Noise Between Stations

Concept Design

  • Twitter was a slow hunch

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    4 min read

    Part of my research into concept design is to look at where successful products and services came from. Today, it’s Twitter. Lately I’m also perusing Stephen Johnson’s thoughts on Where Do Good Ideas Come From. In this context it’s interesting to read here and here about Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey’s years of experience creating software…

  • I.B.M.’s Watson, Like a Good Designer, Thinks in Possibilities

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    2 min read

    After studying concept design for a while, I’ve come to the conclusion that the single best thing designers can do to come up with better concepts is to do more of them. Generating more options increases the chances we’ll find better ideas. With that in mind, I perked up while reading What Is I.B.M.’s Watson?,…

  • Presentation Hardware: Tiny USB Speakers

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    1 min read

    I’m learning the hard way that presenting concepts may mean giving them to someone else to show on an unknown laptop across the world somewhere. I can control for many factors by simply making a video of my design concept, with voice over. But that laptop won’t get the audio loud enough, and no one…

  • Do We Live in a Fantasy World?

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    1 min read

    Rolf Jensen says so, but that doesn’t feel quite right to me. Though his point of view is certainly interesting… In the Dreamtelligence era, we trade in stories and dreams, in the extraordinary and the implausible. In this new age, industry can make anything you want, but what it can’t manufacture is fantasy – and…

  • Brad Bird on Sacrificing Ideas

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    1 min read

    Here’s a quick clip of Brad Bird talking about the film creation process and giving up particular ideas for the good of the overall concept. I find that’s one thing people learn along the way: it’s good to critique and trash ideas, just as long as it doesn’t get personal. His dig on “businessmen” is…

  • Democratized Design at BMW

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    1 min read

    At the end of the concept design phase you’ll need to select among the concepts you’ve developed, and there are various methods for doing so: customer feedback (e.g. desirability testing), a decision market, an executive decision, a vote, and so on. The last option, voting, becomes more interesting when you keep the designers anonymous to…

  • Concept Art Book is Now Online

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    1 min read

    Concept Art is distinct from the design concepts I talk about here, but they do converge at the point of expressing a powerful image of the artifact. The Concept Design book, by Scott Robertson with a forward by Francis Ford Coppola, collects the work of seven concept artists, but the book has been sold out.…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Concept Design: Name the Baby!

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    2 min read

    When you create a product or service concept, you should give it a name. Sounds like a no-duh idea, but in the heat of the moment we forget to do this. Sometimes… we give them numbers or letters. “You see the change in materiality here in concept 2…” or “Clearly Concept C is a total…