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:
It is innovative
It makes a product useful
It is aesthetic
It makes a product understandable
It is unobtrusive
It is honest
It is long-lasting
It is thorough down to the last detail
It is environmentally-friendly – it can and must maintain its contribution towards protecting and sustaining the environment.
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.
Hong Kong is familiar to many westerners as a backdrop for gangster films from Enter the Dragon to Jackie Chan’s Police Story, PTU and the Infernal Affairs trilogy.
In fact, the society is much more organised and less violent than the likes of the UK. Even the old public housing projects in Aberdeen don’t really compare to south London. However, why let the truth get in the way of a good story or movie? Which is why the Beijing Olympics mascot Jingjing made me laugh.
You can see Jingjing giving it the full gangster style in shooting. Also note the red face of drunken rage. And he is also an accomplished fighter and tasty with a baseball bat. This has been featured across Beijing 2008 marketing materials and souvenirs.
On a more serious note the games event pictograms are an interesting organic interpretation of what Otl Aicher did for the 1972 Munich Olympics. You can see them in this surround at the Bank of China building (click on the picture if you want to see in more detail.) They remind me of early Chinese character pictograms in terms of their feel, a kind of future primitive design aesthetic. You can see how pride and nationalism are coming through in the designs.
Google Answers decides to close up shop – Google Answers is an attempt to create high quality material for knowledge search and a monetisation model at the same time. At the top end, Google Answers looked like consultancy on the cheap. Given the size of the core Google business versus other media opportunities Google Answers was never going to be big. However closing Google Answers seems to be less a criticism of knowledge search and more a broader retrenchment to only focus on ‘Google-sized’ opportunities – effectively ossification of the business.
Design
x0xb0x– amazing improvement by German designers on Roland’s iconic TB-303
Health Disparities Persist for Men, and Doctors Ask Why – New York Times – health disparities for men exist in all socioeconomic groups, all are doing poorly in terms of health. Health disparities for men is a multi-factorial problem including economic marginality, adverse working conditions, and gendered coping responses to stress. Which can lead to high of health-damaging behaviours and an aversion to health-protective behaviours. Will equality for women drive similar effects on their health to what is occurring in health disparities for men? More health related content here.
Over my lifetime I have had a number of moments when I felt like I saw things with crystalline clarity: one time was when I was in the library doing a job search in the papers (this is pre-Monster.com kids).I suddenly came to the conclusion that even if I got a job that I would be in the same cycle soon again and I needed to get out of the blue-collar roles, even if it meant leaving vast tracts of my life behind.
The next one was in April 2000, the internet business had gone mental, the PR agency I was employed in was in mid-flow of the dot.com boom and all the mini-bubbles that went alongside it like the Java boom, the Linux boom, the broadband boom, the web business marketplace boom, the mobile web boom and rise of the PDA.
In fact, about the only thing that we didn’t promote was micro-scooters, though we did employ a German freelancer who commuted in from Brighton and rode one everywhere he had to go around London.
Anyway, things got so busy that we had to interview clients and decide whether we wanted to work for them. I met a gentleman from an incubator fund and quickly decided that they were start-up roadkill, but I couldn’t work out why this man who was obviously a lot more clever than me was involved in the enterprise.I asked him what made his companies offering different, to which replied “Ged, I am surprised that you asked that, we are trying to move at internet-speed, so aren’t thinking about things like that.” I had a sudden jolt of crystalline vision and saw how horribly it was all going to end and that my pension fund wasn’t worth squat. The elemental truth in this moment is that common sense trumps eloquent words and intellect every time.
Which brings me on to 8vo On the outside by Mark Holt and Hamish Muir. Steve bought this for me as a Christmas present and up until my move from Yahoo! and move back to agency life I hadn’t really had a chance to read the book in full.
The book charts the rise and fall of the design agency 8vo, their work and puts into context their pivotal role in modern UK graphic design.
The book is a collaborative work written by 8vo, former employees, former clients and industry observers. It is part history lesson focusing on design and the business of design, part a tale of technological change and part catalogue.
The way the book is written it is almost as if it is therapy for Hamish Muir and Mark Holt, I found it in turns fascinating and uncomfortable as they progressed through their work and found some elemental truths in their approach to design.
Much of their style of work has been co-opted by their modern day peers, so it is no longer remarkable, however what their peers lack is a good understanding of their approach to work. More book reviews here.
Iain Tait over at Crackunit had a link to an interesting interview with Eric Reiss who learned the same elemental truths as 8vo, but via a different road: in his case Vinterberg and Von Tier’s Dogme 95 rules for film making.
Anything that exists only to satisfy the internal politics of the site owner must be eliminated.
Anything that exists only to satisfy the ego of the designer must be eliminated.
Anything that is irrelevant within the context of the page must be eliminated.
Any feature or technique that reduces the visitor’s ability to navigate freely must be reworked or eliminated.
Any interactive object that forces the visitor to guess its meaning must be reworked or eliminated.
No software, apart from the browser itself, must be required to get the site to work correctly.
Content must be readable first, printable second, downloadable third.
Usability must never be sacrificed for the sake of a style guide.
No visitor must be forced to register or surrender personal data unless the site owner is unable to provide a service or complete a transaction without it.
Break any of these rules sooner than do anything outright barbarous.
Oh one completely useless piece of information that I found out today, the ZIP in ZIP code stands for Zone Improvement Program.
A couple of interesting artifacts that I found online and wanted to share with y’all.First up, video conferencing, why is it so crap and what are you going to do about it?
Ok, we’ve had video online, we’re now living in an age of pretty much ubiquitous broadband, why do we stop with using our VoIP client of choice and use video instead.Well there is the network side of things: IP networks provide a ‘best effort’ service so the signal may be come degraded. All the pixels will get to the other end eventually but they won’t get there in the right order and the latency of the signal will depend on the slowest part of network travel that they have to make through the internet ‘cloud’ no matter what kind of pipe you have between you and your local telephone exchange, wireless hub or cable television outfit. Look at video streaming, it has errors and flaws in its signal even on my 2MB pipe AND the signal is buffered to smooth out these glitches like a CD player. With real-time interactive video conversations that is not a technical option.
Also you may not want to have the person see you as well as speak to you, imagine if you have a bad hair day or want to lie?
The third factor is a much more basic human system and the best way of illustrating it is by looking at the picture above. Notice how you don’t have eye contact with the people that you have a conference with because the camera’s perspective is slightly different to the view you would have if it were a real-world conversation. Notice how the men on the left and right are looking above their screens and the ladies are looking below, this is just enough for you to notice and process at a low level. It doesn’t feel natural, the conversation won’t flow as well as a real-world sit down would because the eye contact feels wrong.
This is why video conferencing can feel so wrong, even Apple’s attempt at correcting it with a small mirror picture (the one at the bottom) to see how you look to the callers feels wrong.
Historically the way to do that is to have the difference between camera angle and the viewing angle of the screen as small as possible. This was achieved by using big TV screens with a camera on top and the participant perched at the end of a big conference table at the other end of the room. That’s why big oil companies and George Bush love video conferencing but you’re not likely to see it adopted en masse in UK homes soon.
Its also not exactly the most elegant solution, which the reason why I was really intrigued by this Apple patent which I saw courtesy of those nice people at AppleInsider.
Imagine where the screen viewing area was the camera with camera elements squeezed in between the pixels on your LCD. The back-light would provide the ambient light required for the picture, you an have eye contact with whoever you are speaking with without living in a mansion and having a conference table the size of a small yacht.
In theory this principle would also work with on mobile screens (at a lower quality-level), televisions etc. On the scary side it would also allow the omni-present two-way tele screens for surveillance like Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. More content here.
Web 2.0 and the Enterprise
News.com have an interesting article Web 2.0 meets the enterprise how companies like IBM and Visible Path are using technologies like social networking, RSS feeds and wikis to help large companies build IT systems. News.com make a big show of how these ‘consumer’ (their word, not mine) technologies are changing the enterprise software landscape.In addition, Forrester sent out an email newletter talking about how service-orientated architecture (SOA) (simply put: enterprise-grade web 2.0-type technologies) are having an accelerated take-up with happy IT directors to be found everywhere.
The truth is more complex than the News.com story about how the kids are showing big business the way, the process is much more complex.
AJAX is generally a hard thing to do well so it is interesting that Michael Robertson is selling AJAX-based web services through ajaxLaunch and looking to use AJAX as a way of providing applications and widgets on top of an OS. Its an interesting take from a business head on all the utopian dreams such as the network computing meme or Netscape’s ‘the browser is the OS’-hype back in the day and an ideal way for novices to get web 2.0 see his ‘everything is moving to the cloud’ keynote here which also has a good product demo (RealPlaya required).
Nice definition of what AJAX means to marketing people – ‘rich web applications right to your computer’.
