ABOUT YOU: You are an experienced Senior Designer with the skill to craft key visuals and designs. You also hate comic sans and pixelated imagery—with passion. You have experience managing fussy designers and high maintenance clients. You are friendly and consider yourself to be an "overachiever".
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Inspired by the popular, cross-cultural practice of marking children's heights over the years on a doorway or wall in the home, mui Lab has partnered with Wacom to create a prototype for a wooden column that can serve that purpose while adding a digital dimension to the age-old tradition. Day-to-day it looks like nothing more than a column. When the digital interface is activated with a Wacom pen, the pillar lights up with the accumulated notations, which can track the growth of multiple children. The concept first debuted during Salone del Mobile in Milan earlier this year, and will also be exhibited during the upcoming IFA 2019 showcase in Berlin.
The Kyoto-based startup strives to create IoT interfaces that enable a calm, digitally-connected lifestyle. They launched their flagship product via Kickstarter last year, a smart home control hub "for the post-smart screen era." The height chart is a continuation of that ethos, and both products feature mui's signature wooden touch panel, designed to remain unobtrusive in the home. "Private spaces should be a relief from constant connectivity," they explain on their website. "[The hub] acts as a bridge between your focus and the outside world." Users use the familiar swipe gesture to activate the wood panel, which prompts a subtle touch-screen display that works much like other cloud-enabled virtual assistants. It allows you to send text and voice messages, check the news and weather reports, control lighting and temperature in the home, and play music.
"Technology often feels cold and impersonal," mui Lab CEO Kaz Oki says. "It also forces us to change our natural human behaviors to manipulate devices. At mui Lab, we strive to change that, one quiet design system at a time."
When I was hiking in the mountains of the Appalachian Trail, cell service would fade in and out with the change in elevations as well as what side of the mountain you were on. Often I would find myself miles away from the nearest hiker. What if I had fallen or gotten hurt along the way? Would anyone have been able to hear me yell for help? The technology we have today can solve this issue and potentially save lives. My solution came in the form of FLiCK, a quick deploy emergency drone.
We are currently looking for an Exhibit Designer to join our team. The ideal candidate needs a Bachelor's degree in design or related field. The responsibilities of an exhibit designer is to design and detail exhibits and environments for our clients.
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We'll never tire of the opportunity to get a sneak peek inside the spaces where creatives live and work. Home and studio tours are an endlessly fascinating way to gain insight into how others navigate creative entrepreneurship and the endlessly murky work-life balance. And of course, the potential of absorbing some key takeaways into our own practices only contributes to the appeal.
The latest book in the genre, published today by Chronicle Books, comes from Poketo co-founders Ted Vadakan and Angie Myung, in partnership with design writer Gregory Han. Creative Spaces turns the spotlight on creatives who have collaborated with Poketo over the years—designers, artists, authors, chefs, and more.
Focusing on people they already have a close relationship with allowed Vadakan and Myung to conduct a series of highly personal interviews that laid the foundation for an earnest exploration of creativity. "It's an ebullient celebration of inspiring personal spaces aesthetically, but also one where there's an underlying conversation about the challenges that emerge while trying to balance our personal and professional lives," Han told us in a recent interview.
With a slight predilection for LA-based creatives—the city where Poketo is based—the book features Brendan Ravenhill, Lily & Hopie Stockman of Block Shop Textiles, Tina Roth Eisenberg, Terri Chiao & Adam Frezza of Chiaozza, and Jean Lee & Dylan Davis of Ladies & Gentlemen Studio, to name only a few.
The 272-page book includes 258 photographs taken by Ye Rin Mokin in an off-the-cuff style—there were no stylists or special lighting involved, the idea was to capture the spaces exactly as they are lived in, not as they would be prepared for the pages of a glossy magazine. "We were very fortunate to have Ye Rin Mok shoot this book," Han says. "Her eye tends to discover the quiet, intimate, and often overlooked details that personalize a space."
"At the heart of the book was the belief we could reveal the subtleties of the creative mind in observation of the spaces where their creativity is given the opportunity to experiment, fail, and be privately celebrated—the best songs sung are often in the car or shower when we're alone, our finest dancing when we believe no-one is looking," Han continues. "Poketo has always been about promoting a place where people can be themselves, and then share those aspects of ourselves. This book captures that ideal."
The result is a refreshingly transparent take on the ups and downs of creative life, and a portrait of the authors as much as of the subjects. In parallel to the interviews, Vadakan and Myung share their own journey as a couple who founded a business.
"Because the book comes from such a personal perspective about creativity—one that embraces every single step forward, alongside every two steps back—we're hoping the reader comes away with an understanding that creativity isn't a singular destination," Han says. "It's really a messy map, an everyday journey pushed forward by the numerous choices we make consciously and sometimes unconsciously. Just as we reorganize, redecorate, and rethink our spaces to create, so do we reshape ourselves."
As you turn, Buddy will turn with you. Buddy is a playful, Scandinavian influenced task light for the dynamic worker – its rounded, subtly tapered silhouette gives it a friendly stance and will help the user just like a 'buddy' would, featuring a moving head with dimmable light to focus down on a specific task, or to beam up to provide ambient light - making it a space saving choice for an office, living room or more.
These days, consumers want--or companies make them believe they want--"smart," connected homes. But in pre-internet 1950, the magic ingredient being marketed to consumers for their dream homes was…electricity. A sizeable chunk of the population then had grown up without it, and in 1950 electricity, married with cleverly designed objects and systems, promised to provide us with wondrous homes of the future.
While some of the designs in this Westinghouse domestic propaganda film from 1950 are kind of cool…
…I just had to have a go at it.
"This touch-capacitive light switch is made of brass, to better show fingerprints."
"Goddammit, Billy--How many times have I asked you not to sit on our WHITE leather Eames chair after you've been playing outside? Why don't you drink some chocolate milk on it, too?"
"I know she's trying to show me this cabinet-thingy, but I can't take my eye off of those drapes--they look like something you use to catch a wild animal."
Nothing would freak me out more than opening a refrigerator and seeing a human face inside of it.
"You press a button, and then the record gets pushed out vertically through a slit! This means you can only grab the record in the most undesirable way, getting fingerprints on both sides."
"Frank experienced the living hell that was Iwo Jima in World War II, so I wanted to decorate the house with symbols that would remind him of the Japanese Imperial flag."
"This is my hobby shop. I like to write manifestos on the desk at right, which inspires me to create my own weapons using the tooling at left."
This is the era when you could tell a child that his bedroom was "really gay" and it was a compliment.
"We prefer a washing machine with an aperture as small and hard to see inside of as possible."
This 360-degree grill with suspended hood never caught on in American homes, but go to any Korean barbecue restaurant and you'll see where they've landed.
"This 'power pole' is great for watching TV outdoors! The light at the top attracts mosquitoes, and plugging the TV in does introduce a trip hazard, but we want the neighbors to see that we are watching TV outdoors."
[Internal monologue] Wow, Frank is really showing off. I can't afford half of this crap. Well, I'm gonna kick his ass at tennis on Saturday--all of this fancy motorized shit won't fix that weak-ass backhand.
During the Frankfurt Motor Show in September, BMW will reveal a special collaboration with Surrey NanoSystems, the inventors of Vantablack: a one-off BMW X6 finished with the "world's blackest black."
It's an unusual, almost contradictory, choice for a vehicle since Vantablack absorbs 99% of light, making objects appear two-dimensional and obliterating virtually all design details and highlights. For this reason, BMW used a variant called VBx2 that was initially developed for use in architectural applications. This coating can be sprayed on and has a one percent total hemispherical reflectance (THR), meaning it's still considered "super black" while enabling a small amount of reflection from every angle.
"We received inquiries from most of the big-name automotive manufacturers, almost from the day we launched the original material in 2014, but we'd always said no," Ben Jensen, inventor of Vantablack and founder of Surrey NanoSystems, said in a statement. "I think it worked really well on the BMW X6, because of the size of the car, its distinctive shape, and how imposing it is. But putting a paint like that on a conventional car lacking a distinctive design would probably detract from it in some way," he added. "We also realized that it wouldn't have worked if we'd put on the original material, as the viewer would have lost all sense of three-dimensionality. VBx2 with its one-per-cent reflectance provides just enough of a hint of shape."
The one-off is only intended to be a showpiece—there aren't any plans to make VBx2 a regular paint finish. "Developing a Vantablack VBx2 car paint durable enough for daily use is a huge technological challenge," Jensen says.
But that doesn't mean there aren't other possible applications of Vantablack in automotive technology. "The material is now being used more and more in various types of laser-based sensor equipment for driver assistance systems and technologies for autonomous driving, for instance," Jensen explains. "That is because incident sunlight can cause a degradation of performance in these systems...a Vantablack coating eliminates these issues and results in increased safety."
The paint finish has an interesting effect on the X6's expressive design features, creating a stark, matte-black contrast against the car's grille and headlights. "Internally, we often refer to the BMW X6 as 'The Beast,'" says designer Hussein Al Attar. "The VBx2 finish emphasizes this aspect and makes the BMW X6 look particularly menacing."
"In addition, Vantablack VBx2 opens up new possibilities for us as designers," Hussein continued. "We often prefer to talk about silhouettes and proportions rather than surfaces and lines. The Vantablack VBx2 coating foregrounds these fundamental aspects of automotive design, without any distraction from light and reflections...The most remarkable evolution [of the new generation X6] over the predecessor concerns its proportions, and that is precisely what Vantablack underscores, albeit in a rather unexpected fashion."
Graphene has received a lot of attention for its potential uses in everything from solar cells to flexible phone displays, with researchers touting it as a "supermaterial" that will drastically alter the future of physics and engineering. The latest research around the promising material has uncovered another buzz-worthy (pardon my pun) application for the material as a mosquito repellant.
In a paper titled Mosquito Bite Prevention Through Graphene Barrier Layers, researchers from Brown University found the material capable of providing a two-pronged defense against mosquitoes. First, the ultra-thin material creates a physical barrier that the proboscis—the appendage mosquitoes use to acquire their "blood meal," as the researchers put it—can't puncture. More surprisingly, their experiments also showed that graphene might be responsible for blocking the chemical signals mosquitoes use to sense where their next meal is in the first place, essentially acting like a kind of "force field" against the pesky, disease-carrying insects.
"Mosquitoes are important vectors for disease all over the world, and there's a lot of interest in non-chemical mosquito bite protection," said Robert Hurt, a professor in Brown's School of Engineering and senior author of the paper, in a press statement. "We had been working on fabrics that incorporate graphene as a barrier against toxic chemicals, and we started thinking about what else the approach might be good for. We thought maybe graphene could provide mosquito bite protection as well."
To test the theory, researchers recruited participants who had their arms covered in either graphene oxide (GO) films with a layer of cheesecloth on top, or just cheesecloth. Those who had the graphene layer didn't receive any bites, while the other group was "feasted upon." The most interesting thing was that the mosquitoes completely changed their behavior when buzzing around the graphene-covered subjects.
"With the graphene, the mosquitoes weren't even landing on the skin patch — they just didn't seem to care," said Cintia Castillho, a Ph.D. student at Brown and the study's lead author. "We had assumed that graphene would be a physical barrier to biting, through puncture resistance, but when we saw these experiments we started to think that it was also a chemical barrier that prevents mosquitoes from sensing that someone is there."
From there, they continued the experiment by dabbing human sweat on top of the graphene barrier—which led the mosquitoes to flock to those areas as they normally would to human skin.
While all of this is promising, there's still a ways to go before graphene can be used as an effective mosquito shield in, say, camping gear. The experiments also discovered that the material has an Achilles heel: water. When wet, graphene oxide lost pretty much all of its mosquito-repelling properties. Researchers found that another form of graphene oxide (rGO) with a reduced oxygen content was effective against mosquitoes wet or dry, but that variant form of the material wasn't breathable, which doesn't really help in terms of real-world applications.
"GO is breathable, meaning you can sweat through it, while rGO isn't," Hurt said. "So our preferred embodiment of this technology would be to find a way to stabilize GO mechanically so that [it] remains strong when wet. This next step would give us the full benefits of breathability and bite protection."
A Sr. Industrial Designer at PopSockets can independently drive his or her own projects while also helping to guide the rest of the ID staff. This individual also promotes cross-pollination between the various teams within our Design & Development department to ensure that all disciplines are heading along the same vector. The goal is to help define our design language and product DNA, while pushing us to innovate and expand into new categories. Should be self-driven, flexible, and comfortable i
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How can we reduce the amount of recyclable material entering general household waste? A lack of knowledge combined with the constant change of what can and can't be recycled causes valuable material to go to landfill instead of being repurposed. R.I.D (recycling identification device) uses advances in near-infrared (N.I.R) spectroscopy to identify a material and, referencing a local database, inform the user if it can or can't be recycled.
Ammunition is an international design group providing services in product design, brand strategy and identity, UX design, graphic design, and packaging. While Ammunition’s strengths are diverse across design disciplines, our real expertise is to redefine markets by using design to create new business territory, and to communicate and connect with customers. Whether it is a product, an interface, a package or an identity, our approach is to create new, exciting experiences for customers that comm
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Brought to you by MAKO Design + Invent, North America's leading design firm for taking your product idea from a sketch on a napkin to store shelves. Download Mako's Invention Guide for free here.
Navigating the world of crowdfunding can be overwhelming, to put it lightly. Which projects are worth backing? Where's the filter to weed out the hundreds of useless smart devices? To make the process less frustrating, we scour the various online crowdfunding platforms to put together a weekly roundup of our favorite campaigns for your viewing (and spending!) pleasure. Go ahead, free your disposable income:
Dive into Isaac Newton's Principia with this elegant reprint perfect for lovers of science and editorial design alike. The volume's three chapters are separated into three distinct books that feature an open binding, minimalist typography, and embossed details throughout.
Phillip David Stearns visualizes malware samples and transforms them into a range of home textiles and scarves. Cybersecurity has never been more cozy.
The inventors of Fidget Cube have created a fast-paced board game that lets players experience the thrill of making a product and getting it to market in time. Fidget Factory is loosely based on their own experience of creating Fidget Cube. Players work together as a team to make a Fidget Cube while facing looming deadlines, a slew of logistics issues, eager customers, and trolls. Sounds like a design party to us!
Moment is expanding its line of add-on lenses for smartphones with this Anamorphic Lens for drones. It boasts the same optics as their smartphone version, but features an ultra-light enclosure and a counterweight to capture steady, precise footage from the air.
Charge your phone like it's 1980 with these portable power banks that are replicas of vintage arcade games, change machines, and portable cassette players.
Do you need help designing, developing, patenting, manufacturing, and/or selling YOUR product idea? MAKO Design + Invent is a one-stop-shop specifically for inventors / startups / small businesses. Click HERE for a free confidential product consultation.
The 2019 International Design Conference was met with plenty of excitement and expectations, now in its second year of new branding and re-imagined conference experience. The Windy City of Chicago hosted students, educators, and design professionals from all over the world for this year's annual conference. Held at Venue Six10, the IDC was strategically placed near landmarks such as Millennium Park, the Art Institute of Chicago, and an incredible view of the attractions along the Lakefront.
After-Hours Event at IA Collaborative : The Chicago Experience allowed designers to fully experience the studio culture of the downtown area
As a primer to the conference, the educational symposium featured thought-provoking paper presentations, lectures, and Undergraduate and Graduate student merit award winners. The symposium led up to the highly anticipated event of the evening: the IDEA Gala. The competitive international design ceremony honored category winners from 19 industry disciplines, selected from nearly 1,600 entries coming from 24 countries and regions.
Look at all those cellphone snaps!
Day one of the IDC was kicked off by Brett Lovelady, whose lecture sparked conversation on AI, and how advanced technology should mimic the humanistic tones of charisma, authenticity, and familiarity. Cheryl Durst's lecture on the rebranding of diversity was particularly striking, as she painted a picture of what diversity in the future should be. Durst challenges the design community to be more forthright on the barriers and actions we have in place that prevents the design community from being fully inclusive. Listening to the call to action on the stage of an international conference was groundbreaking, and as a female designer, I found it encouraging; I am anticipating the impact this will have on those who have the power to make this message a reality. The IDC also catered to topics surrounding environmental sustainability and the need for collaboration across nations to find solutions to the very dire problems of our age.
On Day 2, J Mays told his keynote audience, "We have microplastics in our water, in our food. We must stop this propelled usage of plastic". Presenter Krista Donaldson brought to light the impact of climate change, its hindrance on global advancement, and how product design will play a major role in our resilience against it.
Laura Silva initiating conversation between members in the audience.
These thoughtful presentations were framed with a short but engaging Q&A by Fast Company's Mark Wilson, who served as MC for day one. At the end of the day, Wilson reflected on the day's lectures in attentive rapid-fire summaries. Day two of the conference was MC'd by Marcelle van Beusekom of IDEO-San Francisco, who brought her insight and industry experience to her Q&A.
McKayla Barber mid-lecture on How to Lose Your Female Designer in 10 days
The IDC encapsulates what a contemporary design conference should look and feel like. It was an integrated blend of tech, traditional ID-ers, UX/ UI designers, graphic designers, and educators within a safe space to have thoughtful conversation. IDC 2019 was an illumination of what IDSA has planned for the future, and I'm excited to be along for the ride.
This interview is part of a series featuring the presenters participating in this year's Core77 Conference, "The Third Wave", a one-day event that will explore the future of the design industry and the role designers will play in it.
To a designer with a more conventional career path, Dean Malmgren's entry into design sounds a bit backwards. In 2009, Malmgren co-founded the company Datascope, a data science consulting firm. After an acquisition of their company by IDEO, he now works directly in their Chicago offices alongside his original Datascope team as an Executive Portfolio Director with a passion for human-centered design. You may be asking yourself, how does an initial curiosity around data collection and algorithms lead to a focus on human-centered design? The way Malmgren sees it, utilizing data alongside user research in considered ways can lead to even more human-centric product solutions than ever imagined. Malmgren's work hopes to push the idea that teams can invigorate their design practice by, as he frames it, "using data as a design medium".
We recently spoke with Malmgren, who will be taking part in a panel with IBM's Joe Meersman and Marijke Jorritsma of NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the 2019 Core77 Conference "The Third Wave", about his background and how to reframe your relationship with data as a working designer.
Dean: We started Datascope as we were wrapping up our PhDs at Northwestern. Mike and I were both in the IDEO lab at Northwestern and we were studying the space of complex systems, which in a nutshell, basically involved taking big datasets and telling stories about what we were observing through the lens of predictive models and lots of other things.
It was through that experience that we gained a lot of expertise and developing models that made sense and that you could interpret. And it was really kind of the inspiration behind [us] designing algorithms that were useful for people, which I would say is sort of the founding principle behind Datascope. As we got started, as you might imagine, we learned pretty quickly that that involved a lot more than just data and code. It was a time of designing not just those algorithms but actually the surrounding products and experiences that accompany them.
So we very quickly started to learn from the agile development community, the lean startup community, but especially the design community. And along the way, we'd met IDEO who was at first an informal mentor to us. We would just grab coffee with them every little bit and talk to a few of their partners about what the future of design looked like and why data science is relevant. [We would also] ask for advice on growing a consulting practice that ultimately turned into an externship, basically where I spent a couple of weeks at IDEO doing a project and we had a senior designer come and work with us on some projects. That all went well. And led us to sort of question, you know, what was the next thing?
What was a step that made sense? And what we realized is that designing intelligent products and services in an authentic way, we do our best work [when] data scientists are working side by side with designers; it's not just the practice of human-centered data science, it's actually just another discipline of design. And so that was the impetus for actually being acquired by IDEO, just to continue pursuing what that looks like and bring that all to life.
By training I've never taken a design class, but to be fair, I didn't take any data science classes either.
Yeah. So I studied math and chemical engineering as an undergrad. My PhD was in the chemical and biological engineering department, although I never took a biology class, like since high school. And I've also never taken a statistics class, so I kind of learned statistics on the streets as they say. Design is kind of the same thing I suppose.
Yeah. At Datascope especially, we would take tools and approaches from the human-centered design toolkit and apply them to a data science context. So one thing that would happen all the time with our clients is that they would come to us and say things like, "we have this big data, what can we do [with it?] How is this valuable? Or we just read about deep learning and we need to use it in our business." And while those like statements came from a good place, the reality is that they're not grounded in a business problem or context.
And so it involves sort of sketching out what that could possibly look like. And we did that through the lens of design and learning about people's needs and what drove them. And then using that to sketch interfaces or services or whatever, you get a better sense for the data that you want to collect and how that might be valuable.
So it never felt like a forced thing. It felt really natural, just to start using those design toolkits for our purposes. And we've also bent it the other way to bring some data science-y tools to how we think about design.
Malmgren (right) with Datascope co-founder Mike Stringer (left)
Well, that's a mouthful and I'll get into that next. I can highlight a couple of things that are different about our work here versus at Datascope. One thing that I don't think would be a surprise to anybody is that IDEO has an incredible portfolio of clients and partners that we work with. So the scale of problems that we're working on is quite a bit more expansive than what we were doing at Datascope.
I would also say that the degree of collaboration that we're having across disciplines today versus then is obviously different. But that's intentional and it's been incredibly fruitful. I share this with a bit of trepidation, but it's a fact that's worth sharing, which is that everybody that came from Datascope remains a part of IDEO today, which in the grand scheme of acquisitions by bigger companies is pretty incredible, two years in. So I feel like we all are pretty passionate about continuing to push this edge of not just what doing human-centered data science looks like, but also more importantly, pushing the edge of what it means to design intelligent products and services.
I mean, I would feel a little uncomfortable speaking to this about the field at large because I've practiced it in a very specific way that's always been kind of intentional about how we're designing algorithms to be useful for people. Like when we were first getting Datascope started, as I reflect, I think it was largely led by this concept of big data, how data's the new oil and you better suck everything up now so that you have something to use later. And I think organizations are getting wise to the fact that that hasn't born as much fruit as you might think.
I think that's how the early era was. Today, I feel like in general, the field of data science remains pretty technology focused, but perhaps with a bit more open eyes. And there's quite a bit more conversation today about the ethical considerations that go into building models and thinking about the data that you're collecting in the first place. That's not only forced through regulations like GDPR or the equivalent law in California whose name I can never remember... The sunshine law, that's a good name. I should've remembered that! But at any rate, while those legislations are important, the fact of the matter is that these things have been top of mind in the data science community and have brought to light a lot of thought leaders in the space.
Design absolutely influences the data that you collect, which is actually directly related to how data science makes design better. I think in 2019 we live in an era where our watches are smart, our shoes are smart, we are using all these different tools and technologies that are connected. You have homes that are aware of when we're present and not. We have thermostats that are smart. You know, the list just goes on and on. And designing how those experiences unfold in an authentic way is, or prototyping what those experiences will look and feel like in an authentic way. It's not something you can just totally wizard of Oz.
Speaking of data science as a discipline in design impacts design in a really positive way by bringing these things to light and allowing us to experiment and learn from how these algorithms can be influenced by the experience and vice versa to make the holistic product or service a lot better. So we have some examples of that across our portfolio.
The economical project that comes to mind for me is this work that we were doing for a medical device company. And the way that this worked is that they had a new surgery, a new surgical tool and they wanted to help doctors facilitate conversations with patients to make them more aware of whether or not they were ready for surgery. And you know, some people when they go in for surgery, they're of the mindset that, oh, I'm just going to a body shop. You're going to swap out a knee and I'll be all set. And it's not that simple. Obviously, bodies react in weird ways to surgeries. And so there's a lot of preoperative and postoperative care that is super important. One of the big opportunity areas that came up was actually facilitating these conversations in a much more authentic way to allow patients to take ownership of their care and giving doctors the tools to sort of have that conversation.
And so we prototyped this interface that was driven on the back end by an algorithm that would basically connect different factors. I can't tell you the real [factors], but things like how frequently you exercise, your diet. These various factors that you can actually control as a patient and the outcome, the likely outcome, or how quickly you would get better after surgery from their data. And it was a huge hit that, frankly, I don't think would have been as impactful had the team not been working side by side along the way. And actually, the side story on all this, and the reason why I really like this story, is that the project team had come back from research and they had went down [for a visit with data scientists] for an afternoon. And the data scientists doing what data scientists do, threw together a halfway decent algorithm and a really bad interface to try to bring this concept to life.
Yeah. You see data impacting design in three different ways. I mean, data is often used to quantify design. You see that a lot in things like AB testing. We use data as a means to inspire design quite a bit. That can happen through exploratory data analysis to identify opportunities or more frequently, we find ourselves doing simulations of future states to illustrate how different designs could be experienced. In a way, that's sort of hard to do or hard to imagine as an interaction designer or an industrial designer. And then of course, data as a medium for design, where you actually are molding it or shaping it or deciding what data to collect in the first place, as you alluded to earlier. And that to me, that's what's most exciting honestly, is thinking about the data that you can and should collect and describing to users why it's relevant to them to sort of make that value exchange really authentic.
Well, that's how we like to think of it in the sense that at the end of the day, data algorithms serve people, not some robot overlord. And so it's really important to keep the people front and center when doing the work. And what that means in practice is that data scientists should, it turns out, talk to other people and learn about their needs firsthand. Data scientists don't talk to people in general, and that's something that I would very much like to change. I think it would generally improve the degree to which people adhere ethical standards and think about the impact that algorithms have on people in their lives.
Yeah. So we've actually done two of these exhibits. One was in Munich called hyper human and the other was called the discomfort zone, which was a exhibit that we did in Palo Alto.
So both of these we did as a means to push the edge on what we think that future could look like. So I mean, there's a lot of things that I liked about the tension that we tried to hold in those exhibits. It brings to light the tradeoffs between privacy and —well, frankly—convenience, which is often played out in a lot of these sagas in the news, but also showing how the future of work doesn't have to be scary actually. That there is lots of promise and reasons to be optimistic about having new skillsets and what that could mean for you. Also, giving people the sense of what it might feel like to be augmented by a machine rather than replaced by one. So there are a number of things that I thought were really cool. My favorite example from the Munich exhibit, I think it was called the "belief checkout". And so with belief checkout, the idea is that when you go to the grocery store and you purchase some products, you have to do a lot of research if you want to shop according to your values. And so the thought that you could bring all that to life in a really compelling and easy to access way that plays off the real things that people are worried about, like cost, convenience, materials it's made of, et cetera, et cetera. That's all really important. And it was fun to play around with that and see that come to life.
Well, that's a great question. I like to think about that a lot. The short answer is that, you know, these systemic challenges, whether it's education, poverty, climate change, equality, I mean, that list goes on and on. I think the challenge, in any sense, is a cultural one about agreeing on principles that we can all sort of align to. And from a data point of view, I would hope that means thinking of ways to make data accessible and transparent, but also respecting the value that it does bring. And so what that might mean is, you know, thinking about how we share wastewater data for example, or pollution data in a way that benefits everyone.
Speaking directly to the Industrial Design audience of Core77, one of the things that I've found really exciting is, you know, as we design artifacts and objects that are in fact intelligence, that's a two-way street. You know, designing the next thermostat, as an example, it brings together a lot of these different skill sets. And I think there's ample room for collaboration, particularly in an era of IOT and other things that we've really only started to scratch the surface on. And I'm pretty convinced by that, you know, designing objects that are aware of their surroundings and help us take meaningful actions and adapt to our ever-changing context. It's an area that's ripe for continued innovation for the years to come. So I'm pretty excited to be speaking with that group.
Hear Dean Malmgren and other design industry leaders speak at this years Core77 Conference, "The Third Wave"! Tickets are available now.
Ramus works with light, producing large-scale light and digital art installations in architecture, entertainment, commercial precincts and civic spaces. Based in Melbourne, we produce works globally. We are now seeking an experienced senior designer to work closely with our Artistic Director and lead the design team in bringing extraordinary visions to life. You will ensure artistic integrity is maintained from conception through to integration, directing a number of technical, creative elements
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This can only be ordered out of the back of Lamborghini Driver magazine.
This is for when you want to fall asleep in an airport lounge and wake up in an interrogation room.
What I want to say to the designer of this motorized lift for the disabled: "Yeah, looks real cool. Where the fuck is the rest of it?"
"I'm calling it 'Active Seating.' The idea is that you have to pick the chair up off of the floor, carefully transfer your weight into it, then concentrate on not tipping over. So you're not just sitting, you're having an experience."
"I'm calling this one 'Active Seating 2.' Getting in and out of it is still tricky, but with this one you have a flat piece of metal pressing down on the top of your knees to help you balance."
"This was a tough one--I wanted the shape of the tables to not make sense whether they were separate or joined together. So I managed to make it work on both levels."
"If you're afraid of indoor snakes, we've got the bed for you!"
"It's called the Oreo Dipper, but it also works with Hydrox cookies. As a designer solving important problems, you have to put yourself in the consumer's shoes, and our research showed that not everyone goes Oreo."
"Our 3D wallpaper designs add a calming, spacious feel to any room. This pattern is called Collapsing Mineshaft."
"The client loves our Ceiling-Suspended Fixed-Height Cell Phone Privacy Cylinders. They allow the user to express themselves with how they enter it; you can crouch, squat, duck or even limbo!"
During the past two decades, technological advances have expanded the importance of design, as well as the demand for designers, at an unprecedented pace. Look at your collection of old cell phones if you need a quick reminder. As president of SCAD, where the digital revolution is in full effect, I feel the speed of progress powerfully.
The sophistication of today's ever-evolving tools has made design pervasive. Employers are expecting graduates to start work with advanced technical skills. And some commenters note that products are increasingly digital— less physically tangible, less of this world — and, in some cases, further removed from humanity. Some look at these challenges and wonder if a university design education is still relevant; I see opportunities to revolutionize how we prepare students for meaningful careers and fulfilling lives. Here are three assets SCAD offers to help our students create the future.
Rev Up the Power Skills
Power skills such as persuasive speaking and empathy are already hot commodities for employers and promote socially conscious, results-oriented design. And the more technical design becomes, the more important it is that designers inspire, persuade, and explain. They also need to be able to listen and hang out!
Tomorrow's designers need to be able to pound the pavement, go to the source, and bring back the goods. Here's an example: During a recent design competition, a student team worked with partners from IBM and Google to develop a portable, solar charger for outdoorsy and military types. The team discovered that users prized ruggedness, so the device would have to withstand the elements and long exposure to sunlight. The mentors intuited that the charger needed to be mountable to a hat or tent to catch the most sun. The end result: a reworked prototype that offered precise user customization and increased marketability, developed by an interdisciplinary design team.
By many accounts, design teams will grow larger and increasingly diverse, which means students will need to both articulate their ideas and get along with each other. Universities should employ communication specialists to work with students, faculty, and university partners across the curriculum, and communication initiatives should feature prominently in strategic plans. And socializing should be frequent, baked into the creative process.
Image courtesy of SCAD
Reclaim the Power Tools
Gen Z has arrived, and they have a deep yearning to be makers and doers and effect social change. And though the incoming classes have boundless potential as designers, our professors have noticed that many of them haven't had the opportunity to use a bandsaw or a table saw or a drill. (Medical schools are noticing a similar trend, which might explain their students' — tomorrow's surgeons' — decreasing dexterity.) The solution? Put them in an actual workshop and ensure they master the basics.
When students work their hands, they think on new planes and get a much-needed respite from screens. As a recent article proclaims, "In the era of ever-vibrating smartphones and increasingly demanding apps, there is no better user experience than peace of mind." That might explain why one study showed that 84 percent of a sample of Millennials and Gen Z'ers said "technology tools" could distract them from work.
Speaking of tools, the pencil is one of the most powerful tools we have. As most architects will tell you, hand-drawing helps students "see"— appreciate and replicate detail — for the first time, meaning they can later render more authentic creations with software. Students who master drawing are also more effective communicators. One of our professors tells a story about a designer in an international meeting in which the conversation got lost in translation. Because the designer had mastered foundational skills — drawing, in this instance — she was able to take out a sketchpad and communicate through pictures when words failed.
Recruit Power Partners
"In a world full of AI and robots, humanity is what will most be in demand" — that's a prescient quote from an organic conversation between several designers in a Slack channel. My takeaway: Forward-thinking design education should emphasize human interaction at every juncture, from problem exploration to prototyping, and powerful partnerships make this happen.
Corporate partners who come to campus bring with them the latest consumer and market insights. They help universities keep pace with industry and ensure students are exposed to real-word, high-stakes design challenges. In return, industry experts get access to built-in, long-term focus groups of college-aged consumers (the drivers of tomorrow's markets) and, through teaching, challenge and refresh their own perspectives on design.
Image courtesy of SCAD
These types of partnerships actualize student learning and solve problems with teams that are increasingly large and diverse — in terms of discipline, background, nationality, and myriad other ways. (Google recently used such an approach to develop apps that address environmental concerns, pedestrian safety, and parent-teacher communication.)
However the industry evolves, tomorrow's designers must strive for authenticity, empathy, and humanity in their creations. This is only possible if our students learn to be present — a state of being that transcends design. Products are inherently reflective of their creators, and educators should strive to develop students who are engaged in their relationships, invested in their communities, and accessible to the stakeholders they hope to serve.
During the Cold War, Switzerland built a complex network of underground nuclear fallout shelters. The bunkers are sometimes used to temporarily house people in need, like homeless populations during the winter. Between 2014 and 2016, Switzerland received a huge influx of asylum-seeking refugees and turned to the bunkers to provide much-needed additional shelter. When they were built, the underground spaces were only intended for extremely short stays in dire emergency situations, but at the height of the refugee crisis, migrants were often housed there for six months to a year, while they awaited more permanent placement.
Even though asylum applications in Switzerland have drastically reduced in number since then, designer Iskander Guetta was inspired to think of a simple, but powerful design solution that could make those spaces more habitable, should the situation arise again. "Everybody knows the living conditions in these bunkers are rough, but no serious conversations are held about potential solutions because nobody thinks it's worth investing in finding a solution for a 'temporary' case," Guetta explained in an interview.
During his third year of design studies at the Lausanne University of Art and Design, Guetta had an opportunity to tour the bunkers and better understand the living conditions within them. "Everything had the same color, the same tables, chairs, walls," he found. "It made me think of a prison." He noticed that residents were finding ad-hoc ways of creating a bit more privacy for themselves—using bedsheets as curtains, for examples—and was inspired to make more durable, practical solutions for these types of problems.
"Every single piece of furniture, from the shower curtain to the cushion, is standardized and has to fit within the federal norms for these fallout bunkers," he said. "As a designer, this was an interesting starting point, because it meant that I could produce a standard object that would again fit within these Swiss norms, which meant it could be used in any bunker in the country."
As part of his graduation project, Guetta designed a series of accessories to give residents "a little more intimacy and privacy, using the only space they have for themselves: their spot in one of those bunk beds."
Development process of the hook
The award-winning Abri+ collection is comprised of an individual curtain system, a magnetic reading lamp, and a pouch for storing personal objects. It all stems from a simple hook that serves as the core of the collection and allows for further extensions of the system. "As I was trying to find a way to hang the curtain and the pocket, I realized that having just one piece to install all the elements would be cheaper and more efficient," he explains. "So the same element can be used to stretch the curtain, to hang the pocket, and also simply as a hook. From that, I was able to develop the whole set."
Guetta's project is deeply rooted in the specific context he was designing for, but ultimately he wanted to have a more universal appeal. Looking at the project images, "if you don't know the original context of the project, you would think it's just objects made for [any] bunk bed," Guetta notes. "That kind of neutrality was very important to me...had I designed or framed the objects with too much of a visual reference to the original political context, I would have further stigmatized the people affected by it as 'migrants,' as something 'other,' while they should be considered as simply part of 'everyone.'" After all, everyone deserves basic human comforts and a sense of privacy and safety—that's exactly what Guetta's project underscores.
Watch Guetta talk about the project in greater detail here:
(H/t Metropolis Magazine)
The zipper has been in our lives for over a hundred years, but when was the last time we stopped and examine it? Taking a closer look at its qualities gives a chance to explore the mechanism and how it can be manipulated and controlled.
From Helix to 90 degree zipper : RichRach aims to challenge the known zipper and create a catalog of new Forms and shapes that are no longer flat, linear and symmetrical.
Paula Wallace, President of SCAD
