No todo se ha inventado ayer

A veces nos parece que todo se ha inventado ayer, especialmente a los que trabajamos en Internet.

Hoy tengo una de esas sorpresas que guarda tu ciudad y que me recordó que los que vinieron detrás ya hacían cosas que pensamos son fruto de nuestra moderna sociedad. Lo mismo sentí hace muchos años en el British Museum contemplando el sofísticado instrumental del maletín de un médico en tiempos del Imperio Romano.

Curioseando en la Iglesia de Sant Just me encontré este dibujo en la lápida de uno de sus feligreses, fallecido en 1781


El dibujo representa una tableta de chocolate. Joseph Roses y Malla, vecino de mi barrio y conciudadano de Barcelona, era chocolatero de profesión.

A la salida de la plaza me encontré con un corte de pelo que me resultó familiar. Pero, ¿no eran cuatro??? John, Paul, George y Ringo ¿no????

Barcelona Design Week Day 1

I attended the first session of the Barcelona Design Week this morning. One funny fact is that in the marketing materials of the Barcelona Design Centre there´s a testimonial from my entrepreneurship professor at Haas, Jerry Engel from the Lester Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation. 

The audience was roughly 70% designers, 30% business people and some students scattered here and there. After several presentations there was an interesting panel with Sue Siddall from IDEO, Matt Barthelemy from Smart Design, Michael Thomson from Design Connect and Gus Rodríguez from Philips Design.

Regarding the dialog between business and design it is a good thing that designers and business people are getting more fluent with each other´s language. Nevertheless my key takeaway was that it is the customer, and her needs, what forces design and business to speak the same language, as Sue Siddall very nicely put it. 

Other interesting thoughts from today´s session: there´s a growing post-ego, do-something-bigger attitude amongst firms or the importance of collaboration, co-creation and open and multidisciplinary approaches that dematerialize or blend design with other disciplines in order to solver higher questions (designing a more ambitious framing activity according to IDEO)...