in the iBitch category, the Twitter slamming has begun. Is it a sign of popularity post sxsw all of a sudden? I’ve been using it for about 4 months now and my usage has definitely gone down since. It only makes sense for the people I know who are in forei
A nice exhibition of the usual suspects of the realm of “critical design”, Jurgen Bay, Dunne and Raby, etc . might be able to make it there, on my way to bruxelles to visit fo.am
In the academic rant section of the web, excellent discussions happening around the values of designers as thinking, does or both and how they becomes one of those by going to which schools
It’s so easy to forget that your own behaviors are the result of your surroundings. India was a vivid reminder of that. Delhi is the home of 13 million people, or 9 000 people per square kilometer. That means nothing until you have to think about how those people will start going places and then it dawns on you that as a foreigner in this vivid city, you know nothing about traffic, that you know nothing of the subtle art of being able to fit 8 cars on a 3 lane highway, and that you’ve had it easy so far.
You see, in Delhi, going around could be an Olympic sport and being a tourist and needing to get around is actually a battlefield. It starts with trying to flag an auto rick-shaw, well enough of them if you happen to be a party of people. Each rick-shaw will only fit 3 people , no more, or you have a deathwish. Then you have to tell him where you want to go and he might just decline if it’s too dodgy, busy or not where he intended to go.
Then you talk price, you have to bargain your way through India, even if it means a fraction of a fraction of what you would have thought to be cheap in London, Paris or New York… 100 rupees to go across town on what is basically a motorbike dressed up for Halloween, that’s 1 pound in my mind and it’s just mind blowing. But you do it, and you’re told by the locals to do it, bargain till the price drops so low you could buy 20 , and you do it because otherwise if you come and buy everything at what they’d like you to pay, then the prices go up for everyone, and the locals will have to pay more, and considering how much they earn you don’t want that to happen to them.
So you get on auto the rick shaw, the car, the bike rick-shaw, trying not to fall out of the vehicle , holding on to the frame for dear life, with a driver who will completely ignore where you’re trying to go or where you point on the map, and will take your somewhere else where his friend works, where he’ll argue and just stand there saying “this is better” on the off chance you’ll buy something from his friend/family out of frustration, so you fight it and you fight him and you argue and you get angry and then stoic, he might get back in the car and start over again.
And then of course there’s the honking, that in Delhi, is an indication of presence. Every auto rickshaw or bus is hand painted at the back with “horn please”, so make sure they know you’re there. I can’t imagine the sixth sense of presence you develop as a driver there. After 8 days in Delhi, I started to cancel the honking out slightly, it became part of the soundscape of the city. I can imagine that for a local person however, it must be like white noise.
There it is, the sights and sounds of Delhi. In the next report I’ll talk all about the tastes and smells.
“To compete in this new design arena the industry is going to have to change. To start with, it would benefit from throwing off the aesthetic myth that design is about sprinkling magic dust on ugly products”
- From an article by Menzies Lowe in NewDesign magazine, issue48.
Chatted with Diane before we stepped into the conference last weekend and I have to say she wrote a very accurate report on that day of the conference… now i have to get moving on blogging about the rest of it :)
Jacques Chirac steps down from the next presidential elections. I grew up with his name ringing in my ears as he was major of my “arrondissement” when I lived in Paris. It’s strange now to see him give it up, makes me feel old.
Not that I want to make my readers believe that I’m having a bad day, the sun is shining, the tulips and tank tops are out… but general statements that influence the way my field is perceived on the market tend to make me react very strongly…
I’m sure Tony Dunne didn’t necessarily intend it to sound that way but claiming that “The name interaction design is beginning to mean something quite specialised and focused on designing interfaces for electronic and digital products and systems. This is probably a very good thing if you are trying to establish a discipline or a group within a company, but it’s not so good if you are interested in pushing boundaries and exploring new ways designers can make technology relevant and meaningful to everyday life.” is a convenient way to ignore the past educational institutions or the legacies of the former RCA teachers like Durrell Bishop.
The fact is that from the beginning of this very young industry, interaction design has ALWAYS been considered associated very closely to HCI and interface design for on-screen applications because the field itself was born out of those particular departments be it on an industry or an academic level. Since the advent of schools like Umea, the RCA’s program for the past 10 years, IDII and now also a number of other european endeavors, this change has already been made on an academic level, unfortunately and this is something that I encounter working as a freelance, that change has not been operating at an industry level yet. And I hardly believe that changing the name of a program will help that change along, I think it just might confuse people more. Imagine this conversation:
A. So what do you do?
B. I design interactions.
A. Oh you’re an interaction designer?
B. Uh, well not quite, I design interactions, it’s different…
A. How so?
B. …
It will still be as difficult for people like me to answer the dreaded question (what do you do) as for future students of the RCA.
I hate to think that with the growing environmental challenges we are facing, the human race is going to sit there arguing whose fault it is that the planet is heating up. It’s a useless conversation that you see in every Hollywood movie, just before the big wave crashes down, the 2 main characters are arguing over who triggered the secret trap door, oblivious to their surroundings.
Welcome to the virtual stream of consciousness of Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino, interaction & industrial designer, CEO of Tinker. A third-culture child, her thoughts are usually gathered around traveling, the cultures she clashes with, how services are designed and what are the implications of the internet of things for people and designers.
