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.

Susan Kare + more things

Susan Kare

Things that made my day this week included mac pioneer Susan Kare, Luxxury, Greg Wilson and JG Ballard:

Great interview with Susan Kare. Susan Kare is famous for her icon designs that appeared in the first nine versions of the MacOS. Even now veteran Mac users will have a reaction to the ‘Dogcow’ that Susan Kare used to illustrate orientation of paper in a printer. More Mac related topics here.

Luxxury

Luxxury have cut a new slice of post-disco, pre-house 1980s dance music that Maze or Hall & Oates would have been happy with. Take it Slow is out on iTunes

JG Ballard

JG Ballard’s High Rise makes it to the big screen alongside some great late 1960s / 1970s set dressing and a great Kraut Rock soundtrack that Daft Punk would love.

Apple Watch

Finally, an Acceptable Use of the Apple Watch | Hackaday and 3D printing for that matter. A lovely Mac Classic homage as watch stand. You can now find this in silicone on Amazon, if you don’t want to 3D print your own version.

Greg Wilson & Francois K

Great interview with Greg Wilson and Francois K talking about the early days of modern dance music. From DJing to production and everything in between. What becomes apparent is something that Robert X Cringely, pointed out in his book Accidental Empires. That the same set of (48) names keep cropping up again and again in the development of something. In Cringely’s case, this was the personal computing revolution. Watching this video; you ge the same sense in the development of dance music.

Greg Wilson helped develop the culture at the Hacienda and brought beat and scratch mixing to UK television in the early 1980s. Francois K’s impact was as a DJ and producer since the early 1980s. The career longevity of these pioneers is fascinating.

January 29, 2016
Cool tools & things that made last week

Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools website has a podcast series, this episode on great tips

Cool Tools is a direct descendant of The Whole Earth catalogue. Kelly started his career helping Stewart Brand edit the last few editions of the Whole Earth catalogue. He was then an editor for follow on projects including the Whole Earth Review and The WELL (Whole Earth eLectronic Link). More Kevin Kelly related stuff here.

For the right content Chinese audiences will watch longer form branded content, Pepsi’s Bring Happiness Home campaigns are designed to tap into Lunar New Year celebrations and this February ushers in the year of the monkey. This is a beautifully made short film about the different portrayals of the Monkey King over time.

There is a new Monkey King film due out with an awesome looking trailer

The X-Files has a new teaser out for the six-part TV series reboot, more over at a microsite which seems to be strangely appropriate. I enjoyed the original series just at the start of my internet usage at college and watched series one of The X Files on a Casio TV with a postage stamp sized LCD screen.

The campaign: Zwitsal is a well-known baby brand in the Netherlands. For many parents and carers, it has associations with the first formative years of a baby’s life.

The aim was to use Zwitsal’s famous fragrance and team it with Robijn laundry (both cleaners and conditioners) to produce a unique highly-emotive new product that would extend the reach of both brands.

Nostalgia and the power of smell was the focus of the brand campaign which used bloggers and Facebook to engage and harness the sharing power of socially engaged mothers.

The results: The campaign, which ran over ten months, saw over 3.5 million people engage with it on Facebook (average engagement rate 8.4%), 137,752 YouTube video views, 23,861 online views and an 11% uplift in sales.

January 15, 2016
SEO marketer crime + more

SEO Marketer Sentenced to More than Three Years in Federal Prison for Extorting Money from a Local Merger and Acquisitions Firm | Department of Justice – just wow. Who would have thought that an SEO Marketer would be sent down for a crime that sounds more like a mafiosi. You’ll never look at an SEO marketer in the same way again

The Many Ways Of WeChat: How Messaging Is Eating The World | TechCrunch – quite a nice primer on WeChat.

Microsoft’s Cortana Gets Baked Into Cyanogen’s Forked Version Of Android | TechCrunch – this should give Google cause for concern

SMARTPHONES: Hungry Huawei Eyes US Smartphone Market – Huawei’s move into the US smartphone market looks like a logical and necessary step to consolidating its place as a top global brand, but will require years of major investment to succeed.

Why the 2012 non-Retina MacBook Pro still sells – Marco.org – The better question isn’t why anyone still buys the 101, but why the rest of the MacBook lineup is still less compelling for the 101’s buyers after almost four years, and whether Apple will sell and support the 101 for long enough for newer MacBook models to become compelling, economical replacements

Circus Ponies – great Alphabet Inc parody by defunct Mac developer

Sennheiser’s 3D audio will finally make VR complete – Engadget – the problem is about getting to a standard, immersive sound options have been around for a while

Nextbit’s cloud-savvy smartphone ships on February 16th – Engadget – interesting cloud based focus, reminds me of the Danger Sidekick in that respect

Yahoo prepping to lay off 10% or more of workforce – Business Insider – you can’t cut yourself to growth

WeChat Unveils New Calling Feature to Start 2016 – Thatsmags.com – To cap off the holiday season and ring-ring-ring in the New Year, WeChat has released a new calling feature that allows users to call mobile and landline phones around the world.

I, Cringely 2016 Prediction #1 – Beginning of the end for engineering workstations – I, Cringely – Centrix model for graphical computing. It depends on network latency, resiliency and redundancy. So it may not work in many markets

Casio’s First Android Wear Watch Will Be Ruggedized And Have Up To A Month Of Battery Life & Razer Nabu Watch – Digital Watch with Smart Functions – closer to the minimum spec I would look at, if they nail 200 metres water resistance, a large G-Shock style form factor and a compelling use case I would re-examine my smart watch usage

NSA hacked two key encryption chips | TechEye – bad news for the likes of Gemalto

The Huawei Mate 8 Review – Anandtech – incremental rather than revolutionary changes, interesting how Qualcomm takes a pasting in the article comments

Qualcomm Pushes Snapdragon Chip Beyond Phones | WSJ – maturation of smartphone market forces expansion (paywall)

Daring Fireball: Samsung Galaxy Tab Pro S | DaringFireball – move to Windows rather than Android – Surface competitor. This probably says a lot about Android on the desktop

Brian Eno Tells The Origin Story For Ambient Music » Synthtopia – Eno on the origins of ambient

IMF Chief Economist’s 2016 Warning: Watch Out for China and Emerging-Market Volatility | WSJ – add to this interest rate rises in the developed world and you have a toxic mix of circumstances

richard sapper (1932-2015) DesignBoom – Richard Sapper was the designer behind Lenovo and before that IBM. The ThinkPad was influenced by bento boxes. You had the butterfly keyboard of the ThinkPad 701 and titanium chassis before the famous PowerBook

January 9, 2016
Things that made my day this week

Dragon Ball characters appear in Ford anime ad specifically made for English-speakers 【Video】 – unfortunately it is unavailable in the UK, there must be some kind of geography-related images rights licensing issue with Dragon Ball. That’s a shame as it looks like a beautiful bit of work for Ford

Great idiosyncratic video that talks about the kind of product design considerations customers need to think about in buying a quality bag. The less seams that you have, the less points of failure that you have in the bab. More design content here.

Pressure Scale – great iPhone hack as a HTML 5 web app. It uses the iPhone’s own sensors to provide a pressure gauge. This goes to show the Swiss Army knife nature of smartphones.

Quentin Tarantino has a reputation for interpolating other film makers work, that he picked up from his time working behind the counter of a great video rental store called Video Archives in Manhattan Beach, California. When it closed down he bought their complete catalogue of content. Some of this won’t have made it to digital formats such as Blu Ray or streaming. I presume that he’ll never be bored, with that comprehensive a film library.

Hungry for more clicks, Zomato is running a killer marketing campaign on porn sites – PornHub has also done similar campaigns with the likes of Diesel jeans. There is a wider ethical discussion to have around this.

Where the line falls will depend on the customer base and the corporate brand.

Whilst it might be right for Axe or Lynx male grooming products, that doesn’t mean that Unilever should do it because of its corporate stance and the knock on effects to the likes of Dove.

On the other hand, a brand that thrives on controversy like Dolce & Gabbana might be a much better fit.

December 27, 2015
Priv fails + more things

BlackBerry sold under 50,000 Priv units, Play Store data suggests | AndroidAuthority – its probably over this number as many BlackBerry Priv devices wouldn’t be allowed to download apps from the Play Store for enterprise security reasons, but it isn’t a blockbuster either. More on wireless related subjects here.

Home Broadband 2015 | Pew Research Center – plateaued with some relying solely on mobile broadband WTF

Markets in everything, tangled and untangled – real world self selecting gamefication

Uber needs more drivers in China. A partnership with a state-owned carmaker will help – Quartz – Uber faces formidable competition in China, mainly from Didi Kuaidi; which explains why its trying to get some ‘vendor financing’ for its ‘non-employees’. It has done a similar deal with General Motors in the US

In Net-a-Porter and Yoox Merger, a Fight Behind the Scenes – New York Times – (paywall)

The Huawei Watch might be the smartwatch for me (REVIEW) – Tech in Asia – If you absolutely, positively, want a smartwatch, if you’re an Android user, and if you care about how the thing looks on your wrist, the Huawei Watch is close to the best option for you (it also works with iOS, although with limited functionality). It strikes just the right balance between usability and design, looking equally at home at a dinner party or a tech event. Unfortunately, it costs twice as much as most of its Android Wear competitors, between S$549 and S$649 (about US$399 in the States).

Women Fuel China’s Fitness Craze – WSJ – reminds me of the ‘All in with my girls’ work done by B-M when I was there

How 19 Big-Name Corporations Plan to Make Money Off the Climate Crisis | Mother Jones – silver linings in them clouds

Here’s What We Need to Do to Get VR to Take Off | Andreessen Horowitz – or why non gaming content is likely to drive VR uptake first

Can’t sign in to Google calendar on my Samsung refrigerator – Google Product Forums – a sign of things to come

Why can’t China make a good ballpoint pen? | Marketplace.org – the metaphysics of quality with Chinese characteristics

December 26, 2015