Come to Pappa - Hulger's New Wooden VoIP Phone
Worried that your cubical kitted out with generic looking hardware and periphery equipment has become indistinguishable from the dude that works in accounts receivable, step it up a notch with Hulger's latest addition, the world's first wooden VoIP phone made from American walnut and brass.
PAPPA*PHONE is available at: hulgershop.com
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Beyond the Schlock of the New: Eight strategies for design and foresight, by Kevin McCullagh
When Samuel Goldwyn wryly advised that you should "never make predictions, especially about the future," he may have been reflecting on Harry Warner's misplaced attachment to silent movies, who in 1927 asked "Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?".
The perils of prediction are legend and the source of many chuckles, but making bets on the future is part of a designer's job description. Whether selecting a colour, or devising a product strategy, designers are--consciously or not--making a series of assumptions about the future. So how can we shorten our odds and become more prescient?
The first hurdle to clear is the cynicism towards looking at the future that Goldwyn's quote captures. The cause of analysing change in a systematic way has not been helped by the self-importance of so many forecasters. Indeed James Woudhuysen, Professor of Forecasting and Innovation asserts that "Because of today's exaggerated sense of uncertainty and foreboding about the future, forecasters have never been in greater demand--and have never been less credible!" Whether they be economists making predictions to three decimal places based on bogus computer models; black-clad Parisians foretelling the return of the 'New Black'; or intrepid coolhunters reporting back from their latest Tokyo shopping expedition, they often have the whiff of snake oil.
The future is much more important than the new, the hip and the cool. The fashion and communications industries may rely on a constant feed of zeitgeisty whims, but product designers and strategists need to develop a deeper understanding of change. Our timeframes are too long and problems too complex for such fluff. Management thinker Gary Hamel frames foresight as being "prescient about the size and shape of tomorrow's opportunities" by building an "assumption base about the future" based on "deep insights into the trends." His advice that "strategy must be created from the future backwards, not the present forwards" also underlines the short-termism of much of today's innovation activity which places too much emphasis on what consumers said last month.
>> read on
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Core77 Photo Gallery: ManufRactured Exhibit at Portland Museum of Contemporary Craft
At the bigger-than-it-looks Portland Museum of Contemporary Craft, ManufRactured is a first-of-its-kind exhibition of art and design projects from re-purposed manufactured materials. Familiar names like Marcel Wanders and Cat Chow are in attendance, along with some lesser known but mightily impressive works like Devorah Sperber's abstracted mosaics from thread spools and marker caps, and Regis Mayot's skeletonized plastic bottles. For those in Portland or visiting soon, it runs through January at the museum's new-ish space on NW 8th and Davis; Carl Alviani and photographer Kirill Shelayev have put together a short, beautiful gallery for the rest of you.
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Target's aiming device: Design talent scouts
Ever wonder how a company like Target gets their designers, from marquee names like Starck to and up-and-comers like Sami Hayek? Businessweek's got the answer with their write-up on Culture & Commerce, an NYC-based design "talent scout" company:
[Materials consultant] Michele Caniato...founded Culture & Commerce with entrepreneur George M. Beylerian in 2000. They applied the concept of Hollywood talent management to product design. "We're a matchmaker and guardian angel," says Caniato, adding that the firm has negotiated $65 million in designer contracts to date....Before introducing designers to companies like Target or other clients...Caniato analyzes their mass-market potential and spends up to nine months coaching them on how to work with large corporations. He also negotiates financial and legal details of a deal and acts as a liaison between the two parties, managing scheduling, budgeting, and contracts.
In return, the designers, who retain final say on the look of their products, pay 25% to 30% commissions under 4-to-10-year contracts with the agency. And they get to focus on coming up with unique products. "Before, I wasn't designing a lot," says Hayek. "After, I began designing again."
Read all about it here.
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Desk cut & folded from a single sheet of steel
Made from a single standard size sheet of steel, London-based design group Formtanks' goal was to produce "more from less". Once cut using CAD/CAM technology the 3fold desk is hand formed and boasts minimal material wastage of less than 4% per linear meter.
You might have to start saving tho, constructing your own life-size Mikroworld starts at £3,851.
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At the UN: Visualizing our carbon emissions
Manuel Toscano will deliver his opening remarks in the United Nations Lobby tonight amongst an installation designed by ZAGO and commissioned by the United Nation Development Program (UNDP) entitled The Nine Planets Wanted!
The initiative launches the campaign One Planet One Chance, "allowing visitors to physically experience abstract data related to global warming and take measure of the inverse relationship between responsibility for climate change and vulnerability to its impact."
Using key facts and figures from the 2007/2008 UNDP Human Development Report, the installation consists of 12 monumental beanbags (made from car interior remnants, natch), representing a comparative view of carbon dioxide volumes emitted around the world. (The largest of these beanbags is 9 feet tall!)
Here's a bit from Manuel's remarks:
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Tikitag
Tikitag is an Alcatel-Lucent venture based in Antwerp, Belgium which provides a service to link the real world with the online world for consumer and business usage via easy-to-apply RFID tags. Currently still in Alpha, the beta launch is planned for launch on October 1st, with the availability of tikitag starter packages and tag packages via e-commerce.
via Bruce Sterling
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BBC launches "The Box"; Heisenberg uncertainty principle now trackable by GPS!
Well, we're really talking about the Observer effect, but still, you gotta wonder about this one. On Monday, BBC News (love them) launched a new initiative called "The Box" unleashing a logotized BBC shipping container out into the wild, LoJacked with a GPS transmitter, and trackable on its very own website. You can even contribute your own pictures.
The goal of the year-long project is to "tell the story of international trade and globalisation by tracking a standard shipping container around the world. It is a project which plans to deliver content for television, radio and online audiences - telling the individual stories behind what makes the global economy tick."
This sounds like a really great project (inspired by Marc Levinson's book), but the lack of anonymity here cannot be good. Cue taggers please...
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Fitbit takes the pedometer and runs with it
We talked a little bit about the potential uses of accelerometer-enabled technology for learning about human behavior last year, but the Fitbit is one of the first examples we've seen of actually turning that potential into a viable product.
Essentially a very smart 3D pedometer, the Fitbit clips unobtrusively onto your jeans or bra strap during the day and figures out how far you've gone and how many calories you've burned. The $99 price tag, though, is justified by some serious added functionality. Taking cues from the Wii and the Nike+ iPod system, Fitbit has enough logic to distinguish between walking, running and riding in a car, and syncs the daily results with the user's computer, posting them to a socially networked website. Moreover, it analyzes sleep patterns when worn at night by detecting REM-induced tremors.
According to MIT Technology Review's coverage, the unit managed to impress several higher ups in the technorati when unveiled this week at Techcrunch50, including Tim O'Reilly of O'Reilly Media, and Evan Williams of Twitter, who commented on its smooth website integration and strong design.
Due to go on sale at the end of the year, and destined to spawn a crapload of imitators.
>> More photos and website screenshot.
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From bike to boardroom, tailored performance clothing for cycling
It's every cyclists dilemma, how do you ride to work dressed well enough to convince the client you're the right choice for managing their tight-ass budget without keeping a second wardrobe at the office. Enter Outlier, classically tailored pants made from Schoeller 3xDry and Nanosphere fabrics. They're water resistant, breathable, quick drying, grease, stain and abrasion resistant.
We could not have hoped for a better result, over the past year we've been testing these garments day in and day out, through rain and snow and even one frightening crash. The bike was destroyed, the knees battered and bleeding, yet the pants were just fine and that was exactly the quality of construction we knew we needed.
Good news for those worried about stretched knee's in their Cheap Monday's.
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As literal as liquid light gets
Yet another great project from the students at the Royal College of Art's IDE program -- this time, Spanish designer Cristina Ferraz Rigo takes the light out of lamps and pours it all over the place. The thesis project, called (DE)light (remember the days when you could name something with just words and not have to worry about clever punctuation?), uses chemoluminescent reactions to create luminous liquids, then puts them through all sorts of clever applications: taps that dispense light, light in a bottle, streams of light, etc.
According to Rigo, the compounds can glow up to 20 hours, and research suggests they could be made rechargeable with further development. Aims of the project are typically broad and sweeping. Says Rigo:
My aim is to look at all the resources we have and then try to redesign new future scenarios, rather than "redesign" what's already just to make it perform better. In this case, I was curious about the fact that domestic lighting has not changed, essentially, that much since Edison's invention: you always need a power source and a physical device (call it lightbulb, fiberoptic, led). What I wanted to do is to give a total different approach to light, make people realise we can think of objects that surround us different and shape the technological advance a different way.
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The Financial Times interview with the chairman of the London Design Festival
Sir John Sorrell CBE, 63, is chairman of the London Design Festival, which he devised and founded in 2003. During a 40-year career, he co-founded Newell & Sorrell, one of Europe's biggest design businesses, with his wife, Frances. He chaired the UK Design council from 1994 to 2002, is chairman of the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (Cabe) and co-chair of The Sorrell Foundation, set up to inspire creativity in young people. He has three adult children and lives in London with his wife, Frances.
Here's a snippet from the frothy interview,
How important is it to you to live in a well-designed house?Very important. I can't operate unless I have a calm and organised environment. I think beauty enhances your life. Good design creates a better quality of living and can dramatically affect your mood.
To make up for it, FT has another write up on The best of British design graduates, a nice round up of the New Designer's show. No slideshow however, pity that.
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Waiting for the whirlwind
Alex Steffen of Worldchanging introduces this essay by Adam Greenfield as one that "speaks, with an almost fevered clarity, about the American relationship to the future, at a moment when America's role in crafting the future may well be the planet's most important uncertainty."
"Mainstream Americans, where they were once called to dream and to believe that their best days as a community still lay ahead, are now at war with the future." [...]"In the relatively narrow field of my interests - ambient informatics, the networked city - can be seen something profound writ small: among fully-developed nations, the US stands out as having generally rejected "futuristic" interventions in everyday urban life, to the point that what I’m bound to present as innovative to US audiences is almost laughably banal elsewhere."
And don't miss out on the passage where he argues why Sarah Palin is "future shock personified".
Read the essay (alternative site)
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A new perspective by design
DaeKyung Ahn, who goes by DK Ahn, has a unique chair - View - on display at the 100% Design show, one that he has designed to teach us about how we make social judgements.
He makes a profound observation about how people see each other by their most obvious characteristic at a certain time or in a certain situation. Even when circumstances change for the other and his behavior changes accordingly, we don't tend to allow that second impression to enter or last in our minds as another "view" of the person. So, if a strong impression is made on us during a person's moment of anger, we will see that person as angry, despite a subsequent meeting in which the person is rational and calm.
In the material world, though, Ahn observes, people are more willing to accept different perspectives; they perceive, for example, that a table's legs are not perpendicular to the floor when seen from above, and they allow that vision to stay in their minds.
"It is very ironic that it is difficult to see the physical world through a particular view point without changing that view point in our mind," Ahn writes.
Ahn designs the View to teach social perspective, using his obvious mathematical skills to create a chair that is a perceptual puzzle. It is only through use of the chair that all of its views can eventually be seen, but even then the totality of the View will remain a mystery.
More 'Views' of the same chair here. Text and photo credit InventorSpot
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Ecolab's bottle-in-a-bottle package design
And finally, Ecolab's Proforce Cleaners bottle design, internally nicknamed "Legoland," cleverly fits a 16 oz. spray bottle within a 1.25 gallon refill tank. The boxy, volume-maximizing design is better for shipping pallets (98.5% space utilization) and easier to store in a broom closet.
Packaging geeks who want to read details about stress engineering modeling and optimized in-line filling lines, click here.
via a.m. steeman
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Special thanks to Niti Bhan and Mark Vanderbeeken for their contributions to this week's newsletter!
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