ALL ART BURNS

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

Every now and then, I find a book that I wish I had discovered much earlier in my life. _Why Things Don’t Work_ is such a book, but I think it’s just as useful to read now as when it was published in 1977.

Papanek and Hennessey’s primary focus is on both needless consumption and poorly designed things that people really don’t need. However, instead of a long rant against conspicuous consumption and designed-in obsolescence, they point out flaws in products and systems then suggest alternatives. Starting with the home bath and ending with community-level resources (like fire engines), many things we take for granted or assume cannot be improved upon are looked at with a critical eye. Their line of questioning includes things like, “how can this be improved?”, “why don’t we do this the way people in another country do?” to “do you really need this thing in the first place?”

These questions are ones that I think anyone interested in design or sustainability should be learning to ask about everything they encounter. An interesting proposal in response to over-consumption is shared ownership of resources and objects that one only occasionally uses. We do this for all sorts of things, from fire engines to library books, but why do we stop with institutions created in the past century?

For example, why don’t we share lawnmowers?

I own two — a reel mower that I normally use and a gas mower given to us by a relative. Both of my neighbors also own gas mowers, and I think it’s a reasonable assumption that any of my neighbors who don’t hire a gardener probably own a gas mower. When I use my mower, it’s rarely for more than 20-30 minutes every other week or so; the same is true for all the mowers my neighbors own.

So why do we all have to own our own mower, each requiring a fair amount of regular maintenance even though we only use each for a few hours a week? What if we each put a few bucks a week into the “mower fund” and were able to check a mower out from a local storage shed? (Similar arguments are made for shared deep freezers in apartment buildings and other shared appliances.)

And if we are all going to own so many mowers, do we all need gas mowers? I’ve mowed my yard with both the reel mower and the gas mower, and the reel mower tends to be faster, quieter, and easier to store. Factor in down-time for refueling, tweaking the spark plug, and the cost of gas/oil, and the reel mower starts to make a lot more sense, at least for smaller lawns. I’m pretty certain that my reel mower will also last much longer than the gas mower, and it cost about half what a new gas mower would cost.

Taking their argument a step further, why do we have grass lawns that require so much maintenance to begin with? Just because they were popular with the Victorians doesn’t mean we need to waste water growing plants just to keep them closely cropped. On a personal level, we’ve started redesigning our own front yard so that we will no longer need to mow or water it other than occasional spot watering during a drought. It just doesn’t make sense for us to water and maintain 500 square feet of grass simply because it’s green.

It’s this sort of process and thinking that makes the book of value. While many of the specific suggestions they make are irrelevant today (such as rethinking typewriters), the processes Papanek and Hennessey use to critically look at the world around us and improve things for the better.

Cite (if you’re interested in my generating BiBTeX refs in future reviews, please speak up):
Hennessey, James and Papanek, Victor. Why Things Don’t Work, Pantheon Books, 1977, 0-394-70228-X

Technorati Tags: design, hennessey, papanek, sustainability

[EDIT:  James Hennessey points out the book is in print again from Schiffer, ISBN 0764330241.]

An area I get distracted by often is tools for nomadic living. I grew up moving around a fair bit and I’ve spent much of my adult life dragging around a portable office of one sort or another. It used to be a leather Day Runner(tm), notebooks, a Sony Walkman(tm) and random art supplies; these days it’s a laptop, tri-band ham radio, sketchbook, iPod(tm), and random tools for safety and personal care.

What I haven’t thought enough about is the next step up from the overstuffed courier bag, actually taking my entire house and all my possessions from place to place on a regular basis. It’s one thing to move my office from home to cafe every day, but moving all my stuff from town to town on a regular basis? That’s something a bit more complicated, especially given how much crap I (as well as everyone else) tend to own.

Becoming a truly nomadic person seems to boil down to two simple steps:

Step 1: Get rid of all the crap you don’t need or put it in some permanent place. You’re going to need to do this before you get to the next step…

Step 2: Own only those things that are easily transported and that you absolutely need. One thing that most of us absolutely need is a bare minimum of furniture, and that’s where Nomadic Furniture comes into play.

Nomadic Furniture , by designers James Hennessey and Victor Papanek, is by not an exhaustive examination of all nomadic furniture but a basic overview of the fundamental types of furniture that people need and how those living the nomadic lifestyle can travel with the furniture they need.

It’s an interesting read now, as it was written in the 70s during the first big oil crunch. The attitude is dated but at the same time completely relevant in terms of the need to conserve energy, reduce consumption of resources, and follow the general model of reduce, reuse, recycle. (If you’ve read Cradle to Cradle, some of this will seem oddly familiar.)

Hennessey and Papanek don’t just show you pictures of furniture you can buy, rather they show you how you can make most furniture on your own. The diagrams are simple and straightforward and are such that they are easily modified and scaled to meet individual needs. Some of the plans are very much in the style of Danish Modern (or IKEA) while others seem a little quaint by contemporary standards. I doubt the dimensions for LPs and cassettes will be useful for many people making storage shelves in this century.

There are a couple of groups of people that I think would greatly benefit from reading this and photocopying some of the plans. The first group are college students who move on a regular basis and for whom saving every penny possible on furniture is worth a little labor. The second group are the true nomadic types, say hardcore burning man participants or people who travel and camp for weeks at a time. There are some creative sleeping and storage solutions in Nomadic Furniture that I will be trying out before our next trip to the playa.

There are only two problems with Nomadic Furniture that I feel the need to point out. The first is that it’s no longer in print, but used copies are easily found on amazon.com and half.com. The second problem is the nearly unreadable typography. I’ve been a huge fan of hand-illustrated and lettered manuals since my first copy of Muir’s How To Keep Your Volkswagen Alive: A Manual of Step-By-Step Procedures for the Complete Idiot, but the strange typeface used in Nomadic Furniture is too much for me. It’s alien enough that the book is an amazingly difficult read, a distraction from the quite clean and readable illustrations.

Find it used, photocopy what you need, then sell/trade/give it to someone else who would find the information useful.

Cite (if you’re interested in my generating BiBTeX refs in future reviews, please speak up):
Hennessey, James and Papanek, Victor. Nomadic Furniture, Pantheon Books, 1973, 0-394-70228-X

Technorati Tags: design, furniture, hennessey, nomadic lifestyle, papanek

A brief review of a short book. I haven’t been writing much due to a deluge of work, but I promised myself I’d try and review each book I read as soon as I finished reading it, not weeks later.

Scott Berkun’s The Myths of Innovation is a brief guide to the history of innovation. It is a well researched look at how innovations really happen and the environments and contexts surrounding people praised as innovators. I suspect some of this is not news to people who worked in the dot-com boom or spent time in an R&D lab, but even those people would benefit from the structural interpretation Berkun gives to those environments.

Where this book falls short, in my opinion, is a lack of practical advice for people who need help fostering innovation in their departments or companies. It’s easy to say, “here’s how innovative organizations operate”, the challenge is in learning how to change your organization and convince management that there will be a benefit to the change. I can tell my boss about innovative companies until I’m blue in the face, but unless I can describe a plan with practical changes, my boss probably isn’t going to support me. If Berkun has experience helping companies change and become more innovative, I wish he’d revise this book with some real-world examples of what works and what doesn’t.

It’s a quick read at ~150 pages and there is a useful bibliography and guide to other books on the subject of innovation and creativity and certainly worth reading the next time you have a short flight or a layover.

Technorati Tags: creativity, innovation, The Myths of Innovation, reviews

That sounds pretty sexy — I think that’s how I’ll describe what I’m doing this summer. Ok, I’m really just going to catch up on a bunch of reading, do some writing, practice drawing, and set up some metalworking equipment so I can make some things. But with a sexy title like that, my summer plans sound much better.

I took a couple of weeks to decompress for school but I need to get back into the study groove. I have a lot of real work (the stuff that pays) to do, but I’m going to try and stick to a self-study schedule for design, security and Japanese in my free time.

My books on the “In” pile so far fall into two piles, design and security.

In the design pile:

• Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things
• Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature
• What Things Do — I haven’t read much design theory, so I might spread this out over several weeks so that it can soak in
• The Complete Japanese Joinery
  
• Industrial Strength Design ("What do you mean it’s not about EBM and stompy boots?")
• Universal Principles of Design
  

The stack of security books is big enough that I might end up skimming many of them:

• Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization
• Physical Device Security
• Reversing
  
• Building Secure Software
  
• Silence on the Wire
  
• Security Warrior (could they have come up with more leet title?)

I’m also considering re-reading some of the classics that I read in school the first time around: Alexander’s design books, Foucault’s History of Science, that sort of thing. It’ll be interesting to see how much my worldly experience changes what I get out of the canon.

Technorati Tags: books, design, school, security, summer