I met [Bill Buxton][1] a couple of years ago in a workshop at UC Berkeley. He's like the Gordon Ramsay of design, not afraid to get in your face to challenge an idea or defend one. Buxton threw down a challenge to everyone in the room: **Know your design history!**
Then he name dropped a book from way back in 1952 titled [Designing for People][2] by one of the fathers of industrial design: Henry Dreyfuss. A quick look at ZURB's own homepage revealed a near identical statement: "Design for People." We stole Dreyfuss' idea!
To be fair, we were unconsciously quoting *Designing for People* when we rallied around ZURB's mission in life. Bryan, our founder, even studied product design at Stanford and was exposed to Dreyfuss and others like Teague and Loewy. These concepts have deep roots and we shared some of them without knowing it.
Knowing our history means loving our craft enough to borrow on the hard-won insights of our forefathers and then use them in our work today. Designers who know their past can create a real competitive advantage today (see [Jonathan Ive's rip off of Teague's work][3] marketing Kodak cameras).
What about the past inspires your work today? We'd love to hear your stories.
*Image of a designer from the dust jacket of Dreyfuss' original book. Look familiar? That's a [T-shaped designer][4], a generalist-specialist capable of working across teams and building advocates around world-changing products for people!*
[1]: https://www.billbuxton.com/
[2]: https://books.google.com/books?id=qOsJl7hW2qUC&printsec=frontcover&dq=designing+for+people+dreyfuss&hl=en&src=bmrr&ei=CM8DTpWHDI2osAOOktD7DQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=book-thumbnail&resnum=1&ved=0CCsQ6wEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false
[3]: https://www.businessweek.com/innovate/next/archives/2008/12/what_apple_learned_from_kodak.html
[4]: https://zurb.com/talent/culture