designswarm thoughts

• BBC – BBC TWO – WHATS ON
  Second Life and relationships… never thought they’d make it to tv.
  (tags: secondlife tv)

• Cory Burr
  Really great prototyping and fabrication work here
  (tags: london product design architecture)
• SomethingLabs
  My office at Tinker is here, if you’re in London and looking for a desk, join us!
  (tags: interaction design office london)

I hope Jimmy will forgive me for the copy-paste.

“My resistance to contributing to blogs in general is that they are by and large vehicles for personal authorship and that participation is ultimately framed and managed by a single authorial voice. Consequently participants tend to get patronized or corrected if they voice dissent or simply toe the line and provide consensual support to common sense statements. I’ve resisted commenting on this blog in particular as the statements and claims posted here police a normative approach to design.”.

I really would like to think I haven’t been policing anything on this blog and that a normative approach is only a starting point for a conversation. I often invite discussion and hardly ever receive it (I don’t consider this blog to be very popular by any standard). I’m interested in a range of things, things I’m usually passionate about and like to rant about often. Design is one of those things. I’d like to think design can change things for the best, has it’s strength and it’s weaknesses in it’s applications and having had one of the best educations there is, I think there is so much potential in how it’s taught.

“Qui ne dit mot, consent” as the french saying goes and I hope that good conversation whether it’s on this platform or in real life (if you’re ever in Hackney drop by) doesn’t always have to be about agreeing with the general state of things.

Me:

- While you’re away, I’ll take the time to watch a lot of movies, read some books and eat meat.

Matt:

- Yeh so when I see you again, you’ll have bacon sunglasses and a steak scarf.

(Coz clearly some of you were wondering :) )

I went to see the impossibly crowded opening of the Work-in-progress show at the RCA yesterday and although I really should try to go back, the feeling I got coming out of it was one of being puzzled by what it all meant.

Fact is, I’m not sure of RCA’s overall design rhetoric anymore. Durrel Bishop who once headed taught Design Interactions is now teaching at Design Products and the product design projects start to look like the works for Design Interactions a few years ago (especially the radio project, a late cousin of the IDII’s Strangely Familiar project when I was there in 2005). The Design Interactions projects are conceptually mostly based on either statistics, exploitation of the edges of society and in general not very self-explanatory. Maybe that’s what that course aims to do, to make us aware of problems to come and simply attempt to illustrate solutions or consequences. But then is that even design anymore or simply creative naysaying?

Few projects were really self-explanatory, and well isn’t that what art is about? You read the description to give you a contextual framework in which to understand what you’re seeing. Devoid of those explanations, I would challenge anyone to understand what was happening. Again, not a good or a bad thing, just a trend it seems.

Bless their hearts the IDE course presented loads of great work, themed on the next generation of mobiles (with the network 3) and global warming solutions for the household.

In strange way, the whole show could have been presented along an axis of time, answering the question: For who is it you are designing?
IDE would have answered: “someone from 2009″,
Design Products: “someone from 2011″ and
Design Interactions: “someone from 2025″.

Perhaps then for me would the show have made sense and so would the activity of designing and future-casting associated with it.

• Together for London | Community and education | Transport for London
  meh, from what I’ve experience so far on Hackney buses, this sort of campaign is not going to have much impact. Adults aren’t usually the ones being obnoxious, but the younger generation.
  (tags: transportation london social)

Reminds me of The Hungries project I was involved in with my friends Dana and Alejandro.

• Nanika
  Fabulous Flash / Interactive work here.
  (tags: flash interaction design retail)

• modu – make new connections
  Really nice teaser for what seems to be some sort of mobile/music/stuff device.
  (tags: mobile advertising)

• Philip Dick-inspired electroluminescent shirt – Boing Boing
  My talented friend and fellow IDIIer Alejandro on BoinBoing! Fab!
  (tags: interaction design wearables)

• Interactive Labs
  Nice visual/interactive work here
  (tags: UK interaction design)

I recently had the pleasure of meeting some of the great people behind a book on services in the tourism industry. Andres explained to me that they had written this book in Estonia (only has been translated to Finnish so far) and was working on setting up a BA in service design.

This was great news, as I often feel that how you teach people can influence the way an industry shapes itself. I quickly realised though that we were talking about services in really different ways. He was talking about the classic and slightly corporate view of the “service industries” like tourism, catering, etc and imagined the alumni of this program to work in middle managment in bridging ideas between people on an execution level and the upper management. Quite a different perspective than my own on the subject.
This makes me think that service design, in the way that I was taught and people talk about in the UK, can be interpreted in a really different way and a little like interaction design, might create a gap between the way a field is taught and the practice. Definitions are always useful and I get the feeling that in these pioneering years of service design, we’re gonna need one really quickly.

• Everywhere Magazine
  This should be linked to Dopplr somehow
  (tags: travel2.0)

As I struggle to keep my head away from tinkering for more than 15 minutes, I’ve realised a few things so far:

- there is a fine balance to be struck between saying yes and saying no

- people are, in general, quite unforgiving of any mistakes, even if you’re starting out

- money is always an issue

- hiring is difficult

- you have to be able to give up control if you want to go forward, but give up too much and all hell breaks loose

- be sure to know what you’re good at and what you’re not

- I only end up doing things I “trained for” 10% of my time, means I have to learn the other 90% on the fly

• Smarter Clothing Care Labels » Yanko Design
  Not sure i would want an RFID tag rubbing the back of my neck
  (tags: RFID clothing)