imikimi.com (CTO & Co-Founder)

Imikimi is an online creative community where millions of people throughout the world gather to create, re-mix and collaborate on their digital self-expressions in a fun and easy way. The company intersects three key components of the web - content creation, content sharing and social media.

Essence and Artifact (blog)

There are two kinds of constraints on design. There are physical and logical constraints on what is possible. These constrains define an upper bound on what is possible when designing a solution to a problem. This upper bound is what I call the "essential solution" to a problem. It is often unachievable in practice, but it is the benchmark by which all solutions should be measured.

The other kind of constraints are historical artifacts. Manufacturing may settle a standard, and though that standard could be easily rewritten, retooling the infrastructure based on that standard may become an economic impossibility. Similarly, virtual architectures, such as the Intel x86 instruction set, are so economically entrenched by all the software that depends on them, that they can't be practically changed.

Artifacts constrain our thinking. The core of innovation is separating artificial from essential constraints, knowing what rules to break and what rules cannot be broken.