Don’t defend your work

and 6 other eye-openers from the Bloomberg Businessweek design conference

1. “Don’t defend your work.”

Who said it? Justin Rosenstein, co-founder of Asana.

Wait, what? I know, right? Here’s the deal. Asana has a policy that work cannot be defended against internal feedback. Employees are asked to take all (constructive) criticism as valid. They can ask questions, but they can’t defend their work. This way, the one giving feedback feels absolutely heard.

2. The guy who created gifpop was tasked with breathing new life into healthcare.gov.

Nothing else to add. Simply an interesting contrast.

3. Ben Kaufman spits quotes like sunflower seeds.

Who? CEO of Quirky, invention advocate

What’d he say? “We all invent. We stop because the world expects us to.”

“Constraints are king. It took 410 days to complete the Empire State Building. 143 days to build the first fighter jet. What happens without constraints? It takes three and a half years to put a bike grip on a potato peeler.”

“The best ideas come from the living room. Not the board room.”

4. “Mother Nature is full of weird-looking eyeballs.”

Who said it? Hal Hickel, Pacific Rim animation supervisor, on where he got inspiration for the look of the Kaijus, the film’s colossal portal-loving monsters.

Side note: You need to see Pacific Rim already.

5. Liz Diller operates on an entirely different level than the rest of us.

Look at this stuff.

6. 3D printing is taking over.

First we heard Andrew Hessel of Autodesk say we’re not far away from designing and printing functional organs for people who need them. Not the organs you find at church. Organs like livers and lungs.

Then we heard Bre Pettis of Makerbot talk 3D printing applications that are happening right now. Like the dad who created two-inch platforms for her daughter’s shoes so she could ride roller coasters. Like Robohand, which creates prosthetic hands and fingers. Like NASA’s biggest science project ever.

7. Florentijn Hofman loves Tokyo.

You know him as the creator of the giant, world-traveling rubber ducky. We now know him for his opening line at the Bloomberg conference.

“I love to travel to Japan. To shit.”

Apparently there’s something about the water jets that get creativity flowing.

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