Design

13 Jul 2007 1000H

Customer service as design investment

Just wanted to talk about this article from MSN that says Sprint’s dumping 1000 customers because they complained too much. I can’t say that this is entirely due to consumer fraud, because if it were the case, would Sprint rate so far down the scale in consumer service? (Perhaps Sprint should not have rebranded with [...]

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04 Jul 2007 1825H

Two notes for July 4th

We had a Weber grill, a black one, for about 20-30 odd years, which we trundled out every summer for the obligatory cookout. This year, since the family has expanded now that my sister has two kids, and we’re no longer stoked (so to speak) about using charcoal, I bought another Weber to replace it. [...]

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03 Jul 2007 0752H

My Design Barbie making a comeback?

Says this press release on BizJournals. (We wrote about My Design Barbie back in January.) But it’s disintermediating the entire online channel! FAO Schwarz is entering into the customized Barbie thing as a way to drive traffic to stores with an exclusive in-store experience. Of course it will be using touchscreens to put the doll [...]

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01 Jul 2007 2143H

Have you seen Everyday Edisons? On PBS?

Caught it by chance this morning on one of our four PBS HD channels.
Everyday Edisons allows people in competition to take an idea from thought to paper and then the whole design and ideation process, including prototyping, and also there’re some intellectual property aspects. It’s hard to be excited about work after you do [...]

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27 Jun 2007 1856H

Wasting away again in . . . oh never mind

Trapped at MCI on account of inclement weather. For those keeping track at home, this makes 12 hours this week spent waiting in an airport. Even after having gotten in at 3AM this morning into Kansas City, it turned out to be a pretty productive morning. It’s a little curious, but when I get [...]

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23 Jun 2007 2123H

Look at the iPhone?

I’m just as tired as everyone else is about hearing about the iPhone. But there’s a guided tour of the iPhone released the other day which I think is probably worth studying just to get an overview of the functions and more importantly, what Apple does not say about the iPhone, viz. what the thing [...]

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21 Jun 2007 1810H

Apple recycles your old hardware

My dad has a hand-me-down Pentium III which had been my PC from senior year and grad school, which I had replaced literally every part of except for the case. I actually still have all that obsolete but perfectly good hardware somewhere, plus a few CRTs, which all contain mercury, even the fried AGP graphics [...]

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21 Jun 2007 1056H

D-School: Innovation Institutionalized or Higher Education Scam?

Occasionally I wonder about going back to school. No longer for the PhD, my MA was long and expensive enough, but, of course, when you’re young, you tend not to think about these things, because life is long and youth is forever. The latest of these inquiries revolves around another master’s, this time in interaction [...]

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21 Jun 2007 1043H

The freedom to play, the need to constrain

One thing that’s been wracking my brain lately is how to create a process wherein designers inexperienced in designing for interactive media are allowed to have a sandbox for experimentation and yet have their excesses constrained within the sandbox through vetting from user experience professionals.
See, each year there seems to be an endless stream [...]

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20 Jun 2007 0731H

Beer pouring robot

From Tim.

When you think about all the questions and decisions that went into making this happen, it’s sort of mindblowing. For instance, why? Why create an $800 beer pouring robot that opens a can of beer and pours it for you, and not very quickly at that? I suppose there is a bit of [...]

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