A map as big as the world — In Borge’s On Exactitude in Science, he imagines a map as large as the territory it describes, covering the land entirely. The idea seems irresistible to a certain type of literary rascal. Lewis Carrol’s Sylvie and Bruno and Umberto Eco’s On the Impossibility of Drawing a Map of the Empire…

Say hello, change your life. Learn to say hello and you’ll give yourself your best shot at a wonderful life. I know this sounds goofy and unreasonably pretentious—you already say hello many times a day—you don’t really need to learn how to do it. And yet… the stakes are high…

How to Design Emotional Products JTBD + Emotions-To-Be-Felt The famous Jobs-To-Be-Done framework helps PMs and Designers figure out what functionality to design for a product, but not how to design the actual experience. For that, it helps to pair it with Emotions-To-Be-Felt. When asked what emotions we want people to…

Teleport to another timezone to work with the best people on the planet. Turn the Earth beneath your feet as you tap through meetings and release the global superstar you always knew lurked inside you. Start your morning in Singapore, spend lunchtime in London, and end the day in New…

As you curve around the road from LA towards Malibu, before you get to Kanye West’s Tadao Ando designed beach house, before you roll past the parking lot for Nobu, way before any of that… turn your head up and to the right, and you’ll spy, high on the hill…

This is a lead-holder known as the Fixpencil. It is without a doubt my favorite way to work with lead. Inside the barrel is a 3mm tube of graphite available in a dark 6B softness that pulls midnight from noon and drains the ocean’s depths into a teacup. Hidden inside…

I recently gave a lecture on The Structure of Story at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design as a part of PRO-7232 Integrative Frameworks for Technology, Environment, and Society II. Many books and ideas were mentioned during the lecture and discussion. The students asked for a reading list. Here it is…

Every endeavor, every undertaking, every hope, every mystery, every product, every artwork, every romance, every skyscraper, every novel, every film, every chair, every hammer, every automobile, every shopping mall, every dining hall, every bookshelf, every comic book, every app, every company, every government, every lawsuit, every piece of clothing, every…

How to run a Friction Audit At the Sequoia Design Lab, we use story-driven design to help founders build exceptional companies. The process starts with story and later translates to every part of the experience. Once you get your story straight, the next step is to audit your experience. We call this process a friction audit. …