Pixar cofounder Ed Catmull exemplifies the greatest form of leadership: empowering others to achieve the extraordinary. People tend to think of creativity as a mysterious solo act, and they typically reduce products to a single idea: This is a movie about toys, or dinosaurs, or love, they’ll say. However, in filmmaking and many other kinds of complex product development, creativity involves a large number of people from different disciplines working effectively together to solve a great many problems. Ed Catmul is an unpretentious man. He doesn’t like to talk about how he performs his job as president of Pixar and (since a 2006 merger) Disney Animation Studios. But the article and accompanying podcast shed light on his exceptional leadership qualities [...]

Autodesk announced the release of Autodesk Constructware 2010 project management software. As a premier solution for the construction industry, Autodesk Constructware 2010, is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) application, providing an on-demand environment for construction project management and collaboration [...]

Not so long ago, Tim Brown recounts, designers belonged to a “priesthood.” Given an assignment, a designer would disappear into a back room, “bring the result out under a black sheet and present it to the client.” Brown and his colleagues at IDEO, the company that brought us the first Apple Macintosh mouse, couldn’t have traveled farther from this notion [...]

An orchestra conductor faces the ultimate leadership challenge: creating perfect harmony without saying a word. In this charming talk, Itay Talgam demonstrates the unique styles of six great 20th-century conductors, illustrating crucial lessons for all leaders [...]

While interaction designers have strong evaluation skills through quantitative research such as usability, IxD lacks the same types of aesthetic-based design criticism that graphic design, architecture and industrial design have. This 25-minutes presentation is meant to offer the beginnings of a discussion around what could are the foundations of interaction design, how do they impact aesthetics of interaction and how can they be used for design critique within an interaction design practice [...]

According to new research, success in 68% of technology projects is “improbable.” Poor requirements analysis causes many of these failures, meaning projects are doomed right from the start [...]