The Cosmonauts

A simple video with some of the Braun/Rams stuff that coincidentally arrived to my place on the same day.

I think of UCD (User-Centered Design) a little as I think of Christianism. The fact I’m an atheist today does not stop me from recognizing that some Christian values have shaped my worldview and my belief system in very positive ways.

César Astudillo

Ariel Guersenzvaig, who knows me well and understands my take on user-centered design, refered me to Apple’s Secret? It Tells Us What We Should Love, an article that questions UCD as a tool for radical innovation. I’ve been moving from true believer in UCD to these positions over time and, although I think it’s easy to use Apple as an example, I consider this article by Roberto Verganti full of true statements:

User-centered innovation is perfect to drive incremental innovation, but hardly generates breakthroughs. In fact, it does not question existing needs, but rather reinforces them, thanks to its powerful methods.

Firms that create radical innovations make proposals. They put forward a vision. In doing that, of course, they take greater risks.

Thanks to this process these companies are serial radical innovators. Their non-user-centered proposals are not dreams without a foundation. Sometimes they fail. But when they work, people love them even more than products that have been developed by scrutinizing their needs.

User centered-design (observation, interviews, user testing, etc. ) is for those who want to improve something existing, not for those who want to create something new. Those need to understand human nature but don’t need to microscope every little behavior and take it as a starting point.

Designing Design - Kenya Hara — The Designer’s Review of Books

Today is Apple fanboy day. Go get one of these 101 Apple t-shirts, popcorn and a beer so you can fully enjoy the Keynote.

Kanya Hara, art director of Muji, explains Japanese design taking knives as an example:

Japanese cooks who have special skills prefer knives without any ergonomic shape. A flat handle is not seen as raw or poorly crafted. On the contrary, its perfect plainness is meant to say, “You can use me whichever way suits your skills.” The Japanese knife adapts to the cook’s skill (not to the cook’s thumb). This is, in a nutshell, Japanese simplicity.

The piece, translated by Oliver Reichenstein is also part of a larger article about Japanese aesthetics published at the NYTimes under the title Beauty and the Bento Box where also John Maeda, Nick Currie and Denis Dutton go through the subject.

Worth reading.

When I see these things I feel designing websites doesn’t make any sense at all anymore:

(thanks denegro)

I.D. will close. It was announced recently on a press note published on FC:

Since 1954, I.D. has served as one of America’s leading critical magazines covering the art, business, and culture of design. Today it is with regret that we announce its closure. The January/February issue of I.D. will be its last; subscribers to I.D. will receive Print magazine for the balance of their subscription.

Image ©Fast Company

I used to buy every number of it when I was a junior interaction designer. It was fascinating to see those amazing projects and prototypes where technology met real atoms. You couldn’t (and still can not) see that in Spain. I even dreamt of working for the companies mentioned there: Pentagram, IDEO, Teague… After some time I felt that the interaction side of it was weak and form + firm was somehow more important for the Magazine than real life projects and I quitted buying it.

I don’t buy design magazines any more. Well, somtimes I pick Metropolis at a press kiosk in some internationa airport (it’s hard to find in Spain) but I mostly read about design on the web. I feel kind of sad, though. It was part of my professional life for some time.

We’ve been working with minube’s team for two years, and now we’ve had the chance to redesign their homepage.

Minube.com is a traveller community where everyone shares their experiences, photos and videos. So you can plan a trip based on the experience of travellers along with minube’s flight and hotel search engine.

We’ve used a modular design that uses the entire width. Modules are easily interchangable, so adaptations can be done by adding, removing, and reordering whatever you want. Modules are also very comfortable to read on an iphone.

The users’ expriences of minube have been given prominence on the first shadowed module, which includes the destination search and all the relevant stats (users, experiences, photos and places). Minube is now pretty much self-explanatory, with a glance you know what is it about.

The new homepage is not only clean and lightweight on the visuals: thanks to minube’s stellar programming team, it’s now lightning-speed fast, loading in 1.2 seconds using our homebrewed tests. A very significant improvement over the 4 seconds of the previous version.

Our favourite detail is the realtime display of travellers’ experiences. we wanted to display a thriving community with user participation on the homepage.

Raúl (CEO of minube) has a great post on the redesign and evolution of their hompage.

We could go for hours on how well designed are paper towels but this is way more effective ;)

The funny thing is that this vid is a response to a ShamWow infomercial)

Nearness explores interacting without touching.
With RFID it’s proximity that matters and physical contact isn’t necessary.

(thanks mort)

Lasers are awesome, we all know that. But what happens when Daito Manabe puts some AI and some interactive capabilities into one? It gets überawesome. Check it out:

Now pray for this to be sold in stores before Xmass.

If you, like us, happen to love Braun designs from the 50’s to the 80’s (you know, those by Dieter Rams, Hans Gugelot, etc.), I suggest you suscribe to Braun’s group on Flickr. From time to time you’ll find rare beauties like this one:

About this picture (by galessa’s plastics):

This transistor radio is considered to be one of the first contributions of functionalist Ulm Design School (HfG Ulm), Germany, to Braun, although the actual designers are never mentioned. This radio was meant for foreign markets and is oddly marked only as “foreign”. It seems that Ulm functionalists could cope with some color after all. Made of white and tan injected Polystyrene; the strap is Vinyl. It is 17,5 cm wide.

I bet there was a lot of collaboration and team involvement in the design of the Microsoft remote.

Lately I have seen what I consider a trend among design consultancies. Many of them jump in the wagon of selling their process (the “how”) and not their result (the “what”). The keywords could go like this:

Design strategy, post-it notes, ethnography, cocreation, design thinking, iteration, methodology, big boards, flowcharts, innovation, moodcharts, multidisciplinary, cardboard prototyping, deliverables, ideas, process.

instead of…

Portfolio. Results. Ratios. Agile. Deliver. Design. Product.

Sounds to me like a late echo of what we used to hear from IDEO back in the late nineties. It was amazing to most of us: new and interesting methodologies for designing smart products. You could be a sociologist and end up designing cool sunglasses or high-tech medical equipment. What a promise… huh? Apparently many design consultancies (and I say “consultancies” with a bit of sarcasm) kept the methodology part but forgot about the delivery/product part.

I am not saying that methodology, etnography and all that doesn´t matter. It does. We do so at Vostok (sometimes, only if necessary). What I am trying to say is that it’s the result that matters, not the methods, not the concepts. It’s the product of your work, not the work itself. Show me what you’ve done, not how you do it.

All the crafty wadus-wadus is cool, the fancy videos, the whiteboards, the multidisciplinary meetings in rooms with pencils, paper and all… But that doesn’t make you a designer. It’s the product that makes you a designer. And if the result is good (both for client and user) who cares about how you got there… It’s not what you say what matters, not what you blog or what you tweet, not what you report or what you put on a 99 slide powerpoint. It’s what you do, what you finally create what matters.

We’ve been condecorated. After a huge load of work we deserved a reward. You don’t deliver/launch three projects in one month and move to a new office all at the same time.

Four beautiful timepieces (just three on the picture) have arrived at the office, each for one of the cosmonauts. They all are the same: the classic SEIKO 6139-7100 Helmet (a.k.a. Darth Vader) a collectors item (Spanish) and a very reliable wristwatch.

These watches were released to the market around 1972 and after more than thirty years they work just nice. Here is a good picture where you can see its beauty. And errr… yes, they also have the “vostok palette”:

Image courtesy of Jay IntrenUK

Go ahead, ask us for the time!

Naoto Fukusawa (ex-head of IDEO Japan, and designer of Muji’s iconic wall mounted cd player) designed this beautiful concept packaging for an exhibition at the Nippon Design Museum in Tokyo.

Worth of notice: the discrete dirt splotches in the banana themed package give it a much more natural look.

Real world production constraints would make it pretty much impossible to mass-produce these items. But it is great example of putting the brand in the background, and let the essence of the product speak for itself.

Approach A

Windows Marketplace for Mobile (Microsoft)

Approach B

App Store (Apple)

Sam just found out this cool easter egg hidden inside the Apple Mighty Mouse: the red light projected by it ressembles something perhaps meant to look like a mouse but closer to Donnie Darko’s rabbit (a bit creepier, I’d say). Check it out:

BTW, we just checked and there seems to be just this little reference to this on the internets.

Fucking thing is supposed to make all your other shit “interactive” or something: