“Already beautiful, already essential, Doublewide legitimizes the elegance that already exists within the simple steel folding chair. A subtle change in proportion alters its character, subtly shifting typologies. It is now slightly more formal, more intimate. It moves from the meeting hall to the living room. What was a public banality to accomodate a singular person is grown to accept a couple in a more private setting.”
via designboom
I had the wonderful opportunity to hear Gregory Colbert speak at the TED conference where he made an extremely rare public appearance talking about his photographic journey and exhibition “Ashes and Snow”. He also spoke about his controversial initiative to start the “Animal Copyright Foundation”, which will aim to collect 1 percent of royalties from companies using images of animals in their ads and distribute these funds to conservation projects around the world, which could become the largest environmental fund in the world. He suggests we should renegotiate our contract with nature. It is common practice to compensate people for fair use of their images in advertising but this has not been the case for nature and animals.
I think this is a brilliant foundation to give back to nature and help keep it sustainable. There’s not much online about this foundation, but lookout for it soon.
more via ethanzuckerman
Business 2.0 has a short article on a few great companies that not only listen to what their customers say, but let their customers run their company. “It’s the open-source software concept applied to product marketing”.
Two examples mentioned were Threadless, an awesome ongoing online t-shirt competition that has some great deals and designs, and Etsy, a very unique place to sell all things handmade.
I love the idea of letting customers vote on what gets further developed and perhaps produced. Sure, people are paid to make those decisions and some products take a ton more time to manufacture than t-shirts, but as we all know, the mass market will always surprise us with what customers want. I mean, seriously, we already have TV shows that let viewers decide who the next rock star, singer, dancer, comedian, invention, chef, designer, wife, etc are!
I’m not saying all products need to adopt this method nor am I asking for mass customization… I’m just saying there is such a rich opportunity in this internet infested society that allows us to show and hear from customers before they see what we thought was great. Sure, smart Continue Reading
I recently had a conversation with a friend about the digital gap and how things seemed more authentic in the past. One such topic was e-mail. E-mails are easy to delete, easy to read, and easily copied, but real physical mail has a personal feel, an authentic touch, a ritualistic process, and at times a more meaningful if not more emotional experience. This can be due to simple crinkles in the paper, ones handwriting, a few scribbled out words, the stamps they used, color of paper, a coffee spill, or something that the digital world has not yet captured. An example I brought up was Fuzzmail, a great email tool that records the act of you writing and let’s you send it as an e-mail. You hit record, start typing, deleting, re-spelling, thinking, etc and finish recording. When your friend receives the fuzzmail, the message is played back as you wrote it, including your spelling errors, backspaces, and pauses. Now, I know this isn’t great for the fast paced digital revolution, but it is a bridge between the authentic years and the fast paced digital years. You really have to try it out to understand how it works. Rather than reading the email, the email reads to you. It’s almost like an IM conversation without the interactivity.
Fuzzmail was created by Hayes Raffle and Dan Maynes-Aminzade at the MIT Media Lab.
For an example fuzzmail, click here! Enjoy;)
With the World Cup kicking off this week, there have been tons of great ads everywhere, but these political soccer heads really caught me off guard and made my day. “Heads will roll: Just in time for the World Cup, visitors to the Leipzig Museum of Fine Arts can bounce Bush or Blair, corner-kick Clinton or soccer-punch Saddam. Kendell Geers’ interactive art, titled Masked Ball, is one of 24 football-themed works by international artists. “
via sfgate
“iBar is a system for the interactive design of any bar-counter. Integrated video-projectors can project any content on the milky bar-surface. The intelligent tracking system of iBar detects all objects touching the surface. This input is used to let the projected content interact dynamically with the movements on the counter. Objects can be illuminated at their position or virtual objects can be “touched” with the fingers.”
I’m not sure what to think here, but I guess it would be fun while I was a bit loopy or really bored. I go to bars to socialize with people and feel this is more of a distraction than an enhancement. Otherwise, it has a settle way of connecting strangers to one another, but it’s not quite there yet. I love the idea of interactive tables in bars, but it comes down to meaningful and smart applications. Be cool if it somehow connected lines to people that were attracted to each other. Otherwise, it looks super cool! Watch the video on their website or watch a YouTube Video.
I first heard Barry Schwartz speak at the GEL conference about his book, “The Paradox of Choice – Why More Is Less“. He talks about how freedom is better, but also worse. How the more options we have the better the final outcome, but the worse the experience. How 175 different types of salad dressings is ridiculous. Is too much choice bad? Does it really numb our thinking and decision making? Does variety mean quality? What’s better, Capability vs Usability. Anyhow, his incredible 1 hour Google lecture can be viewed here. For any of you out there that create consumer products, this is a must watch!
In my opinion, there are the services and products that that I love to have choice in, but then there are a ton of services I wished never had options. Airline tickets, phone plans, health plans, cameras, cars, and the everlasting ordeal of figuring out which movie to watch. A few years back, we’d just watch a movie that came out. Now we look at all the trailers, read a bunch of reviews, dive into their websites, ask friends that have seen it, look at their rankings, look at who’s in it, then finally deciding if the movie is worth watching even though we know everything about the movie now. After all that chaos, we have to figure out how to buy the ticket. Should we buy it early, online, offline, as a group, print the ticket, pick it up, matinée, which theater, etc. Many hours later, our choice is made, which is probably a great decision, but the experience to get there has become a job… So, is choice good? Is thinking about this good, bad? Well, enjoy the video which has several other examples of this paradox!
JetBlue is already one of the coolest airlines to experience with great service, prices, DirecTV in every seat, some yummy snacks, their shut-eye package, and their recently won wireless license, yipeee! So, what’s left you may ask..well, enhancing not only the on-flight experience, but also the off-flight experience by hiring design guru David Rockwell to design their busy interior terminal environment. In Mr. Rockwells well known odd collaborations, he hired Broadway colleague and dance choreographer Jerry Mitchell for the job. For some this may seem odd, but in truth, I love it when projects bring in new disciplines to solve problems. This collaboration uses movement, like in a dance, throughout the terminal as a central means to differentiate the user experience for arrival and departing customers. This interplay between architecture and choreography for a public space is brilliant. The terminal is not scheduled to be finished until 2008 at the Kennedy International Airport(which needs a GUI re-design), but I’m looking forward to checking it out then.
Read more via nytimes article.
Project PDF (more pictures)
Here’s a pretty sweet stylish candle. To turn it on, you touch a large match to it, and to turn it off, you simply blow it out. Personally I love real candles/fire, the ones that can burn you, but seeing how everything is becoming electronic, it doesn’t hurt to add a bit of nostalgia into them.
“The art of experimental interaction design” is a great book to have if you want to see some of the best interaction projects that merge and question the physical, interactive, and interface world together. The book contains projects by ideo, antenna design, daniel rozin, golan levin, and many others. It also includes a CD documenting several of the books projects. I’ve had a hard time finding great books dealing with the physicality in interaction design and electronics, but here it is. Most interaction books only cover interfaces and rarely bridge back to the physical world. I’ve had this book for about a year, and it’s been an everlasting source of inspiration.
I attended the RISD alumni sale recently and came across some great fun jewelry by LeeAnn Herreid. Her moto is, “Jewelry that works”. She has a wonderful collection of work using compasses, thermometers, rulers, bubble levelers, dust, bolts, and other small elements we all encounter in our curious lives. The bubble level pieces are awesome!
Bertendennis brings to us the cute button watch which you can pin onto anything your heart desires. Reminds me of the tempo time clip by vessel.