Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

The key to a gadget’s ubiquity is balancing both function and design, so the device can enhance someone’s lifestyle without requiring them to change their behavior…too much.

I was lucky enough to spend 17 years of my career at HP, mostly with the PC and printer business, at a time when we were creating new businesses and taking new ideas to market at a breakneck pace Some of the basic rules

I learned back then became extremely relevant when I joined Livescribe. Right away, we shifted our product design to embrace smartphones and tablets given the ubiquity and power of modern mobile devices....

The modern family is always in flux. That's why this house--with flexible walls, sliding cabinets, and moveable outlets--is easily reconfigured to meet the changing needs of our lives.

Americans spend around $300 billion each year on home renovations, adding to the construction industry's giant carbon footprint. But what if houses could reshape themselves as needed, so people could add a room or change the size of a kitchen without bringing in bulldozers or building new walls?

The Adaptable House, part of a new development in Denmark, is designed to change over time. If a family has kids and wants to add a room or make a living room bigger, the house can expand. If a grandparent moves in, the family can slide walls around to add another room. The house is even designed to split in two in the case of divorce....

Clean towels in seconds! A global design competition reveals our shared frustration with smelly socks.

Hoarding stacks of quarters and schlepping bags of dirty laundry may soon be footnotes in the history books, if product designers can realize their visions for better fabric care.

This year the annual design competition sponsored by Swedish  appliance maker Electrolux has elicited a range of ideas for saving lazy urbanites a trip to the laundromat, from a system that cleans your clothes using a system of “purified air with silver ions” to something involving “jelly and vibration."...