designswarm thoughts

The Guardian sometimes loves to highlight how completely off the map americans can be. This is the perfect example of useless puritan and conservative America: a photographer takes pictures of children crying because she’s taken away their looli-pop and the net goes wild screaming of child abuse… while of course seeing the body of a dead and tortured man in Irak is still perfectly acceptable… people! dont drink and blog!

Speaking of ecologies of service, I bought a bike a week and a bit ago. Not an easy task in a city that’s just swarming with them, they’re usually overpriced and demand is high, and so for the few weeks that I have in this lovely city, I didn’t want to invest 200 euros. I went online to a aggravatingly badly designed dutch website and with the help of my friend Laura, bid on a woman’s bike that a woman was selling in the North of Amsterdam. Eventually she agreed to the low low price of 45 euros and I went to meet her. Took a bus at Centraal (to be pronounced as if you had a potato stuck in your mouth with a long hiss for the s and a long drawn a) and 30 minutes later, in a weird look-alike of american-suburbia in Amsterdam- Noord, I waited at the bus stop for Rebecca, the bike owner. Turns out the bike had a flat tire and so, i grumbled a tad but remembered seeing bike pumps at my flat and after having convinced a bus driver to take me back even if it was against the “rules”, I walked my bike home happily.

Flash forward to back home where the bike pumps end up not working as befitting more elegantly a mountain bike rather than my city bike. I remember that there are 2 bike shops by my place and decide to go there to get the tires pumped. These little stores have, however a very north american schedule of 10-6, which also correspond to my work hours. Flash forward a week, I wake up on Saturday morning, decided to deal with this “issue” and get a the tire fixed once and for all, I step out my door, and freeze. Nothing. My precious bike with an already rich history was stolen! As i turned to my local friends here and cry out in outrage, they just shrug their shoulders and go “yeh a week is too long, it’s bound to get cleaned off”… what! There has to be a service solution somewhere in there… a 24h bike store anyone? a dropoff anytime/repair/get it back the next day service? a call this number and we’ll deal with the problem 24h? RFID on each bike to locate it back? If North America has the CAA for example, what’s the equivalent here?

Yes, I’m just bitter and miss my bike… god only knows what happened to my precious Tulipa bike that I left in Milan. Sigh.

I love the image of the tourist for this new image enhancing tourist remover web service… what is he, stalking someone? or just american?

Reading Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand these days, I was struck once again by her vision of society and what part the “people” as a concept play in it. She believes, and I am completely paraphrasing and interpreting here, so please don’t quote me on this that one should not follow what is socially acceptable, but one’s own voice. Her characters are very ego-centric (not to be taken as a bad thing) strong minded people who will go against popular beliefs, and public opinion to pursue their objectives. In reading a completely different article on the Global curse of Comic Sans i couldn’t help but be reminded of Miss Rand.

“None of this, however, stops the public from loving it. In Typophile’s online forums, a designer rightly observes that the vast majority of laymen love Comic Sans. “Why do you think it’s all over the place?” he asks. “No ‘decent’ corporation cares what a minority of specialists thinks.”

And he’s right. Who cares if a small minority of deeply principled letterform diehards care about the wanton proliferation of a font that single-handedly throws typographic evolution back, say, a few thousand years or so?

Clearly, there’s no accounting for taste.”

So where does that put us as designers? Keeping in mind user-generated content and user-centered approaches are capturing the imagination of a number of business, when we listen to users, how carefully do we have to listen ? More importantly should we follow what they feel they need, or seek for the nuggets of untold stories and opportunities that lie in their tales of discontent, critique and apprehension?

Sometimes there is power in being the first and only. As i look at the Web 2.0 revolution, I wonder if we would be building all this, if it weren’t for the active 1% of the population? Should businesses concentrate on analyzing what the 86 % that just view content wants? Or look at their own products, cease the opportunity to do something radically different and let the 86% follow. It’s about radical innovation versus incremental innovation of course and we all know which one is the more dangerous.

As Steve Jobs says:
“I understand the appeal of a slow burn […] but personally I’m a big-bang guy.[…] The risk with a fast burn,” he continued, “is that it exposes you to your enemies. You’re going to need a lot of money to fight thieves.”

I’m sure he’s read the Fountainhead.

I really should stop and smell the roses once in a while, but i can never tear myself from work that easily. So this weekend, i created a new blog!!!

Go and check it out, its called Compete and i’ll be posting up anything and everything relating to design competitions from around the world. Any comments and feedback about it would be super welcome of course!

Anyone want help me out and become a contributor? Email me!

A very cool map… so far I’ve lived and visited 15 countries (visited 7, lived in 8 of them ) and on my way to visit another next month…new zealand!!!

Create your own visited countries map

Ok now I’m really freaked out… I found someone else I know on a dating site…arghh… the world of design is just too small.

Ok coming back to it, now in Amsterdam, a friend of mine is also using online dating and I tried to get some feedback from her as well. She’s dutch, in her mid 30’s and has been on about 6-7 dates so far, which I personally find really cool, seeing as I haven’t “dated” in about 3 years and have somehow lost the notion of what that means. Her biggest criticism of the site was also to do with the pictures, she said that they never match and are always a disappointing aspect of the date…

I find this a bit confusing, I mean, I’d rather be honest about what i look like online while there is still an element of anonymity, absence of judgment, and so I’m sure that whoever wants to meet me isn’t disappointed when we meet, starting the date on the wrong foot.

But apparently, because we like to kid ourselves into thinking that looks aren’t everything (they’re not of course, but seeing as 80% of our understanding of the world is through our eyes, they’re pretty damn important), we lie and cheat our way into airtime with a person who will ultimately be disappointed at first sight… I guess that’s why they call them blind dates…

So in the world of dating, so far I’ve found this very uselful blog by Gordon Smith about the online dating industry at large. He talks about MatchActivity an online dating service in California (so far, it’s in Beta still) that makes people meet over activities that they post up. Kinda like eBay for people… I want to take a walk in the park…5 people answer, who’s gonna be the chosen one? Bah…not convinced about the approach. Then of course there are sites like Match.com which make me sick, i mean, its like a shopping list of people…

There has to be a web 2.0 of dating… it would be really useful… hmm something to think about over the weekend as i sit in Vondelpark and read my book.

Ok,so this whole Zidane and Materazzi thing smells of sour grapes on the part of the FIFA. I mean commmooooon here I’m sure the french don’t exactly go around the field throwing roses at the opponent, so is it really worth it to spend taxpayer’s money on figuring out what exactly insulted the sourly french star. One must also remember that in Italy, expressions referring to people’s mothers, sisters and personal attributes, are as common as apperitivo on a thursday night.

France: breath in, breath out… i think you’ve got more pressing issues at hand no? Oh I forget, it’s much more entertaining to think about football than social and racial issues in parisian ghettos.

This is the first and last sport-related item of this blog… can’t believe i just wrote this… oh my, i am italian…

Great article by Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson on the state of the music industry post-peak (before file-sharing). The last “hit” was No strings Attached byN’SYNC surprisingly enough.

I’m using this blog these days as a sort of dumping ground of all my thoughts on my Amsterdam stay as I am cameraless and will be for a little while more, so I hope my Flickr friends will forgive me and start reading me instead. : )

Amsterdam is a strange city of ambiguous nature. Some of it feels like eternally in transition, the american college students, tourists of every kind, who have traveled the world to admire the Dutch’s libertine lifestyle. The red light district in itself only covers a few blocks of the center of the city and each and every one of it’s street is filled with hypnotized men walking around like they had just landed on another planet and every woman behind a red neon lit window was an object of either worship or fear.

Somehow i never quite managed to have a preconceived idea of the Netherlands. The images that flashed through my mind, had something of the misinformed-CNN-watching-tourist: clogs, windmills, drugs, same-sex marriage, tall blond people riding bicycles…

Most of what I discovered here of course had nothing to do with any of that, except for the tall blondes riding bicycles : ) Yes bicycles rule here, with their own set of rules, and cars like pedestrians feel alien. I went for a boat ride last week which finished quite late and got a “ride” from someone on their bike which i was most grateful for. No one walks except for the tourists…feels like L.A. but with bike traffic. The city is slow and soothing with the speed and emergency of bikes everywhere…an odd mixture.

There’s water here…what? I never knew that i would be relocating in the Venice of the North… canals everywhere and lovely undecorated and simple bridges..no fuss here, very little ornamentation, beautiful full colors on narrow houses that lean slightly forward. A lovely flower market with the latest tulip bulbs (look more like onions) on sale everywhere. I bought a “dutch for beginner’s book” because I just can’t stand not knowing what people are on about and living in someone’s culture without being able to speak to them. It’s a form of disrespect in my opinion… so I will make an effort and learn this very odd-sounding language to the best of my ability for the next month or so…

So far I’ve been to great pancakes at “Pannenkoekenhuis Upstairs”, sushis at Kagetsu, drinks at 11 and coffee at Lattei.

Something interesting just occurred to me as I familiarize myself with the Dutch and Amsterdam (although I did date a dutch man once and have two great friends who are dutch). Here a waiter is actually paid very well, which is not the case at all in North America usually when young people who have these jobs rely heavily on tips and therefore provide what we consider a great service or attitude in consequence.

Here’s it’s like a parallel universe.

Waiters ignore you, accuse you of being subordinate, and that’s apparently accepted. Dutch clients are expected to treat them rudely and expect the best, sometimes returning plates if they don’t like the look of it, waving frantically to get the bill, ie being direct and what a north american might consider rude. Is one feeding the other? Is it the contempt of the client that is creating the “laissez-faire” attitude of the worker? or the other way around. Is it purely cultural? I can’t tell yet, but it makes for a very odd service experience.

Oh my god, this is really the last time I get a stupidly early fllight. My easyjet flight was supposed to leave at 6:10AM so of course in the not-yet-so-european-frequent-flyer attitude I adopt at these times, I decide to try to get there early enough so I don’t have to go through the embarrassment of having my name called out 10 times over the microphone (something that a passenger going to Ibiza obviously didn’t have a problem with). So I went out for a drink and indian food with some of my favorite people in London and then proceeded back home to keep working on some CSS and finish packing, as one does at midnight on a tuesday evening : ) At 3:30 I got a taxi company to send a car that could have been the end of me… some guy looking like he had either just woken up or been out drinking pulled over in an unidentified black BMW, disheveled, with a thick east-european accent. I thought to myself, “better text Richard” so that if i get diced and thrown at the back of the car, he can proudly show the policemen his phone and say “look she texted me on her way out”…sigh… technology is useless sometimes : )

Anyway, I leave the taxi from hell behind at Gatwick airport and cue up forever at the Esyjet counter… this was the first time where I saw that they didn’t even have dedicated lanes for specific flights, it really is the McDonald’s of air travel. As usual I had extra luggage and had to dig deep down into pockets to find the remaining pounds i owned… then off to wait for yet another delayed flight… a oversized italian bus, that’s what that airline is like! We were delayed because a woman in a nearby Air Nigeria flight gave birth in the plane and they didn’t want anyone i the vicinity to take off… cute. I wonder if the baby is nigerian because of this?

After a fairly quick flight I get to Schipol and get my heavy luggage, but of course, to make this trip extra special, I had to get into the wrong train and end up in the middle of nowhere (ie Utrecht)… where I had to carry my luggage up and down stairs several times before figuring out which platform to take to Amsterdam Centraal… arriving there an hour later than planned, I got into a cab to my new apartment and of course he didn’t know the street… arghh. I think ill hitchhike next time, it’s simply not my time for travelling… good thing I’m in Amsterdam for a month at least. I need coffee…

Ok this whole internet dating thing is really creepy…I’ve gotten, in the span of less than 24 hours an impressive amount of “fans” in their mid to late 30s and already 3 messages… arghhh…I’m deleting my profile, this is too creepy. I think I’ll go back to walking around town on my own…

Off to Amsterdam tomorrow for an undetermined period of time in the company of Blast Radius.

Having a chat with my friend Jude while looking for a knob for her dresser on Portobello Road, we were catching up and we started talking about internet dating. Since I’ve been out of that loop and kindof stuck in the IDII bubble for so long, I wanted to know more. When I was in Montreal 2 years ago, internet dating was something you talked about in a half-apologetic hushed voice over coffee with your friends on a cold winter afternoon, so I was interested to know what a 28 year old working professional in London thought of the scene.

She’s been using Guardian Soulmates for a few dates. I thought it was interesting that in a way reading the Guardian and therefore using that particular dating site, you’re also making a political and social statement as to who you’d like to meet.

The homepage boasts: “Soulmates is a unique service so you can be sure that you will be part of a group of like-minded people” so already I guess you’re talking to people with similar political views although i pointed out to her that this wasn’t necessarily something that was a given seeing as you don’t have to prove to the site that you read the Guardian… although that would be funni, to have a secret question that you could only find in the Guardian as a security question to have access to the site…: )

Anyway, she’s been on a little more than 5 dates with different types of men and these are some of the things that she mentioned which could perhaps lead the design of better online dating services:

- The pictures posted are completely inaccurate, some men post pictures at weird angles, old pictures when they were younger and more athletic, the level of accuracy plays a lot on whether a woman will choose to meet someone in real life, so why delay the reaction? Let’s be honest here, men expect us to look great at any time and to show it all, why can’t men do the same? Maybe this could lead to using people’s webcams or cellphones… ie take a picture of yourself now and send it within the next 3 mns to this email adress or phone number…

- She ended up meeting people with completely different objectives, so what someone is actually interested in is something that needs granularity… check boxes are boring… “im looking to someone to write to” defines nothing at all and “let’s see what happens” sounds more like “let’s see what you are like in real life and then we’ll decide”… sigh… clarity is king!

- Jude actually met other women who were on the network as well and they started chatting about the men they met and quickly realized that they had actually dated the same men and so started discussing them and giving each other advice. Is there opportunity here for a community-aspect to this online dating thing… reputation? commenting? how many people on the network has that person “favorite”? I’m sure there have to be design opportunities here. Just like life…

So of course after this conversation I really had to give this thing a try, and see what the online interactions were. I really enjoy reading the Guardian and I think they’ve done a really nice job for their website recently but this was ridiculous…I really felt like i was filling in a shopping list of requirements and personal criteria. People don’t post up that many details about themselves and they’re actually little that would make you choose between one guy or the next apart from the picture! And of course this comes back to my first point…accuracy is key. The navigation is very poor and to be honest, information like “so and so is a 85% match” with blue ticks next to each item of the shopping list are really not helpful. The only items which seem to translate what a person is like are the photos, the voice message (but what exactly does one record on these…”testing one 2 one 2, this is my voice”?) and the personal rant entitled “why i would be a good pick”… there’s so much missing here…

So I think what I’ll do is stay on this service and use it as user research if i should ever actually find someone to go out for coffee with. I think it would be a great design exercise for the Guardian to reconsider this service and actually design it properly. They could actually become innovative in their supposed desire to “bring like-minded people together”.

Oh my god, I just saw the profile of someone i know! Gulp!

I don’t have a camera right now and this is really annoying. It’s an old cliché that “you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone” but this really made me think about the way that i document my travels (usually through Flickr) and what inspires me. Have we stopped reading? Are we a see-image-only society of designers? Is the bad joke about designers not reading true? I guess this blog is an exercise for me to try to defend myself. And what better opportunity than the “no-pictures-please” RCA show 2 I went to see yesterday! I have a few friends who graduated this year and I went to their commencement ceremony at the Royal Albert Hall on friday and had a peak at the show but quickly realized this was worth coming back to when there would be less people. So I went and spent about 3 hours walking around on Saturday, on 3 floors of all the RCA work from product design, through to animation and illustration and of course the interaction design work i simply couldn’t miss.

Surprisingly enough, there were a lot of industrial design work (or product , but whatever, i hate that term, will leave this for another rant) that started crossing the boundaries into the realm of what interaction design likes to think it is, which gives me some hope about the industry in general. Maybe they’re finally starting to understand what it means to live with objects and technology and that product design can be more than a teacup or a shelving system.

Robert Philips has designed a really lovely wooden stool that produces sounds when someone sits, crosses their legs and bounces it, taking the action of waiting for someone in public space and making it playful. Great portfolio as well and lots of work for children.

Lisa Stroux designed a fashionable bag that unfolds into a raincoat. The execution and attention to details is lovely.

The work of Shay Alkalay was really poetic and inspiring. From head-less teddy-bear-shaped garbage bags to stickers you iron on top of stains on clothing, I was really seduced by his work, and simple website too.

Manolis Kelaidis explored the future of the book with his “Bluebook” and designed a book with a printed circuit at the back which can be read and link to online content.

Emily Simpson designed a really sweet shelving system that uses folded cushions to hide things in. A very tactile experience, like that of searching for one’s pyjama under a pillow at night.

Jennifer Chan designed some nice vases out of Oasis foam called Disposable Vases, which reminded me of my work for the Commitment Radio. I’m not sure I approve of the waste involved in this idea though : )

Bernadette Deddens designed “Vicky had a hickey” a pump that sucks out the blood in the shape of a hickey if you want to fake your “popularity” with the opposite sex.

On the same subject, the work of Bjorn Franke really impressed me and reminds me of my friend Dana Gordon’s work at IDII. The project was a kit to make your loved one jealous, and another one was a wearable apparel that would give you a small shock whenever the color on the US National Terror Warning System changes.

Yet another project in the same line of thinking (i.e. bordering on art) is Kok Chian Leong’s work with the Rapid Carbonizer that renders unreadable anything that you write with a pencil by spraying the handwritten note with a spray of carbon.

The Cone Clock by Oscar Diaz is simply beautiful. It’s a cone that moves slowly in a circle as time goes by, drawing the line of time and so spatially making you aware of time and allowing you to manage your space with this intrusion, using it to your advantage to remind you of things to do at specific times of the day. Just brilliant!

Mathias Hahn designed a lovely coat hanger/ light called “the unexpected visitor” which highlights the presence of a guest in a dramatic way.

In the illustration department I really enjoyed Julie Hill’s 100 Scriptures as well of the rest of her graphic work. (love the Chirst Chip too : )) I also enjoyed the sonic typography of Grit Hartung.

In the animation department I adored Monica Santos’s film “Your words”.

And of course last but not least I saw the interaction design work of a few of my friends and it was really inspiring. Yumiko Tanaka‘a Plable project, a table which hides an entire world for children underneath it. Mathew Brown’s great work with creativity and musical instruments. I absolutely loved the Sprochs from Daniel Goddemeyer, a series of small containers which release messages after a certain time or with a person’s participation. Again in the “design imitates art which imitates art” section, Sohui Won’s work “Weird objects for weird users” is interesting. And finally in the “brings up more questions than it answers” category, Michele Gauler’s service “Digital Remains” explores what happens to your data after you die.

Ouffff…..my head is spinning…