Hasta La Ideas

Admittedly they’re not calling it that, and are instead using the boring “Taxi of Tomorrow.” But yes, NYC government officials have revealed photos of the three finalists in a competition to redesign the currently ever-evolving New York Taxi. Nissan, Ford, and a Turkish manufacturer named Karsan are behind the boxlike designs.

All three display a rather boring homogeneity, but it looks like the minivan form factor is a sure thing. I’d say the sliding doors of a minivan are a better design for the city, having seen more than one bicyclist crash into a suddenly-flung-open taxi door, and subsequently restore his honor by beating the living shit out of the door-flinger. Other than that details are pretty light. Each one boasts of roomier interiors, but that’s not hard to pull off when the incumbent is a Crown Vic, which made you feel like you were sitting in the back of a police car (because, well, you were).

The winner should be chosen by next year, and will be rewarded with a billion-dollar contract to supply all of Gotham’s hacks. We’re talking 13,000 vehicles over ten years, starting in 2014. It’d be nice to see a promotional commercial where Bobby De Niro drives the new cab to the Village and shoots up a whorehouse, but I’m guessing that’s not gonna happen.

Hit the jump to see the finalists (Ford, Nissan, and Karsan, in order).

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This post is part of the Inspiration series, made possible by Veer.com.

We here at Core77 were recently asked by an aspiring designer to explain the two or three biggest time wasters and mistakes a beginner might make. While the old adage “measure twice, cut once” certainly applies to carpentry, the easy space for virtual prototyping provided by the computer allows precise measurement and even visualization without any actual cutting. Precisely because the virtual world is so easy to interact with, computers offer an illusion of finished products convincing enough that it’s easy to get stuck in the digital world. The endless refinement of infinite virtual prototypes lends the impression of iterative prototyping without any real-world lessons.

A virtual object can be refined ad nauseam in committee, but the most important avenue for feedback is the real world rather than the nourishing glow of an LCD screen. As we alluded in our discussion of the power of undo on a Wacom Cintiq monitor, it’s easy to get preoccupied with perfection in the digital world, but perfect virtual prototypes offer little from which to learn.

A classic business school case on pacemakers contrasted the success of one firm from that of their rival. For the rival, the engineering team constantly developed new and interesting features, many of which could easily be framed as “critical” for inclusion into the next generation of pacemakers. Consequently, their development cycle was constantly dragged out such that releases became sporadic and plagued by delays. The successful firm placed less value in the new, instead implementing a rigid release cycle with inflexible drop dead dates for new feature inclusion. No matter how world-changing a promising feature appeared, it was not allowed to delay the product cycle. Features took a backseat to the release cycle and were simply rolled into the next version when they could be guaranteed completion in a finished state.

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Wonderland font è stato disegnato da Eve Duhamel per Fontself.
[Via]

Today, gestalten.tv presents an exclusive interview with Marilyn Neuhart, author of the newly released The Story of Eames Furniture, and her husband John in their Los Angeles home. They both worked in various capacities with the Eames Office for over 30 years and describe their personalities and working processes, including an idiosyncratic hatred of the word “creative” and the lack of official job titles in the workplace. Watch the video above, or look over the new release here.

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