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.

  • Things that caught my eye this week

    I was reminded of my childhood this week. When I was pre-school, I loved playing with a box and packaging material. I can remember that whatever channel my Mum had the radio tuned into, there was a lot of easy listening songs on it.

    Picture this: Neil Diamond’s Song Song Blue on the radio. A three or four year old Ged scrunching up packaging from a Cadbury Milk Tray box. Playing with a box, I turned the box internals into a conductors baton, and Neil Diamond followed my lead.

    It seems Amazon has had a similar idea in terms of playing with a box: Amazon launches an AR app that works with new QR codes on its boxes | TechCrunch. More related posts here.

    While we’re on the subject of easy listening, the South China Morning Post magazine had a feature article about the late great Roman Tam. Godfather of Canto-pop Roman Tam ‘an imperfect man’ who sought perfection | South China Morning Post – As the voice of TVB theme tunes in the 1970s and 80s, Roman Tam’s singing could be heard in the streets of Hong Kong from 7pm each day. Tam was accepted into mainstream Chinese culture despite homosexuality being outlawed, with his on-stage flamboyance tolerated because of his off-stage discretion – ‘Below the Lion Rock’ is an official national anthem for Hong Kong.

    Roman Tam – Below The Lion Rock

    A translation would be:

    In life, there is joy, but inevitably there is also sorrow

    We met underneath the Lion Rock

    (When look back) We laugh more than we sigh

    In life, there are struggles/rough roads,. Inevitably we can’t go without worries

    Since we are in the same boat, share the same life underneath the Lion Rock, Let’s put aside our differences and get together Put down our conflicts/differences, chase dream/a good cause together

    People in the same boat will walk together, without fear, not intimidated

    We both are at the corner of the world (Literally it says we dwell at the corner of the sea and edge of the heaven).

    Hand in hand we can trample and level all obstacles We use our sweat and hardwork to write our own legend, that will go down history forever

    Unofficial approximate translation of Below The Lion Rock

    The TV series Below The Lion Rock is a great primer for outsiders looking to understand Hong Kong. It started in the 1970s and addressed the living conditions of the poorest sector as well as the working class who lived in the public housing estates and squatter huts below the Lion Rock in the 1970s. Hong Kongers worked hard to collectively rebuild Hong Kong after World War II.

    It even gave name to the Lion Rock spirit of solidarity and perseverance. One could argue that this broke down as Hong Kong de-industrialised, becoming a financial and real estate investment based economy instead.

    https://youtu.be/x2HGwYI4sAM

    The Lion Rock itself has been the scene of protests during the past few years, including a human chain.

    Human chain on the top of Lion Rock. Hong Kong. 20190823
    Human chain on the top of Lion Rock. Hong Kong. 20190823 by Studio Incendo

    Amazing visualisation of Gartner’s hype curve over the past 25 years. It makes an interesting time machine looking back into where we thought technology would go. The data behind the video can be found here.

  • Persuasive Technology by B.J. Fogg

    Persuasive Technology was published in 2003. It is still the bible for captology ( from Computers as Persuasive Techologies). Back when I was working inhouse at Yahoo!; copies of the book could be found on the desks of some product managers and designers. It has since gained a certain amount of notoriety. Questions are asked around the addictive behaviour of social network and gaming app users. Some consumers even find it hard to stop swiping dating apps.

    Persuasive Technology
    Persuasive Technology – Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do by B.J. Fogg

    Fogg realised that computers offered new challenges and opportunities. Persuasive Technology was written almost 20 years ago. How well does it now hold up?

    Relevant content

    Right from the start when Fogg starts going into the advantages of persuasive technology you can see the evergreen nature of the content.

    Some of the content is quite prescient with a section on surveillance technology creating persuasion through observation. The comments on simulation are equally applicable to modern VR environments, which has been proven in the treatment of PTSD amongst combat veterans. The application ‘In My Steps’ (page 76) designed to facilitate empathy among doctors for cancer patients echoes through the patient centric work that pharma companies are currently funding.

    Chapter 5 on computers as persuasive social actors is playbook for the way modern apps from freemium games to Tinder work effectively. If you don’t read anything else read this chapter.

    Tired?

    A cursory skim of the book would yield examples that are Windows Vista-era screenshots of crude applications. You have to remember that the book was written before mainstream social networks or the New York Times paywall. Back then, it was right at the end of the banner ad golden age in online advertising; surviving on ads was still considered an option for news media.

    Whilst the context has changed around the web and the way that we use it; the examples are still illustrative. They’re worthwhile sticking with when reading though the book.

    Misinformation

    The modern issue of misinformation gets a relatively small mention. Fogg realised the impact that misinformation could have on future computer credibility. He felt that as computers lost their ‘aura, their mystique, their presumed credibility’. He thought that computing ubiquity would make computing credibility more complex due to purpose and form-factor.

    He also worried about bad actors; though this largely seems due to hacker Adrian Lamo hacked the Yahoo! News content management system from his browser and was able to alter the quotes in stories. At the time subtly altering mainstream news stories was seen as the greatest risk

    …Peter Sommer, an expert in computer crime at the London School of Economics, says that carefully changing information posted to a major web site could be far more serious. 

    “If it is done in a subtle way then this could spread misinformation,” Sommer told New Scientist. “It’s unfortunate that Yahoo! is the largest and most important portal in the world.”

    Yahoo! is one of the most popular destinations on the internet. In June 2001 the site had more than 200 million visitors. Yahoo! takes news feeds from a wide range of news agencies and web sites. 

    Lamo says he was disturbed to have had access to the system during recent terrorist attacks on America, when internet news sites were in great demand. 

    “At that point I had more potential readership than the Washington Post,” Lamo told Security Focus. “It could have caused a lot of people who were interested in the day’s events a lot of unwarranted grief if false and misleading information had been put up.”

    Hacker re-writes Yahoo! news stories – New Scientist (September 20, 2001)

    In some ways Fogg’s vision came true. The Macedonian fake news publishing during the 2016 US election wasn’t driven by bad actors; but ad revenue hungry teens. The effect was the same as Lamo’s Yahoo! News hack a decade and a half earlier.

    Ethics

    The thinking in Persuasive Technology was weaponised in various products and services. Yet, the book, was ethically driven by design. Fogg had a good understanding of how his work could be used by bad actors. He devoted a whole chapter to the ethics of captology and pointed out times when an act would be unethical throughout the book. Fogg starts off with ethics in the preface on page XXVI right before the acknowledgements section.

    Chapter 9 goes into the various ethical pitfalls that may await the designer and the user. It’s interesting that many of the case studies focus on getting personal information out of children. Protecting children online has consistently been an issue since the start of the commercial web.

    It is also interesting in this chapter that he emphasises the role of education in protecting future users from the unscrupulous.

    Conclusion

    Yes rereading Persuasive Technology was like taking a time machine back to the post dot com bust web. But the lessons to be learned are still the same. We might have more stylish web design and responsive pages; but we still have the same problems. Whether you work in digital transformation, user experience or content strategy, this book deserves a place on your bookshelf

    More book reviews can be found here.

  • Amazon returns + more things

    Hidden cameras and secret trackers reveal where Amazon returns end up | CBC News – interesting aspect of Amazon’s business model. It does make me wonder how much of a drag is returns on Amazon’s business? Retail returns are usually running at 10 percent of products bought. With e-tailing; this rate is thought to be as high as 40 percent according to the programme. That sounds like an extremely high rate of returns. Back when I was in college 25 percent was quoted as a returns rate for catalogue businesses.

    Inside Palantir, Silicon Valley’s Most Secretive Unicorn – “Where you get into trouble is when the software gets so complicated that you have to send people in to manage it,” said one former CIA official who is complimentary of Palantir. “The moment you introduce an expensive IT engineer into the process, you’ve cut your profits.” Palantir, it turns out, has run headlong into the problem plaguing many tech firms engaged in the quest for total information awareness: Real-world data is often too messy and complex for computers to translate without lots of help from humans – to be fair enterprise software companies have always sold a good deal of smoke and mirrors in terms of over-exaggerated claims – sounds a lot like IBM’s Watson in this respect

    Apple’s New 5G IPhones May Be Left on the Shelf | Yahoo! Finance – 5G lacks a killer app for consumers

    Exposure to TV ads up 15% during height of lockdown – Even children were watching more broadcast TV and exposed to a greater volume of advertising in the weeks following the lockdown in March.

    Alibaba Group – investors day presentations – some interesting insight into Chinese e-tailing, retailing and internationalisation of these models

    Blockbuster Chinese games said to boycott Huawei and Xiaomi app stores over revenue tax | South China Morning Post – two Chinese gaming startups, Lilith Games and miHoYo, said they won’t sell their would-be autumn hits via app stores pre-installed on smartphones made by Huawei and Xiaomi. Instead, they’ve opted for stores charging smaller fees or none at all—including Apple’s App Store, which levies the same 30% charge in China as it does everywhere else. While the duo didn’t say outright they were unhappy about the 50% rule set by the Chinese Android stores, many gamers and developers see them as the good guys stepping up against tech’s behemoths

    How to Monitor Facebook Pages – Meltwater Help Center – now allows users to monitor Facebook pages that they’re in charge of. The limit is 50 specific Facebook pages. It pulls out the Facebook analytics data into a Meltwater interface

    European Semiconductor Sales Drop, Global Sales Rise – EE Times Europe – not surprising given the disruptions to manufacturing

    Google Chrome remains China’s most popular web browser, even with Google search and other apps blocked | South China Morning Post – consumer backlash against some domestic browsers can be attributed to their aggressive user acquisition tactics, such as being deliberately difficult to uninstall. But he said that a shift in consumer tastes might also play a role. When Chinese internet companies first started designing websites and applications in the late 90s, the minimalist aesthetic was unpopular, he said a friend told him at the time. “Chinese consumers wanted stores where all the merchandise was crammed onto the shelves at maximum capacity, with narrow aisles where people were just bumping into one another,” he said. “It felt like plenitude.” “Those early design preferences endured for a surprisingly long time online, and I think there’s still a much higher tolerance for it than we’d see in the US or other Western countries,” he added. “I think as consumers get more sophisticated, though, they’re looking for a retail experience that doesn’t feel like a fire sale all the time.”

    Opinion: How Can Luxury Brands Successfully Price In The Post-COVID World? – In these challenging times of lockdowns and demand contraction, luxury brands have increased – even more than usual – the prices of their bestselling products to offset part of the compression of margins due to the pandemic. Take for instance, Chanel which earlier this year confirmed it had brought the prices up of its iconic handbags (11.12, 2.55, Boy, Gabrielle) ranging between 5 and 17 percent in euros and Louis Vuitton which also raised the prices of some of its products in March and May. It is not a surprise that brands like Chanel, Louis Vuitton, Hermès and Dior, whose handbags are products that are considered iconic and perceived by consumers as investment pieces, can be more bold in increasing prices to protect their margin. But not all companies have such strong brand positioning and therefore cannot raise their prices so easily.

    Bulgari CEO Jean-Christophe Babin: “Millennials Don’t Want Formal Luxury.” | Luxury Society – I suspect that this is across age cohorts but the blend of streetwear and luxury is a key sign of it

    Is online advertising subprime? Contagious – interesting thought experiment

    South Korean Activists Accuse China of Using Huawei to Hack Their Election | Daily Beast – of course Samsung is looking to pick up 5G smartphone and infrastructure sales from Huawei….

    New info about Facebook-Instagram deal delays antitrust report: source | CNBC – it will be interesting to see what comes out

    Axios China – Top German official hushed up report on China’s influence – not terribly surprising when you read books like Hidden Hand. More China related posts here.

    The end of the American internet — Benedict Evans – more precisely. The end of Americans being the dominant users and culture on the internet

    Brussels drafts rules to force Big Tech to share data | Financial Times – grab the popcorn

    State of AI Report 2020 – interesting report on the hype

    The great uncoupling: one supply chain for China, one for everywhere else | Financial Times – Untangling supply chains that have built up over a generation is a complex and difficult task and the multinational companies which sell into the Chinese market will stay and even expand. But if companies that once used the mainland to make goods for export do decide to depart in significant numbers, it will represent a major reversal of five decades of economic integration between the US and China

  • Folding phones + other things

    CNET took a look at the mechanics behind Motorola’s new folding phone. Other vendors have launched folding phones. Some of which have folded with the screen on the outside to not have too tight a kink on the screen. Motorola’s folding phones have their screen fold inwards, this is down the space provided by a cam mechanism and supporting metal plates that keep the screen in place and unstressed.

    Its good old-fashioned mechanical engineering rather than software that is facilitating mobile phones and it is a joy to behold. More design related posts here.

    watts towers
    Watts Towers by Paul Narvaez

    Before Ferguson, black lives matter or the Rodney King beating there was the Watts riots. Wattstax was a festival that addressed the underlying issues that kicked off the riots. It was put on by Stax Records. The accompanying documentary is amazing. Richard Pryor provides a narrative, beautiful photography and brilliant performances.

    More from Open Culture here: Wattstax Documents the “Black Woodstock” Concert Held 7 Years After the Watts Riots (1973)

    My computer monitor packed up. I couldn’t get it repaired through my usual suppliers so I got a refurbished monitor through Secondbyte Micro. I am getting rid of my dead monitor on eBay here.

    Tim Hwang has written a book comparing online advertising to the 2007-08 financial crash. Subprime Attention Crisis and I’ve pre-ordered a copy. Hoang reckons that there will be a big crash when marketers at large work up to two things:

    • Micro-targeting doesn’t work
    • Online ads were taking credit for sales that would have happened anyway through the ‘selection effect’. Basically the reason why performance marketing has fallen out of balance with brand marketing

    I am not convinced that there will be a big crash. I don’t think that anyone would be surprised that: tech companies don’t get marketing and don’t tell the truth. Previous generations would have sold shonky enterprise software and vapourware.

    I think budgets will try to be adjusted by marketers more towards brands. But at the rate that boards seem to go through marketing leaders; you first have to convince the C-suite to think about marketing strategically. Which ain’t going to happen thanks to the pervasiveness of Jack Welch’s blinkered perception of shareholder value.

    Finally, I think that this is the first time I have seen a manufacturer teardown its own product pre-launch for consumer audiences. I love that its done by one of Sony’s own engineers.

    The user serviceable dust traps were a particularly interesting touch to the device.

  • Weight lightening + more things

    Midgards Messer Shop – interesting weight lightening techniques in their product designs. It reminds me of the weight lightening techniques racing cars used to use. Drilling out metal on parts like bonnet hinges to retain strength but not the weight. More design related content here.

    In U.S. and UK, Globalization Leaves Some Feeling ‘Left Behind’ or ‘Swept Up’ | Pew Research Center – which gives a good idea of where populism came from

    Rolex Panerai 3646 Service Invoice from 1955 – Vintage Panerai and other iconic timepieces under the loupe at Perezcope – interesting implications on brand provenance and heritage

    Mulberry warns on sales after falling to £14m loss | FT – the comments on online shopping by the CEO in my opinion don’t ring true.

    Facebook to defy new Turkish social media law | Financial Times – Facebook must feel that the Turkish market isn’t worth taking negative PR in the US and EU. It must have relatively meagre advertising revenues for them to make this decision. Why put their foot down in Turkey and not in other markets like Hong Kong or Russia?

    People love products with rituals – Ariyh – the role of rituals in product consumption can drive sales, interesting research. Examples would be:

    • The different ways one would eat a Cadbury’s Creme Egg
    • Twisting to separate the biscuit from the filling on an Oreo
    • Waiting for the head to settle on a pint of Guinness
    • Cadbury’s Flake bath adverts the emphasised enjoying the bar in private ‘me time’ moment

    Facebook Says Government Breakup of Instagram, WhatsApp Would Be ‘Complete Nonstarter’ – WSJ – interesting that the 14-page briefing document was leaked to the Wall Street Journal. Tim Wu’s takes on the claim are interesting ‘A government antitrust case against the company would likely rely on the argument that Facebook made serial acquisitions to reduce competition, a question that wasn’t considered when the Federal Trade Commission originally chose not to oppose the Instagram and WhatsApp deals‘

    Reebok teams up with fashion brand Yoshiokubo for traditional-culture-inspired sneakers | SoraNews24 -Japan News – interesting how they’re incorporating Japanese culture motifs

    Winston Privacy – ad blocker as hardware appliance