March 2009
-
Reverse-Engineered Concept: Waterfree Toilets
•
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
•
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
•
0 min read
-
Communicating Concepts
•
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
•
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
•
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…