Fulfilling my quota of quotations.

  • "Good design is a dualist state; it exists only because it is better than bad design. Without bad design, there would be no design at all, just objects."

    -Jonathan Bell on Industrial Facility for Icon magazine

  • "How do you feel about the term "design art"?
    Mer: I prefer the term experimental design, rather than design art. So many things people label as design art are not truly about art; they're about the user, about the process of making, and they speak about design language in a way that art simply doesn't attempt to. Someone can buy an expensive product, but it's still design. I'm driven by design, not artistic values. Eventually my products can be artistic, but it's a very different starting point.
    Alkalay: Maybe our work isn't 100 percent functional and has an element of fantasy to it, but we don't think of it as pieces of art. At the most, we are experimenting with design.    "

    - from "On the Edge", an interview with Shay Alkalay and partner Yael Mer of Raw-Edges Design in Wallpaper Magazine

  • Another reason I love these guys: Intelligentsia has phased out their "venti" sized coffee. "Drinking our coffee is not like drinking jug wine," said Intelligentsia Coffee founder and Chief Executive Doug Zell on Tuesday. "We're focused on intensity of flavors and providing coffee in the way it tastes best. And it's not in that size." And as a final f-you to Starbucks, he calls 20 oz. espresso drinks "watered-down, Big Gulpish version[s]". I love seeing small business owners with ideals and the conviction to stand up to meaningless industry standards.

  • "Under the guise of “irony,” hipsterism fetishizes the authentic and regurgitates it with a winking inauthenticity."

    - From 'Why the Hipster Must Die' in Time Out New York, the first article I've read that actually analyzes hipsterism in an astute and interesting manner that doesn't completely rely on flat stereotypes and tired cliches.


  7/14/2008


  Why didn't it take?

  • Grolshit!

  • BLU is a street-artist who creates stream-of-consciousness surrealistic animations using the city as his canvas. This video is absolutely inspiring-- and the addition of sound makes it hyperreal...

  • Footworkin.

  • "I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones." - John Cage

  • The Biggest Drawing in the World. When I first saw this site, I saw all the documentation of what appeared to be an amazing art project-- artist ships a GPS around the world via DHL and creates a massive self-portrait. When I clicked again a week later, the author reveals that the whole thing was a ruse-- but for his senior thesis in advertising and design. I almost like it better-- it's like he prototyped an idea for an audacious art project, created all the same thought-provoking ideas, but never actually had to do it.


  6/05/2008


  The Prime Minister of Prime Rib



  5/15/2008


  Fuimos a Santiago de Chile (y Valparíso y etc.)



  5/14/2008


  Storyboarding Experiences

Last month my design director and I gave a presentation and workshop on a technique we have developed at gravitytank for designing user experiences. The workshop was during 'Influence', the annual IDSA Midwest conference, held in Kansas City this year. (KC, by the way, actually was a pretty cool town, but more on that later*)

The basic premise of our presentation was that designers are constantly trying to explain concepts to people-- whether it be consumers in a focus group, decision makers in companies, or shoppers in stores-- but the current tools we use to do this often fall short. Imagine trying to express the experience of using the Nintendo Wii through a product rendering (no matter how hot), a few illustrations of how it's used, and some text call outs. Now compare that to an ad for the Wii. Nothing conveys experience like storytelling over time (Notice they don't even show the whole product until the end? The product is definitely secondary to the experience). Now obviously we can't make an ad every time we want to communicate an experience, but as designers we all share one tool that can get us pretty close: drawing. By using our rapid visualization skills to create storyboards of user experiences, we can express more than just what the product looks like, but how it's used, what it's like to use it, and how different people might interact with it. It creates dynamic stories from static objects.

But beyond using storyboarding to explain ideas, it's also an excellent tool for designing experiences from the ground up. We showed some video from behind the scenes at Pixar-- how they use storyboarding to create scenes in their movies. Some of the most important details from this clip are how they work with storyboarding: each shot is on its own page, and they will collaboratively shape their story by physically moving, adding, and removing pages from a tack wall in hectic critique sessions. Using a similar storyboarding process, design teams can document an experience "shot-by-shot". In attempting to capture an experience accurately, teams will shuffle pages all over and add new touch points as they define them. Once the "scene" is completed, the team can easily see pain points in the process that they should focus their design attention upon, and the ideation begins...

So, what's great about using storyboarding in design is that it:
  • Combines speed and clarity - it's a rapid process that conveys ideas in their purest form.
  • Focuses on benefits not features - it keeps teams looking at the overall user experience, instead of novel details.
  • Conveys experiences - it can portray a timeline of use, instead of a slice of time.
  • Forces decisions - because they can see all of the touchpoints at the same time, design teams can begin to prioritize them.
  • Connects with emotions - just like any good story, you can empathize with characters as the story unfolds.
We shared a basic framework for how to work through a process like this, we showed some examples of how we've been using it in recent projects, and then the workshop portion started. We had our 70+ participants break into teams and storyboard the airport security experience. Obviously this is a painful experience for the average traveler, but also interesting would be storyboarding this process from the viewpoint of the TSA worker, the child in the baby carriage, or the man-handled suitcase (not a person, but why not?). Sharpies, 1/2 page storyboard sheets, and Mr Sketch Fruit-Scented Markers exploded around the room and pages were tacked to the walls and torn down in a whirlwind frenzy. (Maybe it wasn't that dramatic, but roll with me here). In the end we had the teams present their experience storyboards back to the workshop, and we wrapped it all up. From the feedback I heard from participants, the workshop helped them understand why and how to use storyboarding, but also was successful in arming them with a basic feeling for how a collaborative storyboarding session might run, and the methodology behind creating successful storyboard pages. We had a lot of fun sharing it with everyone, and hope to present it again to other groups. I can think of many other uses from consumer products, public space, transportation, events, and on and on...

Man I love getting paid to draw.


Apologies to this anonymous guy-- I don't know your name-- but you illustrate the workshop pretty well, and you happen to frame the storyboard sheets and my graphic facilitation quite well.

* Yeah, so like I said earlier, KC is actually a pretty cool town. Sure it's pretty spread out, but in my few days there, I saw some great old buildings, a firm with a great Brooklyn-style loft space, a great bar with a great band in a strip mall, a nice cozy jazz bar with a modern jazz trio performance, and some really bitchin' BBQ. (Although I was told the BBQ at a certain gas station across town would have been the best. Next time.)


  5/13/2008


  Top Down/Bottom Up

  • Jasper Morrison's Basel Chair. Supernormal, super gorgeous.

  • Morrison's aforementioned chair reminded me (on a visceral level) of the iconic Thonet Chair. I had no idea that it was designed in 1859, as a flat pack (almost 100 years before IKEA existed), and has sold over 30 million to date. Michael Thonet was bentwood, before bentwood was even cool.

  • Joris Laarman's Wirepod decorative power strip, the first in a series of Artecnica products called Wiremore, which will make electrical cables more, rather than less, visible. Interesting concept, even if more than a bit idealistic.

  • I love this song off the first Wackies Sampler: Wayne Jarret "You and I"

  • "Nah pop, no style." Uptown Top Ranking by Althea & Donna is such a tight tune. Ever tighter is watching these two classy ladies perform it live.

  • Summer 2008 is the summer of mankles.

  • Fuck the pig away.

  • Brilliant new work from Aaron Koblin (& Takashi Kawashima): "Ten Thousand Cents" is a digital artwork that creates a representation of a $100 bill. Using a custom drawing tool, thousands of individuals working in isolation from one another painted a tiny part of the bill without knowledge of the overall task. Workers were paid one cent each via Amazon's Mechanical Turk distributed labor tool. The total labor cost to create the bill, the artwork being created, and the reproductions available for purchase are all $100. The work is presented as a video piece with all 10,000 parts being drawn simultaneously. The project explores the circumstances we live in, a new and uncharted combination of digital labor markets, "crowdsourcing," "virtual economies," and digital reproduction.

  • Allstreets by Ben Fry is, of course, a gorgeous visualization. However it's also a depressing documentation to the car-obsessed culture that America has fetishized since WWII.


  5/02/2008


  Anyone can be free.

It's been awhile since we've talked about design.


  4/23/2008

 
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