Building Your Business: A Conversation with Meg Touborg

A conversation with Meg Touborg kicks off a new series on building and managing your design business. Image courtesy Meg Touborg/Metworks Inc.Your ideas are great. Your projects are spectacular. But, when it comes to the nuts and bolts of running a business—any kind of business—all of us can always use a little guidance. From marketing and public relations to intellectural property and employment law to human resources and finance, maintaining and growing a successful firm means a lot of moving parts. We're pleased to present the first in a series of conversations with experts outside of architecture and design whom we've asked to weigh in with tips, suggestions and ideas on the ingredients that go into a building a thriving practice. Our hope is that each one will get you thinking big and strategically.

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The FORM 15: Matt Gagnon

Matt Gagnon's Knit Fort made with strips of wood knit together with rubber cord. Image Mark Iantosca/Matt Gagnon Studio.As part of our on-going series of conversations with architects about the state of the profession, their inspiration and other pressing questions, today we get the perspective of Matt Gagnon. A product of Cornell University, Gagnon worked for Frank Gehry and Gaetano Pesce before launching his own studio in 2002. Since then, he has taken on a variety of projects, with clients ranging from W Resorts to the Los Angeles Fire Department.

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Exhibitions: Exploring the Future at London's Design Museum

A centerpiece of an upcoming exhibition at London's Design Museum is a crowd-sourced piece of furniture. It's an idea that Made.com has pioneered in the last several years. Image courtesy Design Museum.

This is one of those times when we can’t even begin to fathom the changes happening around us. It’s particularly true for design, and an upcoming exhibition at London’s Design Museum seeks to explore its future in a new and provocative way. In conjunction with the pioneering furniture retailer Made.com, the museum’s show The Future is Here: A New Industrial Revolution will explore the potential for democratizing the design process via new means of production. One of the key components of the exhibition will be a publicly commissioned piece of furniture that will be market-ready when the show opens on July 24. Starting April 8, people will have a chance to vote on the shortlist of designs that were submitted last month in response to the show’s brief. We recently spoke to curator Alex Newsom about the show, its genesis and the implications for the future of design.

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Valentine's Day Gifts by Design

Looking for a Valentine's Day gift for your design-minded beloved? We've got some suggestions for you. Image via pixabay.com

Valentine’s Day gets a bad rap. Sure, it might be promoted by the greeting-card industrial complex, and the vast majority of the trinkets sold to honor it might be a little on the, shall we say, hokey side. The sentiment, though, is something we can all get behind. In the spirit of the season, we’ve come up with some of our own—and chatted with some architects (and their significant others) who have suggestions that will take you beyond candy and flowers.

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One Thousand Cranes for Japan Project Involves Artists and Designers for Disaster Relief

Brian Greenwood's image for One Thousand Cranes for Japan

London-based production studios Anomaly and Unit9 are collecting and requesting patterns donated by artists, which users can print out with instructions to make origami cranes in exchange for a donation to disaster relief in Japan. The project, called One Thousand Cranes for Japan, coems from a Japanese legend that says a person who folds 1000 origami cranes will be granted a wish.

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