This is where the Vostok crew blogs
Articles clasified as "Product Design"
Go back to the homepageLasers 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.
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:
We like the definition of the game as “free movement on a rigid structure”. The more rules the game has, the funnier it is. These limitations -or explicit rules- encourage the creation of other implicit ones: for instance we now have groups of users setting the topic of the day and postng videos on that topic. That is much funnier and exciting than a user posting all the videos from his favorite band in a single day.
Alberto Romero on designing unvlog.com (Spanish)
Now, this is what I call A-GREAT-PIECE-OF-SHIT…
Voxan, by the great Philippe Starck
More pictures here
(thanks, Agus)
I am super-happy to share this news about Planetaki: we already implemented a feature to embed a planet in whatever website you want. Ain’t that cool or what?
If you are a Planetaki user and want to try it out, experiment a bit or just do some good to your website readers, try embedding this ultra-tiny piece of code inside your html:
<script type=”text/javascript”
src=”http://www.planetaki.com/javiercanada.js”></script>
Make sure you change the “javiercanada” piece for your planet slug or it will be my planet showing up on your own house :)
From the great Mauro Entralgo:
ENGLISH TRANSLATION:
There are industrial designers who look at an object and they modify it to improve its features in a specific circumstance. They designed the folding chairs, the anglepoise lamp and the unfolding package for the butter.
There are other designers who look at an object and they modify it with the purpose of worsen its features for any circumstance. They designed the three leg stools, the square-shaped glasses and the sinks with no place for leaving the soap.
Me comenta Kepa Landa que la Universidad Europea de Madrid ofrecerá para este próximo curso un grado en Diseño, oficial, aprobado por el ministerio y pionero en España.
Parece que aún hay poca información sobre el profesorado, pues sólo veo 12 nombres (y muchas más asignaturas). El plan de estudios tiene buen aspecto, bastante completo, aunque con poquita carga de diseño de interacción dado que las especializaciones son Diseño Gráfico, de Interiores, de Producto y de Moda, un poco en la linea del IED.
Creo que hubiera sido bueno apostar más por el nuevo diseño de producto, con más énfasis en lo tecnológico y en la interacción persona-ordenador. Aún así hay que reconocer el mérito de sacar una titulación así adelante. Les deseo suerte!
This is Orange-Cosmo (technical name: UniPo, Cosmo Knots-Series 3), one brave traveler ready to cruise the universe in the quest for adventure and beauty. It is now part of the crew at the Vostok Spaceship:
Orange-Cosmo comes from Smupf, a beautiful store of vinyl toys where there sure is something cute for your next gift, something that will stand on the owner’s table and say “hey” every morning.
When product design iterative methodologies (garage-style) and the business of sex toys converge you get early prototypes like this one:
There are free units for the betatesters. Wanna join their program?
;D
Remember the creepy-amazing BigDog robot made by Boston Dynamics? The one which resembled a half-goat-half-fly creature from hell (and amazingly never fell down). Yeah, you remember it.
Ok, here’s the beta version of the prototype by the guys at SeedWell:
(have a laugh or two ;)
In 1954 the first transistor radio was released. It was the Regency TR-1, a small piece of equipment very advanced for its time. Sony followed quickly and one year after that they launched the TR-55 branded as a “pocket transistor radio”. By that time Japanese engineers were not as good at miniaturization as they are today, that radio was way bigger than the Regency and by no means fitted inside a shirt pocket.
¿What did Sony do about it? Well, they took the easy way and made a new shirt for their sellers where the transistor could easily fit. As we say in Spanish, if Muhammad does not go to the mountain, the mountain will go to Muhammad.
And all this is just an excuse to introduce Michael Jack and his freakin’ amazing collection of transistor radios.
All of them are pictured there, on his flickr account. It’s like… unbelievable.
