aza raskin
cofounder, massive health
SAN FrANciSco
“most kids got carried around in strollers,” says Aza raskin. “i got carried
around in an original mac carrying
case.” it’s no coincidence, then, that the
27-year-old San Francisco dweller—and
son of Jef, who helped invent the first
macintosh—has built a reputation
designing interfaces at mozilla and
elsewhere that, like Apple’s, are fundamentally human. After the 2010 haiti
earthquake, raskin helped create a site
that presented crowdsourced data as
an interactive map of rescue efforts.
raskin jokes that he has “idea ADD”;
his nascent startup, massive health,
will design consumer health-care
products such as (hypothetically) a
“chew-o-meter” that fastens to users’
teeth and offers insights about what
they’re eating. “Good design is not
about thinking outside the box,” he
says. “it’s about finding the right box
to think inside.” —DAN mAcSAi
Jake barton
Founder, Local Projects
NE W york
“There’s no story quite like the one you
get when you turn on a mic or camera
and just let someone talk,” says Jake
Barton. As head of multimedia design
firm Local Projects, the 38-year-old has
spent more than a decade dreaming
up meaningful ways to collect and
share the wisdom of crowds—building
the change By Us social network, for
instance, which helps New yorkers
collaborate on city projects (and is
expanding to Philadelphia, Seattle,
and San Jose). For the National September 11 memorial and museum,
Barton presents the tragedy “through
the eyes of people who experienced
it.” he tapped the web to gather 9/11
photos, stories, and video from all over
the world, which is broadcast throughout the exhibition. Visitors, in turn, are
asked to record their own reflections.
“memorials can be about more than
memory,” he says. —Dm
“I love to take a spark of curiosity
and pour fuel on it,” says Raskin, who
gets that kind of inspiration by visiting
San Francisco’s Exploratorium.
