Noise Between Stations

Victor

  • OMA’s Proposal for the Seattle Public Library

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    1 min read

    Now here’s a little nugget of gold for concept hunters like myself: The Office for Metropolitan Architecture’s original 1999 proposal for the Seattle Public Library. I love flipping through it and reading the story of how they let their idea unfold.

  • Images That Sum Up Our Desires

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    1 min read

    We are, by turn — and a writer says it with sadness — essentially a society of images: a viral YouTube video, an advertising image, proliferates and sums up our desires; anyone who can’t play the image game has a hard time playing any game at all. — Adam Gopnik, Angels and Ages: A Short…

  • Reverse-Engineered Concept: Waterfree Toilets

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    2 min read

    Here’s a reality we deal with all the time: toilets that use a great deal of clean, potable water in order to flush. This urinal for instance, requires one gallon, or 3.8 litres, just to flush some pee, which seems excessive: The sustainability problem here has multiple facets: the availability of water, the financial cost…

  • Play Literacy

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    2 min read

    …yes, that term sounds a little dumb, but it’s an idea I think will be important in the future. A deliberate spin on computer literacy, I think play will not only be important to designers to support creativity and innovation, it will be important simply to get along in an electronic world. In the past…

  • This Blog is Now Ten Years Old

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    0 min read

  • Communicating Concepts

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    3 min read

    Image: Configuration A2 Mach 5 Civil Transport, Reaction Engines When I see concepts that are received well, the concept itself can usually only take a portion of the credit. Just as important is how the concept is communicated. Some of this is common knowledge: make it look good, choose the right level of fidelity, show…

  • IDEO’s Open Dev of the BugBase Hardware/Software UI

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    1 min read

    Concept 1 – Electronic Ink over Tactile Switches. Source: IDEO It’s not often we get to peek inside anyone’s concept design process, so this blog from IDEO has me starting up my reverse-engineering machine…. An open project between BugLabs and IDEO, this deep-dive exploration of the BUGbase UI is focused on re-envisioning the BUGbase interface…

  • Concepts as Inspiration

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    1 min read

    New headquarters and cultural center for China Central Television. Design by OMA. Concepts strive to sway opinion by eliciting emotions. Fundamental to this purpose is the new, the aspect that is beyond question different than what has been done in the past. The new is what causes the audience to pause and react. This reaction…

  • Webinar with Bill Scott of Netflix, Yahoo + 20% Off

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    1 min read

    Bill Scott of Netflix, formerly of Yahoo, will be hosting the Future Practice webinar tomorrow, helping web designers learn how to create designs that are easier to implement by illustrating the UI engineer’s point of view. And you, my dear readers, get 20% if you enter the code VTWBNR when signing up. I recorded a…

  • A Quantified Value of the iPod Design

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    2 min read

    This study — Who Captures Value in a Global Innovation System? The case of Apple’s iPod — is one of the best I’ve heard of in a long time. The researchers traced the parts and assembly of the iPod and attributed the value generated by each step by part and by country. A few key…

  • When Engineering Defines the Limits of Design

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    2 min read

    I’ll get the plug part of this post out of the way right here: I worked on a preview of Bill Scott’s upcoming webinar on What Every Designer Should Know about Interface Engineering and I think it’s both very good and very important, and what’s more it’s a topic that I’ve never seen addressed outside…

  • Hire People Who Talk to Plants

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    1 min read

    Empathy has long been a useful trait in designers, because we’re more likely to design products and services that offer utility, usability, and desirability if we care about customers. By extension, it’s therefore a useful trait for business people as well, as authors like Dan Pink point out. When hiring, the tricky part is figuring…

  • Dream Cars Meet Harsh Reality

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    3 min read

    That’s what Phil Patton at the New York Times thought about the concept cars at the Detroit Auto Show. In the article I found some insight as well as some assumptions we can toss out… But this year, dark economic clouds seem to have cast a shadow even over the designers displaying their ideas at…

  • Obama’s Design Thinking

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    2 min read

    (Editor’s Note: a meme like “design thinking” hasn’t really been beaten to death until it’s been associated with and used to explain popular culture :-) There were two lines in President Obama’s inaugural speech that caught my attention, signaling him as someone who can think beyond the prevailing frames and design new situations. In both…

  • How To Get More Responsibility

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    1 min read

    Advice from Scott Berkun on the PM Clinic list: …as a general rule: 1. Do good work 2. Show good work to people who have power to give you more responsibility 3. Ask for more responsibility 4. If told NO, ask what you need to do to get more responsibility 5. Repeat