designswarm thoughts

Oh my, this is the first time there’s a stellar evening associated with the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design is organizing an event with senior members called Voices of Design which take place on May 3rd and is moderated by my once-upon-a-time professor and experience designerLuc Courchesne. Don’t miss it, thoughts about the world of industrial design and how far its gone…

So because of feedback during the exam, i decided to sign up for Last.fm and see what all the fuss is about.

Good things:
1- Interesting ways to surf for music and good indication of the popularity of a song
2- I like the simplicity of the interface and browsing through the different elements of the “service” if one can really call it that, i’m not sure at this point.
3- Kind of a direct way to buy music, not so dissimilar to iTunes
4- I like the friends/neighbours category.

Elements that might need improvement:
1- How on earth do you find someone with your tastes??? Very hard to properly browse for users although each user has an interesting profile. i think that this is the feature that lacks the most innovation for tis service. It’s also extremely anonymous in the visual display of users, no sense of where users are from, and can one really look for someone based on location? isn’t the great thing about music to be able to hook up with people who share your interests and not your location?

I think that i am definitely no interested in making this service i am developing a way for people to browse other users as a main element. I am much more interested in displaying and developing a platform for music exchange that documents use and history of the listening habits, catering to small communities of people who know each other, are flirting, are using music as a way to discover what they are about. This, i think is the best way to discover someone and be introduced to new music.

Had my exam 1 on friday, some really nice crits were there: Mark Delaney from Plan Design, Jay Melican from Intel research, Chris Downs from Live|Work and Steve Thompson from Newport School of Art and Design in Wales.

I hate to say the critique was very harsh and pointed out some really important gaps in my thinking , maybe related to the fact that i had so little time to prepare for this exam, right after Salone. Well that’s no excuse really. So i thought id make a diagram of the foundation of my thesis so i avoid having to discuss it again and can go: here it is and avoid a lot of communication problems i encountered in my presentation.

So essentially I am looking at sustainability and the ways in which our society is supposed to address it. Through concepts like PSS (Product Service Society and service design, we are advocating that we should do more with less; use more services and less material objects, transition from a society that values access versus ownership. I think that this is a very valuable way of looking at the future but it hardly addresses the designer’s role and how we design within and for these services. If we are advocating that we should use less, does that mean that we should care more and therefore throw away or discard less? When we talk about high tech personal devices, we often find ourselves with a little bit of ause-phobia mainly because use and the degradation of those objects is not something that is desirable or appealing. I am calling this negative history. What i seek to find out is if we can design for “positive history” or to create meaningful object-subject relationships by using and treating fabrics as a material that displays history in an appealing and engaging way. History of use is something desirable in a pair of jeans or a teddy bear, so why not in a high tech device?

To test this theory out, i wanted to find a design space that would allow me to address mack of emotional relationships and i found that the area of music and its more recent form the mp3 and its player was a convenient case study. With the disappearance of a physical token for music and an ephemeral attachment to its containers, this was the perfect area to start.

So there, I have laid down the foundation of my thinking for this thesis and can now concentrate on the design work that is necessary for the next review which will take place on the 15th and 16th of June 2006.

The redesigned radios were on show at Salone del Mobile 2006 and are still at La Fabbrica del Design till the 22nd of april from 12 to 17 every day except the 16th and 17th.

Hope to see you there!