ALL ART BURNS

“Weren’t you going to school or something?”

I really hate not being in school right now but I won’t be pursuing my degree until next fall for personal reasons.

Until I can go back to school, I’m putting myself on a little Industrial Design self-study program. The plan is to focus on reading and reviewing books, spending time in the local museums with a sketchbook, coming up to speed on Vectorworks and Solidworks, and taking classes in both figure drawing and Japanese language classes. (If you know of any Japanese classes in Pittsburgh that aren’t university classes, please let me know). There’s also another furniture project I’d like to work on, but that requires bringing the garage out of the last century and into this one. There’s just not much I can do with a single 15A circuit that’s shared with the lights and garage door openers.

Books to be reviewed:

• The Chair, Galen Cranz
• Industrial Design Reader, Carma Gorman (ed.)
• Shaping Things, Bruce Sterling
• Security and Usability, Cranor and Garfinkel

Anything else I should add to the list?

Technorati Tags: industrial design, books, Japanese, Pittsburgh

I’m finally finished with my first indoor furniture project.

“But before I tell you that story, I have to tell you this one.” — Howard Waldrop

Some Things I Believe

The Dependency Tree of Great Works

1. To create Great Works, you must think bigger than life.
2. To think bigger than life, you must not just ignore, but actively refute the fundamental laws of time and space.
3. To refute the laws of time and space, you must be aggressively ignorant, delusional on a grand scale, or dangerously schizophrenic. Pick the one that gets you laid.
4. Stop screwing around getting laid and get back to work.

If you only try what you know can be done, you’ll never do anything new or different. Everything you do will just be a copy of someone else’s work, and who wants to be a copycat?

Time and cost estimates for first generation products are lies. “I’ve never done anything like that before, but I can do it in two weeks and for $10,000.” 6 weeks and $100,000 later you’re finished and it’s still not what they wanted

You won’t finish an original design in the amount of time you thought you would. Mentally prepare yourself now to cut something out or move the deadline. If it’s for Burning Man, you’ll cut the design by half and still be finishing it on the playa.

Now I can tell you this story.

I signed up for an introductory furniture making class at The Crucible and needed a project. I started out wanting to make a simple entertainment center. (Well, I actually started out wanting to make a throne, but it was suggested by someone who has a say in these sorts of things that perhaps I should make something a bit more practical that we actually need.) We looked around the house for something I could make and finally admitted that while it was functional, our Ikea Tubeholden entertainment center simply didn’t match our collection of Mission and Gothic furniture.

Make a simple entertainment center out of tube steel and wood that reflects our existing furniture? “No problem!”

Well, there were some problems. Rather than tell a long, drawn-out story, I’ll summarize a few of the screwups and setbacks.

What you draw isn’t what you build, the model is what you build

What you draw is an abstract representation of what you want to end up with. Somewhere between the drawing and the making reality throws a big wrench in the works. In my particular case, the two big wrenches were “too many small pieces that need to be welded together” and “where do you think the other side of a bolt goes, dumbass?” The lesson learned here is do multiple refinements of drawings, then make a model. I didn’t make a model because “it’s so simple I don’t need a model.” It doesn’t matter if it’s two popsicle sticks glued to a coathanger, make the damn model.

Don’t try to learn a new tool and do a new thing with the tool at the same time

I started laying out the strap hinges in Illustrator even though I’d never used it before because “I need to learn Illustrator”. Two hours later I went to find my french curves and a pad of drawing paper. After drawing out something I liked, I scanned it and imported it into Illustrator to clean up, resize and print out as a template. (This would probably have been a good project for Vectorworks, and I’m decent in Vectorworks, but I was frustrated with computers in general and knew I could do it right on paper.) Lesson learned: don’t learn new tools if you’re doing something you’ve never done before. Learn new tools doing something you’ve already done. (I know this from metalworking, why I don’t apply it to computers is beyond me.)

Don’t believe the hype (or the label, or anything else you didn’t confirm yourself)

A 1×4 is not 1″ x 4″. The paint will not cure as quickly as the label said it would. The depth gauge on the drill is probably busted. It will require more than two coats of stain. Your garage is not a “dust-free environment”.

Ok, so enough of that

Here’s what a class at The Crucible, $500 in raw materials, and an additional few weekends in the garage led to:

Technorati Tags: industrial design, furniture, design

A few years ago, we got your typical water cooler at work:

Take a closer look at the buttons, display, and instructions — in case it’s not obvious, that red thing on the bottom right is also a button:

[/tags]industrial design,office humor[/tags]

(I know, I know, I owe like three book reports and a final write-up on the latest furniture project, but but but…)

The Nintendo Revolution controller has been demoed.

One thing about Nintendo — they give Shigeru Miyamoto the space he needs to break new ground in video gaming. Who is Miyamoto? Just some industrial designer that happened to create Donkey Kong, the Mario franchise, the Zelda franchise, and Pimkin.

So why the big fuss? Doesn’t every new console have a new controller?

Well, yes, but the Revolution controller is a one-handed device. It’s closer to the remote controls the average non-gaming person is used to using to navigate menus on everything from TVs to DVRs and a big step away from the button-fest that is the X-Box controller.

Go back and read that again — a one-handed device that looks like a remote control. Pretty much every game controller since the Wico Command joystick or Pong has required you to use both hands. Some controllers assume the off-hand is a stabilizing device, others require you to grip with each hand while using fingers on each hand to manipulate the controller. The Revolution lets you play games with one hand with an optional second controller for more complex games like Metroid Prime.

Miyamoto is going for a bigger audience here. It’s not the cutting-edge gamers looking for the next thing that will make Bungie cry like little girls, but your average person that might like to play a video game if it were fun and not too difficult to deal with. I can imagine using this new controller with everything from a bridge or poker simulator to Jingle Cats or a modified version of a Katamari game. Something like Space Channel 5 or Rez would be trivial to reimplement with this sort of controller. On the other hand, Soul Calibur * would be impossible, but it’s also impossible with a regular controller unless you’re a 15 year old twitch fiend.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the direction controllers are headed, and I was not thinking this in the slightest. Like so many others in so many ages, I’ve been tricked into fighting the last battle instead of planning to win the next battle with a new and innovative strategy.

Miyamoto is no longer one of my heroes. He is now a final boss that I can only defeat with my superior design skills.

Update: Gizmodo has a round-up of news articles on the Revolution controller.

Technorati Tags: industrial design, Nintendo, Revolution, video games

There are areas of industrial design that might seem esoteric but that I think every lay person can appreciate. One area is the use of sound (audio feedback) in user interfaces. I’m sure plenty of designers think about sound when they’re designing something, but it seems that more often than not it’s a secondary issue, relegated to simple feedback during input commands or emergency notification of a problem.

Just about everything in existence makes some sort of sound when used, either by design or by accident of design. Think about the last time you tried to do something only by touch, say plugging a cable into the back of a stereo receiver, threading a nut onto a bolt in a place you can’t see, or fumbling around in the dark looking for a lightswitch. Think about all the noises you hear and how you respond to them. One of the first things I was taught about MIG welding was to listen for the characteristic sound of a good weld — the sound of sizzling bacon. You might not be able to see the torch or the bead, but if you hear the sizzling sound, you know you’re probably making a good weld.

Now compare that to the Icom R-3 scanner which has an amazing range of responses to key presses: “beep” and “beep beep”. Never mind that it has an internal tuner capable of going from dc to daylight, a speaker and a video screen, the only thing it can do in response to user input is “beep” or “beep beep”. Sure, it’s got a dual-LCD display that can show live ATSC or wireless security cam video on one screen while displaying the frequency on the secondary screen, but odds are I’m listening to an audio channel and not staring at a tiny screen. Even if I am staring at the screens, all the feedback I get is “beep” or “beep beep”.

It never hit me just how annoying this was until I started reading about the Elecraft KX1. The KX1 is a miniature, low-power transceiver with only a three digit LED display. The rest of the feedback is audio, sent in Morse code over the audio output. You have to be a licensed amateur radio operator to transmit with a KX1 and it’s only usable in CW (amateur radio lingo for Morse code transmissions), so having it send user interface data via Morse is a rather obvious design decision.

So this leads me back to the title: why does the iPod have a screen? The iPod is about listening to music, not watching video. It’s certainly inconvenient to have to pull the iPod out of your belt pouch while jogging — and unsafe to look it while driving — just to figure out what music you want to play next. You could argue that the iPod Shuffle lacks this limitation, but it since all it can do is random play or sequential play, it doesn’t need any sort of user interface.

Here’s what I think the iPod should do: read to you what is currently on the iPod. Not just in sequential order while you mouse around, but skip around the way your housemate would while randomly poking through the CD rack. “Aphex Twin. White Zombie. Conlon Nancarrow. Apocolyptica. Sugarcubes. Dean Martin. Bauhaus. C-Tec. Lovespiralsdownards. Chris and Cosey. Dead Voices on Air. Jane Jensen. Orbital. Download. Kraftwerk. Dead Can Dance. Shriekback. Meat Beat Manifesto.” When it reads off something you like, you hit the “ok” button, and it starts reading off similar things by genre and alphabetically.

Let’s say you press “OK” right after it says “Orbital.” It will start listing artists that start with “O”, artists in genres related to “Orbital”, and finally, everything that begins with the letter “O”: “Orbital albums by title. The Orb. 187 Calm. Aphex Twin. KLF. Electronica. Trance. Rave. Roy Orbison. Underworld. The Ordinaires. Willam Orbit. Vidna Obana. Infected Mushroom. Goa. Wipeout XL Soundtack.” and then every disc, track and artist that begins with the letter “O”.

Text-to-speech conversion isn’t free, but does it cost more than adding photo support to the iPod? Which would I rather have: the ability to display photos, or a touch/audio user interface that lets me keep my eyes on the road while picking the music I want to listen to?

Update:

I completely forgot about the PhatBox from PhatNoise. It’s a hard drive based MP3 player for your car that uses “PhatNoise Voice Indexing” technology to read off the titles of your MP3 files. A pal of mine has one of these in his R32 and loves it.

Technorati tags: industrial design | design | ipod | audio