of design and aesthetics in everyday items. Billed as a “tribute to the men and women who design,” the film demonstrates the aesthetic of 1958 is returning to our modern lives. (A special thanks to Katherine Bennett, IDSA for sharing the link.)

By Patricia Lee Younge

Article contributed by: Jim Hand, Senior Industrial Designer, Herbst LaZar Bell

Tom Tjaarda in at the ItalianCarFest in Texas on September 9th 2006. Photo by Matt Bradley.

“Creativity” is one of American auto manufacturers’ major deficits, asserted designer Tom Tjaarda, guest speaker at the ItalianCarFest, Lake Grapevine, Texas, September 8-10, 2006. In an after-dinner Q & A session, Tjaarda responded to audience lament over a current banality and imitativeness in American production car design. The attitude was hardly surprising, given that CarFest participants had just emerged from a full day of hot Texas sun and pure Italian style that momentarily occluded the view of Ferraris, Panteras, Lamborghinis, etc., as not exactly grocery store transportation. Still, Tjaarda made his point.