A Hero is born. And looks boldly to the future.

Let’s hear it for the new Hero Design blog. It’s always exciting to get a fresh look for a webpage, and even more exciting is a lot of the back end stuff we’ve put in place that’s going to let us do some really great stuff here. The thing we’re most excited about is how we built this site from the ground up to really support e-commerce. Yep, Hero is going to be selling products!

And since custom design is key element at Hero we’re really excited about the potential of using interactive web apps to create virtual, shared design spaces between the designer (me), the object and the client (you). Imagine you could come to the Hero webpage and open up an application embedded in the site that allows you to customize some of the design elements of a chair, lamp, or hook.

At Hero we believe that the future of design is collaborative. We are going to try to focus on not just designing objects but designing environments, encounters, situations, interactions that allow you our clients to participate and influence the design.

Of course there are some folks, like NervousSystem, that have been really spearheading this effort.

I also recently found out about (and backed) this awesome Kickstarter project called Chrysalis that is going to create a series of libraries extending Grasshopper functionality into Processing. I actually found Chrysalis while starting to write my own Processing code base to do some of this stuff. Of course I put all that work aside when I found out about the project.

Okay, back to work doing the final tweaks on the new site.