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The future of U.S. medical-device design may reside in developing countries.

In India, where a chaotic road system spawns many accidents and hospitals are often hours away, the need for an inexpensive alternative vascular access is great.

A Bone Drill is a nasty-sounding device that looks like something you'd find on the shelf at Home Depot. You wouldn't want to see one coming at you, but if you needed one, you'd likely be in such bad shape that you wouldn't even notice.

The devices, which typically cost about $300 each, are used to access the marrow and vascular system inside bones when a patient's veins have collapsed or are inaccessible. They're standard features in most American ambulances and emergency rooms.

But in developing countries like India, where the need is huge, that $300 price is an insurmountable hurdle to widespread adoption. And therein lies an opportunity. What if you could design...

This week I'm attending the Design Management Institute conference in San Francisco again. The conference is Re-Thinking...The Future of Design, and the conversations on stage are focused on tracking how design thinking is making a difference in business. Design and business continue to mix.

As I sit in the conference, I'm enjoying my bottle of hotel-provided Fiji water--it's easing the discomfort I have from my allergies. But I feel guilty drinking it. Despite Fiji Water's aggressive work in creating carbon offsets, this plastic bottle is made from oil, processed with energy created from oil, and shipped thousands of miles using ships and trucks that burn oil. It's especially poignant to think about this relationship between oil and water in this post-Gulf-Coast-oil-disaster moment.

Water is good. Water is bad.

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While we all know this, bottled water is super-convenient. It's not that we want to harm the planet,...

Rumors are a-swirl about Apple's new tablet, which may or may not slip into our anxious little hands around September. But what will it look like? What will it do? What will it be named? And why will we want it? Speculation abounds, but we wanted an expert opinion. So we tapped four of our expert design bloggers to tell us exactly what they thought we should be expecting from Apple's newest game-changer.

John Edson, Lunar: If the rumors come true, it won't be surprising. And it will be surprising. The news here is that the world is on the edge of its proverbial seat waiting to see what Apple will amaze us with next. And yet, Apple has such incredible discipline in its use of design that when we do see this device, we'll all look at it and say, "of course." There will be little mystery about the general aesthetic,...

Before I used computer-aided design to create products, I had pencils. Before I had pencils, I had Legos. Before Legos, crayons. Before crayons, blocks. And with these tools, I have always been a designer.

The act of exploring alternate ideas, prototyping them, testing them and then breaking them down in search of new ideas has been a passion of mine for as long as I can remember. It is a way of being that shapes everything I value, everything I do and the way I see the world.

That's probably why it's always a little surprising to me when non-designers find my way a novel--or even useful--way of experiencing life.

I just spent two days at a conference held in San Francisco by the venerable Design Management Institute. The conference, entitled Re-Thinking...Design, was a meeting of about 200 designers and business managers gathered to explore how the practices and processes of design are influencing business.

I can't possibly write for a week about design without bringing up Apple. Has a single company outside of the fashion world consistently produced such an impressive collection of offerings that have been both successful and adored? This week's iPhone 3G S is no different. Their brand and products and software are beautiful, wonderful, delightful.

But it's really a shame that they are so successful.

Why? Because everyone wants to recreate what they have done, but it's never replicable in the same way. That's because the secret to Apple's success is embedded in the personality of Steve Jobs. He is their chief executive designer. He not only empowers an expert team of designers, engineers and marketers, but if you believe the lore that leaks out of Apple, he works side by side with designers giving birth to new products. And he's just lucky enough that people love his taste as...

A while back, I was standing in a checkout line at a drug store, passing the time by wondering who would ever buy the ugliest clock I'd ever seen, on display at the front of the store. It wasn't a regular sort of ugly. It was nuclear ugly.

Sliced from some unsuspecting tree trunk that never hurt anybody, the heavily shellacked face of the clock preserved pictures of red roses and drippy script type that read "Love." The hands and numbers were plastic with a cheap layer of shiny gold-crap covering them.

I was on a roll, hating this thing.

Then, out of the blue, the woman in front of me pointed at it. "Honey," she said to the young girl accompanying her. "Go see how much that is."

My own mother is known for a number of sayings which I carry around with me. One of them is an...

I was on an airplane yesterday. But before I got on board, I had one of those awkward conversations with a ticket agent that keeps vice presidents of customer service awake at night. She said, "That other person you spoke with at the airlines? He was lying to you."

But...but...but...aren't you the airline? I thought to myself.

Companies are trying to create positive relationships with all of us. And not just service businesses, where the relationship is with other flesh-and-blood people. Manufacturers of shampoo and telephones and discount furniture want to create lasting relationships with loyal customers too, and they rely on their products to do most of the talking.

In olden days, way back before the Industrial Revolution, stuff was created in an intimate setting. There was someone who needed something and there was someone who made it for them. In every case, there existed a relationship between maker and customer.

Hp Pavilion dv200, wave pattern for Hp's Imprint Finish designed by Lunar

I bumped into my friend Lori recently and noticed that she had a new PC--a notebook computer from Hp sporting graphic patterns that my firm, Lunar, had designed with them. When I asked her about what her checklist contained when she set out to buy a PC, we ended up talking about her list of technical requirements.

I then shared with her some of the backstage stories--how much effort it took to make those beautiful graphics find their way onto the surfaces of the notebook computer. She was amazed. "Why go to all that trouble just for a PC, something that I buy solely for its function?"

Good question. Why did Hp spend all those resources to create an unnecessary flourish? After all, Hp is a technology company with world-class expertise in delivering the latest wizardry to hungry consumers.

Last week, Fast Company threw a party in honor of the Most Creative People. While the rest of my colleagues were downstairs in the Helen Mills Theater, I was upstairs in our Imagineered Workspace, an "office of the future" project created by designer Laura Guido Clark to showcase some of the best design currently available for the work side of life.

There were chairs by Patrick Jouin and Jeffrey Bernett, a terrific storage system by Coalesse, and a striking glass-topped desk by Ross Lovegrove for Knoll. But, for technology buffs, the centerpiece was a snazzy Hp Touchsmart computer, a sleek workhorse of a machine that managed to look both futuristic, befitting the setting, and welcoming--a perfect marriage of functional engineering and emotionally appealing design.

I had no part in picking the particular computer on display, but I was delighted that the one we chose to showcase happened to be a...