Core77 Photo Gallery: New York Design Week 2009
Photos from our coverage of New York Design Week are now online! Check the gallery for photos from ICFF at the Javits Center and satellite shows in the Meatpacking District, SoHo, Brooklyn and Midtown.
>> view gallery
Pacific NW Readers take note: Coroflot Creative Confab comes to Portland, June 11
Hot on the heels of the highly-energetic, highly-crowded (140+ person) New York City installment of the Creative Employment Confab, Coroflot is bringing the panel + networking event to the City of Roses in its only Pac NW appearance, Thursday, June 11 at the University of Oregon's White Stag Block in Old Town.
As before, the event will run for three hours, feature ample opportunity for networking with local creative professionals and recruiters, and center on an engaging panel discussion with some of Portland's top designers and design recruiters. We'll be spotlighting each of the panelists over the next week, but you can get start getting yourself acquainted right here:
Chelsea Vandiver - Head of the Communications Design Group at Ziba
Beth Sasseen - Senior Design Recruiter at Nike
Nick Oakley - Industrial Design Lead for Mobile Platforms at Intel
Kirk James - Creative Director at Cinco Design
In addition, there will be a limited number of dedicated Recruiter packages available for design-driven companies looking to establish a presence at the event -- check the registration page for details.
Coroflot's Creative Employment Confab
June 11th, 2:30-6 pm
The White Stag Block
70 NW Couch St. in Portland, OR
|
Shape-shifting bicycle prototype
You don't have to sit through the entire two-minute video to get the idea, but German industrial designer Stefan Wallmann's position-changing Zweistil bicycle prototype is definitely worth a look. Click on the vid before it gets yanked for copyright issues, as I'm guessing Wallman didn't pony up for the Rawhide rights.
Wallmann is one of last week's Coroflot features.
via gizmodo
Innovation as Evolution
From a recent New Yorker issue on Innovation, Adam Gopnik writes a lyrical piece about evolution and innovation, comparing the animal kingdom to the creative and business processes of making things. He starts off looking at the multi-bladed shaver, but the most evocative portion was about book lights, highly condensed for excerpting here:
I have tried them all, without much success...Some hang around your neck, some sit on your stomach; some clip onto the edge of the book, where they shake and waver, and some bend around the book's binding to shine creepliy on the pages. None of them quite do the trick...Failure, it seems, generates variety, too, but it is is the variety of futility, the small changes made in a lost cause. It takes the eye of God to see, in the acts of man, which are the children of delight and which the dead ends of despair.
The Context of 'Low Product': How designers can help articulate a new social language, by Ann Thorpe
Will "no product" become the new brand? John Hockenberry provocatively suggests that given the global economic crisis, "no product" is now plausible. But how plausible given our society organized around economic growth? I'm talking here about consumerism as both the primary purpose of growth, and its principal driver—the high product context.
Reliance on continuous growth makes the economy unstable (it must grow or it collapses) as well as unsustainable (it strives for infinite growth on finite planetary resources). Tim Jackson provides a very accessible overview of this situation in his great new report, Prosperity without Growth?, in which he also proposes an alternative—a steady state economy. Enter the "low product" context. Enter the Nomadic Prayer Space, knitfitti and the floating swimming pool. Before getting to the examples and the implications for design of a steady state economy, let's explore "growth" a bit more.
The painful process of corporate product development
When I saw that diagram above, which is an approximation of the product development teams at Sun and Apple, I thought the same thing as you: Where the heck's the industrial designer?
Even in diagrams, it seems, we are invisible. Sigh.
The diagram is from an article on corporate product development processes in Product Design and Development. If you've ever wondered how stuff gets made outside of design firms, in situations where you've got literally dozens of departments that all have to sign off on various parts of the process, then this will make fascinating reading for you.
Of course, if you've already lived this process, as a designer it can be just plain frustrating. An excerpt:
Example #2: (Industrial Design vs. Mechanical Engineering)At Sun we had a very talented Industrial Design (ID) group. On a new "Thin Client" computer project, the manufacturing and design strategy called for utilizing an external OEM partner in South Korea. A problem came up during development which highlighted the very different views (assumptions) we had of each other's processes.
Early in the project the ID group released a cool looking 3D surface CAD model of the enclosure. The OEM ME's began adding detailed features such as wall thickness, mounting bosses, ribs, etc. However when they came across a problem they did what they normally do - they fixed it! ...but didn't tell us.
A month and a half later the ME's sent back 3D CAD models of the finished enclosure for our review and approval. I setup a design review which included the lead Industrial Designer. The ID person noticed that a change had been made to the top vents. The change violated the new corporate "design language".
This was bad because the new computer was one of a family of products that were being introduced with the new look. The vent shape was a key design element used to identifying the next generation of faster/better computers.
It turns out that the OEM's mechanical engineers discovered early on that the vent shape would have prevented the parts from coming off of the plastic mold so they changed it. Apparently, they considered the change minor, not worth mentioning, and in the interest of time simply made the change.
The lead Industrial Designer was angry that he hadn't been informed of the problem. He assumed he would be consulted whenever a change affected aesthetics which was modus operandi for all previous projects where the mechanical design was done internally....
Read the whole piece here.
Continuum presents Resonance, a video about design strategy and "getting it right"
Continuum has put together an illustrative (and very watchable) video about their outlook and process. While they do begin to discuss what design strategy is and how it is developed, the video's primary focus is to indicate the importance of finding the "right" solution: the one idea that brings diverse insights together and fits into the tight space between meaning and profitability. The video suggests that finding this space requires good research and discussion practices, but also a bit of creative intuition:
The real challenge lay less in the technical problem but often...in trying to solve the human problem. It's about understanding their needs and their aspirations and meeting them in some way. So, we are serving them. But sometimes their needs are to be surprised and delighted, and they can't tell us how to surprise and delight them. That has to come from us, as creative people in our profession.
Watch the video here.
Thanks, Steve!
Book Review: I Miss My Pencil, by Martin Bone and Kara Johnson
Martin Bone is one of us. The opening pages of his collaboration with Kara Johnson, I Miss My Pencil, include fetishistic shots of everyday objects like kitchen knives and attache cases that the authors know and love. In the short blurbs of text that accompany the beautiful product shots, Johnson explains a part of the product lifecycle that designers too often ignore. Recounting the effect of a ding on her experience as a car owner, she explains, "My previously flawless car now registered a dent above the back rear wheel. But my love did not waver. In fact, perhaps surprisingly, it grew: I love my car even more now with this little dent," that now serves to remind her of a weekend snowboarding. After the personal introduction, Pencil embraces the holy grail of industrial design: infusing shiny new products with the same love that grows naturally out of a shared history (or dent).
No strangers to industrial design, both authors work at IDEO, with Bone as design director and Kara Johnson leading the materials team. A series of 12 projects done for the sheer joy of creation, I Miss My Pencil reads like a student's wet dream of industrial design 101. The book is broken into three sections: Aisthetika, which deals with sense and experience, Punk Manufacturing, which combines craft and mass production, and Love+Fetish, which might be enough to titillate any objectophiles out there. Using about as much white space as I've ever seen in a book Mr. Bone and Ms. Johnson populate their tabula rasa with plenty of full bleed artful photographs and IM formatted conversations about their products. In yet another designer detail, the voices in those exchanges are each given their own font, with Bone speaking in dot matrix and Johnson a businesslike serif. At once joyous and confusing, I Miss My Pencil left me incredulous in the same way an avant garde indy movie produced by a major studio would. Every once in a while a completely impractical beautiful thing slips past consumer focus groups. At numerous times while reading, I wondered what sort of person would want to read a book about the joy of following absurd premises like "what does a laptop taste like?" to their logical (!?!) conclusions. Perhaps the audience for that sort of thing is tiny, but I think it includes us.
Interview with Audi's chief designer
Audi's auto interiors are widely considered some of the best in the biz, combining functional layouts with exceptional build quality and well-chosen materials. So how do they do it? An Autospies interview with Stefan Sielaff, Audi's chief designer, sheds some light on the process.
Q . Where do you look for ideas and inspiration?A . I believe designers should go out of the studio, travel, go to other countries. There are traditional hot spots like Italy. We always visit the Milan furniture shows. We even go to Singapore for the fashion shows. When we look at the art markets, the Chinese and Indians are making strong statements now.
For clear and clean product design, Scandinavia is still a place to go, where we draw a lot of inspiration. From an architectural point of view, we look to the U.S., at architects like Frank Lloyd Wright. I'm a big fan of Frank Gehry.
Q . How hard is it these days to get the money you need to design good interiors with good materials?
A . I fight a lot to get what we want and what my team needs. I understand the management side. We have to earn money with our product. On the other hand, I want a nice product.
The customer is very intelligent and able to see if the company or the brand has spent a certain amount of money on the product or if it is just playing a game with the customer. Our president, (Rupert) Stadler, has a finance background but understands that if we save money on design, it hurts the company.
Read the full interview here.
Core-Toon: Greenwash
Artist: lunchbreath More: View all Core-toons
Demo of Asus' forthcoming all-in-one "nettop" keyboard
Next month Asus will launch their Eee Keyboard, which looks like an ultraslim keyboard with an iPhone slapped onto it. Touted as a "nettop," the device actually contains an entire PC, with the idea being that you can carry it around and plug it into any available display.
We were curious about the potential for the Frankensteinian integrated-touchscreen interface, but as Slashgear's hands-on review shows, the device may not be ready for primetime. Skip the first two minutes of the vid, the action doesn't start until about 2:04 (and avoid watching altogether if Failblog-worthy demos pain you to see).
A truly customizable auxiliary keyboard
Speaking of keyboards, while working in Photoshop and CAD I've always wanted physical, dedicated buttons to perform certain oft-repeated actions, but my laptop's QWERTY ain't got the space. Could this be the answer? The DX-1 Input System has 25 programmable, label-able keys you can stick anywhere on the transparent tray, which you can also slide labels under (like the transparent sheet on top of a Wacom tablet). It seems better to me than that Optimus Maximus keyboard with the LCD keys, because you can actually select the layout here and sort of tailor the ergonomics.
No mere concept, this thing is actually in production and for sale here.
Reflections from Greener By Design 2009
Last week in San Francisco was the Greener by Design conference, which we've already noted was well-covered by Reuters. But if you want the short version, here are some personal notes.
Greener by Design 2009 was actually the best conference I've been to in a while. Not so much because of the speakers or format--though they were definitely great--but because of the conversations with other people between talks. How does that happen? Maybe it was just coincidence; it was a standard-format gig, not an unconference like foo camp. Maybe it was that Joel Makower did a good job of getting interesting people to attend, and had decent-length breaks between sessions. In any case, it was well worth the time. Here are a few notes from the event.
Your Future Job is Social Innovator: Predictions from Ezio Manzini
Bottega Altromercato, an example of social innovation from Sustainable Everday
"The main activity of designers will be as social innovators," said Ezio Manzini during an intimate conversation with o2NYC on May 6. Ezio's talk outlined an exit strategy for conscious designers, a shift from making things to designing tools for a better society. For those of us who have signed on to the green revolution, who commit to having the conversation with clients, sourcing better materials, reducing life cycle impacts, doing the hard work of greener design, we need an exit strategy. How do we stop making things less bad and start actually solving for climate change?
Ezio Manzini has been thinking about the sustainable design problem for 20+ years. A professor of Industrial Design at Milan Polytechnic, he is Director of CIRIS (the Interdepartmental Centre for Research on Innovation for Sustainability), and is the author of several books on sustainable design: The Material of Invention, Artifacts: Towards a New Ecology of the Artificial Environment and Sustainable Everyday. Ezio feels he has "been telling the same story for 20 years. Always change it by the end it is the same." What has changed lately, though, is his rhetoric, from the soon to be possible to the here and now. That is the opportunity that crisis brings--a chance to rethink how we've been operating as a society, and offer new visions for how we can live.
Ezio first pointed out the problem with the green design movement, and its focus on "fixing the past," which is "doomed because it requires asking people to 'reduce,' asking them to have 'the same, but less.' Instead we need to offer them 'different, but better.'" So what's better?
Ninjas maintaining product dominance over Samurai
And finally, Guerilla marketing firms annoy the crap out of me, but I have to admit that Latvian firm Ninja BTL's business card would probably not get lost in the shuffle on my desk.
But a ninja product I could really use is this flash drive, which can hold up to 2GB of ninja secrets.
Not to be outdone by their sworn enemies, Samurai have retailated by designing themselves an umbrella.
They might not have thumb drives, but at least they will stay dry!
(The umbrella is actually by design duo and longtime Core contributors Bruce Tharp and Stephanie Munson.)
Special thanks to Steve Portigal, Jeremy Faludi, Jen van der Meer and lunchbreath for their contributions to this week's 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
