ALL ART BURNS

No posts here for the next week or so, as I’ll be moderating a discussion with Ann Thorpe, author of “The Designer’s Atlas of Sustainability”

Technorati Tags: design, sustainability

Hugh Graham has an excellent essay on design and aspirational consumer culture. I think he’s on to something and that his idea of artisanal design — convincing people to buy ugly, flavorful heirloom tomatoes instead of perfect, bland grocery store tomatoes — is going to be quite important in the future. Well, if we want to survive as a species and all that. If we just want to consume ourselves to death, we’re already on the right track for that.

Technorati Tags: artisinal design, sustainability

Way back in the day I had an AT&T 3b1 UNIX(tm) workstation. It wasn’t just an amazingly useful desktop unix workstation, it was this wedge-shaped piece of white plastic that was quite pleasing to look at. Supercomputer companies like Cray and Thinking Machines also understood the importance of visual design and color selection on their behemoths, Thinking Machines went so far as to hire Maya Lin to design the CM-5.

Poking around the InterWebs today, I found an amazing collection of photographs of vintage computers. Interesting not because of their power or age, but because they show the importance of visual design during the days of supercomputers.

Mark Richards’ Core Memory is a collection of his photographs of some of the most visual interesting computers in history. Skip past the big bundles of wires and tubes and take a long look at things like the control panel for the PDP-8 or the button layout and typography on vintage IBM mainframes. The photos are collected in a book — “Core Memory: A Visual Survey of Vintage Comptuers” — soon to be published by Chronicle Books.

Where is that level of design in today’s high-end computers? Sure, Apple has a few nice products, but why are the vast majority of computers so damn hard on the eyes? Does it really cost so much extra to have a clean layout on the console of a rack-mounted blade or a desk-side case? My PC’s cd-eject and reset buttons are almost identical in shape and size, are located only an inch or two apart, and as are all the buttons on my PC, all the same color. Does it really add too much to the COG to hire a designer or even an intern and have them clean things up and fix major flaws?

Technorati Tags: beauty, design, simplicity

Phillipe Starck, for reasons unclear, has thrown in the towel. He’s not just quitting, he’s describing all of his past work as, “Everything I designed was unnecessary.” The original interview is in German, which I can’t read; but there are a couple of English summaries, this is the one I’m referencing.

To be honest, I kinda sorta agree with him on unnecessary design when it comes to design in general in the US. I like our Alessi Diobolix bottle opener, and it makes me smile when I use it. But if it didn’t work properly, I’d either throw it out or hang it on the wall. The same goes for Starck’s $80 juicer that is more sculpture than function, even Starck admits it’s not a very good juicer.

How many decades have we spent with product design used to make things redundant before their natural life is over or difficult to use just for the sake of visual style? How many years did Detroit do nothing with their cars other than change the shape, unless forced by some government agency? Sure, you can make things function better with design — and that’s why I’m studying design — but how many designers out there are creating things knowing they will have a short life span then be discarded? How many clothes go to an early grave simply because the trendsetters say the clothes are out? How much cheap IKEA-like furniture have I bought in my life, only to toss it in the dumpster after it fails to survive a couple of moves?

The other quote that caught my eye was this:
“I will definitely give up in two years’ time. I want to do something else, but I don’t know what yet. I want to find a new way of expressing myself …design is a dreadful form of expression.”

Which got me to thinking — maybe Starck is an example of what happens when sculptors and visual artists start working in the product design world instead of being artisans. When I here someone say they want to express themselves or communicate some greater truths, I usually assume they are an artist. I know people who love to write software (a valid means of expression) but who loathe working in the software development industry. Personally, I like cooking and like to think I’m a pretty good cook, but probably I’d slit my wrists after a few days on the line. I’d really like to know what set Starck off in this new direction.

When I started this journey, I was worried that after only a few months someone was going to pull me aside and say, “Hey, just so you know. Design isn’t for you. Sculpture’s over in the next building and we’ll arrange a transfer and get you all set up.” That hasn’t happened (and I don’t think it will), but in the past couple of years I’ve learned a lot about myself and the world as I try to seriously study this whole design thing.

Technorati Tags: design, starck, sustainability

I like simple things. While I often like gaudy, baroque, Victorian, overdone decoration, I like things I use to be as simple as possible. I don’t feel the need to make arbitrary rules like, “no buttons anywhere on the product”, but I try to make things simple and keep them that way.

Visually, this is a pretty boring journal. But journals are about words, and because I stay focused on words, it’s easy to read this journal on just about any device, from my XV6800 phone to a high-end PC. (Just checked and it looks pretty good in lynx as well.) I spent very little time making it simple, I just started ripping things out if I couldn’t justify their existence. So, there’s no autobiographical photo, no fancy widgets showing what music I’m listening to right now, no countdown-until-W-is-gone clock, do dynamic code generation, Flash animations, or any of that. True, if I were a freelance graphic — sorry, “communication” — designer I’d probably put a lot of effort into having a rockin’ web site that shows off my chops. But I’m not, so I don’t.

So, back to simple. If you’ve ever ordered anything from a supplier like Grainger or DigiKey, you know what a nightmare it can be to find what you’re looking for. For awhile now, McMaster Carr has gotten more of my business than, say, MSC Direct, simply because the McMaster Carr site is so damn simple and easy to use.

McMaster Carr is great for the hardware I’ve needed for some metalworking probjects, but in the past year or two I’ve also gotten back into tangible computing (aka “making electric things with embedded CPUs”). The work I’m doing now is mostly based on the Arduino, an AVR-based single board computer. The Arudino does for physical computing what high level languages did for programming — open the field up to more people by simplifying the interface and the programming environment. Yea for simplicity!

Getting back into tangible computing also means dealing with the dreaded mail order supply titans like DigiKey, Newark, Mouser, Allied, etc. Typically when you’re ordering parts, you make a list of what you need, then try and find each part in each catalog, get the price, sum everything up, figure out shipping, then go find out if the parts are actually in stock. It’s an hour or two with a spreadsheet and often both the online search engine and the printed catalog.

Octopart changes everything. It’s a search engine for electronics, but more importantly, it pulls data from all the major vendors and shows you — in real time — pricing and availability. You can make a parts list, then easily compare prices and availability across most major vendors then build individual shopping carts and place orders.

It’s an amazingly useful resource, but most importantly, it’s simple. Simple, simple, simple. There are no garish colors, no image maps, no egregious animations, no masses of corporate logos showing everyone they are affiliated with. Just plain text, thumbnails for search results to help identify parts, and navigation that doesn’t require FPS-developed reflexes.

Go play with it — even if you don’t know anything about electronics — and see what you think. If you think you’re ignorant of things electronic, then search for something you’ve used or heard of, like “9v battery” or “transistor” and just poke around a bit. By keeping things simple, they’ve taken something very complex — component selection and ordering — and made it a much easier task.

Technorati Tags: design, octopart, simplicity