08 Feb 2010 2330H

World’s most helpful dialog

Thank you Borland for your extremely helpful dialog from your very reliable product, CaliberRM. And here’s our winning dialog, which I am now seeing on a regular basis:

caliberdialog

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28 Jan 2010 0022H

Another year, another Apple event

Or was it? I’ve been saying this in various places, but, I think we saw a game changer of an event today. Technologically nothing has changed. But because it addresses emerging markets and unmet user needs, the iPad will change computing as we know it, really make it part of our contemporary everyday experience, almost akin to radio and television no longer being special, but ubiquitous. We all knew, deep inside, that the netbook was really only a band-aid to people’s real needs, which really don’t require the computing power of a laptop, and yet need something more heavyweight than a cellphone or Blackberry. At the same time, they couldn’t build something that would take share away from their phone or laptop business.

We all saw how e-Readers took off this Holiday season and that it may just a matter of time, really, before book discounters could potentially go the way of the big box video rentals, like Blockbuster or Hollywood, and music stores like Tower Records and HMV. Amazon is better insulated against this because they’ve diversified their risk, but you can see it in the big boxes like Best Buy: everything is bits. Hard media is passe. Publishing rights and deals are the new currency in such an economy. I would not be surprised to see not only big time houses do well, but small independent publishing should flourish through the new Apple online bookstore, as podcasting did under iTMS. Amazon has never been able to leverage this as Apple could and hopefully will. Now Apple owns the world’s largest music, movies, and bookstore chain. I get the sense that Amazon’s happy to just sell through Apple, so long as they mind their own business. But there will be a day when Amazon will want more from their partnership, and that will be the end of that.

I have seen some snippy comments about the technology not being so special, in fact, not new technology at all, but those same people said the same things about the Nintendo Wii when it was announced. Again I would say no one is looking at emerging markets, no one is looking at the vast untapped needs out there, no one is looking at how regular, everyday people use computers, now and for the foreseeable future. But this is what divides the design thinkers from those who don’t. The best way to predict the future is to create it, and that’s what Jobs demonstrated today. Again.

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27 Jan 2010 1307H

Wait. Wasn’t that Magic Shelf?

Magic shelf?!

Magic shelf?!

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25 Jan 2010 1304H

NPR interview with designer Mark Coleran

He’s the guy who makes the interface comps you see in movies. Nice interview the other evening, called Hollywood\'s Computers: Telling A Story In A Flash\" on NPR.

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24 Jan 2010 1115H

Example of excise

With apologies to the author, although it’s a brilliant test exercise in coding functionality, this is a perfect example of excise. It seems stuck in beginner mode: if you don’t know the names of months, how many there are, days in a week, hours in a day, minutes in an hour, so on, or what their names, divisions, and units are might this clock be handy. But people quickly move out of beginner mode: then they just want to know what time it is. No comment as to the aesthetic nature of such a clock though, of course, now that the proof of concept exists, then the mechanics of the thing can now be adapted to other uses, such as perhaps, a flip clock or something else like a Kinetic Sculpture or The Source.

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24 Jan 2010 0913H

Recent thoughts on Chinese design

Is it possible to talk about Chinese design when all Chinese designers have been taught about ways of looking, thinking, and form giving by Westerners? That the very value of design comes to Chinese design because of its engagement in the global late capitalist market flows of goods and services? A priori, I draw on the long body of work that tells us that ways of thinking, looking, and shaping are not without their own biases. They have their own histories, and that these ways of knowing give rise to presences that suppress absences and silences in order to legitimize and perpetuate their existence. In other words, design would appear to meet the criteria for what Foucault would have called a discursive formation. So if it is the case that western form-ways have basically colonised Chinese design, what does this mean for the future? Is it possible to disentangle Chinese design from the colonial yoke, so to speak?

I’m thinking no. The genie’s already out of the bottle. In essence, there is no design style that is sui generis “Chinese” per se. Perhaps even the notion of design itself, although it poses as universal, actually is historically conditioned by the West as a kind of discursive formation. At the risk of prematurely speaking, one cannot talk about Chinese design because Chinese designers have not begun to build a national discourse of their own, the narrative of seeing, thinking and shaping for themselves, out of “native”, pre-colonial design history, to solve their own problems using “native” ways of doing so, and not “imported” ways of doing so, such as constructivism, modernism, so on. Largely, when they use such techniques, they’re really only copying from others, doing “what the market tells them” will work, what someone has taught them.

Chinese Design, therefore, properly only refers to the act of form-giving in a more or less Western manner, with pre-colonial or traditional Chinese flourishes, by people who are Chinese or are designing for Chinese and maybe to a degree by foreigners living and working in China. This differs from big-letter Chinese Design because the work seen today does not stem from a purely, uniquely Chinese historical aesthetic tradition, but from the chaotic and tumultuous centuries of engagement with Western ways of form giving, as we see with product and advertising work, i.e. communications design from Hong Kong and Shanghai before the Second World War, and then of course the mainland engagement with the Soviet realist propaganda after 1949, and of course modernism and its discontents take over in Hong Kong after 1949 as well.

I doubt there will be a rejection and revolution in this regard, and I think it is too late for any rejection to be successful so as to “restart” Chinese Design ex nihilo. But, if this were undertaken, a wholesale rejection of western form ways, fashions, trends, and the like, basically, a return to pre-colonial Chinese aesthetics, perhaps then we might be able to talk about Chinese design as its own discourse. Perhaps because colonialism is part of the historical condition, therefore it is inescapable to talk about Chinese design without reference to the colonial masters.

Anyone who talks about Chinese design today cannot however elide or exclude this colonial form of intellectual history as if it does not exist, although it is telling to me why this has not been criticized more loudly. Chinese design cannot also, as I am seeing in a paper from Design Issues, be simply academically explained away by simplistic and outdated colonialist notions about Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism, collective identity, so on: every such simplistic textbookish stereotype can be countered by the rich, direct knowledge gained from actual observation of the real conditions on the ground and the lived experiences of people, their histories, their aspirations and failings.

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20 Jan 2010 1645H

On design thinking and public policy

Given the tremendous quantities of crap not just in products but in experiences that have been rendered unto the public by designers, and the industry’s collective failure to own up to its responsibility for that, design thinking or no, I think it would be not only premature but overly optimistic at best to turn the reins of public policy over to designers. We already do a good enough job screwing up products for people as it is: let’s not expand our scope.

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29 Nov 2009 0833H

Black Friday internet sales up 35% over last year

“It was a stronger picture for Internet retailing. The average online order on Black Friday rose 35% from last year, to $170.19, according to online retail analyst Coremetrics — an indication that people may be looking to buy gifts after a year of economic woes.”

Link

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26 Nov 2009 0647H

Data visualization of Thanksgiving food trends in America

Fascinating visualization tool of American food trends this Thanksgiving by way of the New York Times.

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25 Nov 2009 0645H

Re: Barnes & Noble’s Nook

Dear Mr. Frain: slash the price on the Nook. Give the thing away. Why? The real game is to sell books, not to sell Nooks, just like Microsoft and the other game companies. To compare with video games: if you have good product, as Nintendo planned, quite successfully, with the Wii against Microsoft’s XBox 360 and particularly Sony’s Playstation 3 — or for that matter, the Atari VCS versus the more advanced Mattel Intellivision or the Magnavox Odyssey 2, or the Nintendo 8-bit system vs. the Sega Genesis 16-bit system, the technology becomes practically irrelevant. It’s the things you do with that technology, not the technology itself. In fact, historically, anyone who sells on the technology alone winds up losing. Once everyone has one, then you can concentrate on what you all do best which is of course, selling books. These game companies take a hit on the consoles, but make it back up in the games. Similarly, you could look at music. Apple gives away iTunes, but makes it back up on the music. The iTunes is not the thing they profit on. Also, I think, cleverly, Apple made an agreement with Starbucks to deliver a free iTunes experience at any of their locations: you already have your own bricks and mortar space with free wifi. It would be trivial to have people come to an eBooks store when people log in. So drop the price on the Nook — I would even put out a Nook app for mobile to go toe-to-toe with Amazon and others — and make it easy to buy books, everywhere, anywhere. In fact, why not do this: buy a book in hardcopy format and get the softcopy free?

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