This blog has now a new home and a new name : Artificial Horizon.



All the content but the comments has been transfered, although I might do it when I find some time to. This domain name will die in 6 months so there's still a chance.

Labels: meta

Great example of brain power wasting from Gamedaily.com : NPD analysts make a report on kids and digital content, find out kids like to play.

"What I think might be interesting is that game-playing drives much of kids' early use of digital devices and content."

Thanks for your insights, but what I think might be interesting is that you find a quicker way to tell your readers the air is transparent, or skip to your next analysis. Oh, and read this book if you haven't.
Game-playing is driving kids' early use of anything they can put their hands on, dear analysts, this is what childhood is made for, this is how we learn.

Labels: fingerpointing, gaming, reading

David Lynch making a point on watching a movie on a mobile device, originally from the Inland Empire special edition, edited to fit the iPhone commercials theme.
Sure, you can't fully experience a great feature film watching it on a mobile device, you'd miss a lot of the emotions a movie can convey. But having the ability to read videos on the go can be great for other purposes than entertainment and art consumption, like getting informed or learning some skills.




via Kottke.

Labels: cellphone, cinema, emotions, interface, iPhone

Only a few of the objects he designed would make it to my home because of their style and larger than necessary presence, but I've always appreciated the archetypal character of his production, his masterful sense of proportions and how he put back feelings, maybe poetry, into modern designs.
Every piece of his work I know of is a lesson ; what a sad thing to learn that the source has gone dry on monday.



Enjoy some words he gave in an interview for designboom.com back in 2000 :

"I truly believe that our duty as an architect or a designer is to design things which attract luck, rooms which protect people...
I don’t design things in any style, even less so in any fashion style,
I design things for life states."

"I think that the future doesn’t exist. What we think of today as the future isn’t the future. People are always afraid of the future, and the future has always been a disaster. Like the present is a disaster. But rhetoric about the future bothers me, because almost everything we do today we say we’re doing for the future. The future is here now, let’s try to get organized now. I don’t care about the future at all."

Q : my soul's present condition.
A : worried.

Q : the faults I can bear.
A : all of them.

Q : my motto.
A : be patient, calm, compassionate, knowing that existence is fleeting.

Labels: hero, ondesign, Product design, rip

This post, where my commentary on the Kindle product design has been described as a "silly attempt to review via photos" made me realize that product designers are actually this kind of guys, they judge products from pictures.

What happens is that we get an idea of how a product could be, given the brief, and we start drawing. Doodling first, sketching, getting more detailed with projected views (front, side, top,...) or perspective views, and eventually we build a model of it. Depending on the budget we have in our hands, we'll be able to build one to three physical models before the presses start pumping. So all along, we are judging products from pictures that are not even close to photography, and to save costs we'd better be good at it (models are very expensive). Thanks to imagination and "mental visualization" (being able to do a flyby around the object with your eyes closed), we are making choices on what a product is worth from reduced representations of reality. Paper or screen, 2D or 3D, it doesn't matter, it's still an image, and this is our fuel to get to the end.
I'm not saying we're all able to do this 100% accurately (at least we try) or that only designers can do this, and certainly not that it makes the evaluation of a physical version obsolete. I'm saying it's a huge part of the design process, and every product you see on shelves come to life through this.
Architects are the real masters in that aspect : every building you get in is built from images and have not been evaluated from a real model.

So, Mr Aaron Pressman, thank you for letting me realize it, but don't call me silly upon this (in my back on top of that : boo). I don't feel bad for evaluating the aspects of the Kindle I talked about just from the pictures. This wasn't a review at all, and I never said that nobody should buy it. I'm close to be jealous that you have one. All I said was it could have been so much better. I've been dreaming for a decent e-ink device since I heard of it in 1998, and it's just frustrating when a company that has built a much more complex object that is Amazon.com doesn't get it where it could be today.

Labels: eBook, ondesign, Product design