Ahh, a career milestone reached. I’m blurbworthy. Recently, Nikola Design, a one-man firm in Yugoslavia, asked me for a blurb for their exhibit in Belgrade. I had no prior exposure to the principal or his work, but I took a look and offered a brief writeup. Yesterday I watched a DVD of the exhibit. The camera moves around, showing the work, with text and images overlaying the live imagery. At one point, you see the various quotes from the different critics, including myself (credited as Design Strategist and Core77 Columnist). It was pretty neat; especially given the far-flung nature of the event.

The DUX conference site is now showing my tutorial.

In this tutorial, you will learn more about improv, participant observation, listening, context, and, of course, how these things all fit together and can be used and experienced.

DUX is this November in SF at Fort Mason.

From a lengthy New Yorker profile of Roald Dahl

comes this story of a formative exposure to the notion that the products we experience are the result of conscious deliberate decisions by others, and that this is a process one can engage in.

He and the other boys at Repton also enjoyed a curious perk, courtesy of the Cadbury chocolate company. “Every now and again, a plain grey cardboard box was dished out to each boy in our House,” Dahl writes in Boy. Inside were eleven chocolate bars, aspirants to the Cadbury line. Dahl and the other boys got to rate the candy, and they took their task very seriously. (“Too subtle for the common palate” was one of Dahl’s assessments.) He later recalled this as the first time that he thought of chocolate bars as something concocted, the product of a laboratory setting, and the thought stayed with him until he invented his own crazy factory.

Dahl is brilliant at evoking the childhood obsession with candy, which most adults can recall only vaguely. In his books, candy is often a springboard for long riffs on imagined powers and possibilities. Far from being the crude ode to instant gratification that critics like Cameron detect, Dahl’s evocation of candy is an impetus to wonder. When Billy, the boy in The Giraffe, the Pelly, and Me (1985), opens his own candy shop–talk about wish fulfillment!–he orders confections from all over the world. “I can remember especially the Giant Wangdoodles from Australia, every one with a huge ripe red strawberry hidden inside its crispy chocolate crust,” he says. “And The Electric Fizzcocklers that made every hair on your head stand straight up on end. . . . There was a whole lot of splendid stuff from the great Wonka factory itself, for example the famous Willy Wonka Rainbow Drops–suck them and you can spit in seven different colours. And his stickjaw for talkative parents.” The word “confection” has a double meaning in Dahl’s world: candy is a source not only of sweetness but of creativity. On a field trip recently, I sat next to three nine-year-old boys who spent forty-five minutes in a Wonka-inspired reverie, inventing their own candies.

Simulator technology is becoming increasingly sophisticated, and car designers are building new understanding of the causes (and techniques for preventing) accidents. Lab testing absolutely has its place, but what are these tools doing to help understand the impact of real-world stress (road rage, traffic jams, late for a meeting) or distractions (your favorite song, an annoying cell phone call) – in other words, the context that doesn’t naturally occur in a laboratory. I fear the model is more to consider the human as a component with performance parameters and therefor engineer the hell out of the situation.

Driving simulators are interior mock-ups (or in some cases, complete cars) placed on hydraulically actuated platforms and surrounded by video screens and speakers. Drivers at the wheel feel vibrations, acceleration and deceleration just as if they were driving on the roads projected around them.

“You save 50 percent of your research time,” said Beuzit, noting one reason companies build multimillion-dollar simulators. “It has transformed the automobile industry in the last 20 to 30 years.”

Because the simulator experience is so close to reality, providing the physical sensation of going around a curve or bouncing over a badly paved road, scientists can use it to do fundamental research on how all the senses contribute to what a driver perceives, said Andras Kemeny, a research director at the technical center.

For Renault, he said, “It is absolutely necessary to understand the driver’s strategy in driving, and then design industrial objects according to this knowledge.” Kemeny said it would take a decade to complete the loop of bringing fundamental research results to showrooms.

Link to full article

Kind of a duh article about how difficult packaging is to open, but perhaps a small element of zeitgeist.

Mona Doyle recently filmed people attempting to open bags of pre-cut lettuce. The tape plays like a bit from the television show “America’s Funniest Home Videos.” Everybody uses force and torque that would otherwise be reserved for the gym. Either the bag opens suddenly and sprays lettuce all over the floor, or defeat is conceded and scissors or knives are employed.

When Doyle, whose Philadelphia company does research about food and beverage packaging, showed the tape to an audience of produce packers, they chuckled. But Doyle says that belligerent packaging is making consumers spitting mad. They use words “hate” and “difficult” to describe products that seem to be welded shut.

…

Doyle has no solid statistics on injuries caused by our hassles with packaging, but they do exist in England. One study there shows that ‘wrap rage,’ as it is called by the Brits, has been the cause of more than 60,000 injuries. These often occur when consumers resort to knives and scissors to deal with stubborn packages, according to a 2003 report in the Daily Telegraph.

(That said, here’s a paradox: Hard-to-open bags don’t seem to be stopping us from buying pre-cut lettuce, considered the biggest marketing phenomenon in the history of produce. Sales of the convenience item are soaring. The Produce Marketing Association reports that sales hit $2.6 billion in 1994, then $8.8 billion in 2003. The numbers are expected to zip up to $10.5 billion in 2005. Obviously, cutting our own lettuce into bite-size pieces irritates us even more than cutting open a bag.)

Doyle says American consumers’ demands for ease and convenience have evolved over decades and, once given an easier way, we demand even easier ways. In plain language, we are spoiled.

The about, with & for conference website is was up.

Now in it’s fourth year, AWF is a collaborative forum offered by the graduate students of the Institute of Design to address issues within design research. It is targeted at professionals and academics who develop ideas based on insights into people’s behaviors, perceptions, beliefs, and attitudes. Within this forum, we explore a range of methods to uncover insights and translate them into meaningful systems, products, organizations, services and communications.

As part of a unique partnership, AIGA SF and Apple Computer, Inc. have teamed up to give AIGA members the opportunity to show the business community the power of graphic design.
JULY 20: STONE YAMASHITA PARTNERS

I’m way interested in SYP and what they are about, so I’ll be heading to this. Anyone else?

I participate in several online forums about design. I’ve spent my whole career working with designers and hearing a lot of bullshit about what design is and what it can do. There’s increasing awareness of global issues and a desire to understand the rest of the world and less of the posturing about how design can save the world etc. but today someone posted this gem: To me, industrial Designs and their instructors are the true leaders of a culture.

Choke. Cough. Splutter.

Gve me a break!

That anyone can write that with a straight face tells you some of the problems facing that industry.

Edited from this story

With Taiwanese youngsters increasingly drawn to Western hamburgers and fries, government researchers are trying to lure them back with something more traditional – sort of: rainbow-colored rice.

Yellow rice gets its hue from curcumin, an herb that’s a spice in curries and is believed by some to be an antioxidant that may help prevent cancer. Green rice comes from the nutritious bitter gourd, often used in Asian soups and stir-fried dishes. Pink comes from tomato, and purple from a mixture of vegetables.

The colored rice will likely cost about twice as much as plain rice.

Besides the obligatory “wow aren’t they weird in Asia” reaction (which is ridiculous, because didn’t green ketchup start in the US, after all?), it seems like the story is equal parts science and technology, culture, marketing, fashion, and of course economics (2x for healthy rice? nice price!).

The New York Times reports on a grassroots taxi redesign effort: A nonprofit group called the Design Trust for Public Space plans to ‘define the ideal taxi and taxi system of the future.’ At a workshop on May 24, designers, architects, city officials and representatives of taxi owners and drivers sketched out an array of ideas. Matthew W. Daus, the chairman of the Taxi and Limousine Commission, has given cautious support to the effort. “This is a good exercise to get the perspectives of consumers and passengers, and also of architects and designers who are not involved in the day-to-day business of cabs.”

Yet the perspective of consumers and passengers is not included in the process! This seems like a fantastic opportunity to try to understand the needs of the users of the system from another point of view, rather than as users of the system who presumably arrive at these workshops already ready to solve the problems they’ve defined. Let’s take a step back and try to understand what isn’t working for someone else. Ethnographic study of the cab-riding experience, anyone?