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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!
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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.
