The Glimmerati (design thinkers)
The following list of design thinkers appeared in my book Glimmer: How Design Can Transform Business, Your Life, and Maybe Even the World [Penguin Press/Random House, 2009); republished in 2010 as a paperback by Penguin titled CAD Monkeys, Dinosaur Babies, and T-Shaped People: Inside the World of Design Thinking and How It Can Spark Creativity and Innovation.
From the vantage point of 2023, looking over this list of people I dubbed “The Glimmerati,” I can’t help but note that so many of the innovative designers on the list are no longer with us solving problems and improving our world. We should all feel lucky and grateful that these very busy people, at the top of their game in 2009, gave up a bit of their precious time to share their special processes, keen insights, and beautiful questions.
While these bios on this list are not updated beyond 2010, I hope some of them will pique your curiosity and lead to a deeper dive into these great design thinkers’ lives and contributions.
~ Warren Berger, 2023
The Glimmerati
(downloadable pdf)
Deborah Adler (chapters 1, 3) designed the ClearRx prescription medicine packaging system used by Target stores, the first major redesign of that type of packaging in the past 40 years. She has worked as a designer at Milton Glaser Inc. and recently launched her own independent design operation, focused primarily on designing for healthcare needs.
Paola Antonelli (chapter 8) is a senior curator in the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. As curator of influential shows such as MOMA’s “Design and the Elastic Mind,” Antonelli is attempting to promote a wider understanding of design’s influence.
Irene Au (chapters 5, 6) is Director of User Experience at Google, where her team is responsible for design and user research for Google’s products worldwide. Prior to Google, she spent eight years at Yahoo! where she was vice president of user experience and design.
Shigeru Ban (chapter 8) is an architect and designer known for his use of eco-friendly and economic materials such as cardboard and paper, which he has used to construct, among other things, emergency shelters in Rwanda and a church in Japan. Ban has studios in Tokyo and New York.
Marian Bantjes (chapter 9) is a designer, artist, illustrator, typographer, and writer based near Vancouver, British Columbia. She was trained as a book typesetter (1984–1994) and was a graphic designer from 1994–2003. However, it is her highly personal graphic work that has brought her international recognition. Bantjes is today known for her custom typography and vector art, with an underlying structure and formality that frames its organic, fluid nature.
Yves Behar (Intro, chapters 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10) is an industrial designer and founder of fuseproject, the San Francisco-based firm he established in 1999. He is the chief industrial designer of One Laptop Per Child’s XO laptop computer, and is working on a sequel. Other clients include Birkenstock, Bluetooth, MINI, and Herman Miller.
Paul Bennett (chapters 2, 4) brought more than 15 years of experience in the design and branding business to IDEO when he joined them in 2001. Originally trained as a graphic designer in the UK, he ran his own brand design consultancy in New York for seven years, working in many different fields. Today he is a partner and chief creative officer at IDEO, guiding global visual and communications strategy from the London office.
Janine Benyus (chapter 8) is a pioneer in the field of biomimicry, which studies natural design and tries to extract lessons that can be applied to man-made design. Benyus is the author of Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature. Her company, the Biomimicry Guild, offers biological consulting, and her website AskNature.org answers questions about natural design.
John Bielenberg (chapter 7) is a designer, educator, and founder of C2 Design in San Francisco and the Bielenberg Institute at the Edge of the Earth in Belfast, Maine. He also directs “Project M,” a program that strives to inspire young creative individuals that their work can have a significant and meaningful impact on the world.
Michael Bierut (chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, 9) is a graphic designer, design critic, and a partner in the New York office of Pentagram. Bierut is one of the founding editors of the influential blog Design Observer. His work is represented in the permanent collections at the Museum of Modern Art and the Cooper-Hewitt.
Alex Bogusky (chapter 5, 10) is a partner and creative director at Crispin Porter + Bogusky, an ad agency with offices in Miami and Boulder. CP+B is responsible for a number of innovative campaigns that have fused advertising and design, including work on the “Truth” teen anti-smoking campaign and the U.S. launch of the Mini Cooper.
Kathleen Brandenburg (Intro, chapters 4, 9) is director of design strategy and co-founder along with Dan Kraemer of the Chicago-based IA Collaborative design firm. She specializes in immersive research (closely following and observing consumers in their everyday lives) on behalf of clients such as Nike, Hewlett-Packard, and others.
Tim Brown (chapters 1, 3, 4, 5, 10) is the CEO and president of the design firm IDEO. He speaks, writes, and blogs regularly on the subject of “design thinking” and its relationship to innovation in business. Brown also has a special interest in the ways design can be used to promote the well-being of people living in emerging economies.
Bill Buxton (chapter 3, 6) is Principal Scientist at Microsoft Research and the author of Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design. Previously, he ran the Toronto-based firm Buxton Design, was a researcher at Xerox PARC, and Chief Scientist of Alias Research and SGI Inc.
Valerie Casey (chapters 1, 6, 8) heads a global practice at IDEO, where she designs socially and environmentally sustainable products, services, and business models for organizations around the world. In late 2007 Casey founded the Designers Accord, a call to arms for the creative community to reduce the negative impact caused by design.
Lee Clow (chapter 6) is Chief Creative Officer at TBWA Worldwide and has overseen many of the marketing campaigns for Apple Computer and other top brands. Clow believes that marketers must move beyond ads to actually design the ways they behave, as evidenced in the cultural redesign of the Pedigree dog food company.
Brian Collins (Intro, chapters 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 10) headed the Brand Innovation Group at Ogilvy & Mather before launching his own experiential branding firm, COLLINS:, which is doing work for Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection. Collins also teaches design at The School of Visual Arts and oversees the annual forum “Designism: Design for Social Change,” sponsored by the Art Directors Club of New York.
Hilary Cottam (Intro, chapters 8, 9, 10) is a founding partner of the London-based firm Participle, which is attempting to redesign social services in the UK by developing fresh approaches to education, caring for seniors, and other services. Cottam has also worked on the redesign of prisons. In 2005 she was named UK Designer of the Year.
Marianne Cusato (chapters 7, 9) is the designer of the “Katrina Cottage,” conceived in 2005 as an alternative to the FEMA emergency trailers supplied to survivors of Hurricane Katrina. The Katrina Cottage won a National Design Award in 2006. Cusato, based in Miami, runs a design firm that bears her name.
Joe Duffy (chapters 1, 10) is Chairman of Duffy & Partners and expert in integrating design and branding
Martin Fisher (chapters 8) is the co-founder of KickStart, which has developed innovative water pumps and other low-cost tools aimed at increasing productivity of small farmers in Africa. More than 50,000 new micro-enterprises have been started using KickStart equipment. Fisher continues to direct a team of designers and engineers in Kenya.
Mikkel Vestergaard Frandsen (chapters 2, 8) is CEO and president of Vestergaard Frandsen, a Danish company now headquartered in Lausanne, Switzerland. After a life-changing trip to Africa as a teenager, Frandsen changed the focus of his family uniform-making company to “humanitarian entrepreneurship,” defined as the ability to do business and do good at the same time. In 1997, the company developed the PermaNet malaria-fighting mosquito netting. The life-saving success of PermaNet led the firm to develop an unbranded water filter in a straw in conjunction with the Carter Center, the humanitarian group headed by former President Jimmy Carter. That project morphed into the award-winning LifeStraw, a purification tube that filters parasites, bacteria and viruses from water as it is drunk, in 2005.
Heather Fraser (chapter 4, 6) is director of Designworks, a center for design-based innovation and education at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. Fraser helped develop the “Three Gears of Design” model that is featured in this book.
Naoto Fukasawa (chapters 8, 9) is a Japanese industrial designer, born in Yamanashi Prefecture in 1956. He graduated from Tama Art University in 1980. After having acted as the head of the American company IDEO’s Tokyo office, he established Naoto Fukasawa Design in 2003. Fukasawa is also a professor at Musashino Art University and a visiting lecturer at Tama Art University. He has authored such books as i (TOTO) and co-authored others such as The Ecological Approach to Design (Tokyo Shoseki).
Frank Gehry (Intro, chapters 2, 6) is a Pritzker Prize-winning architect whose best-known works include the titanium-covered Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. He has collaborated with Bruce Mau on a number of projects, including the Disney Concert Hall and the soon to-be-open Museum of Biodiversity in Panama.
Milton Glaser (chapters 1, 2, 3, 6, 7, 9) is among the most celebrated graphic designers in the United States and a recipient of the lifetime achievement award of the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum. As a Fulbright scholar, Glaser studied with the painter, Giorgio Morandi in Bologna, and is an articulate spokesman for the ethical practice of design. He opened Milton Glaser, Inc. in 1974.
Michael Graves (Intro, chapters 1, 5) has been at the center of the democratization of design owing to his successful collaboration with Target stores. Graves is famous for designing stylish teakettles and other household objects, but he also been an influential architect since the 1960s, known for designing the interiors of his buildings down to the furniture and lighting fixtures. In recent years, Graves has begun to focus on “universal design” for the aging and physically impaired.
Bob Greenberg (chapter 5) is founder of R/GA, a leader in interactive marketing design. His firm helped design the Nike+ system, which serves as a model of how a product can be elevated to an experience that helps build a community. Greenberg is an outspoken critic of conventional advertising and advocates for a new marketing model with design and technology at the center.
Fritz Haeg (chapter 9) divides his time between his architecture and design practice Fritz Haeg Studio, the ecology initiatives of Gardenlab (including Edible Estates), and other various combinations of building, designing, gardening, exhibiting, dancing, organizing, and talking. In 2006 he initiated Sundown Schoolhouse, the self-organized educational environment based in his geodesic dome in Los Angeles.
Thomas Heatherwick (chapters 1, 7) works across a broad spectrum of architecture, engineering and public art, and has achieved international acclaim for his innovative use of materials, his eclectic range of projects, and the resolution of them in new and exciting ways. He founded Heatherwick Studio in London in 1994 with his aim being “to bring architecture, design and sculpture together within a single practice.”
Jessica Helfand (chapter 10) is a partner, with William Drenttel, in Winterhouse, a design studio in Northwest Connecticut. Their work focuses on publishing and editorial development; new media; and cultural, educational and literary institutions. Previously Adjunct Professor at New York University’s graduate program in Interactive Telecommunications, Helfand is currently a Critic at Yale School of Art and is the author of several books, including Screen: Essays on Graphic Design, New Media and Visual Culture (2001) and Reinventing the Wheel (2002), and a founding editor of DesignObserver.com.
Steven Heller is an art director, critic, and author of many works on the history of illustration, typography and many subjects related to graphic design. Heller was a senior art director of U&lc magazine for 33 years and currently is co-chair (with Lita Talarico) of the MFA Designer as Author program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.
Hunter Hoffman (Chapter 5) is a research scientist at the HIT Lab at The University of Washington. He holds a Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology and in 1993 began work in virtual reality. His current interests include successfully using virtual reality therapy for post-traumatic distress disorder and severe spider phobias, and is best known for his pioneering use of VR to distract burn patients from excessive pain during wound care.
Alexander Isley (Intro, chapters 1) runs a Connecticut-based design studio bearing his name and specializing in brand development and communication design for organizations involved with culture, fashion, and retail. Isley first gained recognition in the early 1980s as the senior designer at Tibor Kalman’s influential M&Co. He also served as the first full-time art director of Spy magazine.
Dean Kamen (Intro, chapters 1, 2, 3, 7, 8, 10) is an inventor and designer who holds more than 400 U.S. patents. His company, DEKA, has produced the Segway, the IBOT walking wheelchair, and the Slingshot water purification system. Kamen also founded FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology), which sponsors science competitions for high school students.
Larry Keeley (chapters 4, 5) is an innovation strategist and co-founder of the Doblin Inc. business consultancy. He is a board member of IIT’s Institute of Design. Keeley is known for deconstructing different kinds of innovation and for creating three-dimensional “innovation landscapes” in presentations to clients. He also developed the “Compelling Experience Framework” featured in this book.
David Kelley (chapter 4, 10) was an unhappy electrical engineer when he enrolled in Stanford University’s design program. He subsequently founded a design firm in 1978 that became IDEO (Greek for Idea), now with 400-plus employees worldwide. He has helped design the icons of the digital generation—the first mouse, the Treo, the Leap chair. Kelley also has taught design at Stanford for the past 25 years.
George Kembel (chapters 6, 8, 10) is co-founder and currently executive director of Stanford University’s “d.school,” which has emerged as a leader in the teaching of “design thinking.” Kembel heads up a graduate program that teaches a highly-structured design methodology to business, engineering and design students.
Rem Koolhaas (Intro, chapter 2) is a world-renowned architect and who heads up the Office for Modern Architecture (OMA), which has completed, among other projects, the Netherlands Embassy in Berlin, the Prada Epicenter in Los Angeles, and the Public Library in Seattle, where Koolhaas collaborated with Bruce Mau. In 1995, he and Mau published “S M L XL”, a book that documented the work of OMA.
Claudia Kotchka (chapter 6), a thirty-year veteran of Procter & Gamble, Co., served as Vice President, Design Innovation and Strategy of P&G from 2001 to August 2008. Her primary task at Procter & Gamble was to “build design into P&G’s DNA.” That involved changing the mindset at the venerable company from one that focused on the quality of the products to packaging aesthetics as well.
George Lois (chapters 1, 2) is an award-winning art director, designer, and one of the original “Mad Men.” Known for the striking graphic covers for Esquire magazine that he designed during the 1960s, Lois also was a partner in several ad agencies and was a pioneer of the “creative revolution” in American advertising. His breakthrough ad campaigns included “I Want My MTV” for a then-struggling MTV.
Ellen Lupton (chapter 1) is adjunct curator at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, and co-chair of the design department of the Maryland Institute College of Art. She is a Chrysler Design Award winner and the best-selling author (or co-author) of Thinking with Type, D.I.Y.: Design It Yourself, and a new book, Design Your Life.
John Maeda (chapters 1, 3, 7, 9) is President of the Rhode Island School of Design. A renowned graphic designer and computer scientist, Maeda was originally a software engineering student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) when he became fascinated with the work of Paul Rand and Muriel Cooper, and eventually completed a Ph.D in design. He is the author of The Laws of Simplicity.
Roger Martin (Intro, chapters 2) is dean of the Rotman School of Management in Toronto. Named one of the 10 most influential business professors in the world by Business Week in 2007, Martin writes extensively on design and innovation, and has a special interest in “integrative thinking,” which he explores at length in his book The Opposable Mind.
Steve McCallion (chapter 5) is creative director of Ziba Design in Portland, Oregon, which has been a pioneer in using design research for major companies. McCallion launched Ziba’s consumer insights and trends group, using a blend of ethnography and “cool hunting” to anticipate what people are looking for next. His work for Umpqua Bank is featured in the book.
William McDonough (chapter 8) is the founding principal of William McDonough + Partners, a design firm practicing ecologically, socially, and economically intelligent architecture, and is also principal of MBDC, a product development firm assisting companies in designing eco-friendly solutions. McDonough and partner Michael Braungart co-authored the groundbreaking Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things.
Clement Mok (chapters 1, 3) is a designer, digital pioneer, software developer, and a former creative director at Apple who helped design its early graphic interfaces. Since then, Mok has founded several successful design-related businesses—Studio Archetype, CMCD and NetObjects. He has served as Chief Creative Officer of Sapient, and as the president of the AIGA design group.
Jennifer Morla (chapter 10) is president of Morla Design, her graphic design firm founded in 1984. This San Francisco-based mutidisciplinary design group has done award-winning work for clients such as Apple, Swatch, Levi’s and MTV, and today designs unique solutions primarily for nonprofits and arts organizations. In 2005, Morla also became chief creative officer at Design Within Reach (DWR) with more than 70 studios/stores worldwide. Morla spearheads much of the DWR strategic marketing, based on design education and communication. She also teaches senior graphic design thesis at the California College of the Arts. Morla has received more than 300 awards for excellence in graphic design.
Gordon Murray (chapters 2, 8, 10) is a renowned designer of Formula One race cars and the famous McLaren F1 “supercar,” though currently his design firm (Gordon Murray Design Ltd in Surrey, England) is focused on creating the T.25 prototype city car—which is smaller than a Smart car and incorporates a “cradle to cradle” design featuring flexible architecture and a re-usable body and chassis.
Donald Norman (chapter 1, 4 ,5) is a pre-eminent author on the subject of design, whose influential books include The Design of Everyday Things and The Design of Future Things. A cognitive scientist who first became interested in design while researching the Three Mile Island disaster, Norman is a veteran of Apple Computer, and now runs the Nielsen Norman Group consulting firm. He is also a professor at the University of California and at Northwestern University.
Bruce Nussbaum (chapters 2, 4, 10) has been a leading voice on the growing role of design in business while serving as an editor and writer at Business Week magazine. His blog, NussbaumOnDesign, offers daily scoops and case studies on innovation and design thinking In 2005, he was named one of the 40 most powerful people in design by I.D. Magazine. Nussbaum is also a professor of innovation and design at The New School.
Van Phillips (chapters 2) lost his foot in a water-skiing accident in 1976 and spent the next two decades designing the Flex-Foot, a high performance carbon composite prosthetic foot manufactured by the Ossur Company and sold as “Cheetahs.” Currently, more than 90 percent of Paralympian athletes use Cheetahs. Phillips also founded the Second Wind Foundation to help amputees by providing inexpensive and virtually indestructible prostheses.
Emily Pilloton (chapter 7, 10) is founder and executive director of Project H Design, a San Francisco-based charitable organization focused on socially-conscious design initiatives for “Humanity, Habitats, Health, and Happiness.” Trained in architecture and industrial design, Pilloton has also taught design theory, and lectures internationally about design activism and humanitarian product design.
Karim Rashid has created a range of products for companies worldwide and is known for his work with plastics, foams, and synthetic fabrics. Rashid believes strongly in reaching a broad audience and inspiring a sense of well being through design. His designs include Umbra’s highly successful Oh Chair and Garbino waste basket, the Dirt Devil KONE vacuum and packaging for Issey Miyake, Yves Saint Laurent, Estée Lauder, and Method. His products are included in a number of museum collections and he has lectured widely on industrial design. Born in Cairo, raised in Canada, and now based in New York, Rashid published his guide to living, Design Your Self, in 2006.
David Rockwell (chapter 5) is an American architect and designer, who is the founder and CEO of Rockwell Group. Along with architecture, David Rockwell harbors a fascination with immersive environments. His list of design projects is rather mind-boggling: hot spot restaurants, upscale hotels, casinos, sets for Broadway plays, Disney cruise ships, hospitals, playgrounds, redesigns of Radio City Music Hall and the Jet Blue terminal at JFK airport, and a New Jersey spa resort for Richard Branson featuring a ten-acre organic farm. Rockwell’s 2006 book Spectacle, written with Bruce Mau, examines the history and public fascination with larger-than-life manmade events.
Stefan Sagmeister (chapters 1, 2, 10) studied design in Vienna and launched his New York-based design firm, Sagmeister Inc., in 1993. He has done branding, graphics, and packaging for clients as diverse as HBO and the Guggenheim Museum, and also has designed iconic album covers for Lou Reed, the Rolling Stones, David Byrne, and Aerosmith. Sagmeister’s most recent book is Things I Have Learned in My Life So Far.
Paula Scher (Intro, chapters 1, 2, 9, 10) has designed corporate identities, posters, environmental graphics, packaging, magazines, public spaces, and just about everything imaginable. Her images, including those created for The Public Theater, have come to be visually identified with the cultural life of New York City. A partner in Pentagram since 1991, Scher is a member of the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame and was awarded the profession’s highest honor, the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) Medal.
Edwin Schlossberg (chapters 7, 9) was a protégé of Buckminster Fuller and worked on Fuller’s groundbreaking 1969 “World Games.” Schlossberg went on to found ESI Design, a leader in experiential design. He designed the Brooklyn Children’s Museum, one of the first interactive learning environments, along with other innovative museums, parks, retail environments, and public spaces, including, most recently, the Action Center to End World Hunger.
Cameron Sinclair (Intro, chapters 7, 8, 10) is the co-founder, along with Kate Stohr, of Architecture for Humanity, a charitable organization based in San Francisco that seeks design solutions to humanitarian crises. Sinclair and Stohr recently launched the Open Architecture Network, the world’s first open source community dedicated to improving living conditions through innovative and sustainable design.
Philippe Starck (Intro) is a French product designer whose work ranges from spectacular interior designs to toothbrushes and chairs (his Louis Ghost chair is a design icon). Starck is associated with high-end, stylized design, but recently, in announcing plans to focus more on socially responsible projects such as designing windmills, he declared: “Everything I’ve designed is absolutely unnecessary.”
Davin Stowell (chapters 1, 4) co-founded Smart Design with partner Tom Dair in 1980, after he and Dair graduated from Syracuse University. Early on, the firm was approached by an entrepreneur seeking to make a potato peeler that his arthritic wife could easily use; hundreds of prototypes later, the OXO Good Grips peeler emerged. Smart Design has gone on to help create many other innovative products, including the Flip camcorder.
Jane Fulton Suri (chapters 4, 10) leads “human factors” design and research at IDEO. Early in her career, she used her background in psychology to help the British government as it tried to determine why people were injuring themselves using certain products. She then became a pioneer in bringing psychology-based research into the field of industrial design. She is the author of Thoughtless Acts?, about the subtle and amusing ways in which people interact with the world.
John Thackara (chapters 1, 2, 7, 8, 9) is a former London bus driver who is now focused on driving social change by way of design. A self-described “symposiarch” (someone who designs and produces collaborative events, projects and organizations), he served as director of the Netherlands Design Institute and also founded the international design conference “Doors of Perception.” In his book In the Bubble, Thackara coined the phrase “smart recombinations.”
David Turner (chapter 6) co-founded Turner Duckworth Design, an independent brand identity and package design firm, with Bruce Duckworth in 1992. Working “collaboratively across the ocean” Turner heads up the San Francisco studio and Duckworth the London studio. Their many clients have included Amazon.com, Motorola, and the rock band Metallica. Recently Turner Duckworth was awarded the first ever Design Grand Prix at the Cannes Lions for their cups-to-trucks redesign of the Coca-Cola logo and visual identity, including Coke’s new red aluminum bottle.
Greg van Alstyne (chapters 3, 4, 9) joined Bruce Mau Design Inc. in its startup days in the late 1980s. He became director of Mau’s Institute Without Boundaries educational program and also guided the curation and production of Mau’s Massive Change exhibit. Today he heads the Strategic Innovation Lab at the Ontario College of Art and Design, where he has done extensive research and writing (with co-author Robert K. Logan) on the subject of “designing for emergence.”
Massimo Vignelli (chapters 1, 2, 3, 7) is a world-renowned designer whose work ranges from corporate identity, package and furniture design to the creation of a version of New York City’s subway map that is no longer used but is still revered. He works in the Modernist tradition, focusing on simplicity through the use of basic geometric forms. Born in Milan, Italy, he runs his New York-based firm, Vignelli Associates, with his wife and business partner Lella.
Patrick Whitney (chapters 4, 6), director of the Institute of Design at Illinois Institute of Technology, is known as a prominent advocate of human-centered design. Whitney has published and lectured throughout the world about how to make technological innovations more humane, as well as on the link between design and business strategy. In Chapter 4, he explains his concept pertaining to the “innovation gap” (and how to close it).
Robert Wong (chapters 1, 5) is Executive Creative Director for Google Creative Labs, a global marketing unit focused on “innovation” and finding ways advertisers, agencies and entertainment companies can intersect. He’s an expert on branding and talks about the need for brands to have strong “brand DNA.” Prior to Google he was at Arnold Worldwide working on design, advertising, and new media for companies like Apple, Jack Daniels, Harley-Davidson, Timberland, ESPN and MTV.
Richard Saul Wurman (chapters 3, 9, 10), architect, graphic designer, and author, is considered a pioneer in making complex information clear. His 80-plus books include Information Anxiety and the award-winning ACCESS Travel Guides. He coined the term “information architecture,” which holds that the explosion of data requires systemic design to make it understandable. Wurman also is the creator of the highly-influential TED Conference (uniting the themes of Technology, Entertainment, and Design).
Gianfranco Zaccai (chapters 6) is co-founder and President/CEO of Continuum, an innovation consultancy that uses design research to identify compelling business opportunities. Continuum has played a key role in the development of breakthrough products such as Procter & Gamble’s Swiffer. Zaccai and Continuum are also dedicated to exploring the power of design in relation to developing nations.
This list of design thinkers originally appeared in the book Glimmer: How Design Can Transform Business, Your Life, and Maybe Even the World [Penguin Press/Random House, 2009); republished in 2010 as a paperback by Penguin titled CAD Monkeys, Dinosaur Babies, and T-Shaped People: Inside the World of Design Thinking and How It Can Spark Creativity and Innovation.
