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The Designers Accord: A conversation with Valerie Casey
The Designers Accord is a grassroots movement aiming to integrate sustainable thinking into design practice. This month, Core77 will integrate the list of design firm adopters of Designers Accord into the Design Directory--the global database of design firms, providing a platform for adoption of the accord, and a forum to be featured as an adoptor. Core77's Allan Chochinov invited Valerie Casey, founder of the Accord, to discuss the initiative, how it got started, and how it all might end. (Well, in a good way.)
Allan Chochinov: So let's start at the beginning Valerie. I know that the Designers Accord (then called the "Kyoto Treaty of Design") first came on our radar when we blogged that Frog Design Mind issue from last summer, and gushed on your lead essay in the thing. Can you tell me how this idea started, and what prompted you to pitch a "Kyoto Treaty of Design" in that publication?
Valerie Casey: I'm amazed at how many people ask me about how this started. I suppose it's a natural question, but for me I still find it remarkable how designers at all levels, from all disciplines, in countries all over the world relish hearing what someone else's breaking point / crisis of conscience / epiphany was around this topic. (I literally get dozens of emails each week from people telling me their stories and asking about mine.)
>> view article
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Milan Preview 2008: Charles & Marie Pop-Up Shop
The "quintessential lifestyle navigator" Charles & Marie are getting physical next week and offering you the opportunity to take something home from Milan besides too many photos and a hangover.
Charles & Marie
Via Tortona, 12
20144 Milan
April 14- 21. 2008
Daily 10:00-21:00
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Portland's Top Coffee Roaster Dumps the Clover, and Why This Matters to Product Design
The talk of the coffee scene in this coffee-obsessed town for the past couple of weeks has been all about Starbucks and their decision to buy Clover. Not just some more Clovers--the $11,000, networked, hyper-programmable machines that seem to have single-handedly raised the nation's interest in single-origin brewed coffee--but the entire company.
Coffee Equipment Co., the Seattle-based manufacturer of the Clover, was revealed on March 26 to have been purchased outright, as part of the Green Nymph's bid to re-establish itself as...well, a place that makes good coffee. Reacting to the growing numbers of serious caffeine consumers defecting to smaller roasters like Intelligentsia and Portland's own Stumptown, the purchase is part pragmatic, but largely symbolic: it's one thing to say you're serious about improving the quality of your product, but another to attach this intention to a physical object that says "good coffee" more than just about anything on the market at present. Stumptown's reaction was swift: they're getting rid of every one of their Clovers, effective immediately.
Why this is interesting to product designers is the way in which a well-designed object is quietly serving a powerful symbolic purpose, with hardly anyone acknowledging it. The Clover is, in fact, a beautifully designed piece of hardware, extremely modern in both appearance and function, and it's doubtful it would have developed the cult following that made it so desirable to Starbucks in the first place were it not. The saga of its rise, embrace, acquisition and ensuing outcry is a precise, accelerated example of how a well-designed product can become a vessel into which people pour their beliefs, expectations and senses of betrayal; the parallels with Apple run more than just skin deep.
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New Favorite Thing: The Protomold Sample Cube
We blogged about Protomold a couple of years back; they're a Minneapolis-based company that does quick turn-around injection-molded plastic sample parts by rapidly building soft tooling from a client's CAD database to get actual molded parts shot in a matter of days. What we didn't realize (until now), is that shortly after that posting, they came up with one of the coolest gimme trinkets we've yet to see: The Protomold Cube.
Described by one friend as "an ME degree in a box," the Cube is a single molded piece that folds into cube shape, and features physical examples of over a dozen guidelines of good injection-molded part design: there are snap fits, pass-core features, live hinges, ribs, knit lines, textured surfaces, and several examples of how to design and not design a boss to minimize sink. Best of all, it's free through the Protomold website to anyone who can convince them they're a bona fide designer or engineer. If they'd handed these out on the first day of Production Methods class, we could've slept in for the entire semester.
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RSS Alert: New Article up at Coroflot's Creative Seeds: Building Your Portfolio Website: Six Things to Never Do, by Carl Alviani
Over at Coroflot's Creative Seeds blog Carl Alviani has compiled a short, brilliantly informed list. This article is the perfect place to learn what to do, by knowing what not to do with your online portfolio. Here's a snippet:
As with so many things in design, and real life, getting a portfolio website right seems to be less a matter of what you do than what you don't. Compiling Miles' observations together with other comments I've heard over the years, a few clear prohibitions seem like a good place to start...1. Don't think you're a web designer unless you actually are.
This is the Achilles heel of many creative professionals: the belief that being competent in one creative capacity qualifies you for another. Most of us recognize that a great cinematographer probably won't be such a great architect, but a huge number of industrial, graphic, interior, and other designers seem to forget this rule, and try to build a great website from scratch...4. Don't write like a 12-year-old, or like a used car salesman.
If a visitor likes the work, they will read the copy, so make sure it reinforces the positive impression they've already got. As ridiculous as it seems to repeat it: spell-check everything. You're not seeking out a writing job, but you are trying to show intelligence, rigor and attention to detail; frequent misspellings imply the exact opposite, especially because they're so easy to avoid.
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Origami Side Table, zero tools & hardware required
Expanding MIO's range of flat pack, sheet metal products for the home, Philadelphia designers Jaime Salm and Young Jin Chung have developed the Origami Side Table.
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2008 Dyson Awards
The 2008 Dyson Awards were presented by James Dyson himself to an eager crowd in New York City. In conjunction, IDSA and Dyson also presented the 4th annual US-based 'Eye for Why' competition, challenging students to re-envision a product that excels in performance and surpasses competitors by improving on a product's shortcomings.
Ryan Jansen of Southern University at Carbondale won the Eye for Why prize with his clever "Rake n Take" that facilitates the leaf raking and gathering process (pictured at bottom).
First prize for the Dyson Award went to Michael Chen's Reactiv jacket (middle left photo), designed to combat hostile cycling conditions in the city. Second prize went to another cycling-inspired solution, the Single Handed Brake Lever, (pictured at top) designed by a group of Canadian engineering students. The SHBBL facilitates braking using only one hand. Genius solution for everything from handicaps to carrying groceries while pedaling!
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Muji Chronotebook: a non-linear way to plan.
Have you found yourself writing as small as you can, between two events, just to squeeze something in? There never is enough space between those rigid lines in a day-planner. This is why some of us have abandond our pencils altogether, and begun to schedule our days via iphone, and computer. At Muji, they have simply changed the nature of the day-planner into an organic process. Now you can literally schedule your day "around" a certain time. With Muji's recently-awarded Chronotebook design each page starts with a two simple circles, am and pm, waiting to let your day grow, rather than shrink.
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All Chipchase, All The Time
The NYT magazine is set to run a lengthy feature about the work Jan Chipchase is doing for Nokia.
The premise of the work is simple - get to know your potential customers as well as possible before you make a product for them. But when those customers live, say, in a mud hut in Zambia or in a tin-roofed hutong dwelling in China, when you are trying - as Nokia and just about every one of its competitors is - to design a cellphone that will sell to essentially the only people left on earth who don't yet have one, which is to say people who are illiterate, making $4 per day or less and have no easy access to electricity, the challenges are considerable.
Only two days ago, Chipchase stopped in San Francisco (between London, Seattle, Tokyo or some such itinerary) and gave a talk (entitled Street Hacks) about some of his work, hosted by Adaptive Path. And today, The Economist has an photos+voice mail gizmo where Chipchase tells stories throughout his week.
While it's not all gold (and what is), both the work and the worker are fascinating and inspiring. And the exposure is nice to see. We're going to recommend his publicist to all our friends!
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For city-dwelling gardeners
And finally, all of us who live in a city know that doing proper gardening is like running your own business from prison: technically possible, but very tricky to pull off.
Here to help is designer Francois Clerc, whose Graine de Pot is "a wholly biodegradable object which lasts about nine months. The seed is planted in the Spring so the plant can be enjoyed all Summer. In October everything can be thrown away in an organic rubbish tip [sic] to be turned into compost."
For more info click here.
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Special thanks to Steve Portigal and Elle* for their contributions to this weeks newsletter!
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