Learning about Business Models from the Field

Learning business processes is seen as the exclusive domain of the management graduate and not that of the designer, however as teachers at NID we realized that without this knowledge being integrated into the product creation and development process, the impact of the new product or service offering would be essentially incomplete.

From Prof MP Ranjan of NID's Design Concepts and Concern's class blog on the systems design of business models - check out these entries on "Information strategies for research", "design opportunities in water" and more.


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eVolo, mmm... skyscraper I love you
The eVolo book presents the best 60 projects of the '06, '07, and '08 Skyscraper competition. Founded in 2003, the eVolo architecture group challenge students, architects and designers to question what the skyscraper will be in the beginning of the XXI Century. The site's sample pages are loaded with some great ideas and renderings, pictured above is an urban ski mountain concept by Natalie Ghatan.

Thanks Bruno

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Why can't we get trends right?
Debate time: Why are we so often wrong about the way new products and services will affect our lives? TV, said radioheads, would kill our imaginations. The VCR and the DVD, said movie studios, would kill their business. The ubiquity of computers was supposed to bring us paperless offices.

The latest mistaken prediction was that the internet--a simple way of sending electronic correspondence--would precipitate a sharp decline in snail mail. Of course, just the opposite has happened. Postal markets worldwide are continuing to grow. Germany, one of the largest European mail markets, saw increased overall volume of one billion pieces from 2003 to 2006. New Zealand's mail spike has been directly linked to the internet. In America alone, eBay is responsible for an estimated 1 billion packages a year that wouldn't have been sent when people couldn't see the contents of your attic online; Netflix has been shipping 2 million movies a day since at least 2005; and most of us are now getting a paper bill in the mail we didn't get 20 years ago, the DSL bill.

Which is not to say we're always wrong: the telephone did in fact lead to a decline in personal, handwritten letters, cell phones make us drive like jerks, and the music business is most definitely dying. (That latter fact, however, may have less to do with MP3s and more to do with the fact that most new music, well, sucks.) But we're not putting this entry up so we can pat ourselves on the back for correct predictions--we're interested in what makes us wrong. How can we, as product designers, look past the obvious and truly understand what global trends will really mean to us as end-users?

Suggestions please!

Sources: 1, 2, 3


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Feng-GUI Heat Maps Show You Whether Your Website Is Hot or Not
The Feng-GUI heat map service is an automatic alternative to eye-tracking. The heat map is a composition of several algorithms from neuroscience studies of Feature integration theory, Salience, Visual Attention, eye-tracking sessions, perception and cognition of humans. Or in English: "What people are looking at?"

Google's heat map? No wonder that they score well in brand ranking.


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One Hour Design Challenge WINNER!: TheftProof Bike Seat Lock
Okay, we know that the amount of negative space in the seat shaft is slim, and that the cable's gonna be similarly slim, but the winner of the most recent One Hour Design Challenge to design a better bike lock is RBAid's "TheftProof Bike" seat lock system. We liked that this solution embraces and exploits the behavior that people are already engaged in, and the fact is that this concept never failed to put a smile on the face of anyone we showed it to. So charm gets you half-way RBAid, but it would've been nice to see some iteration on external coiling, or another approach that preserved the "they're already taking the bike seat off" insight, but stood up to robustness constraints. (Oh, and bonus points if the spelling of "combonation" was ironic.)

Some notables: Special mention should go out to tadatadatada's "belt system," thinksketch's "integrated bike lock and pump," sprawlers' "don't lock your bike; ride your lock," kallol mohanty's "lock it graphically," and Jesse Daniels' "blue ink 'sposion!"

Check out these and other submissions right here.

Big thanks to everyone who participated in this 1HDC, and congrats, RBAid! Hope you enjoy your $200 gift certificate at Harris Cyclery!


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Milan Preview 2008: Tuttobene
Core friends from the flatlands Tuttobene are back for their 5th consecutive year presenting work from 28 young designers. They're also taking over the Nhow Hotel basement to create a Tuttobene Design Forest, a space which can be viewed through the glass floor entry of the hotel. And Tuttobene cyclists will be roaming the streets of the Zona Tortona offering directions and perhaps even a ride if you can swing it. Don't forget to register for the party unless you like watching from the door.

Tuttobene
Spazio Mortara
Via Mortara 15, Milan
April 16 - 21, 2008

Tuttobene FOCUS on NATURE
Nhow Hotel
Via Tortona 35, Milan
April 16 - 21, 2008


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Soapfusion
Our favorite showertime activity: Take a tiny, used bar of soap, jam it onto a new bar of soap, and squeeze like heck. Add some hot shower water and presto, you've successfully created a soapglomerate. (It's not exactly CERN, but we like to think on some level we've achieved molecular fusion.)

The folks over at DesignNoDoubt don't seem to share our enthusiasm--they've designed something called the Soap Bank, a kind of porous stocking that holds used bars of soap, rendering them usable within their own little gallows. We can't deny it's inventive...but we prefer the soap-atom-smashing.

via yanko design


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Concrete But Different #1: Concrete Curtains
The next weeks we'll be featuring new applications of well-known materials to refresh our material thinking. We are starting off with a very usual material indeed: concrete!

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Please update your bookmarks if you are still filing concrete under "rough and clumsy". The Concrete Curtain by Memux architectural design from Vienna redefines the use of concrete with this unusual application.

The curtain might have the looks of a thick fabric but is actually a set of small concrete elements gathered on a flexible mesh of geo-textile. The play of light and it's sluggish movement by the wind gives concrete a more soft and poetic character.

via bright


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Dwell on Design '08
The 2008 Dwell on Design Conference will be held on June 5th and 6th in Los Angeles, the very city that will be the focus of many discussions and lectures in the realms of sustainability, architecture, urban planning, interiors, products, and landscapes. The very long list of speakers includes Eric Garcetti, Council President of LA, Benjamin Ball of Ball-Nogues Studio, Enrico Bressan, Principal at Artecnica, Jenna Didier of Fountainhead Design, Monica Gilchrist and Walker Wells of Global Green, Leo Marmol of Marmol Radziner, and many, many more. The Exhibition, open on June 7th and 8th, will feature a marketplace where visitors can check out new products, interiors, pre-fab structures and more design-y stuff from over 200 exhibitors. This weekend will also feature home tours of LA's Westside Single Family Homes and an inside look into Downtown urban living.

Dwell on Design '08
June 5 - 8, 2008
Los Angeles Convention Center

Conference : $349 ($149 for students)
Exhibition : $25 ($50 at the door, complimentary for trade)


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Not Content with Enormous, Weird Buildings, Chinese Government will Also Engineer the Weather at Beijing Olympics
From MIT Technology Review, a so-bizarre-it-must-be-true story on plans already in the works to make sure it doesn't rain on the 2008 Olympics, no matter what.

The details of how this gets done are mighty impressive, starting with a supercomputer-driven weather tracking system that gives hourly forecasts for the Beijing area, specific to within a kilometer. Once an errant cloud is spotted though, the big guns are hauled out. Literally.

Then, using their two aircraft and an array of twenty artillery and rocket-launch sites around Beijing, the city's weather engineers will shoot and spray silver iodide and dry ice into incoming clouds that are still far enough away that their rain can be flushed out before they reach the stadium.

The obvious implications of technological hubris are dealt with in a smart and balanced way in the remainder of the story, with nods to some of China's other massive technological undertakings like the Three Gorges Dam, and a brief but engaging history of weather control systems across the globe. Worth a read, if only to see what it looks like when you take "designing your environment" to its logical extreme.


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Window of energy-saving opportunity
The sunlight-window relationship is a simple one: during the day the former passes through the latter, giving us interior light. But Australian designer Damien Savio's Lightway is a window that can conceivably extend that relationship into a 24-hour affair.

The Lightway--details of which are still proprietary--works by absorbing sunlight during the day, storing it in a battery, and giving that light off at night. The time ratio is quite good--four hours of sunshine will give you six hours of 60-watt shine. Savio went with louvers rather than straight glass for his first model, because the individual louvers can be removed and used like ambient flashlights. The OLED-loaded device has been nominated for the Australian Design Awards-Dyson Student Award.

"Whenever I do a design I just want to do something different and something that stands out," says Savio. "I like that with this, you don't even know it's a light until it's on."

via sydney morning herald


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Concrete But Different #2: Inflatable Houses
We featured "Concrete Curtains" earlier but what does concrete have to do with lightweight architecture? Researchers at the Kassel University are exploring new synergies of constructions and materials - including a combination of membrane constructions and concrete.

To create this lightweight building out of concrete, a flexible skin with an embedded membrane structure is inflated with air and filled up with a special concrete mixture such as UHPC (Ultra High Performance Concrete). Once the substance is hardened a solid concrete skeleton allows the building to be finished from the inside.

Instant housing such as these concrete-based Concrete Canvas Shelters are made to save lives in refugee camps. If Kassel's research works out well, building a solid house might become as quick and easy and as blowing up a big balloon?


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DIY Shopping Bag Wallet
And finally if you're looking to upgrade that Duct Tape wallet you made last year, but not quite ready to drop your hard earned cash on a freitag, then instructables might just have the answer.


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Special thanks to Aart van Bezooyen, Niti Bhan and Carl Alviani for their contributions to this weeks newsletter!

Please share the Monday Morning Must Read with colleagues, clients and collaborators. Many email programs do not forward messages in their original format, so please use this link: http://www.designdirectory.com/blog/newsletter

Email us your feedback and comments. We are looking for stories, case studies and global news on where and how design can make the difference.

Event Review: Times Talk: Designing the Car of the Future

For car designers, these might well be both the worst and best of times. As for the bad: some automakers are forecasting the lowest sales since 1998; emissions seem to have become the new tobacco in terms of public ire and (in other countries) regulation; and with each new lawsuit, designers are beholden to increasingly draconian safety standards. On the upside, these are noble challenges to meet -- the kinds of constraints that will, in theory, make for safer, cleaner, and better looking cars. Maybe even all three at once.

Last Monday's Times Talk panel "Designing the Car of the Future," presented a provocative subsection of the automotive industry's leading design lights: Edward Welburn, VP of Global Design at GM; Joel Piaskowski, Chief Designer, Hyundai Kia; and Franz von Holzhausen, Director of Design at Mazda North America.
read complete article






All work and all play at Google Zurich

It's no secret that Zurich Googlers inhabit an office that puts your foosball fun time corner to shame, and there's no better way to spur envy than through a photo gallery put together by the Googsters themselves. Also check out this recent BBC video and article that delves into the inner workings of this ultimate alterna-workspace's benefits like sliding into work rather than taking the elevator.

thanks bryman!

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photo:Marie Richie

RSS Alert: New Article up at Coroflot's Creative Seeds: Eight Things They Never Taught You About Networking, by Carl Alviani

Over at Coroflot's Creative Seeds blog Carl Alviani has compiled a short list of specifics that aim to shed a little more light on this crucial but undefinable skill, networking. Read the beginning of a few...

"1.It's not about the first impression, it's about the third.
You know what they say about the Third Date, right? There's a reason the number three has so much meaning attached to it in relationships, and it's true in professional networking as well.

2. A nice business card is nice, but it's just a piece of paper.
I remember the first time I had business cards printed up--500 of them, for Design Week in New York. They were dreadful, but to me they signified that I had arrived. I must have handed out 150 of those things over the course of the week, and I'm confident 99.5% of them never got looked at again.

3. Obsequious: Look it up. And don't be it."

>>read full article<<

Nike's "garbage" shoes: Air Mary Shelleys?

As part of their "Considered Design" mandate, Nike has come up with a clever way to turn production scraps from their own factories into a complete shoe. The Nike Trash Talk (yep, that's the name) uses Frankenstyle stitching so that even tiny scraps can be incorporated into the uppers; the midsoles are made from scrap foam; and the outsoles are made from "environmentally-preferred rubber."

Currently available only in New York and New Orleans, the Trash Talks will go nationwide with Footlocker in April. And at 100 bucks a pop, they pass the savings onto...well, somebody, but not us!

Learn more about Nike's sustainability initiatives here.

via inhabitat

thanks jill!

Bank-sponsored playground design: how to plot fun from misery

Washington Mutual Bank, in conjunction with the non-profit KaBOOM!, is hosting a series of Design Days where children can design playgrounds to be built in ten US cities.

Kids, if you need inspiration for the shapes of your slides and climbing blocks, look no further than the US housing market. Have fun!

wheeeee!

sources: 1, 2, 3






Eiffel Tower Extension

Paris-based Architects Serero have won an open competition to redesign any of the Eiffel Tower's public reception and access areas. Serero's proposal is a temporary addition to celebrate the Eiffel Towers 120th Anniversary by extending the top floor without any modification to the existing structure. It will expand the usable floor area from 280m2 to 580m2.

The Eiffel tower in Paris suffers from its success. Since its creation the amount of visitors coming to reach its top has increased to reach its limit capacity. 6.5 millions People wait between 35 minutes to 1H10 to reach the elevators. The floor area of each level decreases with the height because of the tower geometry resulting in very long waiting lines and crowd management problems.

Designed by Gustave Eiffel, the Eiffel Tower was built for the 1889 Expo in Paris.

Via Bustler

read on






V&A Museum's China Design Now exhibition review.

I wanted to know what it was like to walk down a real street, not see this cleaned-up virtual reality. Where were the urban furniture, the crowded bazaars, the supermarket shelves, the red-light districts? Where were the videos of fashion shows to accompany the showroom dummies dressed in couture? I wanted real people to show me their homes and the design objects they lived with. Excuse me for using a trendy word, but this kind of exhibitions need to be much more of an immersive experience.

Even safely on design territory there was an omnipresent timidity. The curators make little attempt to define the emerging aesthetic of Chinese design - although it is detectable in the exhibition. Chinese elements surface in extremely elegant graphic design. In one poster, a leg in a black trouser is intertwined snake-like with another leg decorated with Chinese florally patterned cloth - a neat symbol of modernisation. Literary magazines, meanwhile, use striking monochromatic designs based on Chinese letters. Another purely Chinese quality is the evocation in haute couture ballgowns of the imperial golden age of 1930s Shanghai.

Via "Chinese Art of Deception", Evening Standard

Those of us unable to see the Victoria & Albert Museum's long awaited exhibition on design in China can enjoy it vicariously through reviews. The exhibition opened yesterday and will continue till 13 July.






Different approaches to cell phone design

Though we don't think about it often, cell phones are revolutionary in that 20 years ago few of us had them, and now everyone's got one. Like many products, their designs currently suffer from a "hit" mentality, where a new design becomes a must-have for an ever-shrinking amount of time; anyone remember the Razr, or the Star-TAC?

A Forbes article takes a look at different approaches to cell phone design, from Neonode--the most innovative cell manufacturer you've never heard of--to the big dogs, like Nokia with their $4 billion R&D department, and Sony-Ericsson with their "Clamshell Center of Excellence." Motorola's messing with alternative energy sources while carrier T-Mobile is looking to students at the Illinois Institute of Technology's Institute of Design, who are in turn "staking out their local Starbucks" in a bid to see what well-caffeinated cell users do. Click here to witness the amusing scramble of all the players trying to knock one out of the park.






200-page sketch blogging PDF of TED 2008

The most recent TED conference was captured in writing, on video, and through photos, as always and as expected. But a new medium was tested using Autodesk's BigViz system (Wacom tablets and Sketchbook Pro) and the artistry of visual cartographers David Sibbet and Kevin Richards who captured each presentation live and on the spot. The sketch-blogging session yielded over 700 sketches which have been rounded up into a hefty 200-page "book" that you can download as a PDF.






Softbank's animist cellie

And Finally, Softbank/Toshiba's latest cell phone (coming out April 2nd in Japan): more than meets the eye. The 815TPB has AI that lets it express its "moods" through the LCD, and poseable limbs that are hopefully not hooked up to servos--last thing we need is this little bugger ringing and running away from us because he's not in the mood to serve as a conduit for our calls.

via softbank mobile




Special thanks to Aart van Bezooyen, Niti Bhan and Ian Curry for their contributions to this weeks newsletter!

Please share the Monday Morning Must Read with colleagues, clients and collaborators. Many email programs do not forward messages in their original format, so please use this link: http://www.designdirectory.com/blog/newsletter

Email us your feedback and comments. We are looking for stories, case studies and global news on where and how design can make the difference.

RSS Alert: New Article up at Coroflot's Creative Seeds: The Pen is Mightier than the Pen: Why Writing Matters for Designers, by Carl Alviani.

Over at Coroflot's Creative Seeds blog Carl Alviani is adding spice to the discussion on the designers lost art form, writing. Where has the eloquence gone? Jumping two paragraphs in:

There was a time when facility and even eloquence with the written word was expected of just about every professional--creative or otherwise--and a lot of non-professionals too. Reading letters and business correspondence from the early part of the 20th century is a gently humbling experience, imparting pangs in the reader who realizes that a request for additional tacks by a carpenter in 1910 was written more elegantly than most correspondence between executives today. There are a range of reasons for this apparent decline--literacy rates are higher now, for example, and so the upper-class association that the written word once held has faded--but this is a larger, more academic question than I'm trying to answer here.

...designers create visual documents, and complain that their non-creative counterparts don't know how to read a sketch...

Read entire article...

Book Review: The Back of the Napkin, by Dan Roam.

When I was a little kid learning to draw, I always had the deepest admiration for comic book artists, along with a profound misconception. Upon actually purchasing a Marvel, DC, or later an Image publication, the reader sees only crisp, perfect drawings, with no construction lines. You see, many artists proffer an illusion. There are several steps to making a comic: In the first step, the artist sketches out a rough with a pencil, complete with construction lines (often this is done on a much larger scale than the final page, so large errors appear small when it's printed). Second, an "inker" comes in and goes over the rough sketch with a pen, darkening only the ideal lines and ignoring errors. Then finally, the "colorist" lays a palate of color over the work.

So for the viewer, the final result omits much of the work that went on in making a "perfect" layout. This sort of trickery is pervasive in art, where artists ranging from Van Gogh to Vermeer may have used a variety of tools like the grid or the camera obscura to attain accurate proportions. Thus a subterfuge has been pulled over the eyes of the viewing public, who are left thinking that artists possess talent beyond their own, when actually a lot of the work that went into art has been erased or covered up and reworked with oils.

As someone who has gone to art school and seen that the act of repetitive practice can turn a mediocre sketcher into someone the world sees as "talented," I have no trouble understanding where Dan Roam is coming from in his book The Back of the Napkin when he speaks to his readers about visual thinking. Frankly, it doesn't matter whether or not people can draw when they present their ideas. All the errant lines and mistakes that they make when drawing under pressure contribute to a sense of immediacy and urgency in the final product.

Roam is a consultant by trade, and I trust that he won't take offense when I say that while his "back of the napkin" sketches lack the technical prowess of a Rembrant or DaVinci, his simple line drawings are clear, concise and evocative of the emotional verve one sees (and casually discounts) in the "funny pages." This, of course, is precisely the point of his book: simple sketches are often more compelling than technically adept Power Point slides.

continue reading review...

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Beyond Fashion: Reviving Experimental Design, by Scott Klinker.

What's experimental in a Flat World?
A fragrance by Zaha Hadid. Jewelry for Tiffany's by Frank Gehry. Self-help books for hipsters by Karim Rashid. Signature designers had arrived in the luxury market long ago and by now it's ordinary. Radical or poetic form, once considered experimental, is the not-so-secret weapon of modern brand building. Where design once served industry, now industry often serves design. Here Design meets Art meets Fashion meets the Devil-wears-Prada Catch-22 of a culture industry starving for new icons and rocket-fueled by a viral Web. If the world is flat as Tom Friedman claimed, then so is design--stripped of the hierarchies that used to distinguish high and low, design and art, theoretical and applied. Has this newfound freedom produced wild experimental design thinking? Not enough. Instead, design's intellectual edge has been mostly employed by the vanities of a fashion system. Someday we may recall this period as design's fashion phase. Is it finally time to revive experimental design thinking from this fashion hangover?

It's not that fashion is bad, or unimportant. Design's marriage to Fashion was fated and permanent so that beauty and design storytelling are here to stay. It's just that it's not so experimental any more. The honeymoon is over. It's as if Memphis never died, and instead is continually reincarnated in an aesthetic economy endlessly hungry for new styles, with plenty of colorful characters ready to exploit new aesthetic markets. Outside this fashion system there are plenty of juicy design issues that deserve experimental exploration in search of new modern meanings. Experimental design is the way that design comes to know itself better and to advance its potentials. It's the way the field of design moves forward. Design has absorbed fashion. Uncharted waters await.

continue reading...

Orca Design's GreenHouse Effect exhibit.

In conjunction with the Singapore Design Festival, Beijing, Singapore, and Malaysia-based Orca Design launched its GreenHouse Effect exhibit, a conceptual exploration of sustainable solutions for the home. The collection tweaks products that we use daily to perform on a greener level, where a little change makes at least a little difference--better than none at all. Two of the items include the Post-It Notepad, which works as a notepad in one direction and sticky notes in reverse, and the Bottleneck Saver that restricts the flow on pumped products to ensure rations are economical and shampoos/soaps/lotions are used efficiently.

Classics Master: Interview with Kenneth Grange.

One of the founding partners of Pentagram, Kenneth Grange's CV reads like a list of iconic British products. During a career spanning half a century he has designed the UK's first parking meters, the Kodak Instamatic, the Kenwood Chef, razors for Wilkinson Sword, typewriters, loudspeakers, Anglepoise lamps, Parker pens, London taxi-cabs, and - arguably his crowning glory - the distinctive nose cone of the Inter-City 125. It is fair to say that few industrial designers have influenced so many areas of our lives.

The Engineer interviews Grange on his long career. Here's a snippet:

The designer's role, he said, is to make sure a product marries form and function in a way that will satisfy both marketing people and end users.

He said: '[a marketing department] might come to us with a brief with a strong fashion component but that might not have a strong slant on whether its functionally is as good as it should be. The designer has to use his wits to keep all these things in balance, one without the other is a lost opportunity - that is the nub of the designer's role.'

But Grange does not see much evidence of this fine balance today and believes that the disproportionate influence of the marketing department has changed the role of the designer for the worse.

RSS Alert: New Gallery up at Core77: New York Toy Fair 2008

Trends at this years fair (Jan 7-20) saw a much stronger focus on 'green' issues and a heightened awareness of safety with many manufactures overtly promoting their 'Made in the USA' status. To be expected, a larger proportion of toys were offering a virtual component to extend the experience.

>> View the Gallery Here <<

Bruce Sterling exhibition about digital manufacturing in Turin, Italy.

Digital manufacturing is about computerized creation, digital design.

Digital manufacturing tools now come in wide varieties of prices and capabilities. And, they're being hooked to the net and made available to artisans in studios. The virtual is actualizing. When? Now! Computer manufacturing produces objects, tools, products and fine-art works impossible to make through any other way.

Today was the opening of manufacturing, the central exhibition of the Turin-based Share Festival, this year curated by Bruce Sterling.

More photos [also here]

Design Observer joins the Coroflot Network.

We are thrilled to announce that Design Observer, one of the most esteemed design communities on the web, has partnered with Coroflot to launch their new Design Observer Job Board. Design Observer provides a global readership with outstanding design discourse, criticism, provocation, and, well...observations on design and the creative industries, and we are proud to welcome them into our network.

If you've got a creative job to post and are looking to attract the best talent, check out Coroflot.com and its partner sites Design Observer, Businessweek, How Magazine, ID Magazine, Print Magazine, and the Art Directors Club.

London Design Museum's top 100 designs.

"Brit Insurance Designs of the Year" is surely an unsexy title, but that's what the London Design Museum is calling their latest design roundup.

The first in an annual exploration of the most innovative, interesting and forward looking new work in design of all kinds. Selected from around the world, Brit Insurance Designs of the Year presents 100 projects nominated by a group of internationally respected design experts, curators, critics, practitioners and enthusiasts. These projects fall within seven categories: architecture, fashion, furniture, graphics, interactive, product and transport. The exhibition gives an overview of the most significant achievements in design and architecture in the last year, whether they are projects by a practice, a team or an individual.

With projects by Ron Arad, SANAA, Anthony Dickens, Nintendo, Apple, and others. Later this month a "winner" will be announced in each category, but the exhibit runs through April 27th.

Core77 One Hour Design Challenge: Theft Proof Bicycles.
Don't miss out! Win a $200 gift certificate at Harris Cyclery.

We all remember when our first Huffy was stolen. The realization that some lazy-eyed cretin had stripped away our freedom all for the purpose of a 15 minutes joy ride hit us like a ton of bricks. Maybe that was just me, but no one can argue that bike theft is rampant. A recent discussion on the Core77 Blog about a Biomega bike that attempts to turn the whole bike into the bike lock is the inspiration for our latest 1HDC incarnation. Can you design a better bike lock in one hour or less? Push aside that looming deadline and pick up your Sharpies...it's 1HDC time again! What can you bring to the table to prevent more Huffy Heartache?

Last Call:
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
1PM PST (8 GMT)

Theme:
Theft Proof Bicycles

JURY:
Winner will be selected by the Core77 Admin. Community discussion is encouraged to help ensure the best design wins.

thanks to ip_wirelessly for settin' this up!

>>>CLICK TO ENTER YOUR SUBMISSION<<<

DMI Design/Value Conference, Singapore.DMI International Singapore Conference began on March 13th in Singapore, on the theme of using design and design thinking to solve business objectives. Or rather, creating business value through design. Here's a familiar snippet from their site,

The role of design in business has shifted dramatically over the past few years, and is now becoming recognized as a key business asset that can add true value. With a panel of international experts, this conference will communicate how to create value through design, based on the triple bottom line: economic, social/cultural, and environmental value.

The conference was kicked off by Tonya Peck, Sr User Experience Manager with the Windows Mobile team at Microsoft who shared her experiences on managing two far flung teams - Beijing and Redmond - working on the same design projects together though separated by vast differences in culture, time and geography. This is a challenge that most of us face and I've summarized some key points from her presentation after the jump.

Read more
part two
part three

Ben Hughes, Course Director, MA Industrial Deisgn: Central Saint Martins College.

Regine over at we-make-money-not-art catches up with Ben Hughes who gives some thoughts on the philosophy driving the MA Industrial Design program, and takes a stab at defining what exactly 'Industrial Design' means today.

We have been experimenting for several years with different means of prototyping interactive experiences in order to test them. We continue to incorporate everything from role-play to swift cardboard test-rigs to hacking existing systems, to basic programming. In terms of the latter, we have this year started working with Arduino, which look very promising. This year we also worked with colleagues in Textile Design and the Epigenome Network to explore ideas of Epigenetics using design thinking. I would draw the line at projects dealing with the entirely hypothetical, or 'conceptual,' as we are primarily interested in material culture; the 3 dimensional component of this stuff.

Ben trained as an Industrial Designer in the UK, worked for consultancies in Taiwan and Australia and came back London where he's been heading the course since 2000, writes about and practices design, and consults on industrial design, brand and marketing.

view article

3D Modeling Symposium for Architects, Industrial Designers and Engineers. From April 7-9, the Universität der Künste Berlin (University of Arts Berlin) will be holding the first 3D Modeling Symposium for architects, industrial designers and engineers in cooperation with Visual-Dream.

The three day event brings together lectures, case studies and master classes to boost your 3D modeling skills. National and international experts will demonstrate advanced solutions for contemporary architecture, construction and industrial design - such as ParaCloud software which supports the design, or generation, of free form surfaces and complex constructions (photo: a digital approach to Kiesler's biomorphic Endless House).

All information and registrations under www.3d-msb.de

And Finally, Things we could never have built without CAD.

We're pretty impressed by Landscape Structures' Mobius Climber, which can help kids get exercise and maybe teach them a thing or two about fourth-dimensional wormholes.

But what we'd really like to see is an M.C.-Escher-designed condominium with space-saving anti-gravity staircases.

Early architectural tests indicate it would work! Well, at least in Lego.

sources: 1, 2, 3

Special thanks to Mark Vanderbeeken and Niti Bhan for her contribution to this weeks newsletter!

Please share the Monday Morning Must Read with colleagues, clients and collaborators. Many email programs do not forward messages in their original format, so please use this link: http://www.designdirectory.com/blog/newsletter

Email us your feedback and comments. We are looking for stories, case studies and global news on where and how design can make the difference.

Love Objects: A review of MoMA's "Design and the Elastic Mind," by Alex Terzich. Here's a snippet:

Do androids dream of electric sheep? It's a question that rang through my brain while visiting "Design and the Elastic Mind" at the Museum of Modern Art, a show where science and science fiction share the stage.

The science on display is fascinating--genetic engineering, nanotechnology, biomimicry--but it's the science fiction that makes the show particularly compelling. This is not a typical science museum exhibition transplanted into a MoMA gallery. Curator Paola Antonelli altogether avoids the often dry repackaging of scientific material for a general audience. Instead, she's filled the upper floor with projections about possible futures and explorations of poetic technology. Like so much good science fiction, here science is the stage set for playing out the tangle of human relationships and emotional ambiguities that unfold when the technology that connects us begins to infringe upon or even claim our affection.

Continue reading review...

All you need to know about design innovation in three and a half minutes. Eric's Really Good Idea--A stop-motion explanation of how designers really come up with their brilliant concepts. If this short film reminds you of more than one of your studio classes back in school...well...join the club.

Via Blu Dot and Campzine.com.

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Stockholm Design Week 2008. Every year, for five days, creative contributions from all over Sweden, Finland, Norway and Denmark gather here. Stockholm Design Week is growing and by far the biggest design event up north. This year's event is about recognizing young designers and their first steps in setting new standards for the future of Scandinavian design.

>> View the Gallery Here <<

Planned obsolescence that's actually in favor of the environment. Right now you own a cellphone, and we both know you ain't gonna have it forever. In a year or two you'll either donate it, give it to a friend who needs it, sell it on eBay and dump the scratch into a better model, or toss it in the trash.

Inspired by last month's Greener Gadgets conference, the similarly-named but unaffiliated thinktank TheGreenerGrass.org has come up with Linc, a phone concept that thinks differently about product lifecycles.

The Linc concept takes into account that your phone is as temporary as the computer you're using to read this. So rather than being a product, the Linc smartphone is a service; you lease it by the year and once it becomes obsolete, you ship it back to the manufacturer, who harvests and recycles the parts, and they ship you a new one. (The info on your phone is transferred wirelessly in a low-hassle manner.) From the user point of view it's something like a long-term Netflix for phones.

Shipping things back to the mannie for recycling is nothing new--check out the Y Water bottle--but what's different here is that the phone is specifically designed for automated disassembly, and designed without paints and adhesives for easier recycling. Read more about the concept here.

via kitsune noir

Design Green Now. West Coasters and spring time West Coast visitors should keep an eye out for Design Green Now events making their way from Washington to Southern California. DGN is an ongoing series of *free* panel discussions focused on sustainable product design. Panelists from companies like IDEO, frog, fuseproject, Nau, and ZIBA, and institutions including The Designers Accord, Art Center, Sustainable Style Foundation, and o2 will share with the audience the green projects they are currently working on, the challenges they face, and the tools they use for successful sustainable design.

The tour kicks off on April 1st, 2008 at Western Washington University in Bellingham and will continue down along the coast to other design universities like The Art Institute of Portland, California College of the Arts, and California State University. At the end of the tour, DGN will provide video coverage of the events as well as a dynamic list of resources and tools for designers on the official website.

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MX: Managing Experience Through Creative Leadership is for VPs, directors, or managers involved in product strategy or development, service design, or design management. Join us for two days of inspiration, education, and networking. Space is limited. Register now and get 10% off registration.

Design Your Own Mobile Phone with Openmoko. Openmoko, creator of the first completely open mobile computing platform, expanded the meaning of Open Source by posting the industrial design source files for its Neo branded mobile phones. Industrial design artists now have the same freedom as software engineers.

Earlier, the source code was freed for complete transformation of the phone software. Now, by publishing mechanical CAD files (here), we can start thinking about redesigning the Neo branded mobile phones to fit their vision and market needs. Some already have.

"Open Source development encourages contributions from a diverse, imaginative, and creative software community. Unlocking the CAD files for the Neo cases empowers the industrial design community to share and contribute their unique designs," said Openmoko Head of Developer Relations, Michael Shiloh. "And, with ready access to benchtop CNC machines and 3D printers, people will build these designs, even in single quantities."

Factory Fun: Guess! Okay folks, what kind of factory are we looking at here?

(Hint: You're lovin' it.) Mmm...fresh off the assembly line.

Click here for the rest of the industrial meat pics.

via static

CCA Summer Institute in Sustainable Design. This summer, California College of the Arts will launch its Summer Institute of Sustainable Design, a two-week immersive program that invites both design and non-design professionals to learn about and discuss the latest and greatest trends and advancements in green strategy and other sustainable design applications. This year's program will be held from June 15 - 27 in Point Reyes and San Francisco. The registration deadline is May 1st, 2008 and the program cost is $4,100 ($3800 for early birds).

IOGEAR's new Mobile Digital Scribe. If you enjoy taking notes by hand but loathe re-typing everything onto the computer, or if you loathe taking notes on the computer, IOGEAR's new Mobile Digital Scribe could be your ticket to note town, no strings attached. The device consists of an electronic pen that uses ordinary ink and a receiver that captures natural handwriting or drawings from any surface, with no special digital notepad required.

And finally, people keep making furniture that turns into something else. There is now so much transforming furniture out there that we're waiting for someone to give the genre a dedicated blog. (URL hostage-takers: www.TransformingFurniture.com is still available!) In the meantime check out the latest workstation-in-a-box, the Trunk Station AD from Japan's SoHo Street.

At US $1,980 it ain't cheap, but saving space never is. (Used to be that "time is money," but somewhere along the line "time" got swapped out with "footage.") Anyways if one of you decides to pony up for this thing, we have the perfect chair for you, below.

via unpluggd

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Email us your feedback and comments. We are looking for stories, case studies and global news on where and how design can make the difference.

Photo: John Haslam

Coroflot Creative Seeds: Exploit Me! : A Designer's Guide to Surviving Design Competitions. Carl Alvian's latest post on Coroflot's Creative Seeds Blog takes on the question of design competitions, and it's a must read for all designers. Here's our favorite passage:

If you're in it for the money, you're doing it for the wrong reason. While there are some pretty good prizes out there (Dell is offering $25,000 to the overall Re-Generation winner), the real benefits of a good contest are available to all entrants. The trick is not to view it as an employment opportunity, because it's not; it's a professional development and marketing tool.

If designing for a competition were the same as designing for a client, the payoff would be poor indeed. But in many ways a well-designed competition is like The Best Client Ever. Think about the characteristics of a Bad Client:

::Non-specific and constantly shifting deadlines.
::Frequent changes in project scope.
::"I know it when I see it" design requirements.
::Wants you to do something just like you did for another client four months ago.

A Bad Client offers too little information when you most need it--at the beginning--and starts making changes when you can least afford it--at the end.

A good design competition is the opposite of all these things. It starts with a clear, concise statement of constraints, target market, manufacturability requirements, and expected deliverables, all before you even agree to start working. It tells you exactly when results are due. It will never ever call you three months into the project to say the production budget's been cut by 30%. It has no idea what you've designed in the past nor does it care, so you're free to knock yourself off, or knock yourself out with a totally new direction. And if you blow it, nobody gets mad at you, and your professional reputation remains intact.

Read the full article
More Creative Seeds

Products we need, for stuff we do: drink coffee and go to work. Here are two anthropological clues, in the form of products with a tinge of tragedy, that say something about our modern lives. In an era when more and more of us are living single in cities and working our tails off, it's easy to see where both of these products come in:

Reuben Miller turned us on to the WMF 1, a coffeemaker for one that forces us to admit our 10-cup model operates at 10% capacity for about 360 days out of the year. When you're ready to admit you don't normally have nine friends over for coffee on the daily, take a look at one of these.

Similarly, the Workplace Dish Set is an admission that while we once shared lunch and laughs sitting next to our buddies on some construction girder, nowadays we mostly chew quietly and alone in front of an electronic version of the New York Times, trying not to get our Cobb Salad on the keyboard and praying the phone won't ring.

Refreshing Approach to Car Design (In Only 3 Steps). 1. Cut
2. Assemble
3. Colorize

Check out Rodolphe Dogniaux' approach to designing cars at Design Matin.
(if you hate cars and love shoes, go here)

via todayandtomorrow

Design Research: Dan Soltzberg on Debbie Millman and Mike Bainbridge. Dan Soltzberg's got a bulls-eye post around Gain's Design Meets Research, where Debbie Millman and Mike Bainbridge provide a tight primer to, well, design and research. But something Dan wrote in his post really resonated with me:

I see research very much as a generative tool as well as an evaluative one, and have started to question whether the concept of a border between research and design is really accurate or productive. At the front end of the design process, research is a way of surfacing opportunities and generating ideas. At later stages, it's a way of refining and validating these ideas as they become concepts and prototypes. In this way, research is a design tool in the same way that drawing is a design tool, except that at the center of the mechanism is the customer/user.

Certainly it's the wise designer who moves back and forth seamlessly between information and iteration, and eliminating the border between the two--even in how we talk about design practice--might be a very good idea indeed.

Springboard : Entrepreneurship for (Aussie) Designers. With promising new breeds of Australian designers in the making, Springboard has been launched as a national mentorship program to aid creative businesses develop a competitive edge both locally and internationally through sustainable design innovation. 100 hand-picked applicants will experience a year's worth of guidance in successful entrepreneurship.

Applications are now being accepted for the 12-month program that covers a range of topics including sustainable best practice, contractual law, IP, financial management, the media, manufacturing, retail and export markets. Mentors include former brand consultant for Apple Computer Bradford Gorman, eco-design specialist John Gertsakis, and Swedish market strategist Mats Ekström.

Systemic workflow problems between designers and engineers. "You never see an industrial design student taking engineering courses and vice versa. They work shoulder to shoulder in product development [but] with curriculums as they are, they don't collaborate until they've left school... They have contact with each other on the first day of the job." So says Francis DiBella, director of engineering technology at Northeastern, in "A Focus on Use," an excellent essay on how to fix workflow and communication problems between industrial designers and engineers.

"What's usually happening is designers throw the styling and concept over the wall to the engineers and when they see it the first time, they have to work out all kinds of problems," adds Bill Dresselhaus, principal of consulting firm Dresselhausgroup.

The 2,000-word essay isn't just mere bitching; it contains plenty of ideas for solutions. Cynics will be unsurprised to learn that the education- and technology-based suggestions will not be easy to implement, but then, nothing worth doing ever is. Judge the ideas for yourself here, and if you've got better ones, leave us a comment below.

via red orbit and american society of mechanical engineers

Plea for a Zipcar for the people. Erica Barnett over at WorldChanging has posted a disappointed yet hopeful breakdown of the happenings since Zipcar's Flexcar acquisition. Fair prices, a little leeway, and actually getting to talk to a real live person for customer service were well-loved perks at the former Flexcar, but are the same major elements missed at today's Zipcar. Overall, there is no doubt that carsharing is an excellent solution for sustainable mobility, however, Barnett fears "Zipcar is more concerned with its own bottom line than its environmental mission."

Here at Worldchanging, we recognize the almost revolutionary potential of product-service systems. Because it's one of the best demonstrations of that potential, we've been vocal supporters of carsharing, and we want to see it work.

But in order for it to work, the companies who bring us shared products need to recognize that they are more intimately connected to our lives than other companies tend to be -- that when they're working, they become more than mere companies, they become communities... and they need to hold themselves to a higher standard.

SMIT in the Limelight. The sustainable materials and resources community Ecolect has just launched Limelight, a monthly series dedicated to featuring Ecolect members doing extraordinary sustainable design. The debut designer is Teresita Cochran, CEO and co-founder of SMIT, or Sustainably Minded Interactive Technology. In addition to checking out its Grow hybrid energy device at MoMA's Design and the Elastic Mind exhibit, get an inside look at SMIT through the eyes, well, words rather, of Ms. Cochran. Here she describes Grow:

Using flexible solar cells as leaves, GROW takes the shape of ivy growing on a building; wind power is generated by the fluttering of these solar leaves. GROW is a modular, lightweight system that can attach to any building surface. We are exploring possibilities of using a leasing/take-back system for GROW so that we as the producers are ultimately responsible for its end-life and recycling.

Constraints and closed doors. The NYTimes has a provocative piece entitled The Advantages of Closing a Few Doors, and it's a must-read for designers. Somewhere between Paul Budnitz's argument that designers have to make sacrifices and Barry Schwartz's breakdown of the Paradox of Choice, John Tierney's piece introduces some intriguing MIT studies but makes sure to drive home the implications of those studies. Here's our favorite bit:

Xiang Yu was a Chinese general in the third century B.C. who took his troops across the Yangtze River into enemy territory and performed an experiment in decision making. He crushed his troops' cooking pots and burned their ships.

He explained this was to focus them on moving forward -- a motivational speech that was not appreciated by many of the soldiers watching their retreat option go up in flames. But General Xiang Yu would be vindicated, both on the battlefield and in the annals of social science research.

He is one of the role models in Dan Ariely's new book, "Predictably Irrational," an entertaining look at human foibles like the penchant for keeping too many options open. General Xiang Yu was a rare exception to the norm, a warrior who conquered by being unpredictably rational.

When was the last time you crushed your client's cooking pot? Or your own?

Find the article here.
Find the book here.

And finally, Strap-On Chair by Annika Schmidt. Artist and designer Annika Schmidt's Strap-On Chair looks and sounds a little risqué, especially shown here on topless people, but it's a series project in-progress that's intended to attach to just about anything.

Objects are live and constantly transforming. Rather than serving as ends in themselves, each piece serves as a vehicle to a greater interaction. Through their activation and engagement by participants, or simply through a new location, each piece takes on a new life.

via designspotter

Please share the Monday Morning Must Read with colleagues, clients and collaborators. Many email programs do not forward messages in their original format, so please use this link: http://www.designdirectory.com/blog/newsletter

Email us your feedback and comments. We are looking for stories, case studies and global news on where and how design can make the difference.