Archive for January, 2007

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Interaction design semantic discussions

January 30, 2007

Interesting how this all started with a simple email conversation with Régine talking about some conversations I was having with ex-students and observers in London about the Interim show at the RCA and then WHAM… everything explodes… she writes no less than 6 posts about the show and a whole vibrant and slightly aggressive conversation starts on her posts, Handcircus and here on a post 3 months old.

This is good, the less we talk about what we’re doing, the more chances we are of diluting the field of interaction design which is only 25ish years old… this is a young field. There is no such thing as “traditional interaction design” as there is no tradition to follow, this field has always followed people and the technologies that have surrounded them both of which have changed radically in a very short amount of time. Anyway, it’s fun to get some action on this website for once!

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links for 2007-01-30

January 30, 2007
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Service design workshop in Antwerp

January 29, 2007

You can find the details of the workshop i’m conducting on service design with industrial design students on the workshop blog.

My introduction presentation here (pdf)

Closing presentation here here.

Enjoy!

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links for 2007-01-29

January 29, 2007
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links for 2007-01-28

January 28, 2007
  • Quebec humour on a yourtube-like platform… highlarious… if you know how to speak “québecois”…sorry french wont do, its totally different ;)
    (tags: video Quebec)
  • Extremely interesting trends for the uber rich of the bespoke products. This is showing an interesting trend away from the industrial age and slowly towards smaller and more catered services. Material for an upcoming rant for sure.
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designswarm update

January 28, 2007

I finally de-lazied a bit and am slowly putting up videos of my past works, there are a lot of them but with Youtube I no longer have any excuse : P

The Hungries videos.

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From Helsinki with love and curiosity

January 28, 2007

Ok so this was the least carbon neutral flight ever, but I spent 16 hours in Helsinki and my camera was acting up so some key words/things for me to remember form the little I saw:

- I’m definitely staying at the Klaus K hotel again.
- They only serve brown sugar
- They can’t really do croissants
- They had salt flakes on the tables
- Jimbo is the name of a big supermarket chain i think
- Finland is the home of the Moomins
- They have little plastic boxes hanging from buildings with the address numbers (not sure if they light up at night)
- People have ash blond colored hair, literally, a pretty color i haven’t seen elsewhere.
- Aika means time
- Kiitos means thank you
- They played jazz classics (Nat Cole, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald) during the flight on Finnair, first time i had a soundtrack to a flight, felt like we were in a lounge waiting rather than on a plane, interesting.

There, a little cultural enlightenment for all. designswarm, travelling so you don’t have to : P

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links for 2007-01-27

January 27, 2007
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links for 2007-01-26

January 26, 2007
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Service design workshop brief

January 25, 2007

As I mentioned previously I’ll be teaching a service design workshop at the Higher Institute of Product Development in Antwerp next week. This is the brief I wrote for them:

“Industrial designers, in light of our growing environmental concerns, are being asked to be more and more “green” or eco-friendly, choose the right materials to make more biodegradable, easy to recycle or disassemble objects. Another wave of thought though, fueled by the likes of John Thackara, Ezio Manzini and Live|work advocate for the development of services where objects become “touch points” to an experience or a service being provided. Who you are should be defined as what you have access to and not what you own in this model.

In this workshop we will be working to dig a little deeper in the roles that objects and products take on within services. We will try to design services, the objects that allow these services to exist and will explore some presentation and design techniques such as experience prototyping and video prototyping.

Useful for the workshop: Camera and/or Videocamera”

I’ll be working on the actual layout of the workshop and the presentations I will make at the beginning of the week and post them up this weekend.