Agate Design - Design Blog Welcome Guest | Login or Register

The National Portrait Gallery won't be moving from Ottawa into EnCana Corporation's new office tower in Calgary, the company says.

The boyfriend of former Olympic champion Myriam Bédard has been sentenced to six months in jail for stealing works of art by Montreal artist Ghitta Caiserman-Roth.

A Chinese artist has been announced as the inaugural winner of Japan's International Manga Award, the government announced Friday.

By creating a document in Google Docs & Spreadsheets, published in the public access and opening up in Preview mode in the source code, you can find interesting line :

Trying to remember the event when Google linkovali foreign service similar way, and I can not.

What do you think about?

I recently came across a troubling article that clearly illustrates how a failure to understand the fundamentals of human psychology and behavior does not serve interactive designers well. If nothing else, the naïve conclusions in the article serve as a useful springboard for an examination of the relevant issues.

• HTML5 differences from HTML4
• A JavaScript Module Pattern
• Web Accessibility Guidelines - an Interview with Gian Sampson-Wild
• Frameworks for Designers
• You Are Not a Robot
• Ajax rain
• The Best Online Research Apps/Sites You’ve Never Heard Of
• Pre-release of the ECMAScript 4 reference implementation
• How to Choose an eCommerce Package
• Squiggles help find personas
• Delay loading your print CSS
• New Digital Signature Services (DSS) OASIS Standard Assures Authenticity of Data for Web Services
• So How Do We Fix the Web, Really?
• Animated Collapsible DIV
• Westciv free self paced courses back online
• Netscape 9
• Camino 1.5
• Safari 3

Tags: links, light-reading

Há dias em que eu penso "epá, ainda bem que não vivo nos States". Segunda (ou Terça, quando me lembraram para ir atacar o podcast) não foi um desses dias, quando uma amostra do que se passa por esses lados entrou-me pelos ouvidos dentro, cortesia do Nuno Markl. Nada mais nada menos que um firebrand preacher (nota-se que passei demasiado tempo no Colonization?) dos tempos modernos de seu nome Adelino Sousa, a avisar o Mundo da chegada do anti-cristo e da Nova Ordem Mundial (não confundir com aqueles rapazes que saíram dos Joy Division), por entre ovnis,  enciclopédias que  cabem na cabeça de um alfinete e pessoas a subir aos ares. Mas a análise do mestre já foi feita e por isso vamos às novidades: o MiP (após os êxitos de "Treinador do Braga" e a organização do "Cotonete Aid") assegurou os direitos cinematográficos  da história, e já tem um poster preparado para a ocasião:

The third Blueprint Open Studio will be hosted by advertising agency Mother London at its Shoreditch lair. Rumour has it that the founding members named themselves Mother in a tactical ploy to avoid being bad-mouthed by press or competitors – a canny move that certainly seems to have worked. Since its inception in 1996, the practice has been behind some of the most intriguing, arresting and downright enjoyable advertising moments on television – note the Schweppes Cocktails for Two, the Pot Noodle miners and the cinematic Orange mobile phone campaign.

Co-founders Robert Saville, Mark Waites, Stef Calcraft and Libby Brockhoff started Mother London in a more insular, formal advertising community than the one they now inhabit. With its consciously radical creed, Mother has always encouraged the hiring of diverse creative types from all over the world to keep things interesting; it has since become something of a mecca for creatives. Libby has since left, and two new partners – Andy Medd and Matthew Clark – have joined. However, the agency’s original egalitarian attitude remains, with all staff seated around a 200-seater/legendary Camelot-style communal table, and absolutely no private offices. Mother has carved its very own niche in the über-trendy Tea Building, getting Clive Wilkinson Architects to redesign the interiors to stunning effect and cheekily dubbing it The Biscuit Building. A personal tour and a discussion of the Mother A-Z of Inspiration promises an unequalled insight into this humorous, unique and successful practice.

 

"Innovation often arises out of crossing disciplines and combining technologies".*

Cross pollination is a technique industrial designers are expected to excel at. In my view, this can mean different things:

• Leveraging existing references and new concepts coming from unrelated designs or areas of study
• Working with cross-functional teams involved in the end-to-end of the value chain
• Developing multi-disciplinary skills and identifying a meaningful intersection across disciplines
• Giving technology a social role, becoming a cultural exponent of innovation and not just a technical achievement
• Addressing design requirements for a product to interact with its context in a range of scenarios including both typical or atypical use cases
• Looking for adjacent and new application areas beyond the initial focus of the study
• Looking at unconstrained scenarios where a number of things come together, just to dream of what's possible in a boundaries fashion, and only then applying a reality check to figure out what's doable in today's terms and the road map to the future

When we look at the early history of industrial design in Europe, there was a clear expectation for designers to "humanize" the new products the industrial revolution was delivering in the XIX century. Mass production had been able to democratize products at the expense of craftmanship's quality.

Many companies willing to fix that problem got things wrong by placing designers at the receiving end of the work flow. Engineering for manufacturing was first while human factors and design had more to do with cosmetic adaptations to the source blueprints. Some other enterprises applied the opposite work flow, making engineers scramble with unrealistic requirements from design divas.

Making a difference in people's quality of life involves well thought out products (quality) that become widely available (quantity). Tight collaboration between engineers and designers in the ideation process is a better practice. However, embracing business and marketing in that mix is the best practice.

All of us admire designs that have become classics by enjoying some timeless appreciation, which is known to be the benchmark for "good design". However, it is "continuous improvement" the driver behind innovation. Many designers have been occupied figuring out whether form follows function or whether it should be the other way around, when what really matters is whether a design delivers value to society, meaning to those who are going to use it and to the supply chain that brings it to market.

José de Francisco Lopez Chicago, 20 June 07

Click here to display my most recent blogs

or click here if you needed info on how to receive my newsfeed.

This blog’s Long Tail:

• Avoid innovation traps

References:

• (*) Pushing the Boundaries of Design by Jessie Scanlon
• The Ten Faces of Innovation by IDEO
  
• Sketching User Experience by Bill Burton