Spotlight: Design Writer Carl Alviani

My name is Carl Alviani and my medium is stories: visual, spoken and written.

My love of complex systems has taken me through a pretty diverse sequence of careers—I studied engineering, but ended up becoming a science teacher in the Peace Corps, then an industrial designer, and eventually a writer, focusing on design and infrastructure. The hidden structures that change how we think and act are an endless source of fascination, which helps explain why I work at a creative agency (Ziba, in Portland).

I use Flipboard to publish articles we write about design and the service economy, find out what other designers are up to, and highlight interesting new approaches to the service industry. Flipboard does a nice job of incorporating content from different sources into a single format that looks great on mobile platforms.

Flipboard is also great for audio and video. We’ve started creating short movies and podcasts, exploring how different design fields are changing, and Flipboard gives our readers a simple, elegant way of experiencing them.

My biggest influences are mostly writers, journalists and documentarians. I love writing that looks at the absurdity of modern consumer culture: Rob Walker and George Saunders are two favorites at the moment. Joan Didion is still the champion of telling human stories that are both honest and sympathetic, and Gary Hustwit’s documentaries have done an amazing job of showing how design impacts everyday life.

How can design help the service industry? Find out here: