Author: Willoughby Avenue

From making flights tolerable to modernizing the museum, here are 2015’s best examples of experience design.

Good design goes beyond the simple act of imbuing a product with visual beauty or perfect functionality. It’s also about making someone feel satisfaction, excitement, or comfort while interacting with it. That’s where experience design comes in, and this year’s finalists and winner exemplify this facet by updating the museum visit for the 21st century, making your flight less miserable, or making it easier to navigate through complicated spaces. Congratulations to all, and many thanks to our judges: Dan Gardner, cofounder of Code and Theory; Mauro Porcini, SVP and chief design officer of PepsiCo; and Kevin Young, SVP of product experience at Continuum. And finally, a sincere thank you to everyone who entered and supported Fast Company‘s commitment to elevating the design profession.

Read Full Story

Five years ago, everybody was excited about the idea of using tech to borrow things like power drills. In practice, though, not so much.

“How many of you own a power drill?” Rachel Botsman, the author of the book The Rise Of Collaborative Consumption, asked the audience at TedxSydney in 2010. Predictably, nearly everyone raised his or her hand. “That power drill will be used around 12 to 15 minutes in its entire lifetime,” Botsman continued with mock exasperation. “It’s kind of ridiculous, isn’t it? Because what you need is the hole, not the drill.”

Read Full Story

Data breaches at ATMs are at a 20-year high. Here’s what you can do to protect yourself—and your money.

We’ve heard the warnings for years now to avoid sketchy ATMs, yet folks continue to withdraw from hacked ATMs and later watch helplessly as money drains from their accounts.

Read Full Story

A (former) Silicon Valley entrepreneur and mother explodes some of the myths about “having it all” by combing through old email and IMs.

When news of Hillary Clinton’s email trouble broke, I felt queasy, but not with worry over national security or doubts about the woman who might end up running our country. No, my instant concern was much more visceral and self-centered: What if that had happened to me while I was running a company?

Read Full Story

A startup in Europe wants to make it easy for anyone to become the owner of their own rental cycle fleet.

Like cars, bikes usually sit around for most of the day. But they haven’t been easy to make part of the sharing economy. The money someone can make from renting out a bicycle—compared to, say, a spare room on Airbnb—may not seem worth the trouble it takes.

Read Full Story

The Integrated Space Plan, a 100-year plan to take mankind out of the solar system, has been updated for the 21st century, and it’s gorgeous.

When it comes to vintage chart porn, there’s nothing quite like the Rockwell Integrated Space Plan. Now, New York-based design firm 212box, in cooperation with the original ISP’s designer and a team of space enthusiasts, have given the ISP a much needed overhaul as the result of a successful Kickstarter.

Read Full Story

Want to try a new T-shirt design? Grab the clone stamp tool, and don’t take off anything.

“But how will it look on me?” It’s the age-old question of clothing shopping, and a new, seemingly magical mirror not only answers that question—it lets you redesign what you’re wearing along the way.

Read Full Story

“Getting benched” is a good thing for designer Peter Otto Vosding.

Thanks to the wonders of modular design, you can create furniture that morphs with your specific needs. (Case in point: this customizable cat tower.) For his graduate project, German designer Peter Otto Vosding applied the principals of modular design to a chair that riffs on the position one assumes while seated.

Read Full Story

Producer Jason Blum perfected the model for high-concept low-budget horror, and he used it to aid in M. Night Shyamalan’s creative comeback.

If the scariest thing imaginable is the unseen lurking threat you can only imagine, perhaps horror is the movie genre best suited for minimalism. High-concept, low-budget horror is at the core of super producer Jason Blum’s wheelhouse, and it’s the reason he nearly always makes a box office killing.

Read Full Story

The new cameras also support interchangeable lenses.

Consumer drone powerhouse DJI just unveiled a new set of cameras aimed at professional filmmakers and photographers.

Read Full Story