INCLINED TO DESIGN – DESIGNING SUCCESS

Am I REALLY blogging?

Welcome to my blog; I am Caroline Di Diego. Building bridges between people, while designing success.  Thanks to Accidental Creative for the 7 word Bio!

I love communicating about things that interest me and things I am doing, yet I really don’t like to talk about myself, and it seems to me blogs are supposed to give some insight into the ‘personal’ me.

So, here goes:

I am passionate about clean, simple, orderly design, and creating spaces that bring beauty, order, success, and serenity to their occupants; eliminating some or most of the stress in their lives. I do very high-end residential architectural and Interior Design with my Design partner James Ferris, in interesting locations for innovative, successful and entrepreneurial clients.

I am passionate about entrepreneurs and designing or helping early stage companies and start up businesses. I am always involved in several.

I am learning about China, the Chinese culture and the Chinese point of view. I am interested in doing design projects in China, and maybe even having a house or apartment there. I am now planning another trip to China for this spring with my friend Robert Hsu who writes China Strategy. I look forward to a tweetup in China.

I love technology and how it has changed the world we live in. I enjoy helping people understand and adapt to this new technology in a practical way. One way I do this is I help first-time computer users (Mac only! please), currently someone over the age of 70, and it is rewarding to see how the internet can fill the void of loneliness and expand the horizons of a house-bound senior member of our society.

Last week when I arrived to help Barb with her MacMail, which she thought she had deleted, she told me excitedly “Did you know a pig has a 30 minute orgasm? I would never have known this if I hadn’t bought a MacBook and gone on the internet!” (Barb is over 70 and this her first computer ever)

Am I really blogging, even though I have said I would never get into the blogging scenario? Last month I heard that  Eric Drexler just started blogging, so maybe I am in good company. I met Eric at Lake Tahoe many years ago and have been trying to keep up with what he is doing since then. But what exactly prompted my change of mind, and why now?

I recently read “Better Than Owning: Ownership is not as Important as it once was” by Kevin Kelly. It was posted by Conversation Agent on twitter; and the more I started thinking how owning less could positively impact our extremely well positioned clients on the one hand, I began thinking about new design criteria for things like shared accommodations ……not just another furnished rental, but something to relate to the mobile global participants of the 21st century.

That’s one of the things  I can write about, with input from my followers, and I plan to do this, with your help of course!

When I mentioned to my good friend Judith Matheson that I was thinking of doing a blog, this was her response – “Oh, but you have been sort-of-blogging for years; what exactly do you call the NEWS on your website, and the (too frequent) updates, requests for feedback you send around by email in between News? Isn’t this all really just a blog by another name?”

“In fact you always keep us updated with some interesting project you are doing or some other off the wall things; like the time James  and the infamous Dr. Morgan flew the good Doctor’s old Lake Buccaneer amphibian from Seattle to Dayton, Ohio, in between ice and snow storms in February. We loved sharing via those hourly one liner emails; tweets by a different name?”

If, according to my friend Judith, I have been sort-of-blogging all along, how difficult can it be? I am multi-faceted and pretty good at multi-tasking, so it’s just one more stream of things to do? (Only one?)

Residential design will change as people eliminate some or most of the stuff they own, or don’t get into “owning” in the first place, and this will make our designs simpler, and cleaner, and more organized and different. Hooray! For example, I am usually asked to create “more storage space” for clients, specifically for media. Lots of old media! Old VHS tapes (who has a VHS deck anymore?), audio tapes, (why?), and thousands of CD’s. “Pay your son as his summer job, to put everything on a hard drive” I suggest. “Try cloud-storage.”  I think they will accept this, maybe, someday……

I have already had success designing and installing his and her iPod/Blackberry stations in dressing closets; and for one client recently, out went ALL the old media, and in came an iPod! “The future is here!”

Being a collector of books, with the related problem of storage and care, how easily will I be able to change my own point of view about owning? The paperbacks I buy, read, and donate to the local library; no problem downloading to my eBook the 150 library books or so I read in a year; but what about the shelves and shelves of Art and Architectural books I own?  Maybe I can learn from David Wolf in Beijing, who sucessfully owns both.

Will everyone in the family have their own eBook? My friends Mike and Shannon showed me theirs (they have two); he told me he had five books on his Kindle; much easier than stuffing five paperbacks into his luggage when traveling. Mike Hess is one of my favorite entrepreuneurs, and he’s always travelling, and always reading.

Will we be designing docking stations for the family Kindles?, Where is the logical location for this? We are already designing family computer rooms (family offices which include terminals for toddlers), and TV dens have morphed into home theatre’s, where video games are played and movies viewed on a mega screen!

What about cars? I have a number of friends that use flex-car and love it. Will our clients do time-share on collector cars? Will they lease modern art collections? We brain storm on these and other “future” questions many hours a week.

I am fascinated by predictions for the future. I follow Thomas Frey on twitter.

How will we be designing your home in 10 or 20 years? Let me know your thoughts. Where do you think the logical place for an eBook dock will be?

Comments or suggestions? Please email me at casudi@esse-group.com and of course, find me on twitter@CASUDI and www.linkedIn.com

Caroline

www.inclinedesign.info

INCLINED TO DESIGN