From the humble fireplace to electrical oven cooktops, kitchens have
evolved over time to become much more than simply an area for cooking.
nowadays it is a place for eating and socializing – an integral part of
our daily lifestyle. as the new hub of the modern home, we expect more
from our kitchen – convenience, comfort, cleanliness, the latest technology -
while simultaneously demanding less – less energy consumption,
water usage, and waste.
VIA: designboom.com
Inventor Dean Kamen lays out his argument for the Segway and offers a peek into his next big ideas (portable energy and water purification for developing countries).
VIA: TED.com
In this talk from 2003, design critic Don Norman turns his incisive eye toward beauty, fun, pleasure and emotion, as he looks at design that makes people happy. He names the three emotional cues that a well-designed product must hit to succeed.
VIA: TED.com
What is this all about?
Extending this idea that science fiction is implicated in the production of things like science fact, I wanted to think about how this happens, so that I could figure out the principles and pragmatics of doing design, making things that create different sorts of near future worlds. So, this is a bit of a think-piece, with examples and some insights that provide a few conclusions about why this is important as well as how it gets done. How do you entangle design, science, fact and fiction in order to create this practice called “design fiction” that, hopefully, provides different, undisciplined ways of envisioning new kinds of environments, artifacts and practices.
Why does Design so often struggle to communicate its value to the world, when it’s something we all recognize?
When we speak of product development, we frequently look at the domains of Design and Engineering separately, evaluating them in different ways. Engineering, at its core, is a measurable process; Design, for the most part, is not. This gives the former an inherent advantage: engineering efforts are easily quantifiable, and this provides them with authority. Design is intuitive, working on the non-verbal levels of our experience, sometimes triggering our most subversive emotional states; this makes it difficult to evaluate empirically. Lacking an analytical vernacular, Design is labeled subjective, when it is actually the agent of universal truth through form.
VIA: Core77.com
At the 2008 Serious Play conference, designer Tim Brown talks about the powerful relationship between creative thinking and play – with many examples you can try at home (and one that maybe you shouldn’t).
Tim Brown is the CEO of the “innovation and design” firm Ideo — taking an approach to design that digs deeper than the surface. Full bio and more links
VIA: TED.com
Core77 recently published an article titled “how not to write like a designer”. For me this brings back membories at university where after reading over a presentation board I could no longer contain the number of spelling mistakes and gramatical errors on one hand. This article offers more than just the basic tips and offers up 5 solid tips on how to improve your design writing. This along with a spellchecker is something everyone should read over before submitting any presentation, essay or portfolio.
Here’s how it begins…
Half technical, half intuitive, the design process is tough to explain. But that’s my job—I’m a design writer. I write so you don’t have to, putting into words the work that you’d rather do than write about. But write you must—website copy, proposals, captions, emails to clients—and though the worse designers are at it, the more work I get, in the spirit of collaboration I’m going to share my secrets. So what if it puts me out of a job. Continue reading…
VIA: Core77.com
The team at Design Droplets have done a really great job going out and interviewing some major international faces in the international ID world. In this interview Raph Goldsworthy asks C. Sven Johnson about the future of Product Development Tools, Transreality and potential design futures.
VIA: Design Droplets
Designer Philippe Starck — with no pretty slides to show — spends 18 minutes reaching for the very roots of the question “Why design?” Listen carefully for one perfect mantra for all of us, genius or not.
VIA: TED
The NOVA channel on PBS has put up a cool site revolving around it’s documentary ‘The car of the future’. Not only can you download the documentary (you have to watch it in sections) but you can also edit the content to create your own ‘user generated content’. If it’s good enough they may feature it on their site. To me however I just liked watching to documentary.
VIA: NOVA – PBS
