Here's my first one, the "Hand"Wrench by Paul Julius Martus:
Monday, January 19, 2009
Designing literally
I would love to start a section in my blog whereby I would showcase some quirky design ideas, whether still in concept or in production, which I hope my readers will find interesting. And no, you don't need to have a level 5 DQ to appreciate them. :)
Here's my first one, the "Hand"Wrench by Paul Julius Martus:
Here's my first one, the "Hand"Wrench by Paul Julius Martus:
Sunday, January 18, 2009
I would like to read this...
An interesting book, that will definitely be amongst my personal shelves once it is available locally. Read the reviews, and i am sure the designer in you will agree. [Original post taken from here]
Wired to Care, by Dev Patnaik with Peter Mortensen
Posted by: Robert Blinn
The concept of "needsfinding" seems unique to our consumer culture. True needs like air, sleep or hunger announce themselves with neurochemical fury, tearing animals away from what they think they should be doing and dragging them into the immediacy of their body. So when we industrial designers talk about the customer's undiscovered needs and how our products can address them, we should admit to ourselves that needsfinding, as we know it, is an oxymoron. For most of corporate America, resonating with their customers is really more about finding things their clients didn't know they wanted rather than needed.
For some clients, though, the issue of wants versus needs does begin to blur. In their book their book Wired to Care on customer empathy, Dev Patnaik with Peter Mortensen wisely begins with the example of Patty Moore, a young industrial designer who wandered out into the city streets with a fake white wig, earplugs, blurry glasses and a cane. For Patty, the needsfinding journey was about discovering what parts of the modern world were incompatible with old age. No doubt the city was filled with plenty of other real elderly women who were perfectly capable of navigating, but it took her Harrison Bergeron outfit of handicaps to make Patty realize just how hard walking a mile in those shoes might have been. What Patnaik has done is realize that the "needsfinding" exercises that industrial designers do that seem so focused on objects and products are really about people and empathy. So while empathy and companionship aren't exactly the most primitive of needs on Maslow's Hierarchy, they are among the most human, and frankly, a little humanity is something that most companies could use a little more of.
Business books these days tend to take a page from Malcolm Gladwell, structuring themselves as a series of chapters that read like individual anecdotes or short stories, but all revolve around a common theme. Wired to Care shares this format, and touches on examples with which industrial designers and many businesspeople should already be familiar. Once again, we hear how Betsey Farber's experience with hard and narrow tools led her to create OXO Good Grips, and about how Harley Davidson turned itself around by focusing on bike culture rather than bike manufacture. I was impressed that even though I read a lot of business books, Patnaik surprised me with some fresh examples.
Instead of simply cataloging the (late 90s) rise of Starbucks, he prefaced his discussion of the coffee chain by focusing on how Maxwell House had slowly degraded their coffee over time by replacing Arabica beans with Robusta due to supply and cost pressure. They'd devalued their own product almost imperceptibly over time and slowly lost touch with their customers while doing so. Likewise, instead of simply talking about the Apple juggernaut and waxing philosophical about the iPod, Patnaik talks about Apple successes through the failures of Microsoft. Talking first about the Xbox, which was a smashing success for Microsoft, he then addresses the Zune. The Zune was/is Microsoft's competition with the iPod for the mp3 market, but it has not faired nearly as well. Amazingly, however, Patnaik tells us that the Xbox and the Zune had the same design team. The Zune failed and the Xbox succeeded because the design team consisted of hard core gamers. Because they were their own audience for the Xbox, they didn't need empathy or needsfinding. Sadly, that didn't hold for the Zune, and Apple's careful development and design process left them in the cold.
On the strength of anecdotes alone, I'd put Wired to Care ahead of many comparable books because the case studies included haven't already been hashed over in the popular press. What really sets it apart, though, is the science at the end that pulls it all together. Patnaik spends a full thirty pages exploring the scientific underpinnings of the success stories he's included, with details on mirror neurons and the influences of the limbic system on purchasing decisions. In some ways the concepts are almost reminiscent of the fears about subliminal messages from the sixties and seventies, except that they work. Fortunately, the only way for a company to convincingly act empathetic is to actually be empathetic, and that's good news for us all.
Wired to Care, by Dev Patnaik with Peter Mortensen
Posted by: Robert Blinn
The concept of "needsfinding" seems unique to our consumer culture. True needs like air, sleep or hunger announce themselves with neurochemical fury, tearing animals away from what they think they should be doing and dragging them into the immediacy of their body. So when we industrial designers talk about the customer's undiscovered needs and how our products can address them, we should admit to ourselves that needsfinding, as we know it, is an oxymoron. For most of corporate America, resonating with their customers is really more about finding things their clients didn't know they wanted rather than needed.
For some clients, though, the issue of wants versus needs does begin to blur. In their book their book Wired to Care on customer empathy, Dev Patnaik with Peter Mortensen wisely begins with the example of Patty Moore, a young industrial designer who wandered out into the city streets with a fake white wig, earplugs, blurry glasses and a cane. For Patty, the needsfinding journey was about discovering what parts of the modern world were incompatible with old age. No doubt the city was filled with plenty of other real elderly women who were perfectly capable of navigating, but it took her Harrison Bergeron outfit of handicaps to make Patty realize just how hard walking a mile in those shoes might have been. What Patnaik has done is realize that the "needsfinding" exercises that industrial designers do that seem so focused on objects and products are really about people and empathy. So while empathy and companionship aren't exactly the most primitive of needs on Maslow's Hierarchy, they are among the most human, and frankly, a little humanity is something that most companies could use a little more of.
Business books these days tend to take a page from Malcolm Gladwell, structuring themselves as a series of chapters that read like individual anecdotes or short stories, but all revolve around a common theme. Wired to Care shares this format, and touches on examples with which industrial designers and many businesspeople should already be familiar. Once again, we hear how Betsey Farber's experience with hard and narrow tools led her to create OXO Good Grips, and about how Harley Davidson turned itself around by focusing on bike culture rather than bike manufacture. I was impressed that even though I read a lot of business books, Patnaik surprised me with some fresh examples.
Instead of simply cataloging the (late 90s) rise of Starbucks, he prefaced his discussion of the coffee chain by focusing on how Maxwell House had slowly degraded their coffee over time by replacing Arabica beans with Robusta due to supply and cost pressure. They'd devalued their own product almost imperceptibly over time and slowly lost touch with their customers while doing so. Likewise, instead of simply talking about the Apple juggernaut and waxing philosophical about the iPod, Patnaik talks about Apple successes through the failures of Microsoft. Talking first about the Xbox, which was a smashing success for Microsoft, he then addresses the Zune. The Zune was/is Microsoft's competition with the iPod for the mp3 market, but it has not faired nearly as well. Amazingly, however, Patnaik tells us that the Xbox and the Zune had the same design team. The Zune failed and the Xbox succeeded because the design team consisted of hard core gamers. Because they were their own audience for the Xbox, they didn't need empathy or needsfinding. Sadly, that didn't hold for the Zune, and Apple's careful development and design process left them in the cold.
On the strength of anecdotes alone, I'd put Wired to Care ahead of many comparable books because the case studies included haven't already been hashed over in the popular press. What really sets it apart, though, is the science at the end that pulls it all together. Patnaik spends a full thirty pages exploring the scientific underpinnings of the success stories he's included, with details on mirror neurons and the influences of the limbic system on purchasing decisions. In some ways the concepts are almost reminiscent of the fears about subliminal messages from the sixties and seventies, except that they work. Fortunately, the only way for a company to convincingly act empathetic is to actually be empathetic, and that's good news for us all.
Saturday, January 17, 2009
Inculcating Design Maturity
One of the key challenges that I am relishing currently is in how to inculcate a sense of Design Maturity amongst my young charges. And I am not even talking about a Level 5 Design Nirvana DQ, or anything just below that, suffice to say that if I am able to make a significant section of them be aware of what design is all about, I think I would be happy already.
Design Maturity in this context does not try to make them total design critiques, or for that matter, designers of products that are superlatively wow! What I have in mind, and I hope to be able to achieve, is to get them to realise the importance and rudiments of design, and about how design in itself is something that permeates every section of their lives, whether incidental or accidental. My objective is clearly to enable them to lead themselves on to a higher level of DQ, should they want or be motivated to, but at the very basics, they must be at least be equipped with the basic capacity 'to see, more than look, and to listen more than hear'!
With the few experimental things that I am trying out within and out of the classrooms this year, I hope to be able to enlighten myself on what makes my young charges tick, where design is concerned, and perhaps, just perhaps, be an enabler for me to become a much better educator, professionally and personally. I hope to be able to get my blog readers posted on this, more so to get some reviews and feedback, and hopefully, just hopefully, the intellectual discussions that follow online can be a platform to greater heights for all those who are involved.
Design Maturity in this context does not try to make them total design critiques, or for that matter, designers of products that are superlatively wow! What I have in mind, and I hope to be able to achieve, is to get them to realise the importance and rudiments of design, and about how design in itself is something that permeates every section of their lives, whether incidental or accidental. My objective is clearly to enable them to lead themselves on to a higher level of DQ, should they want or be motivated to, but at the very basics, they must be at least be equipped with the basic capacity 'to see, more than look, and to listen more than hear'!
With the few experimental things that I am trying out within and out of the classrooms this year, I hope to be able to enlighten myself on what makes my young charges tick, where design is concerned, and perhaps, just perhaps, be an enabler for me to become a much better educator, professionally and personally. I hope to be able to get my blog readers posted on this, more so to get some reviews and feedback, and hopefully, just hopefully, the intellectual discussions that follow online can be a platform to greater heights for all those who are involved.
Sunday, January 11, 2009
28 different ways of screwing...
And just to lighten up the rather sombre/serious note in my last few entries of my blog, here's one that I found rather...well, perplexing in itself, as I don't realise that there are THAT many ways of screwing...ehem, and I mean that in the literal sense. :)
[Taken from core77.com site]
[Taken from core77.com site]
Saturday, January 10, 2009
The need to work towards a more sustained redundancy
My significant other has just started working back in her old line, which is in social work, and never is there a really busy time for our fellow Singaporeans than now, when the economy of the country is really battering those who are not ready, or never ever ready, with the worst case scenario that they can ever end up in in this island state. Having to deal with cases after cases of family that is in dire straits of help, whether financial, social, or both, it is heartening to note that even in this depressing state of the economy, the country's management has repeatedly and consistently make it a point to assist the less-privileged and the less-fortunate, with an ever increasing array of goodies, that both seek to help for those who can't help themselves, or to provide those that are more able, a leg up in enabling them to 'learn how to fish'.
In fact I have seen this slow but sure shift in assistance policies that are mostly classified in the latter category, offering those who really need help, to help themselves with the eventual aim that they may be able to wean themselves out of the vicious cycle of a crutch mentality. I guess at times it is NOT easy for one who has been receiving aid, to get themselves into this mental model that what they are receiving are aid that comes with strings attached, but I guess it is a necessary pre-condition so that the society, especially those who does have the tendency to abuse such a welfare system, will be better off eventually, much like what the title of my post suggest.
But on the other side of the fence, I am not too sure though whether this is something that all our self-help groups (SHG's) are working towards to. Paradoxically shouldn't our SHG's be working towards their own demise, towards perhaps a state of affairs where in actuality their very state of existence is questioned, not because of abuse or anything, but more so because they have been able to shift the society towards a more socially sustainable state of being? In actual fact, in my opinion their only need to be around can only be justified if they have been able to sufficiently transform themselves to be beyond just the mere givers of aid, to perhaps to an organisation that looks at how help, if any can be given in a more sustainable manner, and perhaps to look at reducing the number of aid receivers, and increase the number who gives!
Which also brings me to the other argument on the yearly zakat, the compulsory tithe that every responsible Muslim should be contributing to, that has, over the years, been increasing in numbers. This is definitely good news, a great testament perhaps to our greater social awareness to help the others, and perhaps could be due to to a greater resurgence in gong back to the fundamentals of being a Muslim. But on the other side of the scale, we are also seeing more people receiving aid...no I am not questioning their qualifications to receive aid, I mean if they are able to meet the criteria of aid, I am all for it. What I do worry is that there seems to be an ever increasing number of aid receivers, and I am not talking about those who are really deserving, but of the likes like the 21-year old health young man, who just got married recently, and is not able to sufficiently provide for the family because of a few reasons that I should not elaborate. I mean seriously I do believe that there is indeed a certain element of welfarism in the disbursement of the zakat, but shouldn't there also be a certain degree of a sustainable social element that we, as a community can think of to ensure that this is non-existent in the future at all? Hmmm, I guess only a greater degree of social awareness and effort will be able to pull us through to that state of being...!
In fact I have seen this slow but sure shift in assistance policies that are mostly classified in the latter category, offering those who really need help, to help themselves with the eventual aim that they may be able to wean themselves out of the vicious cycle of a crutch mentality. I guess at times it is NOT easy for one who has been receiving aid, to get themselves into this mental model that what they are receiving are aid that comes with strings attached, but I guess it is a necessary pre-condition so that the society, especially those who does have the tendency to abuse such a welfare system, will be better off eventually, much like what the title of my post suggest.
But on the other side of the fence, I am not too sure though whether this is something that all our self-help groups (SHG's) are working towards to. Paradoxically shouldn't our SHG's be working towards their own demise, towards perhaps a state of affairs where in actuality their very state of existence is questioned, not because of abuse or anything, but more so because they have been able to shift the society towards a more socially sustainable state of being? In actual fact, in my opinion their only need to be around can only be justified if they have been able to sufficiently transform themselves to be beyond just the mere givers of aid, to perhaps to an organisation that looks at how help, if any can be given in a more sustainable manner, and perhaps to look at reducing the number of aid receivers, and increase the number who gives!
Which also brings me to the other argument on the yearly zakat, the compulsory tithe that every responsible Muslim should be contributing to, that has, over the years, been increasing in numbers. This is definitely good news, a great testament perhaps to our greater social awareness to help the others, and perhaps could be due to to a greater resurgence in gong back to the fundamentals of being a Muslim. But on the other side of the scale, we are also seeing more people receiving aid...no I am not questioning their qualifications to receive aid, I mean if they are able to meet the criteria of aid, I am all for it. What I do worry is that there seems to be an ever increasing number of aid receivers, and I am not talking about those who are really deserving, but of the likes like the 21-year old health young man, who just got married recently, and is not able to sufficiently provide for the family because of a few reasons that I should not elaborate. I mean seriously I do believe that there is indeed a certain element of welfarism in the disbursement of the zakat, but shouldn't there also be a certain degree of a sustainable social element that we, as a community can think of to ensure that this is non-existent in the future at all? Hmmm, I guess only a greater degree of social awareness and effort will be able to pull us through to that state of being...!
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