Product Design

16 Jul 2008 0814H

Design Can Change; Interaction Design Supporting Sustainability

Maybe you all have seen this site, Design Can Change, from SmashLab in Vancouver, but I just tripped over it the other day. It’s a good read, and I think we’re all looking at ways to make changes as we can in the work we do.
A new society will require all kinds of people, [...]

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15 Jul 2008 1049H

Randy Pausch lecture

This is a fantastic talk, the condition of the lecturer notwithstanding, which incidentally has really great relevance for user experience:

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04 Jun 2008 2214H

Do you make things? Real things?

So I get this email from this guy today. I usually don’t help out grad students generally. As a former academic I try not to get involved now. But the ghost of Victor Papanek won’t let me ignore this one. He said once, “There are professions that are more harmful than industrial design, but only [...]

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17 Apr 2008 0626H

Apple Design Methods

Was passed this by a colleague, an article from Business Week, which reveals some techniques they use for ideation. Particularly useful I think are paired design and the pony meeting. We hold pony meetings all the time, reminds me of the lines from Romance of the Three Kingdoms, “they talked wildly about the death [...]

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08 Apr 2008 0745H

On “Chinese Design Everyday”

Is there such a thing as Chinese design?
Of course there is design produced by Chinese, either Americans of Chinese descent or Chinese in Hong Kong, Shanghai, Taiwan, or Singapore. That is Chinese design after a fashion. But is there a vernacular we can call Chinese design? What makes it so?
I would aver, as the exhibit [...]

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13 Mar 2008 0657H

In the end, it’s not enough to have it work

People have to love the product and be passionate about it. How then to build this factor in? I think the answer is in something called kansei engineering, the design of “feeling” into the product. Maybe you could label them as “desirability studies” as Nielsen Norman did with Microsoft. 

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16 Feb 2008 2232H

Overheard: Amazon’s Kindle rocks

I had originally passed on Amazon’s Kindle e-book appliance, but overheard a conversation among techies over the cubicle wall the other day that it is quite the must-have nerd-toy. Not just an e-book reader with an e-paper screen, it also provides one-handed access to newspapers, magazines, blogs, and even podcasts; apparently it is wireless-enabled and [...]

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03 Feb 2008 0924H

Motorola may get out of cellphone biz

Read this in the Trib the other day. Given how hard this stuff is to do, it isn’t surprising that they lost their way. I was cautiously optimistic when their ex-CEO Ed Zander said the way forward was more RAZRs, but, because their culture is both behind and unlike Apple’s, Motorola failed to fix existing [...]

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10 Jan 2008 0931H

the Tata People’s Car

I’ve talked a lot about cars here in the past, mostly small cars, and how cars represent a design challenge because of their impact on the environment and users and usage contexts and the like. So, by now people probably have heard all about Tata Motors’ bargain basement car, Rp1 lakh/$2500, comes with nothing but [...]

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