Category: Design

I’ve long been in two-minds about the OLPC project. As a source of technical innovation, the XO-1 laptop has been a sensation; from mesh networking, clever power management to the dual-mode screen and the Sugar interface, Yves Behar‘s iconic green design has distilled some of the best-in-class electronics into a unique product. Indeed, the price point has enabled companies such as Intel to see low-cost portables as a viable and attactive market for their products.

After meeting Lee Felsenstein (during a midnight munchies session at Foo Camp 2006!) and understanding his concerns about the educational and social model of the OLPC Foundation, I’ve been less enthused about the educational philosophy of the project. Without understanding in great depth the needs of communities in the developing world – and the exclusion of adult empowerment – OLPC was guided by governments, not the consiutuents of the communities it sought to help.

Recently, the OLPC movement has begun to fragment with the launch of Mary Lou Jepsen‘s display technologies startup, Pixel Qi and Walter Bender‘s Sugar Labs, focussing on continuing the development of OLPC’s operating system.

With last week’s announcment of the XOXO – a $75 replacement for the XO-1, targetted for 2010 – it seems that the departure of Jepsen and Bender, coupled with OLPC’s embrace of Microsoft signals a change in phiosophy for the foundation…as a concept design house. By explicitly encouraging others to copy the XOXO’s design, the foundation is codifying its role in generating design capital and encouraging imitation of the sort that previously lost the foundation powerful allies such as Intel.

Though Negroponte is still persuing the educational goals of the foundation, perhaps they can avoid previous controversies and conficts by explicitly playing the role of a concept and design organisation, helping to set a vision but enabling more capable and trusted organisations to bring it to life.

I was recently asked to help a client develop an Arabic language edition of their web product. They have strong brand with a great contemporary aesthetic and some Web 2.0 flava, but there is a dearth of contemporary Arabic typefaces that would enable their brand to retain its design DNA once translated.

Aside from Saad Ahulbaab’s work on Arabetics – which is largely focussed on helping non-Arabs learn Arabic – Arabic graphic design is constrained by the availability of type styles that sit well with modern graphic design.

However in researching resources for my client, I came across the work of Tarek Atriessi. In a great post on Arabic Type Design, Atrissi talks about his approach to developing typefaces for Al-Ghad, last year’s Asian Games in Doha,  Bahrain’s Amwaj Islands and Ayna.com.

Each is perfectly suited for use in various contemporary digital applications…I can’t wait to  suggest them to our client and also use them for our own future Arabic editions of Believr 🙂

Ian forwarded me an intriguing post on rapid product design from Kathy Sierra’s Creating Passionate Users – How to host a product/feature design party. I love the contrast between a dry focus-group and a friendlier social session.

The method looks just about complex as a regular meeting, but seemingly more inclusive, and more importantly, fun.

It’ll be interesting to try this in a few months time as some of Carbon’s work progresses 🙂

I take it back…I was a little unmoved by Matt Webb’s playsh at ETech 2006 and conceded I might not have fully grasped the implications of his work, but after reading Schulze & Webb’s recent The Hills Are Alive with the Sound of Interaction Design, I’m really taken with Matt’s approach to design 🙂

Some of the mind-bending observations and illustrative product ideas include…

• A self-powered scanner that breaks down scanned documents organically and uses the resulting methane to power a turbine.
• Designing around experiential acts, than enrich moments of engagement – the anticipation of receiving and opening a parcel rather than simply receiving a gift.
• The experience hooks intersecting with the ownership of books, that lift services like Amazon above a simple bookstore.
• The notion of thresholds as an important moment in the experience of a product, such as unboxing a new Apple product.
• The value of simple being and expressing friendship and sociality rather than carrying out the discrete acts of friendship.
• The social letterbox printer, that allows family members and close friends to print items of interest directly into your home…a compliment to a regular printer, that acts more like an internet family-fax 🙂
• The parallels drawn between sport and cleaning up, leading to products such as vacuum cleaners that emulate picking up pills like Pacman, along with a built in high-score table of the best players!

Though much of this is understood intuitively, a vocabulary that defines and qualifies the underlying design patterns is immensely useful…expect to see Carbon experimenting with some of these approaches shortly. First up mee:view…

‘…an actor in your social life and life with media, and is helping
along something that wants to happen already: You want to have a
relationship with a soap opera; you want to discuss TV with your
friends tomorrow. These are the important moments of engagement a VCR is participating in, and we should focus on those, not the fact it is incidentally being used to record broadcast programming…’

UPDATE: S&W’ve extended their thinking a little further at this year’s ETech. From Pixels To Plastic includes the notion of a desk lamp that ‘looks’ at what you’re doing as you work…kinda like Luxo 🙂

In Summer 2005, Liz designed a set of Aqua-esque icons for a proposed Orange Firefox browser that Mark and I were working on.

The project was never finished and I’d almost forgotten about Liz’s mini-project until today…Liz’s icons are too good to remain hidden, sO I figured I’d blog ’em for posterity 🙂

If things go well, you might see a whole lot more for a project we’re both trying to contribute to…

TDR go from irony to optimistic semi-psychedelia with their Love Being video for Citizen Bird’s Joy…you can download it from Coke’s The m5 design project.

The Coke collaboration is intra-ironic, given TDR’s earlier Work Buy Consume Die pastiche of the Pepsi logo. The m5 project also includes contributions from LOBO, MK12, Caviar and Tennant McKay/REX.

TDR’s also designed a very cool limited edition ‘M5′ bottle along with tees, posters, figurines and an iPod shuffle case…’when retro is done right, it looks more modern than the moment from which it was created’.

Wow – I’d almost forgotten how much I loved TDR’s work…one day I’ll get me one of those screen prints 🙂