Ged Carroll

Category: design | 設計 | 예술과 디자인 | デザイン

Design was something that was important to me from the start of this blog, over different incarnations of the blog, I featured interesting design related news. Design is defined as a plan or drawing produced to show the look and function or workings of a building, garment, interfaces or other object before it is made.

But none of the definition really talks about what design really is in the way that Dieter Rams principles of good design do. His principles are:

  1. It is innovative
  2. It makes a product useful
  3. It is aesthetic
  4. It makes a product understandable
  5. It is unobtrusive
  6. It is honest
  7. It is long-lasting
  8. It is thorough down to the last detail
  9. It is environmentally-friendly – it can and must maintain its contribution towards protecting and sustaining the environment.
  10. It is as little design as possible

Bitcoin isn’t long lasting as a network, which is why people found the need to fork the blockchain and build other cryptocurrencies.

Bitcoin uses 91 terawatts of energy annually or about the entire energy consumption of Finland.

The Bitcoin network relies on thousands of miners running energy intensive machines 24/7 to verify and add transactions to the blockchain. This system is known as “proof-of-work.” Bitcoin’s energy usage depends on how many miners are operating on its network at any given time. – So Bitcoin is environmentally unfriendly by design.

On the other hand, Apple products, which are often claimed to be also influenced by Dieter Rams also fail his principles. They aren’t necessarily environmentally friendly as some like AirPods are impossible to repair or recycle.

  • Lean web development + more

    This is more of a wish list of what changes I’d like to see in technology and related areas in the next 12 months. This is based around a number of concepts, a few of which are lean web development, security, SSD pricing, better product design and service breakouts.

    Lean Web Development

    Lean web development. This have gotten ridiculous when the average size of a web page is now 1MB. It adversely affects page load times and assumes that bandwidth for the end audience is limitless, which is a fallacy when you have mobile broadband caps and telecoms providers looking to meter broadband use moving forwards. Lean web development recognises that wireless and wired networks don’t provide the kind of limitless low latency broadband technologists assume exists. It might be about turning the approach to web development on its head and developing for mobile devices first and then adding on content or features depending on the device rather than trying to hyper-mile existing web technologies.

    Security

    A more secure web. At the base level an increased awareness of security: why do companies store credit card details or personal information in unencrypted files? At an architectural level:

    • Re-secured DNS and SSL certificates
    • Secure VPNs over IP v.6 networks
    • Effective IP address and system configuration masking to protect from privacy intrusions and badly executed behavioural advertising

    SSD price decrease

    The price of solid state drives (SSDs) to fall so that they can be used on my MacBook Pro as the primary storage drive for my life. At the moment whilst devices like the MacBook Air are attractive. they don’t have enough storage capacity and act as an adjunct or special purpose personal computing device. At the present time that just isn’t possible. Cloud is interesting as an idea, but the reality of networks doesn’t make it as practical as people seem to think.

    Design

    An increased appreciation of ergonomics in device design. In the mid-90s I had an Apple PowerBook which came with legs that flipped around to angle the keyboard at an optimal angle for typing. My current MacBook Pro doesn’t have any kind of similar feature. My iPhone feels too wide in my hand as a phone and my iPad is awkward to hold. And I haven’t even started into a rant over the pictures under class interface and soft keyboard of the device with no haptic feedback.  Part of this is down to a size-zero aesthetic design obsession and interface designers per-occupation with the Tom Cruise film Minority Report – but its making designs that are not particularly human-friendly and leading to poorer product performance.

    A move away from general purpose technology hardware and smartphones to focused designs. Convergence has been a watchword in hardware and software design. A less positive spin on this is bloatware. In hardware that has meant personal computers and smartphones. The personal computer is currently being challenged for dominance by tablet devices which only use a fraction of the computing power available. Why is it that Microsoft Word only allows me to write as fast in the latest version for the Mac as Word 5.1 which was released two decades ago? It is ironic that smartphones like the Apple iPhone can do a range of great and trivial tasks, but are quite poor at being a phone. Dropped calls, poor call-quality and a form factor that still feels a bit too wide in my hand as I hold it to my ear – it is a great example of being a jack-of-all-trades but master of none. Whilst a Swiss army knife or Leatherman tool is useful at a pinch, you are still better off doing the job with the right tools if available. With software or digital services space and weight aren’t an issue, yet we have products that have overloaded awkward functionality that leads to a poor user experience. By all means get different things to talk to each other: iftt provides a great template for how that should look; but don’t try and do all of those things on the one user space. 37Signals ethos to become the norm, rather than the exception.

    Service break out

    One of the Chinese services like Sina.com’s Weibo crossing over and giving Twitter a run for its money. Sina.com have kept innovating with their product getting ahead of Twitter and innovating in terms of the user experience. A side benefit of compliance with Chinese government legislation has meant that they seem to do a good job on spam as well.

    Wireless choice

    A clear idea of what on earth is happening with Research in Motion | Intel | Sony in the mobile space and excellent differentiated products to bring some choice back into the wireless world rather than more of the same. The wireless device industry is starting to exhibit some of the dynamics of the PC industry: with ARM and Android being the Intel X86 and Microsoft Windows of the handset world, with Apple doing their own things. Costs are coming down but innovation only seems to look like what Apple does at the present time. There is a reduction on the types of form factor designs and interaction methods.

    Media

    The return of Geek Monthly. This was a US publication that I came across in Hong Kong. It’s publisher filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy, but it got picked up by a new firm looking to get it back on the road. Hopefully they’ll succeed. This Current TV programme should give you an idea of what to expect:

  • IWC 59210 movement

    Why does someone who spends his working day thinking about the future and all things digital care about the IWC 59210 mechanical watch movement? A modern quartz movement watch can be more accurate.

    An analogue watch has some advantages over a digital display in terms of legibility and the ability to see how much time one has until an appointment, but that can have quartz movement behind it.

    I like a mechanical watch movement because:

    • The movement of a good mechanical watch is an object of beauty in itself. The great watch companies take as much pride in making the insides look as beautiful as the watch exterior. It is rare to see that detail in the design of modern products outside those designed by Apple
    • You have a lifelong relationship with a mechanical watch. Companies like Rolex will service your watch for you every few years or so and will even refurbish it if necessary. Patek Philippe have used the same strapline in their advertisements for years: You never actually own a Patek Philippe. You merely look after it for the next generation. Good quality design is products that you will want to own until you wear them out, or they wear you out. It is also a good way towards creating more environmentally friendly products and I haven’t even got on to challenge of battery disposal…
    • Finally, I like to be able to know the time all the time. I wear my watch in bed, in the shower, in fact it only comes off if I find it getting in the way typing. Part of this comes from having done scuba diving when I was younger; your watch became part of you. I had a quartz watch and moisture got in stopping the watch dead. A friend had an automatic watch movement in a Seiko which had a little damp in but kept on going. Both of use eventually invested in good quality Swiss watches

    The IWC 59210 is a marvel of the watchmakers art. It holds up to eight days power when fully wound up and runs at 28,800 beats per hour which is a marvel for a mechanical device that small.
    IWC calibre 59210
    The IWC 59210 movement goes into the Portofino range of watches which have a case that is not as technical as the style of watches that I like, but make a nice dress watch if you like that kind of thing. More related content can be found here.

  • Sony Discman D-250

    When you think about the likes of the Sony Discman D-250 you need to realise what it was like growing up in the 1980s. It meant that personal music on the move was a ghetto-blaster perched on your shoulder annoying the neighbourhood or a Sony Walkman personal stereo. I was really fortunate in that I had a half decent Walkman WM-24 which whilst bulky gave half decent sound. It was more expensive looking than it actually was but the Dolby noise reduction made a big difference. This eventually died on me and I ended up with a more modern, but poorer quality Walkman WM-36.

    But a CD player was what you really wanted, for decent sound.
    Sony D-250 Discman
    I poured over the Sony catalogues working out which one I wanted (the Sony D-Z555) versus the best that I could afford (the Sony D-250). The Sony D-250 Discman was in Sony’s premium Discman range, featuring a pressed metal chassis and a NiCD rechargeable battery the size of a packet of Dentyne gum. Eventually the battery dying and my not being able to buy a replacement battery would see it do hi-fi duty. Portable music would have me use a Sony DCS901 Sports Discman. This also played CD-Rs full of MP3 files – it was my pre-iPod and had a battery life of almost 40 hours, but more of that another time.

    The Discman D-250 came with line-out connection for a hi-fi and you could attach a wired remote control. It could be programmed to random play, play tracks in a specific order and access CD ‘index marks’. These index marks put you to predefined points in a specific recording and at the time were only used in some classical recordings. As a standard it wasn’t widely supported but would have leant itself well to the mix CDs that started to come along a few years later from Mixmag Live.

    The CD has served me well as a player for my hi-fi system because of its rugged mechanicals and decent electronics long after I started using an iPod for portable music and its more sophisticated brother the D-Z555 is highly prized by hi-fi enthusiasts for the same reason, particularly as it featured a digital output as well.

  • Think Outside Stowaway

    I first got hold of a Think Outside Stowaway portable keyboard at the start of my agency career. It was 2000, the over-enthusiasm for internet-based businesses, alternative telecoms providers and Linux eco-system businesses was in full-swing and I was building my agency career helping further fuel the economic bubble.

    Broadband wasn’t a word in common parlance, streaming video windows were about the size of a postage stamp; that didn’t stop sites like UK business technology site Silicon.com from trying to develop and promote video content for the web.

    We weren’t living in the real-time always-on world of now. At this time wi-fi devices were online starting to be launched on to the market and was some way from adoption. Wireless meant using IrDA infra-red connections between devices (like a TV remote control having a long conversation) and wireless data meant the then new digital mobile phone networks with SMS and patchy voice services.

    You could could get some Nokia and Ericsson phones to talk to other devices to connect to the internet but it wasn’t cheap. The only people I knew who used it were news photographers getting pictures over to picture desks at photo agencies and newspapers.

    My biggest client at the time was Palm who were spun out of 3Com with Carl Yankowski at the head of the company and Bill Maggs as CTO.

    I had gone out and bought a Palm Vx PDA three weeks before being put on the account (where I would have got one for free).  The Vx became my primary computing device, as I was away from home much of them working in the office, at client meetings or traveling. I started to write on it, but the stylus would only get you so far.

    I had looked at devices like the AlphaSmart 3000, which was cheap, ran on three AA batteries for weeks at a time, and could transfer text via USB. It had proper keys with decent travel on them and was sturdily made, but it had a similar footprint to a modern-day 13-inch MacBook Pro.

    I eventually ordered a Think Outside Stowaway portable keyboard from Amazon in the US. The keyboard used the Palm Vx as its ‘computer’ and and PDA became a compact word processor that would fit into two jacket pockets and was more productive than even the current iPad.

    I managed to draft emails to colleagues, positioning documents, media tour briefing documents and press releases on it. You could type away quite happily on the train or an airplane, which I frequently did when I went back home to see the parents.

    How on earth did a they get the Think Outside Stowaway keyboard to fit in a jacket pocket?

    This came down to a bit of product design genius by a Silicon Valley-based start-up called Think Outside Inc. who came up with a Jacob’s Ladder-type keyboard design which gave you 19mm keys and then folded into four sections – connected together with a flat ribbon cable. The pieces were locked together by sliding in two handles (the red bits in the picture above) to provide a stable flat keyboard. The design was so successful that Palm sold their own-branded version to be sold to people like me and Targus-branded versions did a similar thing for Handspring, Compaq and HP PDAs. But none of them had the elegant design solution collapsing the keyboard like the Think Outside Stowaway unit.

    A flip-up connector plugged into the serial port of the device and held the screen at an optimum position for viewing. Later versions of the keyboard used Bluetooth wireless connectivity, unfortunately the electronics were less tolerant of being folded up so the keyboards became less elegant and bulkier. Eventually Think Outside was acquired by cellphone charger company Mobility Electronics (iGo) and eventually touch devices pretty much killed the mainstream demand for a portable keyboard all together.

    You can still get keyboards that embody the ideas of the Think Outside Stowaway. Unfortunately, they aren’t any more compact or robust than their predecessor. Which is a shame given the prevalence of iPhone users is many businesses. More throwback gadget related content here.

  • iPhone 4S

    I read through the Apple press materials following the iPhone 4S and iCloud services launch the other day. There was a lot of disappointment out there when the phone revealed wasn’t a massive step-change forward which is probably massively unfair for example Carnegie Mellon University professor or computer science David Farber posted the following message on his Interesting People mailing list:

    After yesterday’s announcement by apple I decided to   explore changing phones and/or carriers. I am specifically interested in the most advanced smartphone with “4G” capability.

    Any suggestions?

    Having done my own research, I ended up coming away with questions rather than forming opinions.

    Firstly, iCloud; I read and saw nothing that altered my initial perceptions and concerns when I wrote about the service back in June. So rather than repeating myself it is easier to link out to my earlier post.

    As for the iPhone 4S itself; the updates to the device compared to the iPhone 4, felt as much about feature catch-up as about innovation. The improved camera matched features in top of the line Nokia and Samsung phones. The much-lauded speech recognition application Siri was as much about matching the voice activated features in Android software.

    Unlike many online who were looking for a new thinner form factor, I was glad that the new phone kept the iPhone 4 size as there is already an unhealthy focus on size zero design at the expense of battery life, product performance  and ergonomic design.

    When Steve Jobs talked about the transition to Intel processors for the Macintosh product range, the rationale was mostly around a new focus on processors moving from computing power to computing power per Watt. I’d like to know what effect that Apple’s new electronics design for the iPhone 4S has on power consumption and battery life. Does the faster video transitions come at the expense of usability due to declining battery life?

    Only time will tell if the aerial changes and new electronics have improved the iPhone performance in areas such as call quality and dropped calls. After the initial rush to buy from completists and early adopters the word-of-mouth around these issues are going to be important for iPhone sales. More information about the iPhone.