“Noted ceramicist Edith Heath died at the end of 2005 in Tiburon, California, at age 94. Why should it matter to you, the devoted design creator and consumer?” — from […]
paradox: the necessity of willful poetic misinterpretation to the design profession The Professor wants industrial designers to read more poetry. He wants them to be inspired by words, not just things […]
“Why must design for a patient’s comfort be a sick joke?” When the Professor asked the above question in 2004, he did so as both a patient and as […]
This is a different kind of essay for The Professor; not only is it longer but it also delves into the personal history of one of his best friends. Like […]
Rex Ray passed away the 9th of February 2015, a scant two weeks ago. Rex was the same age as The Professor [who is still stunned and reeling] so news of […]
The Professor offers his most sincere apologies for the current ongoing delay in putting his thoughts into aggregate sharable form. The charms and challenges of the always-elusive written word, as alluring […]
There’s another part of the story concerning The Professor’s relationship with Nepaug Reservoir [see the earlier posts “The Young Professor Slept Outdoors Here: Nepaug Reservoir” of July 19, 2014 as […]
In 1985, The Professor wrote a short essay that was published in the pages of Innovation, the periodical published by the Industrial Designers Society of America. The article was entitled “Design, the […]
Believing that a design philosophy was increasingly a necessity—and not a luxury as seemed to be the prevailing viewpoint at the time—The Professor decided to set down some of his […]
Memories are never simple—as authors as different as Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Primo Levi, and Dave Eggers have shown in their writing—but The Professor’s aim here is somewhat different: to reveal the essence […]
Sneakers again?!? You betcha! See the post “The Professor Finds a Pair” from 13 June 2014 for his previous sneaker pronouncements. Yes, but first the backstory: In 2003 and 2004, The Professor […]
In early 1996, esteemed colleague and designer-educator Thomas S. Bley invited The Professor to join with him in a presentation to be given the 6th of June at the International […]
NOTE: The following article contains the first usage of the term “designer-hackers” that The Professor is aware of—a phrase that since The Professor first used it [see point 03 below] […]
Since everyone in the Red Sox Nation has already been speculating on what trades and acquisitions might happen in the coming months and what it will mean for the 2015 […]
The takeaway: The story of Dogtown and Z-Boys has essential messages about creativity and commitment for students and professionals alike so watch it carefully, and watch it more than once. […]
No, The Professor is not the examining the existential yell/yelp of the Edward Munch painting. And no, he’s not focused on the nicely nuanced Sarah Michelle Gellar movie about a […]
The Professor has not posted recently due to the fact that he has been on a break visiting the east coast. Historically, August has been the month of real tomatoes, […]
As The Professor has pursued his enthusiasm for teaching the design arts, he has occasionally had reasons to pursue conceptual projects. Usually these were next-generation studies of what a product might […]
Back in the autumn of 1983, The Professor assumed the top editorial spot at ID magazine and ventured to Philadelphia to attend a symposium for the opening of the landmark […]
This short piece was originally written for the Museum of Contemporary Craft whose 2013 exhibition “Object Focus: The Bowl” put its emphasis not simply on the bowl, as curator Namita Wiggers […]
The Young Professor spent most of his childhood being outdoors, unsupervised like most kids were at that time in the late 1960s-early 1970s, and generally running amok in rural Canton, […]
Recently, The Professor posted his first batch of haiku; they were constructed via the processes of appropriation, sampling and stealing [“The Professor on Poetry: Appropriated, Sampled, Stolen,” 10 June 2014]. The […]
Toward the end of 1993, Graphis magazine offered The Professor a project to produce a column on products. It was a bold move on the part of Graphis […]
In 1988, The Professor saw the work of Ashley Bickerton at Sonnabend Gallery on West Broadway in SoHo, NYC. It was a revelation. It was neither painting nor sculpture in […]
The creative climate of today makes it so easy, so natural, to forget the past. The Professor sees it in the business world all of the time, and in the […]
Here we are at the halfway point [81 games] of the 2014 Major League baseball season, a reasonable time for The Professor to take stock of where the Boston Red […]
Some years ago, The Professor was teaching in New York at Parsons School of Design. It was clear to The Professor, even in that late-1980s time period, that simply solving […]
One of the creative strategies that The Professor has found to be successful is that of willful misinterpretation [beginning first with the comprehension and interpretation of a subject]. This is […]
The Professor has recently noticed that his hours and days trickle by slowly but the months and the years feel as if they race by. It’s part of the aging […]
Over the years, The Professor has been blessed to have beauty come to him in many different forms. The Professor has seen beauty show-up in his professional work, on […]
The white 1800s farmhouse in the photo is near its end; it suffered from a bad address located at the ugly intersection between capitalism, real estate and zoning. Because […]
The Red Sox—the baseball team-nation-empire-floor wax-desert topping that The Professor loves to love, hates to love, and loves to hate [in that order of significance]—are almost to the halfway-point […]
15 Years ago this month, the Professor headed to the Embarcadero, the roadway that runs along San Francisco Bay, to go to the X Games. It started at […]
The Young Professor’s first good road bike—and by that he means something that he could ride fast and for long periods of time—was from Sweden. It was a Crescent, bought […]
You know the real-deal Holyfield, the soundtrack plays while The Professor works even though The Professor’s work is mainly play. As 7A3 used to say back in the day, “gettin’ […]
The Professor has been onto the sneaker phenomenon since the days of the very early Air Jordans [his graduate thesis project was about deconstructing the sneaker, literally blowing up the […]
Dear Ettore, Even though I only met you a few times, and even though you have been gone for seven years now [which is why I’m putting this out into […]
[graffiti, Basho / consider their collision / roots of my haiku] The Professor has always written poetry—well, at least since the awkward days at Notfittininere High School in rural Connecticut—but this is the […]
What Eric Demaine presently is to origami and programmable materials, Jaron Lanier was to virtual reality and the augmentation of human experience in the 1990s. At once its most vigorous […]
Often when the subject of 3-D printing [3DP] comes up, especially out here in the San Francisco Bay area where The Professor is based, he finds himself chuckling. There are […]
The Professor / Steven Skov Holt 