Great Design from Non Designers

What's the right approach to new products? Pick three key attributes or features, get those things very, very right, and then forget about everything else. Those three attributes define the fundamental essence and value of the product -- the rest is noise. For example, the original iPod was: 1) small enough to fit in your pocket, 2) had enough storage to hold many hours of music and 3) easy to sync with your Mac (most hardware companies can't make software, so I bet the others got this wrong). That's it -- no wireless, no ability to edit playlists on the device, no support for Ogg -- nothing but the essentials, well executed.

via paulbuchheit.blogspot.com

I have written before about creating a design school or curriculum around the principals of a company like Google. In this provoking post Paul Buchheit (one of the people who did Gmail and later Friendfeed) talks about a perspective on design that I agree with very strongly, and that I think many other people have failed to clearly represent.

Additionally I think it is rather interesting that many non designers have very valuable perspectives on design, not just as solutions but really as methods and models for the creative process. I wonder how much we can really learn?

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A door into the mind

I am very interested by the idea of a language of the mind as has been discussed by many authors including the well known Steven Pinker in The Stuff of Thought and The Language Instinct. In any case, so far as I have read there is not a good way to bridge interface of human language and an underlying mental one, so called mentalese. 

There seem to be a number of non verbal systems for surpassing common animal interfaces. One interesting example is in certain ant colonies, pheromones are used by wasps to essentially mind control the colony during some invasive procedure. In humans hormons can have similar effects although they tend to be much more subtle. (It is also often said that the sense of smell has the most significant influence on the brain because of its proximity and direct connection, as can be seen when sniffing a strong acid). In a recent TED conference however, Vilayanur Ramachandran discussed how nurons can be effected directly by the eyes in a strange kind of empathic consciousness. 

Anyway, I am interested in this idea of having some kind of interface into and out of the mind for a few reasons.

1. For design and psychology research being able to measure emotions more accurately by using digital smell sensors which give some idea of the endocrinological condition of a subject. 
2. For high speed learning, to learn logic structures faster without the barrier of language.
3. For computational knowledge systems, something which is still largely nonexistent. Even Google's data scheme is not generally based on knowledge but just a coincidence of the way knowledge needs to exist. 
4. To create a kind of mental API

What do you think? 

The image is obviously from the matrix.

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BLOOM- Ruth Whiting and Tim Elverston's art show

My sister is putting on an exhibition with her boyfriend in Gainesville Florida. It should be pretty interesting so pleas check it out if you have a chance.

Bloom

Handmade Seeds in a Technological Age.

Bloom is a show about passion. It's a show about a choice to make our own reality. It's a study in the density of hand-made technology and the miracle of cumulative intuition. No matter what we ask of our materials, they always have an answer.  This work is about learning to listen—as indeed, appreciation of subtlety is often a matter of survival.

Ruth Whiting and Tim Elverston foster a handmade future in a world where products arrive in sealed packages and advertising tells us how to dream. Bloom is a glimpse into a reality that is painstakingly fashioned from the raw fruits of our technological age. Tim Elverston is a designer and kinetic sculptor who makes kites, lamps, mobiles, and clothing. All his work is tuned with exquisite function from the most appropriate materials. Ruth Whiting paints sumptuous and imagined worlds where electric cables come to life within a thriving ecology of their own.

Opening February 26th during art walk at Randy Batista Gallery in downtown Gainesville next  to the Hippodrome.

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Virtual Reality and Real Virtuality

Recently I have realised that many ideas in design: new design models, processes and theories of design, are in some way related to a transformation of ideas from computer science or related digital logic into the real world. Examples for this are the concept of Object Oriented Design in product design which is something I have been considering for a few years now but also, as a less dependent example, the prospect of an API for a non digital object seems quite interesting. In any case, I think computer science is built on very rich developments on logical systems which I think many other disciplines can learn from in some situations. I hope this happens often, and in more ways than simply the current interest in openness such as open-source hardware (and more from Make and Wired) in which open-source notions are physically represented. 

In any case, I thought an important step here would be to devise a term to describe this trend. One that I thought may be appropriate in some contexts is Real Virtuality, but that is more like tangible computing or meeting online friends offline. I would be interested to hear any other suggestions. 

The image is an Arduino board which is a notable example of open-source hardware. 

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On a short holiday in Busan.

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Google Chrome for Korea (an IE extension)

via chrome.google.com

In Korea people the web world is designed so people need IE to run many of the major websites and in fact, to do any online payment as far as I know. I hear that to buy a mac online in Korea you need to have a PC to do so for this very reason.

In any case, this situation has caused many potential Korean Chrome users to shy away, knowing they would have to use two browsers regularly. This option however, an extension for Chrome which enables it to display IE webpages seems to be quite a lovely work around, and may well let people avoid ever having to undergo the embarrassment of opening IE.

I hope it works!

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Meaning or Infrastructure for Local Information

In some parts of the world they do not use street names in common communication for navigation, or for that matter, anything else really. Korea and Japan are two such countries, however China is mostly not that way now days, as far as I have experienced at least. I do not know about other examples but I am sure they exist. In any case, in Korea, we do not generally know the name of any streets and we do not use them to explane how to get places. This is a reasonably big change for me because all my life my world has been oriented about streets that have some nomenclature, a name or a number. So, in Krorea, instead of streets, they use points of significance, such as shopping centers, apartment blocks, or region names. Then for more granular instructions, people will say something like "walk towards the coffee shop then make your second left, then walk about 100m and we live just there." As you can imagine this sometimes ends in tears and yet more often ends in numerous phone calls and eventually the resident or a local going out and finding the visitor who is lost in the streets near by. In Seoul if you live 10 minutes walk from a train station, it is almost impossible to give instructions to a foreign visitor, but also in general. People thus often create meeting points, for example, "Lets meet at the 5th exit of the train station" and accordingly will show the way to their destination. 

This system intrigues me for various reasons. It means that signs with content (as opposed to signs with infrastructure), i.e. what business is where and what building is where, are very important as they are the primary mechanism by which people can recognise a location. It also means that there is a very valuable body of knowledge held by locals about the local area and that people are more likely to ask others in an effort to use this knowledge. The interesting conclusion however is that this system is meaning based, as opposed to infrastructure based as it would be in most other countries. That is to say, everything known about where something is is also meaningful knowledge about the area around the something. In the infrastructure based system, we generally do not know what stores are where and what kind of apartment is in which area of town, instead we know a system of meaningless infrastructural information which lets us navigate alone, and generally not understand our surroundings. So, the Korean system encourages interaction and knowledge of businesses and localities while the street address system encourages isolation from others and from an understanding of any locality, in some cases, even one's own. 

I think the Korean system has a distinct advantage, however it is hard for new visitors, especially foreigners, and it is probably a little slower than using street addresses. Similarly I think creating an abstract infrastructure reduces the movement of knowledge, a notable disadvantage. However, I think given an awareness of the Korean method and its benefits, I think places could be designed to optimally use this system, over simply instituting a crowded area, which as far as I understand, accurately summarises design principal currently in place in most Korean developments. Perhaps one example of a well designed system like this is Disney Land where many areas do not have infrastructural nomenclature but most places are findable due to the numerous destinations that people have awareness of. 

What principals do you think we could use to build better location information systems while avoiding creating a separate infrastructure to represent the information?

The images attempt to depict the situation of navigation of several Korean cities including Daejeon, Seoul and Busan. Notice that image of a map does not include any street names but simply landmarks of some kind or another. 

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When Google Speaks, and When we Speak About Google

Occasionally, people at google write something long and interesting and when they do I tend to find what they say well informed and mostly true to form. Some people argue that they are being hypocritical however I find that they are generally being human. 

In any case, recently, Jonathan Rosenberg, wrote a nice long post about openness as a market strategy, how it should all come together and how google plays or at least hopes to play in this game. Have a look at the Meaning of Open to see what I am talking about. 

An interesting piece, posted by a non googler, Devin Coldewey  from Crunchgear, made the comparison between google and the roman empire which ended up also being mostly about openness and creating contextual improvements, not just making better products. Read Google, Rome and Empire. 

I have posted about these kinds of things before, in particular, one of my favorite articles from google, also from Jonathan Rosenberg, as a similar kind of state of play perspective from earlier this year, From the Height of This Place. 

I guess I quite like Jonathan Rosenberg's writing. What do you think of all this?

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Programers and Designers

The romantic image of an über-programmer is someone who fires up Emacs, types like a machine gun, and delivers a flawless final product from scratch. A more accurate image would be someone who stares quietly into space for a few minutes and then says “Hmm. I think I’ve seen something like this before.”

via johndcook.com

This is a snippet from a short and interesting piece on why programmers are not payed biased on productivity. I think he raises some interesting points and I think this snippet is sort of the key to it. Interestingly I think that this kind of situation applies to designers too. Good design is often about building your own kind of efficiency out of awareness of design in general.

What do you think?

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Art Lebedev - designers who admit to working

via artlebedev.com

I really love Art Lebedev studios. Not because they are the best, nor because they are the most interesting or the company with most valuable perspectives. What I love about them is the playful connection with consumer design, something that very few consumer product design companies seem to have. However there is more that makes them a valuable company. They regularly report on process and on conclusions about design in a rather interesting context.

In this image we see a new product called Fleximus they have designed as a kind of flexible camera. On it's website they provide a design brief, which is wonderfully simple "Problem: Design a flexible camera," and they also provide a link to their process which is arguably more interesting than the product its self. Conveniently they go further than simply telling you how they did it and have a rather nice selection of progress images. In this way Art Lebedev is a model design house.

Another effort of significant value is one of their blogs, Mandership. This blog is seldom updated but when it is, they speak of great conclusions or suggestions about doing design. Quite a great think I say.

What do you think of this company?

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노래방 - Learning to Sing Again

In korea 노래방 (norebang) which literally means singing room and translates to Karaoke (which does not mean singing room in japanese interestingly) is rather popular and people often go late in the evenings and sing with their friends in private rooms. Several interesting things emerge from this.

1. People often start singing at a young age and practice frequently. One friend told me she used to practice songs hundreds of times each in order to be able to sing them well. In any case, the result is that some singers are exceptionally good. Several of my friends are so good that hearing them has a physiological affect. This is not just party tallent this is incredible, well practiced expertise with years of practice to back it. In some cases I think the 10000 hour mark would have been met. 
2. Because in Korea there is a strong connection between business succes and night time activities, drinking and the like, it is expected that you will be able to sing well with your colleagues. For this reason there are 노래방 schools designed to teach lader climbing executives to sing more competitively. 
3. There are many levels of quality and expense for singing rooms and there are various nefarious activities which sometimes occur within, however, an interesting fact is that there are even very small singing rooms, for one or perhaps two people. These are often found in arcades or a similarly game oriented kind of location. I have yet to try this but it seems interesting and good for practising. 

In any case, I have lived here, and in China where similar singing rooms exist, for some time now and of course I have been to the 노래방 quite many times. I have however, until recently not been very good at it. One issue is that I spent many years in voice lesons and choral groups of different kinds however I did not do much solo work and I did very little  singing of non classical or a capella music. Additionally, as a child I listened almost exclusively to classical music and thus know almost none of the english language music these venues offer.The singing rooms of course offer words however they do not offer a score or some other indication of timing and pitch so if you do not know a song it is not easy to site read it, which I could probably do in most instances.

Anyway, I am now starting to practice several songs, in the hope I can become a rich executive in Korea, with the help of some Korean friends. As soon as I am as good as the average Korean I will share a video I think. (this will probably take years) 

The images are from a highly stylised singing room I was at with 2 friends several days ago. The thing that looks like a fan, but is not, is actually a heater wich constitues of a metal paraboloid and coil that reflects eat off it into the room. These are common here, though I have not seen them in the west (granted I have only really lived in warm places, Florida, and Australia in the west). They do also often oscillate like the similarly fashioned fans do and they produce a huge amount of heat.

Tell me about your wonderful times in similar situations. 

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