designswarm thoughts

I’m slightly baffled at what’s going on in design at the moment. Never more has the term “designer” meant something completely superficial, not so useful, egocentric and unsustainable. And at the same time, in business circles, the term “design” is being hailed as the great solution to a changing economy and market. Has the concept of design diluted itself so much we can’t tell one from the other?

When I was taught industrial design , it was always about problem solving. If the problem wasn’t valid, didn’t affect enough people or the research was poorly done, then the professors would shoot you down. I still feel that’s a great academic approach.

When did design start being about “making a statement”? Is it because it’s easier to think of a general public of “all” as opposed to a public of “some”. Is it because it’s easier to produce just the one piece than to care about bigger production and it’s impact. Is it because designers envy the glamour of art? Is “designer” a new way to say “applied artist”?

I don’t have an answer to these yet… but we should collectively come up with some and quickly if we want to still know what design is supposed to stand for.

A few links that brought this up:
+ Design is the problem by Nathan Shedroff.
++ But is it art? at Intersections07
+++Philippe Starck @ TED.

Found while doing online xmas browsing.

According to John Lewis, girls can only see the color pink.

Stupid.

This is just wild!.

Since I’m involved with way too much technology, leading activities for tinker.it! in London, and helping out Tom with thinking about the future internet of things, I suppose it’s only normal I’m also spending time on technology-light projects as well.

I worked on to&fro(muji) with Dave last August and we submitted the idea to the Muji Award 02. The second edition of this international conference, the theme this year was “re”. Re-do, re-use, re-think etc…

We focused on reviving a lost art of letter writing. Taking the idea of RE-spond, RE-use and RE-think, we wanted to inject this activity with some of the components of it’s more modern counterpart: email.

The reversible envelope allows you to write the name of the sender and receiver once. As you write your letter on the perforated letter-paper provided, you can choose to tear the leftovers after you’re done (leaving no space for a reply if it’s a “dear john” kind of letter :) ) or not. Put your letter in and fold up the envelope and make sure your “to” will match the adress you’ve written down. Put a stamp on the right hand corner and send it.

The person who receives it gets to open the envelope and reply with the space you’ve left, deciding whether to keep your letter or not. He/she simply reverses the envelope (as the adress turns from “from” to “to”) includes her reply and sends it along.

Check out the Flickr set for this project.

Enjoy!

As I’m flying to Amsterdam for a few days tomorrow, I had to literally squeeze my london design festival experience in 2 days. Yesterday was dedicated to designersblock and today was 100%design at Earl’s Court. Some nice finds there, still too many tiles, bathroom fixtures and lighting design, and not much interaction design but there were a few nice things and some weird ones too.

Tomoaki Yanagisawa, former RCA student I met a few years ago in L.A. presented his fabulous project Luminos.

“Luminos are bricks in darkness. Like a candle needs a fire to light it up, Luminos, which have light sensors and LEDs, need light to turn the LEDs on.
This is a simple and intuitive interaction yet it has the possibility of complexity of a chain reaction created by configurations of Luminos like dominoes and bricks.”

Cassi Hill presented a series of fabric life-like lamps that you can wrap up around your apartment.

Yeon Juyang designed some interesting looking lamps, I can’t feeling there could be more to them, just not sure what.

And finally I had the great pleasure of seeing one of the few academics I truly admire, Jonathan Chapman talk about emotionally sustainable design in product lifecycle, at the 100%sustainable booth.

One strange thing I noticed is that several exhibitors were members of a so-called Anti copying in design association, clearly showing that the open-source phenomenon is not making any headway in product design yet.

An interesting online battle is being fought these days on the productdesign2.0 scene.

Ponoko just launched (I first heard about them back in May). Part online gallery, part market, part distributed manufacturing, they are catering to the creative industries to provide their catalogue. Think of is as a mash-up between Etsy and Amazon’s business model.

On the other side we have Crowdspirit which relies on people giving ideas about new products, the community votes and most popular ideas get manufactured. Slower pace, smaller slice of the pie (it’s only for electronic products) and reliant on the quality of the community’s ideas.

Who will win?

(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!

(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?

I’ve had the pleasure in the past few years of working on a number of great projects with some fabulous people but The Hungries really does hold a special place in my heart. This is why I’m glad to say we‘ve finally launched the website and are looking into making these wonderful creatures more than just a prototype. Can’t say much more at the moment but go and check it out!

There’s a habit in the world of product design to only concentrate on the object, its design, the supposed environment in which it would be used (think ikea catalogues where the occasional good looking Swedish person will show up to pick up a spoon from a drawer) and not really on it’s use… For example the Cima ladder, featured in my Core 77 feeds today…

Ok it’s a ladder that looks pretty… and it basically forces you to climb… but holy shit i would be scared senseless to try to change a light-bulb with this, forget trying to paint a wall, i can’t steady my feet on the same level. Perception of stability when doing vertically challenging activities is more important than esthetics… so this ladder reduces any possibility of doing anything that’s independent of a wall… which is why I would need a ladder in the first place no? … as for coming “out of the closet and stand proudly in the salon of the house.”, i don’t have that much space to spare.

So when we’re talking about sustainable product design, and using smart materials, etc… can we also perhaps expect designers to come up with designs that are smart and have the potential to be used in more ways than one? In this case provide the same function as the original product and not less. A “No one-liner” policy would be a great start, otherwise we will keep cultivating the egos of aesthetic and material-based designs with poorer functions and uses…

There’s been a little of bit of a talk lately about service (wopps i’m sorry experience) design and what it means to have multiple touch points and how this shapes a user experience.

What’s perhaps left aside here is how important the quality of those individual touch points is. As a designer and business owner, the more you have, the more you have to deal with, the less likely you’ll be able to achieve a uniformity in the quality of your service.

I’ll give you an example. Yesterday, Matt & I went all the way to North Greenwich (if you don’t live in london, well it’s far from the centre) to go to a Comet warehouse. Looking to buy a major appliance, we figured that going to the store and seeing them would be better than the useless online catalogues with tiny images that never really give you a good idea of proportions.

This place was a huge warehouse with only about 3 sales people which didn’t really matter because we were browsing at the beginning. Once we found what we were looking for, we waited around 10 minutes before someone came to see us.

The young man obviously had other fish to fry (other customers i mean) so when we started getting a little too technical, asking him about delivery, range of products, etc… he quickly suggested we go check online because the range of offer was “better” and there would be all the detaisl. He then walked off to his next customer. Annoyed, we walked off, vowing never to deal with these people again.

We ended up buying from Curry’s online when we came back home.

Lesson here: When one touch point fails, no matter how many others you may have as backup, the experience will always remain negative. There is no “win back” here.

I’ve often said that in the wonderful world of product design, a sure sign that you’ve made it is that your chair design gets produced by a company like Flos. There’s a certain top-down process here where a designer will decide what context a chair lives in and the company sells that dream to the end consumer in glossy magazines.

If however, you want to see a chair be a coffin, a taxi, be used to hang someone, in a church, a bar, or in a home, go see Steven Berkoff’s play adaptation of On the Waterfront, which I went to see with Matt, at the Hackney Empire.

He uses the chair not as a simple prop but as a character in itself, more than you can say for most designers.

I always deeply hated the Cabbage Patch Kids as a child so this seems somewhat comforting :)

via 7Gadgets

Ok so we all agree that the planet is in trouble right? Regardless of whether that’s our fault or the neighbors right? Right.

So why on earth have we decided to allow for one of the most polluting industry to take off and become commercially available? Are we that suicidal?

So let’s have a look at the possible sources of pollution of a space shuttle, just for shits and giggles…

1. Energy consumed in the launch (from Madsci Network):

“Space shuttle fuel consumed in a launch: 3.5 million pounds
Gasoline consumed in one day in the US - 2,500 million pounds
In other words, one space shuttle launch is equivalent to about two minutes
of gasoline consumption in the United States.”

2. Hydrochloric acid production (from BBC):

“All shuttle launches can nonetheless have damaging impacts on the local environment. […] “The classic example of environmental impact is in Kazakhstan at the Baikonur launch site, where there are reports of quite serious environmental damage.”

For most shuttles, the damage comes from the solid rocket boosters[…]
As a shuttle launches, a “cloud” becomes visible which contains SRB exhaust products, either dissolved or as particles in the water vapour released by the main engines.

Hydrochloric acid formed in this launch cloud leads to acidic deposits in the surrounding area, a phenomenon which may also be observed some distance away if exhausts are carried on prevailing winds.

The scenes of dead fish in Spain could be repeated next to launch sites
John Pike, president of Global Security.org, and an expert on the US space programme says: “The hydrochloric acid can pit the paint on your car if it is too close to the launch site.”

3. Everything else (from a 1997 report on General space tourism):

“A myriad of legal and regulatory aspects of public space travel and tourism must be resolved before viable large scale businesses can emerge. This is especially true of those public agencies with the responsibility to regulate in the interest of public safety. This includes identification of public policies and/or laws that exist or must be enacted to enable business formation, licensing, certification and approval processes for both passengers and vehicles, clearance and over-flight considerations, and environmental and safety issues including atmospheric pollution, solar radiation (flares) and orbital debris.”

I certainly hope that these issues have been dealt with because the “design coating” that’s happening around this industry these days is making me sick.