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.

Beheadings + more things

The Laborers Who Keep Dick Pics and Beheadings Out of Your Facebook Feed | WIRED – moderation might make up half the staffing numbers of social media sites. The materials is not only traumatic for the moderation staff, but often criminal evidence. Deleting beheadings might be disposing of war crimes evidence. As repulsive as beheadings are, they could be responsible for ensuring criminals get the justice that they deserve.

China’s Assault on Corruption Enters the C-Suite | WSJ – could also be encouraging management to move the business out of the state sector

HP Eyes Chinese Partner For Router Division | Young’s China Business – not convinced about the upside for Huawei given that it has already built an enterprise business

Programmatic buying no solution without data breakthrough | Campaign Asia – data sharing a key issue

China Mobile’s ARPU Drops While Net Profit Sinks 9.7% – voice calls and SMS down presumably due to OTT messaging services

Daring Fireball: Retailers Are Disabling NFC to Block Apple Pay – not convinced but it is an interesting move, they think that mobile wallets give them a chance to disintermediate merchant services (bank debit card services, credit card services, charge cards)

LG unveils Nuclun, its very own smartphone chip | The Inquirer – interesting move by LG; a stratagem to cut costs and differentiate in a commoditised Android handset marketplace. Expect the chipset to move into other consumer electronics

Want to dance? Cabinet approves revised law easing regulations on dance clubs | Asahi Shimbun – Japan eases laws that was killing its dance music scene, probably about the Olympics in 2020. The LDP will be kill joys on nightlife in the future again

Facebook and Yahoo Find a New Way to Save the Web’s Lost Email Addresses | WIRED – Aol should be crying out be part of this as well surely?

The Asian Luxury Market Is Stumbling – Business Insider – Thailand and Hong Kong apparently

footnoted* — What’s $8m to Google? – interesting article about Nikesh Arora. Is this similar to his departure from T-Mobile?

Procter & Gamble Sets Duracell on New, Independent Course – NYTimes.com – interesting move, how will it affect Duracell distribution?

High-tech jewellery to help you unplug | Tech blog – interesting and smart (from a design perspective) lack of ambition for the devices, context is king

William Gibson: The Future Will View Us “As a Joke” | Mother Jones – any interview with William Gibson is a good thing

Peak Google | stratechery by Ben Thompson – interesting article

Apple Strengthens Pull of Its Orbit With Each Device – NYTimes.com – interesting analysis – Google is going on a similar trajectory and Microsoft has already been there for a while (paywall)

Luxury goods: The end of ostentation | Campaign Asia – APAC markets less interested in flash luxury (paywall)

Tod’s ignites ecommerce sales with online only handbag promotion | Luxury Daily – limited edition bag rather than discounts

Material Design Icons | Prosthetic Knowledge – Google have open sourced a pile of icons

False and misleading? Advertising on social media in China and Hong Kong | Freshfields – great summary of the legal position (PDF)

Quick Reply – PressRush – interesting idea for the media

94% of Chinese shoppers research on mobile while in-store. | Resonance China – comparison numbers with other countries in Europe

China collecting Apple iCloud data; attack coincides with launch of new iPhone | GreatFire.org – probably implemented to deal with the increased device security that the FBI is wringing their hands about

October 28, 2014
Dorothy & things that made last week

Dorothy

Dorothy by iStrategy Labs is a really interesting use of haptic for discrete navigation information. Glanceable interfaces are important for smartphone devices and wearables to work in the next world. Haptics allow this to be taken to the next level, encouraging glances only when needed, or not at all in some circumstances. Technology mediated behaviour would become much more fluid, indistinguishable from a human with no technology, but perfect contextual knowledge.

A very simple example of this would be the Jæger-LeCoultre Memovox alarm watch from 1950, that relied on a mechanical self-winding (automatic) watch movement.

Kovert Designs

Kovert Designs seem to be taking a similar approach with their jewellery; as does Casio with their BlueTooth G-shocks. BlueTooth LE (low energy) dramatically changes how the technology can be used, making wearables to wireless tags a much more practical proposition.

William Gibson

I am really looking forward to William Gibson’s new book and this interview with American magazine Mother Jones shows that he has not lost his edge in telling truths from the future. The scope of his William Gibson: The Future Will View Us “As a Joke” | Mother Jones

Porter Tokyo collaboration with Isaora

Porter’s collaboration with Isaora are always interesting, but I have really fallen for the Filo pack, with its digital smoke print. Porter Tokyo have built the bag out of Cordura to create the kind of burley design you’d expect from more tactical vendors. The digital smoke pattern is ideal for urban living including hiding the grime of everyday commutes. Unfortunately I can’t justify buying it because I have a perfectly good Mystery Ranch bag.

Physical interface design

I really like this physical interface designed for use on iPads. The pictures under glass interface has its limitations which this design draws attention to.

This design takes the best of software and physical design and melds them together. Of course, how this can be commercialised is another matter of finding the killer application.

October 26, 2014
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