Today we are sharing the first volume of the L+R Applied Imagination Review, our annual perspective on business strategy, design, and technology. The Review brings together what we learned over the past year and turns it into practical direction for the year ahead. It is written for the leaders and teams we work with, and for anyone trying to make sense of a market that keeps reshaping itself.
The name comes from Alex F. Osborn's 1953 book Applied Imagination, which introduced the practice of brainstorming and made the case for structured, collaborative creativity. That idea has guided L+R since we were founded in 2012. We work at the intersection of strategy, design, and technology from our studios in Brooklyn and Barcelona, and the principle we return to most often is the one in our name: Strategy + Aesthetics, the discipline of pairing analytical rigor with creative intuition so that solutions are both effective and resonant.
This first edition reflects a year defined by the rapid arrival of AI in everyday work, a changing workplace, and ongoing economic uncertainty. Rather than catalog every development, we focused on what businesses can act on. The volume sets out six guiding principles for 2024, covering digital transformation, customer experience, innovation culture, sustainability, user-centric product development, and organizational resilience. It then looks at the pioneering trends we see shaping the year across technology, strategy, and aesthetics, and closes with a set of questions worth asking your own team as the year unfolds. Throughout, we draw on real projects from our portfolio so the ideas stay grounded in practice.
We made a deliberate choice to publish the Review only in print, with no digital edition — a physical object meant to be held, marked up, and kept on a desk rather than scrolled past. For us that reflects a wider commitment to thoughtful, human-centered design, and it is part of why we intend to produce this as an annual publication.
A project like this is the work of many hands. I served as editor-in-chief alongside co-founder Ryan Riegner, and Violet Dine led the design and gave the volume its form. Our thanks also go to the contributors who shaped the perspectives inside it, including strategist Rachel Smith, designers Chris Martinié and Trent Howell, and engineer Alex Queudot, and to the wider L+R team and the partners and collaborators who supported the effort.
If you would like a printed copy of the 2024 Review, you can request one at magazine.levinriegner.com. We hope it gives you something useful to think about, and we welcome your feedback as we build toward the next edition.
— Alex Levin
Editor-in-Chief, L+R Applied Imagination Review
