(Yes, I know this is starting to be boring :P )
If you’re in town this week, well you’re probably going round the London Design Festival. Topoware will be part of the Designboom exhibition hosted by designersblock 10th anniversary show so come on down!
“Interaction design is not about form or even structure, but is more ephemeral–about why and when rather than about what and how.”
This really isn’t helping anyone come up with that one liner at a bar in response to the dreaded:”So what do you do?”
London design festival guide 2007. Tee hee.
Anyone who’s a die hard fan of Apple, stop reading now…
Gone? Ok.. here we go.
I walked into Matt’s office yesterday to be greeted by the giddy sound of “Oh hi, we’re following the Stevenote”. I tried not to roll my eyes but simply couldn’t help myself.
From 2001 - 2006 , if I only count the ipod, Apple has released some 17 different models of the damn thing. And this was still only to be able to listen to music alone, not counting the products of 2007 of which one of them will already be discontinued.
So I took some time to find out what they were doing about the environment. Most of it in reaction to the well advertised Greenpeace campaign obviously. Yes there’s something if you’re “lucky” enough to live in the US.
But that’s not the point now is it? How necessary is it to have such a high turnover of products that essentially bring the same value to the end user? At this point it’s not like Apple has to prove to people it’s a desirable company. Why can’t upgrades be available on the same product to transition from one set of functionality to the other? That would be clever product design. Is the amount of resources taken, energy spent, employees hired worth the production and environmental costs of sales of a product that will be discontinued 2 months after it’s been on the market?
In the mobile industry they call it feature-creep, i think Apple is now bringing this concept that to the next level: instead of providing all functionalities into one (such as the Jesus phone) it’s now creating a suite of products, each of which doesn’t quite offer all the functionalities of the other, thus inviting consumers to spend money on several of them.
I doubt that’s responsible product design and I will keep rolling my eyes.
(Disclaimer: I started writing this post yesterday and Safari crashed on me, so this is a much shorter version of what I originally wanted to write (which was so freaking brilliant). This morning, i have less time on my hands. )
1. Twitter blocks came out.
2. A lot of people started bitching (on twitter, jaiku, etc of course coz no one seems to be bothered making full-fledged arguments on blogs anymore) that their visualisation was *pretty but useless*.
3. Stamen defended themselves aggressively.
4. In light of the fact that the internet is full of people who amuse themselves filling up pages of cats staying stupid things, I think they should relax.
5. The best defense is offense. Keep at it guys, you’re doing great work.
Conclusion & other questions this brings up: When you’re in the “grey zone” between the totally practical and art, what do you do? Do you keep defending your work as one or the other? Do you just ignore the silos and just get on with it? If Stamen is the grey zone of the internet’s information age, who occupies this role in “offline product design”? And what does that scale look like? What are the criteria for this?
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