Category Archives: Good Design

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

DMY review: the expositions

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 This will be the first part of my review of the DMY intenational design festival 2009 in Berlin. The second part will take care of the conferences.

I must say I was in general rather dissapointed with the expositions. It is sad to find out that desing and styling are still so often confused even within the so called design comunity.

A lot of hand made furniture, loads of lamps, but very little of nice really creative design proposals. Since we all have enough expamples of boring/usesless design, I am going to focus on the things I liked.

Shelves:

Wooden shelf and Piegato metal shelf

A metal one from the Matthias Ries design office. When you order this shelf you receive it already precut and lacked, and you fold it yourself. I liked the fact that the more you load this shelf, the more stable it gets.

A wooden one from the École Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs de Strasbourg. To fix the books on this shelf you’d just pull up the loose plank and the tension created held the books. The system got unstable when the weigh of the books was too high, but it is a quite new approach.

Waschhaus presented their concept Colo, a dishwasher reduced to its very basics.

All you need to have in your kitchen is a second tap (for the water supply), a connection for the water waste and a power supply . The dishwasher itself consists of a transparent cover with the conventional washing mechanism inside. It fits into the sink and seals so that the water doesn’t come out. once the washing is finished the cover is pulled and it hangs somewhere up where it doesn’t disturb. It could be a good product now that apartments get smaller an kitchens even more. I particularly like the multisize-fitting tray.

 

dishwasher Colo

The Hochschule für Kunst und Design Halle had set up probably the nicest stand in the exposition and it had mostly very creative furniture in it. The best pieces were probably form the collection "7 für die ecke". Since I have no good fotos from it have al look at the designer’s website.

Last but not least a new lemon juicer form the Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weißensee. It is always interesting to see how we find new solutions to hte verey basic design problems. This is a very aesthetical attempt that also plays with the gravity force. We didn’have the chance to see it working, though.

 Lemontile

Products that are Part of a Service Ecosystem

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There is a clear trend in product design, especially in electronics design: in the last years we have been observing the raise of products that offer, additionally to the physical thing, a bunch of extra services connected to the computer and internet ecosystem. In this article I give you a few examples on this design trend.

 

Kodak cameras are not silly apparatuses

The sudden appearance of digital cameras made Kodak lost big amounts of money, from one day to the other a network of services around the picture development business was gone. So Kodak started thinking outside the camera again but this time in the digital world: they developed Easyshare, a software bundled to cameras that makes photo printing, storing and sharing easy. Easyshare is actually not just another software, it is the revival of that old good Kodak service. I find important the fact that Kodak is now the number one digital camera brand. 

  

Kodak Offering Services

Picture taken from Kodak’s website

 

The Kindle should be the new iPod

Let’s say it, the first Amazon Kindle was, judged from the physical point of view, a poorly designed device. So why it was such a success? Amazon did to Sony what also Apple did to Sony; they practically stole the market through the offering of something that is more than just a device; Amazon and Apple designed whole service ecosystems around the Kindle and iPod. Of course, Apple designed beautiful iPods and Amazon had to redesigned the way the Kindle hardware looked in order to make it more appealing and usable, but the new concept here is that physical design, software interface and service design are all very important.

 

Kindle Offering Services

Amazon Kindle offering services, picture taken from Amazon’s website

 

Nokia makes the best cell phones

Any doubt about the previous statement? Well, technically, it is true. I still remember using my Nokia smartphone and being able to connect everywhere and getting a fantastic speaking quality; physically, Nokia telephones are great. But Nokia was in the past not able to successfully design a proper ecosystem around those smartphones, I still remember how complicated loading music or installing applications on the phone was… Oh, and I won’t forget that time when I did an update of the phone’s OS and all my information was deleted.

 

A cell phone without a zero button, actually, a not that happy phone.

 

Connecting to the environment could add glamor to a brand: Fiat

Fiat’s eco:Drive connects cars to computers offering customers the possibility of checking how they drive and offering customized advice on how to drive more efficiently to reduce emissions and save money. Plug the car to the computer to get extra services.

 

Fiat Service Design

 Picture taken from Fiat’s website

 

The connected patient

A highly probable success will be the connection of medical devices to systems outside the devices themselves. An example is the asthma inhaler designed by Cambridge Consultants that connects to an online personal health care application to send relevant health information to monitor progress and to make it available to the care specialist. A traditional "lonely" device like an inhaler is now connected to a bigger system to provide a better user experience.

 

Connected Patient Inhaler

Picture take from Cambridge Consultants

 

Conclusion

At Design vs Art we believe that in the future devices will be even more connected, not only to the Internet but they should also start talking among them. In order to offer a better user experience and a better service, devices should start connecting and talking to the bigger system they belong to.