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:

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.

On wearing a smart watch
At the beginning of the month I took the plunge and decided to buy a Casio G-Shock connected watch. After a week or of wearing a smart watch, I have a pretty good sense of the pros and cons of using it.

The connection with the iPhone makes a major leap forward in the G-Shock experience. Using a G-Shock is rather like using an old computer system like a DEC VAX minicomputer, the experience is modal. Everything revolves around combinations of button pushes to get to the functionality of the watch. Realistically you can’t navigate this process while wearing a smart watch. The manual is a quarter of an inch thick and the commands not exactly memorable. If you have clumsy fingers or are not paying attention you have to cycle through the complete set of button commands again

The G+ iPhone application deals with every setting on the watch bar setting the time and date itself (which still requires a bit of button juggling).

The achilles heel is battery life. Most of the facilities about the watch are about husbanding a relatively meagre lithium ion battery. What Casio’s engineers managed to achieve is imperfect but impressive. The battery life is the silent hand that ruled all aspects of the product design. In order to have a sealed in battery that lasted more than a day, Casio had to go with an old school battery. Out went modern G-Shock features such as the GPS module and atomic clock radio units used to provide accurate time based on location.

Out too went the solar power option. Alerts seem to be polled every quarter of an hour for things like email. But then in this connected age, having a message to let me know that I don’t have email would be more noteworthy.

This all had a number of effects:
- The watch didn’t alert me to everything – that isn’t a bad thing. I do want my alerts to be consistent, so I shut down alerts from everything but Twitter, calendar and calls. I would have loved to have alerts for WeChat, SMS / iMessage messages, FaceTime and Skype calls but they aren’t on the programme (so far)
- The watch did cure ‘phantom’ rings. I got to ignore ringtones out in public and at home unless my wrist shook. It also worked well when I couldn’t feel my phone vibrating in my Carhartt jacket
- I remembered to take my phone with me on more occasions, the watch would vibrate if the Bluetooth link was broken
The best bit of the phone for me was that it was still a G-Shock, it could be worn in the gym, the shower, whilst shaving, washing dishes or swimming. It is a watch for living rather than a Bluetooth-enabled human leash.

More information
On smart watches, I’ve decided to take the plunge
October 20, 2014
Walmart + other things
Walmart online to offline retailing

A really interesting video with Walmart that looks at the interface between online and offline retailing. Particularly interesting take on mobile payment form factors. Amazon presents an existential threat to the Walmart business. Walmart isn’t going down without a fight. It has innovated in the past on using technologies like data mining. More recently Walmart has been making strategic purchases across the online retail realm.

More retail related content here

Water resistance

The reality of watch water resistance is that it is usually measured in a pressurised laboratory rig. Five years ago Casio took their Frogman model from the G-Shock range and did the test in open water off the coast of Japan. It shows the reality of the watch being exposed to a depth of 200M. The two most disappointing aspects of this video are:
- It hasn’t got as much viewer love as it deserves
- They failed to come across any diakaiju during the dive and we don’t know what Japan’s beloved son Godzilla (ゴジラ Gojira) thinks of the G-Shock range
Name generator

Citizenfour the Edward Snowden documentary launched this week, which prompted a lot of NSA product name silliness including too much time spent on the NSA Product Name Generator

Mascots

The people at Rocket News have come up with a new take on the Japanese mascot meme with Hard Ku**mon. More here. Japan seems to have mascots for everything as a way to engage consumer attention. The mascots can build up to be big business in their own right and gain international attention.

NASA apps

Finally I have been working my way through NASA’s collection of iPad and iPhone applications, more here. NASA has an amazing range of content. I would also recommend checking out their flickr accounts for high quality imagery.
October 13, 2014
On smart watches, I’ve decided to take the plunge

I have long thought on smart watches as a possible useful device. So I have decided to take the plunge into wearables. My previous attempt with the Nike Fuelband didn’t go very well as I seemed to break them with frightening regularity and never really learned much from the experience apart from Nike can’t build hardware.

I haven’t gone with Samsung wrist watch, or the better looking Sony one. I will not be rocking a pre-release device from Apple. Instead I have relied on smart watches pioneer Casio, who gave us the Data Bank in the 1980s.

Casio has built a low power Bluetooth module into a G-Shock that gets up to two years on a lithium battery and is still water resistant to 200 metres. Realistically I would be happy if I got 12 months out of it. It uses its Bluetooth skills to give you basic notifications around email, incoming calls and alerts across Facebook, Twitter and Weibo.

At the mid-point in the price of G-Shock watches, it means that the upgrade path isn’t exactly painful. The G-Shock strikes the right balance between robust hardware and disposability required for technology improvements. In fact, I’ve worn a G-Shock before when travelling to span timezones and as a timepiece that I won’t get too attached to if it gets stolen – the smart watch G-Shock has the advantage of my phone being on view less often, ideal for the crime-filled streets of Shepherds Bush or Shenzhen.

I think the smartest thing about the watch is it’s deliberately limited scope to provide notifications. I don’t think that Casio has it perfect, in fact I can see how the power-saving function on the Bluetooth module is likely to miss messages; but I think that they are on to something with this approach – and so I am willing to give it a try.

I am surprised that these watches aren’t being sold in Apple stores around the world given G-Shock’s brand presence in the street wear community. Maybe Casio hasn’t got their act together, or Apple aren’t particularly keen on the competition.

Oh and I won’t look-or-feel like a complete dick wearing it.

More information

“Generation 2 Engine” Bluetooth® v4.0 Enabled G-SHOCK | Casio – yes their marketing sucks with a naming structure only a Microsoft product manager could love
Comparison Chart of Mobile Link Functions – Casio

October 5, 2014
Keybase + more news

Keybase – ‘Keybase is a website, but it’s also an open source command line program’ – outlines one of the key problems with encryption right there for widespread consumer adoption. (Note: Keybase ended up being acquired by Zoom in 2020). More security related content here.

FMCG

What Chinese brands know that MNCs don’t – Campaign Asia – marketers targeting too small a segment of Chinese middle class. Don’t really get Chinese middle class dynamics (paywall)

Hong Kong

One in five Hongkongers may emigrate over political reform ruling | SCMP – no they won’t and the people who feel the most strongly about this are in the least good position to leave

Ideas

LOOK Google gamifies search with Google Mo Lang | Marketing Interactive – interesting Google tactic to increase usage

Luxury

Luxury brands in a quandary as China’s wealthy young develop resistance to bling | The Observer – picking Wendi Deng as an ambassador won’t do anything for their appeal to a Chinese market and they could have got more contemporary than Gong Li (gorgeous as she is)

Media

Facebook Earns 10% of Digital Ad Dollars, More Than Any Other Online Platform | Adweek – a third of global social spend is in APAC

VML China acquires Teein, fills hole in social media capability – Campaign Asia – really interesting that IM2.0 didn’t already have social and used to outsource it. VML in China is formidable

Online

Line temporarily cancels its IPO | Techinasia – avoiding the kerfuffle around Alibaba

Quality

iPhone 6 Is the Most Durable iPhone Yet, Says Insurer – WSJ – you would need to do a larger sample of phones for statistically significant sampling

Security

MIT Students Battle State’s Demand for Their Bitcoin Miner’s Source Code | WIRED – it’s all a bit weird

The free wifi war’s security edge in China | WantChinaTimes – interesting that Chinese internet companies are rolling out free wi-fi. Where does this leave the likes of China Mobile?

The Athens Affair – IEEE Spectrum – anatomy of the Vodafone Greece hack. Very Snowden-esque

Microsoft no longer Trustworthy | The Register – interesting that it is getting shut down, I suspect integrated is a better way of looking at it

Wireless

Apple – Press Info – First Weekend iPhone Sales Top 10 Million, Set New Record – take this with a pinch of salt may have something to do with not all markets being address which has driven demand and scarcity

September 25, 2014
Wearable devices
The Apple Watch launch gave me a chance to go back and revisit the development of wearable computing and my experience with wearable devices.

Wearable computing had it’s genesis in academic research; some of it government funded. For instance DARPA had a hand in the US Army Land Warrior programme. France has it’s FÉLIN programme and Germany IdZ. All the programmes sought to provide soldiers with location data and in communication with their colleagues. Unsurprising key issues for the soldiers involved included:
- Weight
- How cumbersome the equipment was
- Battery life
- Reliability / robust product design
- Value of information provided
It is worth bearing in mind these criteria when thinking about wearables in a consumer context. SonyEricsson’s LiveView remote control for Android handsets launched the current spurt in ‘smart’ watches. Sony made a deliberate decision to position the LiveView as an augmentation to the smartphone. Think of it as a thin client for your wrist.

Samsung and Apple in some of their communications have looked to muddy the water in the way that they presented their devices, despite the fact that both of them rely on the smartphone in a slightly more sophisticated way than LiveView.

Much of the early drive in wearables has been around health and fitness where the likes of Nike and Jawbone reinvented the kind of service provided to dedicated fitness enthusiasts by the likes of Polar and Suunto. These devices are primarily about simplification of design to democratise the technology.

By contrast Samsung and Apple have a greater ambition for their devices in terms of the what they can do. I don’t know what the killer app is for a general purpose device and I suspect neither do Apple or Samsung.

Wearables are not particularly robust by design. I have had three Nike Fuelbands fail in 12 months or so. Compare this to the Casio G-Shock and IWC watches that I generally wear. I don’t have to think about wearing my watch; I didn’t worry about washing my hands or stepping in the shower or the swimming pool with it on. You couldn’t do that with a Samsung Gear.

A second unknown factor is how often consumers would be willing to upgrade a smart watch? When one thinks about the expected price point of Apple’s premium watches, it is similar to the products coming out of Switzerland. The cases and straps are well made, but the price of buying an Omega watch is also about buying into a service centre that will keep the watch going for decades to come. Apple’s iPod Classic barely lasted 13 years. The electronic innards of an iWatch would be built from components that would become obsolete, even if Apple wanted to service them.

Would Apple compromise with a modular design that could make it easy to swap out smart watch innards in a case as an analogy to having a watch serviced? I don’t think so, if one looks at Apple’s design move over the past decade towards sealed computing appliances: the iPod, the iPhone, the MacBook Air and the Retina MacBook.

More information
FÉLIN | Army Technology
SonyEricsson LiveView remote and the changing face of mobile computing | renaissance chambara
September 18, 2014