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.
Spanish luxury brand Loewe x Paula’s rolled out its collaboration with Ibiza boutique Paula’s. Paula’s reflects a move of Ibiza away from sweaty EDM fans to a more elite stylish visitor more used to Pykes and Hunters. In many respects Loewe x Paula’s is about taking Ibiza back the original Balearic vibes where it was populated by the international jet set, before football casuals and clubland discovered the white isle in the mid-1980s. More related content here.
Generation Z
Meet Generation Z in our latest film | JWT Intelligence – downloadable and handy for provoking thoughts on planning in terms of data point. I have broader issues with the concept of generations and find life stages generally much more valuable as a concept. Generations hide data which should have use asking broader questions. Their generalisations aren’t that helpful either.
Fred Wilson
Venture capitalist Fred Wilson speaking at MIT Sloan School of Management. Fred Wilson used to run a technology VC operation with Andy Kessler. He then went on to found his own VC business – Union Square Ventures, based out of New York.
Wilson talks about the VC role in terms of coaching entrepreneurs as much as investing them. In some respects this feels at odds with the usual VC approach of investing in the team. He talks about the demise of the investor letter, but also the importance of writing as ‘thinking out loud’.
Product design by algorithm
The Lowly Folding Chair, Reimagined With Algorithms | WIRED – classical material and computer aided design came up with something special. Its a fantastical piece of design. The question of intellectual property with regards the chair is a problem that can be solved another day
UNISON
UNISON campaigns to get voters on board with more of a focus on public services as the UK election got under way seems to have failed completely judging by the opinion polls. This disturbing video was made with Claire Sweeney – which breaks the uncomfortable ground between daytime TV programming and satire. At worst, this could be used as an excuse for the government to clamp down on the ‘interference’ of trade unions in parliamentary elections.
A Japanese TV vignette from 1997 featuring the dons of Japanese streetwear Jun Watanabe and Nigo.
Jun Watanabe has worked since 1984 for Comme des Garçons. He puts out four collections a year and is famous for structured clothing using technical materials. He has done collaborations with Nike, The North Face, Reebok and Carhartt (Work In Progress).
Ten principles of good design (not)
A classic example of progress not being better. Tobias Van Schneider revisited Dieter Rams ten principles of good design and bastardise it with current digital design practices. It is soul destroying in nature.
— Tobias Van Schneider (@vanschneider) 18 April 2017
Fast love
A half hour edit of George Michael’s Fast Love. It reminded me of the way DJs and producers used to make extended edits of disco records to keep the dance floors moving. That was the origin of the 12″ single and the art of beat mixing. Digital now allows these edits be done for a long, long time, rather than being restricted to the theoretical 20 minutes of a side on a 12″ single.
This 30-minute version of Fast Love is truly epic check it out.
Louis Vuitton x Jeff Koons
Louis Vuitton have been on fire recently. Their Master collaboration with Jeff Koons pokes fun at classic art. It riffs on some of Koons’ signature art pieces based around his balloon inspired metal sculpture.
Really nice piece of augmented reality marketing with a virtual cosmetics app to sell make-up.
And then there is the collab collection with Hiroshi Fujiwara’s Fragment Design. Fujiwara’s Fragment Design is more like a consulting designer than a traditional streetwear label. Previously Fujiwara was a musician and founded one of the early streetwear labels Goodenough. More related content here.
Nicky Siano on disco, drugs and DJing at Studio 54 | The Vinyl Factory – Studio 54 was an iconic club at the height of disco. While the Studio 54 was synonymous with disco, it became known for being a celebrity mecca and a restrictive door policy. The celebrity attendance meant that there is a huge archive of society and press photography taken inside and outside the club, which cemented its fame further.
Three kingdoms, two empires: China’s internet giants go global | The Economist – with the exception of political censorship, the internet sector in China is lightly regulated. Facebook, Apple and Google, in contrast, face increasing scrutiny. Chinese internet firms can achieve market domination of a sort that would attract close attention in other markets
I’ve go in involved in a few crowdfunded products and some of them have worked out but the majority haven’t. The latest example was the high profile e-ink phone cover PopSlate. PopSlate got over $1 million dollars of funding and was widely covered by the media.
“popSLATE 2 is E-Ink for your iPhone done right.” – Slashgear
“It’s an evolution, not merely refinement.” – Wired
Why crowdsourced projects fail?
Generally I’ve found that crowdfunded projects like PopSlate tend to fail for three (non-criminal) reasons:
They underestimated the cost or complexity for batch manufacture of items. They have problems with getting tooling moulds to work and have to go through iterations that burn up cash
They get gazzumped; their product is sufficiently easy to make that Chinese manufacturers who go through Indiegogo and Kickstarter for ideas get the product into market faster
The engineering is just too hard. This seems to have been the problem for PopSlate who couldn’t innovate and get their product into market as fast as new phones came out
On the face of it, the PopSlate is a great idea. Bringing the kind of dual screen technology to the iPhone that had been in the Yota phone for a number of years. Huawei had a similar snap-on e-ink back available for the the P9 handset in limited quantities.
PopSlate had already launched a mark I version of their product. With the mark II version of their product PopSlate tried to do too much: they tried to make it a battery case but still ridiculously thin. The following email was sent out on Saturday morning UK time:
Critical Company Update
This update provides serious and unwelcome news.
Based upon your support, we have spent the last year continuing to develop our vision for “always-on” mobile solutions. Our goal was to solve three fundamental issues with today’s smartphones: we wanted to simplify access to information, increase battery performance, and improve readability. Unfortunately, the significant development hurdles that we have encountered have completely depleted our finances, and we have been unable to raise additional funds in the current market. As a result, popSLATE does not have a viable business path forward.
This marks the end of a 5-year journey for our team, which started with a seed of an idea in 2012 and led to our quitting our jobs to start the company. Although we are very disappointed by the ultimate outcome and its implications for you as our backers, we are proud of our team, who worked tirelessly over the years to commercialize the first plastic ePaper display, globally ship thousands of popSLATE 1 devices as a first-in-category product, and re-imagine & further extend the platform with the second generation product. Despite a strong vision, high hopes, and very hard work, we find ourselves at the end of the journey.
We are out of money at this juncture for two key reasons. First, we have spent heavily into extensive development and preparation for manufacturing; as you are aware, we hit some critical issues that multiplied the required spend, as described in previous updates.
Most recently, we learned that the fix for the Apple OTA issues would involve more significant redesign. While we initially suspected that the Lightning circuit was the culprit, it turned out that it was a much more fundamental issue. Namely, our housing material is not compatible with Apple OTA requirements. You may think, “Wait, isn’t it just plastic? Why would that be a problem?” While the housing is indeed largely plastic, we used a very special custom blend of materials that included glass fibers. The glass fibers were used to solve two issues, both of which were related to making the device super-thin: a) they enabled uniform, non-distortional cooling of the housing mold around our metal stiffener plate (the key component that makes popSLATE 2 thin but very strong) and b) they added tensile strength to the very compact form factor. Unfortunately, we have concluded that these added fibers are attenuating the RF signal and that we would have to spend additional cycles to tune a new blend with required modifications to the tooling. This is an expensive and timely process.
Second, we have been unsuccessful at raising additional financing, despite having vigorously pursued all available avenues since the close of our March Indiegogo campaign (including angels, VCs, Shark Tank and equity crowdfunding, both in the US and abroad). Many in our network of fellow hardware innovators have encountered this difficult new reality. You may have also seen the very public financial struggles of big-name consumer hardware companies—GoPro, Fitbit, Pebble, Nest and others—as highlighted in this recent New York Times article [link]. The most dramatic example of this phenomenon is the recent and sudden shutting down of Pebble, paragon of past crowdfunding success.
There is no way to sugarcoat what this all means:
popSLATE has entered into the legal process for dissolution of the company
Your popSLATE 2 will not be fulfilled
There is no money available for refunds
This will be our final update
While this is a very tough moment professionally and emotionally for us, it is obviously extremely disappointing for all of you who had believed in the popSLATE vision. Many of you have been with us since the March campaign, and a smaller set helped found the popSLATE community back in 2012. To you—our family, friends, and other unwavering backers—we are incredibly grateful for your enthusiasm, ideas, and support throughout the years. Just as importantly, we deeply regret letting you down and not being able to deliver on our promise to you. We truly wish there were a viable path forward for product fulfillment and the broader popSLATE vision, but sadly we have exhausted all available options.
The problem as a consumer you have for much of these gadget is this:
If a product can be easily made in Shenzhen, it will be so you should be able to get it cheaper on lightinthebox or similar sites
If it can’t be turned out in a reasonable time, it has a low likelihood of succeeding
There have been successes of more hobby-based products; I have a replica of Roland’s TB-303 synthesiser. It’s the kind of product that can be assembled whilst not relying a China-based supply chain. It also is based on well understood technology and there weren’t issues of with designing for very tight places or Apple’s requirements (in the case of iPhone’s accessories).
What about the poster child of Pebble? Pebble managed to go for longer with a sophisticated product but couldn’t withstand the gravity of declining sales in the wearables sector. More related content here.
The World as Design author Aicher was a German designer. He is most famous of his graphic design and typography. His most famous font is Rotis His impact was far wider. Aicher was a co-founder of the short-lived Ulm School of Design. Over its 15 years it developed a legacy that continues to echo through design education.
He worked with prominent German brands including Braun, Lufthansa and ERCO the lighting firm.
Aicher’s design language for the Munich Olympics was ground breaking. He designed the first Olympic mascot: Waldi a dachshund with multicoloured bands on his body. The posters for the Munich Olympics were hyper coloured designs that still had a system wrapped around them and now trade for hundreds of pounds.
You can blame him for single handedly kicking off the use of stickmen pictograms on public signage in buildings like airports.
Aicher and his colleagues at Ulm were about more than making things look pretty on their medium of choice, they thought about systems. Aicher’s holistic approach to systems influenced modern brand design. Mark Holt, a co-founder of 8vo; who worked on everything from Factory Records to billing systems for mobile carrier Orange cited Aicher as a major influence.
Aicher’s book The World of Design collects a series of his essays across a wide spectrum of topics. Culture and political essays sit alongside examinations on the process of design and typography. Design and art do not exist in isolation but as part of the wider world. Something that you become keenly aware of as being central to his thinking – alongside his advocacy of reinvigorating modernism.
Probably most striking is Aicher’s delivery and style of writing. He writes with absolute confidence as each item has been thought about, despite feeling like a stream of consciousness in the way those mulled over thoughts are put down. He also completely dispenses with capital letters, sentences flow into each other from a visual perspective. This gives his work a sense of urgency and authenticity – but doesn’t make it any easier to read.
Theses essays felt as if they were born on the internet not written sometime before Aicher died in 1991, which says a lot about how fresh and contemporary his work still is.
