Every year the world holds many contests for industrial designers. Lots of submissions, lots of time spent by jurors reviewing them, lots of pretty pictures afterwards. Fun to read, wonderful for the winners. What's the problem?
I have been a juror for a number of contests, including the major American yearly contest sponsored by the Industrial Design Society of America, IDSA, and BusinessWeek. Although I always enjoyed the experience and the interaction with talented, hard-working fellow jurors, I have become increasingly dissatisfied with the results.
Why are shows bad? Shouldn't we reward good design? Sure, if that's what the shows accomplish, but they don't. In fact, I believe they do harm to the profession. They reward the visible parts - styling - and ignore the most important, but hardest parts: interaction, experience, truly meeting needs, and even economic success. Oh sure, the rhetoric that accompanies the awards often heaps praise upon these other aspects of design, but that praise is not based upon solid evidence. No tests or studies, no independent evidence. As a result, the contests perpetuate the myth that industrial design is primarily about style and that brilliant styling leads to success in the marketplace. Both statements are false.
Jurors in design contests can only judge the material submitted to them. Invariably, the contest entries consist only of drawings, photographs, and videos accompanied by lush words of praise written by the design team, their company or client, or worse, their PR agency. Most of the time the actual products are not available for the jurors, nor can they be, when some products are tractors or cranes, air-conditioning units or automobiles - things far too large to transport to the jurors. As a result, jurors cannot experience them in use, they can't watch the intended audience use them, they can't assess how well they provide for graceful interaction, what pleasure or pain they provide, what benefits they provide. These problems result in fundamental limits to design contests.
I recently spoke with a founder of one of the largest and most successful design firms in the world who confessed that although his firm consistently wins multiple awards year after year, he is frequently puzzled by the choices. Entries he considered mediocre (from his own company) would at times win top prizes whereas entries he considered exemplary and superior would sometimes get passed over. What does that tell us of the contests?
Well-meaning, well-qualified judges are thwarted by the system. They are doomed to fail, for they lack the information required to make informed, intelligent choices. The only thing that can be judged is appearances. As a result, these shows perpetuate the myth that design is only about appearance.
Over the next six weeks, in a special Core77 exclusive, design firm Continuum will share, from start to finish, their latest branding project for the new, nomadic Design Museum Boston and ask for your feedback, kicking off with the brief introduction below.
How do you create an identity for an organization that is constantly changing? We're taking on this challenge with a new project for Design Museum Boston and want your input to help determine the brand identity and visual language. The evolution of the design from problem to solution will be published in real time for you to watch, comment on and shape.
Design Museum Boston is a twist on the traditional brick and mortar space: it's nomadic—existing mainly in a virtual space—creating pop-up exhibits, throughout Boston and New England, that educate the general public on the role of design in their lives. We'd like to reflect this itinerant character in the brand, making for an especially interesting project.
Every week for the next six weeks, we'll post our progress and ask for feedback in each critical phase of design. In our posts, we'll share things like the development of thematic approaches; the client's competitive landscape; images from client meetings and in-house design charettes; and applications of the winning concepts.
Current Design Museum Boston brand identity.
Our goal is not only to demonstrate how a brand becomes a brand, but also to allow multiple perspectives determine how this identity will take shape.
Stay tuned for next week. We'll start with the exploration of three thematic approaches for the new identity of Design Museum Boston with brand attributes, brand pillars, and mood boards.
We love seeing industrial design process shots and concept sketches alongside the finished product, and one thing we can never get enough of is original inspiration pics compared directly to the market-ready end product. I guess the reason why is obvious--not a lot of designers want you to see where "the magic" came from.
Canada-based Fluid Faucets, on the other hand, puts the inspiration shots right next to their products on their website, and you can't help but be impressed; just goes to show a talented designer can take things as different as a penguin, a violin and a Doric column and turn them into sink faucets:
When you think of Artek you think of design classics in natural colors, as the Finnish company leans towards the muted and understated; so it's a bit of surprise that they're splashing out on black, white, grey and even red for their quick-ship Carry Away collection.
The line-up runs from Alvar Aalto's classic Stool 60 from 1933 (top) up to Artek Studio's Magazine/Firewood Rack from 2004 (bottom).
I had a friend who was a caretaker for an extremely wealthy family in Westchester, New York. The family had been rich for generations, and everything they owned was "the best" and was brand-new. One of my friends' tasks was keeping the family's considerable fleet of cars filled with gas, and one day when he was returning with the family SUV, he carelessly let a tree branch on the estate gouge the paint on one side. When he confessed his crime to the family patriarch, he couldn't have been more surprised at the response: "Oh," said Rich Dad, "that's too bad. I guess we better get a new one."
"Uh...what?" my friend said. The truck was less than a year old.
"We'll get rid of the truck and get a new one. It's no good, right?"
In short, the patriarch had been raised the same way he was raising his kids--to believe that only new, pristine things were good, and when you needed something, you went out and bought it.
In contrast, I remember Karim Rashid recounting that his father was a set designer who had built many of the things in Karim's childhood home. He had thus had impressed upon him from a young age that if you wanted or needed something, you designed and built it. (The philosophy's certainly served him well, as the man has something like 3,000 designs in production.)
Obviously these are not binary choices in how to raise children, but if I had kids I'd certainly lean towards the latter philosophy rather than the former, and not just out of my eternal indigence.
Kids who spend hours communing with technology -- plugged into televisions, computers and iPods -- may benefit from some good, old-fashioned arts and crafts fun. Especially if they can then play with what they make.
..."The process of picking out the project, getting stuff together and making it" is only half of it, she says. "Then they go play with it. It's not over. That's what I like."
...The toys aren't intended to last forever. After all, they're made from cardboard tubes and glue.
"It's going to break. It's going to go away," Swain says. "But they can make it again. They can change it and innovate."
Amen to that. If my kid scratches the family car, I won't learn about it because he told me to get a new one; he'll just show up to the dinner table with paint under his fingernails and a respirator-impression on his face.
The evolving nature and adoption of EV technologies means that our design has to be fail-proof in order to build trust among early adopters. That's why we created a design language for Blink that echoes current driving behaviors to make the transition to an electric vehicle as easy as possible. The driver instinctively knows how to use the charger thanks to the recognizable cable wrap design. This was purposefully designed not to have moving parts that could break down over time, or complex mechanisms that might confuse users, ultimately complicating the experience.
...Every garage is different, but for most consumers, restricted space and keeping things organized are major issues. We specifically designed the connector so it would not stick out from its mount, to avoid the possibility that the user could knock it off or be scratched by inadvertently brushing against it. The taper of the housing was designed so rain will run off, and the driver won't be tempted to place their coffee cup on top of the unit, a potential hazard for the electronics it contains.
Another challenge for the design of the residential version of Blink was the fact that the location of charging points varies on different EV's. We purposefully separated the cable wrap and charger to allow the user to place it more conveniently within the garage. This ensures that if a consumer buys one electric vehicle now, the design of Blink can adapt if they purchase another brand in five or ten years.
The Blink is being produced by ECOtality, a clean electric transportation and storage technology company, who plans to begin rolling them out this year.
Here's a video of Andy Hooper, frog's Director of Biz-Dev, breaking down the blink:
I first learned about plywood and its properties not through the Eameses or design school, but as a teenaged skateboarder. We built ramps and surfaced them with two layers of 1/4" ply, and our boards themselves were made of seven layers laminated together, cross-hatched for strength. The way skateboards are constructed became obvious to me after I shredded the tail of my John Lucero deck, worn down after months of abuse; the tail "de-lammed" or delaminated unevenly, and as the glue failed you could see the different profiles of individual layers and their alternating directions of grain.
I wasn't the only one riding a raggedy-ass skateboard, as it wasn't something you were meant to keep nice; it was supposed to be abused, and you'd keep riding it until you wore it down to an unworkable nub.
Which makes me wonder if Mechanical Engineering and Design student Louis Bradier's carbon fiber skateboard will be a hit or not. It's a downhill longboard deck as opposed to a more thrashable street deck, but will skaters take to a material and technology more likely associated with skiing than skating?
Whether or not it takes off, it's impressive that that's no rendering, above--Bradier designed and built the thing himself. "It features a foam core construction with a torsion box," he writes, "an impact tough injected polyurethane edge and load distributors." You can see more of Bradier's projects here.
The computer graphics gods (i.e., geeks) of the world have descended upon the Los Angeles Convention Center for the SIGGRAPH 2010 International Conference and Exhibition. Now in its 37th year, SIGGRAPH draws together tech-minded people interested in graphics research, art, animation, gaming, interactivity, science, education and the Internet for a week-long mashup.
Yesterday, we walked the aisles of the expo and found a number of products jumping on the 3D bandwagon. Whether you think 3D video / film / television is the future or that it's a passing fad, no one can argue that the amount of 3D eye candy presented this year is enough to make any 3D-hater drool. You can't walk 10 feet without finding an exhibit that uses the technology in new and fascinating ways.
When it comes to displaying 3D imagery, there are generally two types of technology: displays that must be viewed with 3D glasses (stereoscopic displays), and displays that do not require 3D glasses (autostereoscopic displays). Each technology has its advantages and disadvantages; however, it seems that autostereoscopic technology, though still in its infancy, is the future of 3D technology. If advertisers were to create a 3D video display for a store, for example, they would need the glasses-less technology for passersby to view it. Besides, having to wear glasses to view 3D imagery is becoming too cumbersome. Are you really going to carry around a pair of 3D specs in your pocket?
Sony is at the forefront of autostereoscopic 3D technology. During the Emerging Technologies portion of SIGGRAPH 2010, the company showcased the 360-degree autostereoscopic display prototype we've been anticipating trying out since we caught wind of it last week: the RayModeler. The device—which looks like it could have been taken from the set of a Star Wars film—is a compact version of a 3D display enclosed in a cylinder. At first glance, it looks like a high-tech coffee-bean grinder or a blender, but after taking another look, one can view the display from all directions and see a bright, color 3D image. According to Sony, the system is the first display of its kind, featuring special LED light sources that show 360 unique, 24-bit color images in all directions. The user can even control the orientation of the display's content by using hand motions in proximity to the display (see video above).
Once you land in JFK, you know you're in New York. Sadly this is not because the terminal is filled with expressive designs celebrating Gotham; rather, you know because it's filthy, illegal cabdrivers are beckoning to you from across the street, and the legal hacks are occasionally getting out of the stopped cars to scream at each other face to face.
Indian design firm Incubis Consultants, tasked with designing the interior of Indira Gandhi International Airport, came up with a much more pleasant installation that would remind you where you were. Called "Expressive India," the design is comprised of enormous cast-resin hands performing mudras, the hand gestures from classical Indian dance forms.
All airports have very similar design vocabulary. They are actually machines. They tend to evolve in a similar glass and metallic fashion. Very early on they were keen to give the terminal an Indian context and infuse it with Indian values. The basic positioning we created for the terminal was "Expressive India." All classical Indian dance forms use mudras [hand gestures]. It's a common vocabulary.
Read the full interview, and more on how the hands were made, here.
Plastic Dreams by Charlotte and Peter Fiell, aims to be, as it observes on its back cover "quite simply the definitive guide to plastics in design." Indeed, Phillippe Decelle of the Plasticarium in Brussels agrees; "Plastic dreams is outstanding. No one icon is missing." Core77 didn't even know there was a Plasticarium, although our enthusiasm is strong. In a rare moment of candor, however, we must admit that we're simply not qualified to assess the whether one icon is missing. What we do know is that the Fiells have long dominated ID history course syllabi with books like Modern Furniture Classics, so critiquing their content is tough, because they literally wrote the book on industrial design history.
As they've just branched out from Taschen with their own imprint "Fiell" (a slightly easier decision to critique in the fading era of print journalism), the couple was gracious enough to sit down for an interview regarding their new imprint and its first ID centric book, Plastic Dreams. Plastic Dreams follows the same format as nearly every other Charlotte & Peter book we've read: introduction followed by chronological product spreads (two pages, clean grid, explanatory text, simple product shots against gray or white backgrounds). Of course, Core wouldn't be Core if we hadn't asked why their work rarely presented us with process: gritty studio shots, battered molds, ideation sketches that had little bearing on the finished product, etc. With a heavy heart, Peter explained that people just didn't buy books big on process ... they tried. So Core readership, if you want juicy product shots (and we think you do), you've got to get out there and support the supple pages of traditional print media with your wallets.
Instead of process shots, however, the Fiells present something almost, but not quite as good. The photographs of all the watershed products included in their book are all of "ideal, early-run" examples of seminal design classics. Given their history at Sotheby's and the V&A; museum, Charlotte and Peter can literally tell the difference between an Eames PAW chair in the first run of 2,000 by Zenith, and between the non-Zenaloy non-Zenith reproductions to follow. We here cannot tell the difference, even though we look at this stuff all day (we never heard of the catchy Zenaloy either, at least until we read the book). That's why office manager, designers and auctioneers keep the Fiell's compendiums around. Even more remarkably, the Fiells care so much that if they couldn't find the perfect version of a design classic, they bought it. Plasticarium be damned; we know where our field trip will take us, so apologies in advance for knocking on a West London studio door.
Design at the End of
The Rural Design Vernacular 
Berlin Design Week 2010 
Design Miami/Art Basel 
Device Design Day 
Presenting the winners of the BetaCup Competition 
Book Review: Box, 
Book Review: Inventors and Innovations 
COLAB 
Philadelphia University 
Jonathan Ive on the design 
Design Fancy: 
Ninja Throwing Star Magnets 
The Dreaded Killer Jellyfish of Graphic Design Favors 
Untitled by Kieran Fletcher
50's by Enache George
Trompe L'Oeil Pencil Case by Gillian Maniscalco
Berlin Design Week
Design Miami/Art Basel
Neocon 2010
Core77 speaks with Jonathan Ive
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BERLIN DESIGN WEEK 2010
DESIGN MIAMI/ART BASEL 2010
NEOCON 2010
BESPOKE: THE HANDBUILT BICYCLE
The Design Comedy: In Defence of Irony 
COLAB: A Laboratory for Collaboration and Serious Play 
The Artisan and the Automaton: FedEx Office and Hope Bindery 
Infectious Ideas: Using Antimicrobial Copper Alloys in Hospitals 
Interaction + Product Design: A Peek Inside the Revo Heritage Radio 
Real Estate Bust: How Creatives Are Carving Up L.A.'s Empty Space 
Design Fancy: Carlo Heckman 
Design Salary Survey Results
Inventors and Innovations, edited by Duncan McCorquodale
Box, Bottle, Bag, by Andrew Gibbs
Vending Machines: Coined Consumerism, by Christopher Salyers
Innovation X, by Adam Richardson
Priceless, by William Poundstone
Design Meets Disability, by Graham Pullin
The Best of Core77: Our Favorites from 2009!
77 RIGHTEOUS Gifts Under $77
Essential Tips for the Design Professional
Greener Gadgets Design Competition 2009
Read our back-to-school guide for design students. A must!
