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From 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.
From 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.
Donald 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.
From Eye blog at eyemagazine.com
Victor Margolin, Professor Emeritus of Design History at the University of Illinois at Chicago, a lucid thinker and vivid critic, shared some critical thoughts with Ksenija Berk last winter, in this two-part interview. His overview of basic ideas in design thinking brought to light some thoughts that could foster positive change in society – and in design itself, which all too often forgets its chief goal: the wellbeing of all mankind.
Professor Margolin argues that design can’t introduce positive changes into any society if we fail to create a sustainable economy on a global scale. Sustainability is a fundamental value of life, not something that can be found solely in a product; it is a total way of living.
Courtesy of Bill Lucas, from Vimeo.
This is a short film (a fast paced preview of a larger effort) by MAYA Design created to put some perspective on the invisible but fast approaching challenges and opportunities in the pervasive computing age.
Please visit this link for more information.
Really interested in the implications of a trillion-node world? Read Dr. Peter Lucas’s seminal white paper that not only predicted this sort of scaling and complexity but outlined some of the resilient patterns that we need to follow to get there from here.
A piece by Lev Bratishenko from triplecanopy:
The Roma build their palaces just like the rest of us, one cinder block at a time…
TIMOSORA, ROMANIA – Like Saint Petersburg before she was operated on for her three-hundredth, the brie-colored streets and decaying facades have a dusty continuity. Against this backdrop, the Roma build their Disneyland.
Forced by the Communists to settle in the ’60s, they have embraced a style of permanent renovation. Their mansions, in primary colors, stick like fingers in the dead dictator’s eye. But this provokes nothing beyond tourists snapping photos and locals shaking their heads.
“How do you think they pay for them?” they ask me and then spit.
An essay by Richard Powers at Granta…
You’ll have heard how the city once ended in fire, and around these parts, it threatens to end in ice every few years or so. But once, not too long ago, Chicago flirted with ending in water, an entirely preventable man-made inundation that few saw but everybody felt – a two-billion-dollar sucker-punch tsunami that weighed in among the dozenmost costly floods in American history.
The groundwork for the Great Flood of 1992 was laid a century before, when the Illinois (later Chicago)Tunnel Company built a series of semi-official, semi-clandestine tunnels under almost every street downtown. The tunnels were only supposed to house telephone cables, but in a nice Pynchonian twist, the operators covertly decided to install a narrow-gauge railway for delivering freight, as well. The dirt hauled out of the tunnels filled in the lakefront and formed all the land now under Grant Park, the Field Museum, Soldier Field and McCormick Place. You’d think that amount of landfill ought to have tipped off more than a few officials that something besides phone cables was going in underground. More…
From Kate Rockwood at Fast Company:
The engineer is holding his breath. Beside him, the project manager grimaces. A dozen Emerson employees, all in khaki pants and button-down shirts, are gathered — silent and expectant — around their teacher as he squints at their creations. Back in their real roles, making aerospace controls or medical machinery or marine valves at the $24.8 billion St. Louis-based manufacturer, these people are not often met with bewilderment. But then, they rarely bring raw ideas to consumers either.
Here, in the Pittsburgh offices of MAYA (“most advanced yet acceptable”) Design, a mashup of design firm and tech-research lab, these people are students. Given 30 minutes to imagine a TiVo-like car radio, they’ve built prototypes with construction paper, markers, and stickers. Chris Pacione, director of MAYA’s innovation boot camp, is playing an average consumer — and he can’t find the on button. “Some companies are not used to working across silos — design, marketing, engineering,” Pacione says later. “They still think design is something that happens at the end: ‘Should we paint it red? Or blue?’ They’ll have brilliant minds working on a project for two years before it hits shelves, and it’s not until then they know it’s deeply flawed.” More…
Marcia Lausen
Marcia Lausen is founder of the Chicago office of Studio/lab and Director of the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
As Director of the UIC School of Art and Design, Marcia administrative leadership for programs in Graphic Design, Industrial Design, Electronic Visualization, Moving Image, Photography, Studio Arts, and Art Education. As a Professor in the Graphic Design department Marcia teaches graduate and undergraduate students preparing for professional careers in design education, research, and practice. More…