The idea of faces on objects

Photo by: irfandarian, idphotography 2013

In recent months, I've started to notice faces in some of the objects that I used or passed by daily. No, it is not because I have gone nutty up there, but it seems strange to me that sometimes we can see things that we want to see in all these lifeless things around us.

Or perhaps this is just one of those skeuomorphic tendencies that I have as I delve a little deeper into the subject matter of design. Perhaps replicating a face-like design in some objects would lead to a greater acceptance by its users of the intended objects. Or perhaps, it is part of that grand plan, at the psychological or neural level, to make people happy about using the intended products! Or perhaps, it is just my mind playing face-recognising games on me, on those bored mornings/afternoons/evenings...the reasons I might never clearly know or find out, but one thing I do know is that not all things lends itself well to have a face implanted or imagined on it!

But then again...that's just my opinion.

Hingeless bendable speaker: #MadeWithPaper

A visual of the proposed hingeless, bendable speaker.

Inspired by the need to be simple, the hingeless, bendable speaker idea sketched above works on the idea of simplifying the practise of customising the users' experiences with their current portable speakers. Allowing the speakers to bend at almost all angles for customisability, whilst at the same time, leveraging on a flexible material type that one would use to clip excess wires of extension cords, I thought these ideas could converge to form the above design quite simple. The speaker itself is envisioned to be curved for added acoustics, and aesthetics.

ForkSpoon+Knife: #MadeWithPaper

Version 1: ForkSpoon combination

Version 2: ForkSpoon+Knife combination

Inspired from my own personal experiences with my children, I think that there is a lot of potential for a combined Fork+Spoon+Knife utility product. With the advent of magnets in a lot more product uses, I thought the use of such adhesive-able element in the above combi would play nicely with making the combination more useful and utilitarian, but at the same time, without sacrificing the simplicity of its function!

An-IDEA-a-DAY: Baby bathing module

A bathing furniture piece that aims to make the bathing experience of bathing an infant that much simpler.

The quadrant-arc shape eases the work flow of the caregiver as he/she bathes the infant. With the common post-bathing items within easy reach in a arc-like manner (read 'user-centric ergonomics'), the experience itself would also be a pleasant and efficient one for the care-giver.

The extendable concept aims to give users the required space-saving that usually is absent from similar bathing furniture pieces. The built-in changing tub serves as an additional attachment for users who follows through the bathing process with the intended work flow that the tub offers.

An-IDEA-a-DAY: Rotateable Framing Elements (Ro-FL)

The design of the RoFL was inspired by the difficulty faced by people who are in the habit of framing up their photographs and the likes. The whole set up works as a set, with adjustable-length framing elements, and rotatable frames.

The design itself eliminates the need for one to work on nailing/fixing up a few hanging elements at one go. The focus is on the ease of setting up a network of frames at one go.

The modular nature of the framing elements would allow users to change the configuration quite easily, although not at the level of flexibility that one would like to have.

Lastly, the design would also work wonderfully with a set of similarly-sized frames, for those who just wants that added difference to their otherwise plain vanilla walls.

An-IDEA-a-DAY: the Mooo dispenser

Inspired by the need to make the showering experience an even more pleasant one, I embark on an idea of borrowing the milking action to dispense the required amount of soap/shampoo.

I thought this would be a more natural action compared to the press-down motion of current soap/shampoo containers. The idea that you are able to grab the teats and pull out the liquids, in one fluid (pun unintended) motion helps to overcome the discontinuity of the current dispensing motion. It also dispenses with the need for situations where the whole container slips out and falls over, due to the wet slippery nature of most shower environments.

The container options would most likely come in 2 forms, one that is affixed to the wall, and as a refill option, as per what some of the current cleaning liquids option come in.

Lastly, the rubberized/silicone look and feel of the teats would surely endear a lot of users, winning over users who are not only curious, but who would most probably be able to see the functionality of the design, and the beauty of the milking/dispensing action.

When one design improvement begets another...

I recently bought a new pair of earphones, after the old one simply gave away. What caught my attention was the improvement in the design of the wires, one example of which is as shown in the picture on the left.

I simply love the idea of making the wires a little flatter now, to reduce or even eliminate entanglement, compared with the old designs. And somehow locating the controls (mine has controls for volume and start/pause) on a flattened piece of cable just seems a little more...'designerly plausible' and apt, compared to what I used to have.

But one thing that I wasn't prepared for is the idea of storing this new piece of flattened cable. Being one who uses a messenger-type bag for his laptop and other accessories, it didn't dawn on me the need to get another piece of wire coiler, since the old one is designed for round-shaped cables.

What I thought is that updated design of the cable is better, but somehow the design flaw here is the need to also redesign the wire-coiler too, to cater to users like me. Perhaps this is where a reDesign exercise just stop short of actually enhancing the users' experience a little more 'perfectly'. I felt that having a coiler that complements this redesign would definitely make more converts out there.

What do you think?

When being Innovative is more important than being Creative

I had some time to think things through this 'debate' the last couple of days, on what makes somebody creative or innovative. And perhaps the debate on whether it is more important to be creative, or innovative. The debate seems to stem from the idea that I had that there should be a balance between the two, especially in my approaches towards teaching my charges this idea of 'creativity versus innovation'. But could there really be only one thing that one should focus on, in order to give that sense of value-addedness? 

I was reminded the other time about how Apple is not necessarily the most creative company in the world. A case in point was that they were NOT the ones who invented the portable digital music player, nor the mouse, and neither the tablet. But what they did to the idea of

• how a portable digital music player should be part of an 'ecosystem', 
• how a mouse should operate buttonlessly and 
• how a tablet should look like and be experienced with multi-touches and gestures...

now...these are indeed examples of innovation. Yes they were not original ideas, nor their overarching concepts of working totally original, but the very fact that they have managed to leverage on an existing design concept, and work on how to transform these elements into a 'disruptive' tool to the current status quo...now that's innovation at its finest.

So perhaps creativity does have its place in the whole scheme of things, but in order for things to get really moving, and exciting, the innovative piece of the puzzle must also be present, and in order. And then perhaps...just perhaps, things could move along along a more 'disruptive' mode!

SIRI and the Evolutionary Product Design Idea

I remembered blogging about the wonders of a product that evolves and grows with the user, or adapts to the user as he or she grows up. And I believe I have come across again a good example of such a product. Introducing Stokke's Tripp Trapp, now with the newborn set. This allows it to be used right on from day one of a child's life, as seen from the picture below, taken from their site.

What makes it so wonderful is the whole notion of how a product should evolve with the changing need of the user. I can envision this particular concept being translated to a wider age-group. Perhaps a set of product line that caters to those about to hit the elderly age group. Thus the product is not only purposeful during the more active days of their users, but also adapts to him or her when he/she grows older, or when there is a sudden reduction of his/her physical capacities.

And why must this idea just be constrained to physical products. I'm envisioning the idea being adapted to perhaps, software systems too. And why not, I do think that it would just be a matter of time before such a system could be designed to 'grow' old together with its user. Perhaps an adopted version of SIRI, just like the Tamagotchi craze a while back! She would grow old together with her user, and perhaps be a constant digital companion, or perhaps a digital  personalised concierge/oracle/entertainer of sorts for the user.

I guess we would just have to wait and see then what would happen when SIRI grows older...

Beautiful handmade bags

I do love functionally aesthetically-designed bags, and especially when they are well-made. And this video...is something I totally dig! Enjoy...

Beauty Through Bamboo from Turnstyle Video on Vimeo

Moleskine Bags animation

An awesome animation using tonnes of Moleskine, pointed out to me by a colleague. Enjoy!

Moleskine Bags in Hyper Stop Motion from Moleskine ® on Vimeo.

The humble elastic band

A picture of my water bottle,
with 2 elastic bands around it.

I usually have this habit of putting the leftover elastic bands from my lesson notes around my water bottle, as shown in the picture. The primary purpose of me doing this is to basically increase the friction of the gripping area.

But a thought just occur to me while I was having dinner with my significant other the other day. The thing that bug me sometimes is how NOT socially aware some of these waiters/waitresses are when it comes to topping up your glass of water. There are the overly-enthusiastic ones, and there are those...well let's just say, they seem to be so expendable.

Anyway, I thought the idea of using these elastic bands around your glasses of water is a neat idea to communicate to the waiters whether your glass of water need topping up...or not. Perhaps we can have a way of telling customers to adjust the level of water that they deem to be the level that they would want their glasses to be topped up! If the water is still above this level, then the waiter wouldn't have to bother about topping it.

Alternatively with 2 elastic bands, we can have a maximum and minimum water level too, that are adjustable according to what they are having throughout their dining experience. So the customer can adjust the max and min level during the opening dishes, and adjust them lower if they think that they would want to make their move. These would definitely help to reduce wastage of water, and more importantly, mitigate the intrusiveness of overly enthusiastic waiters too!

How about that?

Design Ideas: The Xpandable Hard-Disks

I just thought the idea of having to buy a new hard disk every time the old one goes into 'scarce mode' is something that could be rethought. It doesn't help too that with improvements in technology, what used to cost $200 can now be obtained at half that price a year later. This is where the inspiration for the expandable hard disk gets into the picture.

The idea here is to re-look at how and why is there a need for one to expand their hard disk capacity. Possible reasons are the regular increase in storage and backup demands, and perhaps just having a better way of organizing data. But the troublesome part about having new disk spaces is the need to firstly format them, and then copy over stuffs to the new (and usually higher capacity) disks, and then wondering what to do with the old ones.

And this is where my idea for an expandable hard disk is worth looking at. I partly got my inspiration from reading about a model of Nikon DSLR that is able to handle 2 SD cards at one go. The neat and cool thing about this is that you can actually program it to either:

• Use the second SD card if the first one is full
• Use the second SD card to store exactly the same picture files as the first one
• or...Use the second SD card to store another format of the same picture, e.g. RAW format in one, and the usual JPEG in another

I thought since this 'intelligence' is something already available, we can include this functionality into my expendable hard disk designs. Here's some sketches that I did while in one of the meeting yesterday.

Picture 1: Overall ideation. I first started off with a re-ideation
of the basic hard disk design,
seen on the top left of the sketch

Picture 2: Close up of the initial re-ideation of a typical hard-disk

Picture 3: Close up view of an initial expendable design idea,
inspired by jigsaw puzzles

Picture 3: Close up of the final configuration.
Whether vertical or horizontal, it depends on the users.
Numbering or customizing the different hard disks either through
numbering or using different colour could be a good way to cosmeticize
the whole hard-disk usage experience

Note that all sketches and ideas are the copyright of Irfan Darian.

Designing for the constrained spaces of an airplane

It is interesting that in my plane trips, I tend to look at how the the overall designs of the spaces centring around the customers' experiences tend to be rather ingenius. Ingenius in the sort of way that they are still functional, but yet not necessarily lacking in its availability to pander to (almost) most of the usual needs that a passenger would want on a flight...and maybe more! Space constraits aside, I am always amused at firstly, the design of the aisle and the seats, of how a high degree of optimisation must have gone through the minds of the seat designers when they were conceptualising its designs. It certainly brought me back to the good old days during my post-graduate studies, when optimisation studies and operations research were 2 of my specialisation areas.

And who can forget the swiss-army-like concept in the toilets. The kind that perhaps would put some of our pulic toilets to shame. Barring the squeezy nature, what surprises me from an ergonomical and anthropometrical points of view is how everything seems to be within reach and arranged in a certain orderly yet logical way. However i would love it even more if they could just make the toilet roll a little more to the front of the seats, rather than at the back.

And who can forget meal-times, the sight of the stewardesses sashaying down the aisle to hand out the airline's version of MRE's (meals ready-to-eat) is usually a welcoming one to most (hungry) passengers, unless of course you were beginning to think that they must have been cooked by your evil mother-in-law from your previous live/marriage! And what surprises me about these meals was also about how some of the small design details that must have taken place back in the design studios. Two examples that I have managed to capture in my recent trips are as shown below.

The first picture shows how a portion of a cornflake meal is also packaged with enough milk at its top. Hence instead of having the flakes and milk as separate entities, they are combined in a single packaging.

The second one is a little easier to see, but what surprises me is the non-necessity of such design, but then it might just be my opinion. They perhaps dipped one end of the 2-pointed toothpick into a green dye, to allow its users to differentiate the different ends. Perhaps its a small gesture of design thinking, but it certainly was enough to make me wonder whether I might have missed out on anything else!

And perhaps I have....!

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Location:Singapore