Author Archive for homer

The Problem with Design Education

Published on April 8, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Credit: Peter Belanger

From David Talbot in Technology Review:

University industrial design programs are usually cloistered in schools of art or architecture, and students in such programs are rarely required to study science or technology. That bothers Don Norman, former head of research at Apple and an advocate of user-friendly design. Having traditional design skills—in traditional artistic pursuits like drawing and modeling—isn’t enough, he says, because the creators of good products and services also must have a working knowledge of everything from the technical underpinnings of microprocessors and programming to the policy aspects of information security.

Norman, 75, is the author of The Design of Everyday Things; his latest book is Living with Complexity. He consults through a firm he cofounded,the Nielsen Norman Group, sits on the board of trustees of the Institute of Design in Chicago, is finishing a teaching engagement at the Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, and was just elected to the National Academy of Engineering. He spoke with David Talbot, Technology Review‘s chief correspondent.

Norman’s own career follows a path somewhat at variance with what he advocates in this article in that he was once an excellent specialist. Over time he has also made himself an excellent generalist.

For more…

Apple needs Jony Ive more than it does Steve Jobs

Published on February 28, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 1 Comment

From Joe Wilcox in betanews.com:

There has been lots of recent speculation about whether Apple can go on without its CEO should he not return from medical leave. Steve Jobs may be visionary and iconic, but Jony Ive’s value simply can’t be overstated. Apple’s vice president of industrial design has influenced most of the major hardware product designs since joining the company in 1996. I have long felt that Apple could more easily go on without Jobs than Ive, but never really had cause to state so until today, following a report from the Sunday Times of London that is spreading like wildfire across the InterWebs.

The article describes how a single design idea has been applied across such a range of (related) products for such a long time.

For more…

How to Make It

Published on September 23, 2010 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

fan_landing_range1From John Seabrook in The New Yorker:

In the fall of 2002, the British inventor James Dyson entered the U.S. market with an upright vacuum cleaner, the Dyson DC07. Dyson was the product’s designer, engineer, manufacturer, and pitchman. The price was three hundred and ninety-nine dollars. Not only did the Dyson cost much more than most machines sold at retail but it was made almost entirely out of plastic. In the most perverse design decision of all, Dyson let you see the dirt as you collected it, in a clear plastic bin in the machine’s midsection. One day in 1978, Dyson was cleaning his house when he became frustrated with the way his vacuum cleaner quickly lost suction. It was a design flaw, and yet vacuum cleaners had been made that way for a hundred years. As the brand story goes, Dyson thought about the problem, built thousands of prototypes, and finally came up with a vacuum cleaner that used centrifugal force, rather than a bag, to separate the dirt from the air. Best Buy was the first retail chain to carry the DC07. Today, Dyson has a twenty-three-per-cent share of the market. Sir James Dyson is now known to millions as the man who made vacuum cleaners sexy again. Not only is Dyson the most celebrated British engineer of his time but he is also the unofficial technology czar of the new Conservative government. David Cameron asked him to come up with a strategy for reviving the great tradition of British engineering and invention, which flowered during the industrial revolution and has been in steep decline since the end of the Second World War. The way forward, Dyson argues in his report, “Ingenious Britain: Making the U.K. the Leading High Tech Exporter in Europe,” is for Britain to go back to designing, engineering, and manufacturing things.

For more…

Apostle of Architecture’s Power Left Mark on Chicago Skyline

Published on March 10, 2010 in News. 0 Comments

na-be910_remem__dv_201003091808221
From Stephen Miller in The Wall Street Journal:

Bruce Graham was the architect behind Chicago’s Sears Tower, the tallest building in the world when it was opened in 1974 and still the tallest building in the U.S.

Mr. Graham, who died Saturday at age 84, was senior design partner at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and was involved with projects including Canary Wharf in London and King Abdul Aziz University in Saudi Arabia.

But Chicago was where Mr. Graham left his greatest mark, not only in the Sears Tower, but in the city’s second-tallest building, the John Hancock Center, two buildings that together bracket the city’s skyline—much of which he also helped design.

He also played an important role in developing a downtown master plan for Chicago.

Following in the footsteps of such giants of Chicago architecture as Daniel Burnham and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Mr. Graham was an outspoken advocate of the power of architecture to communicate messages of optimism and power.

For the article…

How Facts Change Everything (If You Let Them)

Published on March 10, 2010 in News. 0 Comments

tufte-420-253From Edward Tufte, as told to Jimmy Guterman in the MITSloan Management Review:

On the (Very, Very Bad) Design of Corporate Web Sites

The front page of a good news site will have 300 links on it. That’s great. And so the question is: How come your corporate Web site has only seven links on its opening screen, and the links are called “sharing our values,” “participation” and so on? No user has ever asked Google to show him all the Web sites about sharing your company’s values.

A corporate Web site should do what a good news Web site does. If you look at the really successful Web sites where there are millions of hits, especially nonfiction Web sites, the New York Times and Google News, they all have 300 links on the opening page. How come businesses don’t do that? How come the links are to “sharing,” “participating” and “our values”? That’s flabby design for flabby content. The models for presenting nonfiction should not be what your competitors are doing, but rather excellence in reporting nonfiction. And there are terrific examples out there for reporting nonfiction.

The kind of conformity toward flabbiness in corporate Web sites is astonishing, and they’re imitating each other in their content and design flabbiness. It’s silly. People are inherently distrustful of them. And yet most of those sites are, in fact, about reporting facts. But they get softened up by the marketing people. You get all these pressures that tend to normalize design, that tend to make it like other corporations and that make things intellectually flabby and visually flabby. They turn into pitches.

For the article…

Computers Turn Flat Photos into 3-D Buildings

Published on February 23, 2010 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

3d_exampleFrom John Markoff in the New York Times:

Rome wasn’t built in a day, but in cyberspace it might be.

Computer science researchers at the University of Washington and Cornell University are deploying a system that will blend teamwork and collaboration with powerful graphics algorithms to create three-dimensional renderings of buildings, neighborhoods and potentially even entire cities.

The new system, PhotoCity, grew from the original work of a Cornell computer scientist, Noah Snavely, who while working on his Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Washington, developed a set of algorithms that generated three-dimensional models from unstructured collections of two-dimensional photos.

For the article…

Technology first, invention second, needs last

Published on December 23, 2009 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

dan-thumbDonald A.Norman recently posted an essay to his web site http://www.jnd.org discussing technological innovation.

I’ve come to a disconcerting conclusion: design research is great when it comes to improving existing product categories but essentially useless when it comes to new, innovative breakthroughs. I reached this conclusion through examination of a range of product innovations, most especially looking at those major conceptual breakthroughs that have had huge impact upon society as well as the more common, mundane small, continual improvements. Call one conceptual breakthrough, the other incremental. Although we would prefer to believe that conceptual breakthroughs occur because of a detailed consideration of human needs, especially fundamental but unspoken hidden needs so beloved by the design research community, the fact is that it simply doesn’t happen.

For the complete essay…