Category Archives: Design Strategy

An industry needs a redesign: the publishing business

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Design vs Art is following very close the developments on the electronic paper (epaper) industry. We think it is a great technology that is about to explode. Specially ebook readers could be the next big thing. Epaper is making the revolution that will change everything unstoppable. For that reason, the publishing industry needs a redesign.

After hearing about the Amazon-George Orwell incident (article on the New York Times), I decided to try to buy Orwell’s Animal Farm ebook in its original language and to write down on my Moleskine details about that experience. From the beginning the task was set to be difficult; I had an Amazon Kindle and I live in Germany, meaning that I can not buy ebooks at the Amazon/Kindle store.




The above described exercise took me to the following impressions:

Amazon would not sell me the ebook with a European credit card, so I went to Mobipocket.com and bought the digital version of Animal Farm. The Mobipocket software does not work on Apple Macs so I directly downloaded the book and send it to the Kindle using Calibre, an ebook management software. I tried to open the ebook and I got a disgusting message saying that the file was protected and could not be displayed in an unregistered device. Of course, I didn’t know that I could not register a Kindle on Mobipocket.

In case I was not clear enough, I would like to say again that I paid for the book I was trying to open. The whole user experience was totally frustrating.

You are not allowed to read this ebook on this unregistered device.

You are not allowed to read this ebook on this unregistered device.




What I discovered while looking for ebooks is that copyright laws are actually preventing publishers to make more money. Many ebooks are available only for some countries; if the user is connecting from another place she might not be allowed to buy and download the book. That’s a model that used to work fine in the past, but the future is digital and people want to buy from different resources.

For copyright reasons you can not buy this ebook from your country.

For copyright reasons you can not buy this ebook from your country.




I tried to find Animal Farm in a German ebook store but I found only the German version of it. I wanted to buy the book in English language but it was not available. A lot of people love reading books in different languages, if this kind of restrictions continue customers will lose, students will lose, publishers will lose.

Even worse, somebody could eventually decide which version of a book a whole nation should read. This is something that might be already happening somewhere in the world, but readers have the chance to travel, buy books somewhere else and smuggle them if necessary; something that is not going to be possible in a digital publishing industry controlled but old copyright laws.

You have to use our German store, buy the German version of this ebook.

You have to use our German store, buy the German version of this ebook.




In a completely digital publishing industry the control over what people should read could be managed in an easier way. Amazon showed its customers how dangerous its proposed design is. I am not blaming neither Amazon nor publishers. But what if an untrustworthy government buys a piece of Amazon and controls what Kindle users read? A book could be deleted or a paragraph could be changed to benefit somebody. Recently, Barnes & Noble announced it would team up with Plastic Logic to mimic the Kindle experience, enforcing a trend started by Amazon but that could (actually, hopefully) fail.

Yes, the user experience of buying an ebook at Amazon and have it delivered to a Kindle is great. Everybody loves that. But I have also read comments on forums from panicking customers promising not to activate their Kindle wireless feature anymore, worrying that the ebooks they bought in the past could disappear. The user experience is broken, the system is not trusty anymore.

Delete that ebook from all the devices in this country.

Delete that ebook from all the devices in this country.




We have to help the publishing industry to survive. We should pay for our music and for our books. Publishers are in  disadvantage in comparison to the music industry, they can not make money selling concert tickets. But illegal copies of books are already there and they will be there for ever, it can not be stopped. It is also impossible to stop the ebook reader revolution.

I looked for the electronic version of Animal Farm on a torrent search engine. The book was there. I could have downloaded it for free in a few seconds. It could have been so easy…

I have to say this again: I tried to get a legal copy of the book. I actually paid for the book, but I was not allowed to read it on my device.

To download an ebook illegally is already easier than buying it.

To download an ebook illegally is already easier than buying it.




The publishing business needs a redesign in order to keep making money and to sponsor writers. The danger is big but the future could also be brighter for publishers. This new technology offers the possibility of a better, faster, cost-effective distribution system. They only have to make it happen before someone else do it for them, sooner or later.

Article by Alexis Brion.

Ways to fix a design

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Discovering that a product is not working as expected when it is already at the streets is not a pleasant feeling. Fixing a product design it is neither easy nor always possible. In this article I show you two typical examples of design fix that you should try to avoid.

First Case

Traveling to the Bavarian alps on a beautiful, high-tech train, I was doing something that the designers of it didn’t do: observing how people use doors and in particular how they would interact with their design. I was lucky enough to be sitting in front of the toilet’s door, enjoying the possibility to look at the passengers trying to deal with the door.

The design: the door had a door handle, a yellow button and a huge sticker indicating that people are not supposed to use the door handle to open the door; instead they should press the button.

 

Door with door handle, button and sticker.

 

What happened here? After many passenger breaking the "automatic" doors, designers decided to add an sticker to their design to try to fix it. Did it work? Obviously not:

 

Woman opening door

A woman trying to open the door 

Second Case

In Mar del Plata, one of the biggest cities in Argentina, people have been paying bus tickets with cash using machines installed on the buses. This system has recently been changed by another one that uses magnetic cards. These cards have to be loaded with electronic money at city kiosks; once on the bus passengers use the cards to paid for their trip.

The problem with the new design: people that were used to pay using cash were trying to introduce coins and bills inside the magnetic card reader. Probably, hundreds of readers got wroken and had to be replaced.

 

Magnetic card reader on a bus

"Do not introduce coins"

The solution: designers (or maybe the people in charge of the system) tried to fix the poorly designed system with a sticker saying "DO NOT INTRODUCE COINS". Did it work? Probably not well. 

Why this is happening and what could have been done?

These two products, the high tech door and the card reader, were probably designed without taking into account many parts of the system. Observing a few people interacting with the train door would have been enough to notice that people would try to open the door using the door handle if there is one (and not a button). The same applies to the card reader, designers probably never got on a bus and observed people using the old ticket machines.

Specially hardware design flaws are difficult and very expensive to solve. In most cases a sticker would probably not solve the problem and would make the whole user experience even more confusing. 

A user centered design process should have prevented these design failures: doing field research, talking with people and observing what they need and how they behave in their environment.

DMY review: the conferences

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This is the second part of my review of the DMY international design festival 2009 in Berlin. The first part took care of the expositions.

All conferences were planned on a symposium day and the whole event lasted about eight hours. The quality and background of the speakers was as motley as it gets. It started with two so called "institutional presentations" by the Taiwan design Center and the "Metropolitan Design Center of Buenos Aires". Promotional videos of both places, a lot of charts and never ending text on the projector. No real talk about design there, even though they repeated the word until it lost its meaning. I suppose they paid to be there…

Yuri Suzuki and Hiromi Ozaki at the Symposium

Within the "Alternative strategies" block Yuri Suzuki and Hiromi Ozaki talked about their "Cybernetic love: future sex project". These people analyze the Japanese society habits from all angles to get to the conclusion that sex practice is integrating elements such as virtual lives and places, electronic pleasure gadgets, robots, etc. till an extent, that a human partner is no longer the preferred alternative. This project is financed by Tenga, a company that develops high quality adult toys. I must say they have a point, check out their promotional video;  if this is not user experience design, I don’t what is!

Ronen Kadushin presented "Open Design" and his way for design to evolve if we really want good design to surround us. We all have seen how open source software gives the best results, now here is a way to do basically the same but with product design.

Ronen Kadushin at the Symposium

Interesting lectures of the block "Sustainability": Ralf Ketelhut from Stoffstromdesign let us know what really happens when products are waste and made us aware how harmful coatings and pigments are in our product. We also saw an example of a very nice nearly 100% environmentally friendly wallpaper. Key to success they said, is to go to the manufacturer, talk to him and find a different way of doing things.

from left to right: the wallpaper designer from eccellence goods, the roll of wallpaper, Ralf Ketelhut

Probably the best example of good innovative design was given by 2012 Architecten. They presented some realized projects in which they rather than recycling they reused material that was considered waste. They identify a source of large quantities of waste material in good conditions and they find a way to use it.

Jan Jongert from 2012 Architecten ans a shot of their Villa Welpeloo

One of their requirements when reusing materials is to take them as they are and add no processing to them when possible, this way it is economically and environmentally worthwhile reusing. Some of these projects are an espresso bar made with used PVC windows and the duchi shoe shop, where car windows make the shelves.

Jurgen Bey gave a nice lecture about how we approach design problems and what could be the role of design in the future. A pity that I didn’t record it… there is a good summary of it in design.nl