designswarm thoughts

Spotted on the world’s favorite waste of time: FB.

There’s clearly something wrong with the delivery of a service if it makes me think “oh what a waste”. This reflects poorly on the company, it’s brand and it’s supposed values, especially when I’m already aware I’m being unsistainable by using the service.

1st example:
Last week during a doze on the Eurostar a member of staff woke me up (!!!) by pushing a leaflet on me that described what their specials were at the restaurant car. I always valued the Eurostar experience as one of the best, especially their ability to generally leave me alone to just enjoy the ride. This has definitely changed things as not only are they wasting a lot of paper for trivial advertising but they actually encourage rude behavior from their staff.
2nd example:
Today on the Gatwick express, I bought a bottle of water, only to have a napkin given to me with it. Did I look like I could spill it all over the place? I realised it was made in the Netherlands for Starbucks and had the clever and oh so ironic “less napkins, more plants, more planet” printed on it. As you’re being handed a napkin so uselessly, this tagline really is reduced to hypocritical corporate advertising.

“Caring from a distance”

The tagline for a telecare (read remote care for the elderly) conference last year. Somehow doesn’t quite get the point across.

I’ve finally found some time to have a proper read through Baudrillard’s System of objects to find it really is shaping my thinking around material culture and technology. Some quick thoughts based on quotes from the book:

“No sooner does an object lose its concrete practical aspects than it is transferred to the realm of mental practices”.

This made me think today about my first mentor if I can call him so. Hywel Jeffcott was my DTC teacher when I was 14-16 and the first one to truly encourage me to go into design. He gave me, on graduating from Year 11, a fabulous book I ended up endlessly flipping through called The Way things work by David Macauley. I think in a way the work I am doing with Tinker tries to somehow get back to the idea that innovation and technology are also palpable things that can be understood down to simple components. Simple components, simple actions that exist within the real of direct application are part of an art and a craft that in design is left to “fabricators”.
“Man has to be reassured by some sense of participation, albeit a merely formal one”

I think there’s much to be said about the fear that technology will take over. Baudrillard highlights an inconsistency in our thinking where we want technology to be as human as possible but if a sense of agency is too present (such as in articifial intelligence) then a line has been crossed which fills us with apocalyptic fears. We want so much for this technology to know about us and our needs, but not _that_ much. Where this line lies depends almost entirely on context of application, which means it isn’t policed and all sorts of privacy issues and concerns arise. It’s what he calls the “new anthropomorphism”.
“No man’s land between workplace and family home” is a metaphor that Baudrillard applies to the automobile. I think it can almost potentially extend to the cell phone. A personal object that is used so publicly and bridges space and time.

In any case, I truly recommend it as compulsory reading for designers. It is full of insights and questions about the great illusion we are creating and the mechanisms  and motivations that work just under the surface of  our everyday life.

Ok so del.icio.us sucks right now.

After sending them 3 support emails and no reply or help whatsoever, I’ve decided to suspend my daily automated posting and go for a sidebar posting instead. Yes I know most people don’t actually visit my site and RSS is king, but I can’t stand this anymore and I’m pretty sure it annoys you guys as well…
Grumble, I hope they wake up or I’ll look into other automated bookmarking options…

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.

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

I must confess I hardly find the time to keep updated on world events, a sad side-effect of being involved in a startup, manufacturing hell and freelancing at the same time.

Living in navel-gazing London hasn’t made things easier and if anything, for me, 2007 was the first year in a long time when the focus shifted away from the ongoing and evermore subliminal war in Iraq to sad, ridiculous and horrible small human stories.

From Britney Spears’s  embarassing love and hate relationship with a paparazzi-ridden life, to Amanda Knox’s sadistic behavior in jail after a murder only Agatha Christie would have been tempted to write about, to Maddie McCanns sad yet banal disappearance (banal when so many others go missing every day in the UK alone) ending with articles on how to take a good Facebook profile picture, it’s as if we all desperately wanted to forget about bigger issues.

I thought that sustainability would actually lead the way with Al Gore dominating headlines in early spring, but as the months went by, not unlike war and obesity, apathy took over and it slowly became someone else’s problem, or marketing strategy.

Here’s to 2008, the year where hopefully, bigger things will matter again.

Has anyone else noticed some creepy similarities between Windows and Leopard in those extremely annoying pop-ups asking something along the lines of:
“This application has been downloaded from the Internet, are you sure you want to open it?”

My answer to this is simple:
Yes, and before this, that was why I was using a Mac in the first place! Because it would trust my judgment as a user, to know what on earth I was doing. Otherwise I probably wouldn’t have upgraded to Leopard in the first place, I would have gone back to my desktop Windows PC. And if this is a way to make it easier for Windows users to switch (because God knows they’re used to popups being part of their lives) then that’s just smoke and mirrors. Switching to Mac is a pain, it _will_ take months of adaptation, but it’s worth it.

I’ve been working a lot and I admit, more than is probably required by your average human. I barely keep on top of email, check the odd flickr photo, haven’t opened my RSS reader in weeks, haven’t done my Xmas shopping and barely managed to squeeze in a haircut after 2 months without one.

I think I need a new generation of portable technology that let’s me keep up with the world when I’m on the go (what do you mean cell phones already do that?).

Give me till saturday and I’ll be back on track I promise!

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.

(Another set of random ideas about the Internet of things)

Matt likes to show off to me his latest games and Portal got my attention.

If you don’t know the game, pictured above is the “Weighted Companion Cube” that you have to save and move as the game progresses and “take care of”.

It’s really interesting to me that a relationship is encouraged with this virtual object that is in essence, not classically attractive. Building this online relationship of course meant that now there are rumors that the cube will be available in plush for this Xmas.

It’s now becoming apparent that relationships of desire towards “objects” can be first established online, through experience of a game, to then lead to an offline sale and expansion of that relationship in the real world through a very different experience.

This is all getting a bit surreal.

Sustainability, product-based values, product design, desire, China, US, values, and a partridge in a pear tree…

It makes me chuckle to eavesdrop on people who have pre-conceived ideas of what it’s like to freelance.

“Oh I don’t want a 9-5 job” they say. Yes that’s true, if you freelance you will be working ALL THE TIME if you’re not careful. Most of your time will be spent looking for those “next steps” and your evenings and weekends will be taken over by client work that needs to be done.

Yes you’ll be better paid, but less often and usually not on time.

Regardless of these factors, as I write this post at the end of a shattering day, knowing that the rest of the week will probably kill me as well, I still like being a freelancer. But it’s definitely not for everyone.

Before attending thishappened last night I was invited by Garrick Jones to attend an informal discussion on web2.0 hosted at the Hospital, a very chichi private club in Soho.

Nothing could have been more further away from how I thought businessmen perceive the value of the now 3 year old term. I should have known better, of course and quickly recalled a client who asked me last year to produce a document on the business value of growing a community online. le sigh.

Here are some answers to parts of that conversation that stood out for me, since the conversation was pretty much taken over by 4 quite aggressive, serious types in a room of 20 sheepish looking observers (i’d kill to know who on earth these people were!).

1. The future of the web is NOT in paying people for their time.

That’s called work. People interact online because it’s fun, they learn stuff, they laugh, they read and educate themselves about the world, and they can meet new people in ways noone would have thought possible. Oh, and Second Life is not a good example of monetisation on the web (WoW is much better at it).
Paying contributors for their time and effort has proven to be an unsuccessful model (check out some thought about this on theWealth of Networks Chapter 4, an article in the O’Reilly radar, and the founder of wikitravel). A vivid example is why, Yahoo answers won against Google answers.

2. Facebook, mySpace, Second Life and Boingboing aren’t the only things online.

These 4 were the most used examples during the entire conversation ( a gentleman from Nokia mentioned Get Satisfaction which was the only new example) and I do not think they represent the spectrum of web2.0 interactions.

3. Stop thinking the Internet is just a dump.

Not unlike a huge library where people don’t put the books back where they left them, the web is full of information which isn’t relevant to EVERYONE but to SOME. Live with that and leave it alone. Not everything is meant to be organised and controlled. Again think word “fun”.

4. Web2.0 can be stronger than corporations, even the online corporations and if you don’t take control of your company’s voice online, you can be sure someone else will.

I have 2 words for you as worthy examples:HD-DVD and Crapwest. If you don’t want something like this to happen to your company every time you piss people off, take part in the conversation online, the worst thing that can happen is that people will challenge you to offer better services.

So in short web2.0 is immensely useful to businesses if they’re wiling to dig a little deeper than the Facebook “you have a new message” emails. (yes someone did refer to that as an example of web2.0 interactions!)

I won’t even try to address some of the silli comparisons to traditional warlord models that were brought up and I wish I had stayed longer talk through some of these points with people, but I had to dash off to a much lovelier crowd in Shoreditch.