July 27, 2007
the cardiff tower.
Santa and Cole Lights, in a lobby in Cardiff.
Pretty swanky urianls
Awesome Tiger carved in Stone.
Large wooden clock above market.
A very interssting designed stoll.
I spend Thursday in Cardiff, the capitial of Wales. The city has some very strong archieture, with a great display from modern to the medival castle. The obove is some of the more modern designs of the very young fresh city. I really recommend checking out Cardiff if you get the chacne.
After spending a couple days on a train I got the chance to read my latest design book. Book Review. Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design. By Bill Buxton. This book is a deep look at a product design techniquie, but in the lanuage for technical software / user interface designers. The first half of the book is all about sketching, and covers some product design history. He talks though this by showing mountain bike, and orange juice case studys. The 2nd part of the book (pages 234 and after) is all about diffent technics that we can us to create sketches using new technology.
This book is a very easy read, with 6 page bibliography and allows for lots of potential follow up reading, on many sections. I would recommend this book to very one!
Read businessweek review for more information.
Bill Buxtons website.
£17.96 from Amazon.co.uk
July 17, 2007
Addicted to Cheap Shopping? Most people believe that prices are constantly rising, but in reality the cost of most consumer goods have been drastically falling over the past 10 years. Libby Potter crosses three continents to reveal how ‘cheap’ has changed the world.
In America she visits the busiest mall on earth - which can house 32 jumbo jets - and the small town where one store revoluntionised the way everything is now sold. In Europe, she meets shopaholics and sees how one retailer totally transformed how we buy. She also goes shopping in the ‘citadel of cheap’ - the largest wholesale market in the world and discovers why communist China no longer wants to be capitalism’s low price manufacturing workshop. But how long will our addiction to cheap last? [S,SL]
This afternoon I saw a BBC 2 program about the state of England’s addiction on cheap shopping. As a product designer, you have think that its my occupation that are making things worse, but this is my design solutions to a couple of questions proposed on the show.
PROBLEM: So many products, so cheap, products are disposable. Recycling centers can’t keep up.
SOLUTION: a ‘Cradle to Cradle’ design response, where each product is easily up-cycled into the same product or even a better product. See my book review post.
PROBLEM 2: There is always a looser in cheap products.
SOLUTION: Yes, Socially resonability can be built into the design. For example during my time at Resolute I investigated VOC’s (Volatile Organic Compounds) used in our manufacturing process. By designing our products to use a low VOC, we lowered the risk of casnergenic compounds introduced to Resolute workers by 80%. This investing in design and design for the assembly line and the environment add an extra cost to the product, but that’s better than cancer… Isn’t it?
I found this book in the Museum of Modern Art in SanFran, yet the book is written by Lee McCormack an English Designer. The book will teach any designer what you will learn on placement and that Is that industry sees ‘Designers as wankers’. The book talks about how to work with industry and manufactures. The book follows Lee’s multimedia Pod, and how he struggled filling orders and getting componets from manufacuteres. Lee addresses how to approach these industries and how to protect yourself and your ideas.
The book finishes with review from top designs, Paul Smith, Jason Kirk, Karmin Rashid, Neville Brody and Pier Roberts.
Personally I found that I learnt most of these lessons the hard way on my placement, this is an easy and quick read for all design and Product design undergraduates.
Designers Are Wankers
Price: £10.50 GBP
I have just completed my years (10 months) work placement at Resolute, an arcertical lighting design firm. The work placement was part of degree which is 4 year sandwich. This just means that I work for a year before my last year, I would recommend this to all undergrdautes as you are going to have to end out working eventily, a work placemnet will give you an option to see what the industry is really like, and what your strenghts are.
At Resolute I had a rought 3 phase workplan, this consited of.
- Full Imerisoin: Working in all areas of the company. I helped, or undertook nearly every job Resolute offerd. This meant working in the glass shop, Assemblery, design office, sales office and general office type work. This part of my placement went on for 3 months and gave me a chance to see all areas of the company and more importatnly what could be manufactured, and what would sell.
Assemblery.
Glass Ready to be cold worked.
Resolute Assemberly Line.
- (2.) Assiting Designers & Assembers: The next phase was helping Max, and Andrew the two designers at Resolute. They work alongside Douglas Vary to create solutions, and change designs depending on the requirement from the arcitects. This means that they can be doing something as simply swapping out a ballast, or they could be creating a complete solution for a one off lighting project.
- (3.) Continued development of the Ardent Lighting Range. The last part of my placement was to work on the Ardent range of lighting. This project has been started from 2004, by Brent. I was incharge of taking the range and seeing how feasable the lighting range would be to take into mass production, in an offsite outsourcing site in Rockford. We completely re-designed the hardware, which went thought a very itterative design process. Price and easy of production were critial and this is very differnt design problem that I had encounterd before. I didn’t get the chance to get a commerially viable product, but i did process on some manufacuting and component issues.
- Green Design. Alongside with Ardent I undertook studies into ‘green’ issues, and what we could do as a company to become more greeen and substainalbe. After a lot of reading most of this turned out to be green washing an marketing. I created a seperate blog to document my discoveries. This is avaible from http://www.blogthemanifesto.com
To all of Resolutes products see Resolutes Website
Many thanks to Doug Varey for employing me, Max Mosley for letting my Crash in his basement, Andrew Elliot for helping get over the imperial mesurement system, Kent for showing me how to run a J(about)IT assemberly line, Holy for selling the stuff and keeping things rolling and real, Jannet for being friendly and smiling, Yang and Steven for being Bad ass assemblery workers, Tommy for putting up with my bad QC standards. Mie for being patient with my Ardent Questions, Jessica for feeding me Henersy, Drew from Slipstrem design for showing me his design office, and a huge thanks to everyone else I worked with! Hopfully see you in the future at some point.
Thoughtless Acts: BBQ Wheel Barrow.
Inspired by the Book from IDEO, This is a great product solution with not for it purpose products.
