Hasta La Ideas

Continuing our journey through Design @ Your Service, the article below is a contribution from service thinker Luis Alt (founder of live|work in Brazil). Good read!

–Tennyson Pinheiro

Take a look around. It is very likely that right now you are surrounded by objects that in some way or another make your life better and more pleasant. All those objects have been in some degree designed—some nicely, others not so much.

Now, if you start thinking about the way you interact with the world around you, you will notice one other common pattern: you access your life through services. Private services, governmental services, local services, global services, digital services, physical services. You use the world around through the services that somewhat are available to you. When you interact with a product, very often someone has put a lot of thought into figuring out beforehand how your experience should be when dealing with this object. Product and interaction designers take into consideration users desires and needs, materials and processes that are available for manufacturing the product and they run a series of anthropometric and ergonomic studies to come up with the final object. Everything is done in order to make sure that you will get the best experience possible when in contact with this product—which also makes it easier to sell it in the first place.

But let’s take a look at the different services that we access. Who is behind the solutions we use on a daily basis? Who is thinking about our experience when we order something at a restaurant, don’t receive a package at home or forget to pay a bill that never got to us in the first place? Unfortunately the answer is, in most cases, no one. We are using everyday services that have not been thought to our benefit as customers, but instead to be easy and, most of all, efficient to its providers. The business must run efficiently and it’s up to the user to ‘deal’ with it.

Much has been said in marketing theories that we get to use products by interacting with a whole range of services that exist around it. If I want to use my phone, for instance, I have to buy it in a retail store, pay my monthly bills and then I’m ready to, well, use the device. We think the opposite. Service thinking teaches us that any product is just one mean to access a set of services (or a main service). Take the mobile phone, for instance: in the essence of everything is the service. The bill, the store, the mobile phone, etc. are just products or services that help me to communicate with others or access information through a connected network. In the core of everything, there is the service.

Now the really good question is, “What exactly should be designed in a service?” And our answer to that is: what shouldn’t? Service designers have to take an important role in the new service order, given they are the ones with the capacity to navigate between the broad and strategic aspects of the service and to translate the business purpose into user journeys that are useful, usable and desirable, thinking on the overall experiences of clients and service providers that are connected throughout different touchpoints.

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Innovations in LEDs, compounded with many designers’ renewed interest in age-old illumination techniques, have brought new life to contemporary lighting design. To celebrate creativity in this enduring design sector, the following are five notable hanging lights in a variety of mediums spotted throughout the 2013 );…

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With a terrace sheltered beneath its overhanging eaves, this building by Japanese architects Kakuro Odagi and Daisuke Narushima functions as an information centre for prefabricated show homes in Yokohama (+ slideshow).

The two-storey building is positioned within the ABC Center, where visitors come to see full-size mock-ups of prefabricated houses, and serves as an administrative centre and an enquiries point.

Designed as a collaboration between Odagi, of Odagi Planning & Associates, and Narushima, of Narushima Architecture Office, the ABC Center House features a mono-pitched roof covered in skylights and solar panels, as well as mixture of different cladding materials that include timber and stone.

“In contrast to most model homes, where the building products pretend to be the surface of real materials, the real materials are applied in a graphical way in this building, as if they look like the imitated materials,” says Kakuro Odagi.

The architect also explains that, like the show homes, the building was designed without any reference to its industrial surroundings. “The architecture may be seen to be fitting into the daydream-like landscape at a glance, but it is free from the model-home park’s merchantability,” he adds.

The square-shaped skylights are dotted across the surface of the roof to bring natural light to both the outdoor terrace and a top-floor seminar room, which opens out to a narrow balcony.

Glass walls separate the terrace from a customer lounge and information desk on the ground floor, plus an office and storage area are located alongside.

We’ve featured a few buildings relating to property sales on Dezeen. Others include a pointy property showroom in China and a showroom with a rampart-like facade in Singapore.

See more architecture in Japan »

Photography is by Daici Ano.

Here’s some more information from the architects:

ABC CENTER HOUSE
2012 Yokohama, Japan

ABC CENTER HOUSE is an administrative building in a model-home park located in the inhospitable area with factories and industrial plants in Yokohama city, Kanagawa prefecture. This two-storied building is used as an office where customers first come to get information and where various events and seminars related to homebuying take place.

In general, the model homes are remodeled almost every 5 years in an attempt to promote their own merchantability and are equipped with the latest technology and specifications. The relationship with the surrounding environment and other neighboring model homes are ignored, and as a result, self-contained houses based merely on commercial value are standing independently on the park. It is ironic that every design of the house, consisting of factitious and mass-produced materials that would appeal to the dream of the buyer, all look much the same and has no distinctive qualities at all. In response to this context, we intended to create a place where visitors can experience the openness of the space and its value. The architecture may be seen to be fitting into the daydream-like landscape at a glance, however, it is free from the model-home park’s merchantability.

A large shed roof with randomly-placed top lights covers the three parts of the building: the lounge connected contiguously to the terrace, the seminar room that looks like it has its interior and exterior reversed, and the semi-outdoor terrace under the eaves. It makes a gentle unity of the three spaces while maintaining each spatial identity. The terrace also serves as an intermediate space between the outside park and interior.

In contrast to most model homes, where the building products pretend to be the surface of real materials, the real materials are applied in a graphical way in this building as if they look like the imitated materials. This finishing gives a coordinated impression, seen from a distance, with the surrounding model homes in appearance of materials, while its actual contrary state can be seen from close by. Every material, whether it is for interior or exterior, is treated equivalently and mapped across the boundary of the adjacent room. The crossover of surface elements generates a relationship between the inside and outside space of the architecture itself and the one between architecture and landscape. Thus the outward extending space can be felt wherever you are: expansive space is created within a small building.

Architect: Kakuro ODAGI (Odagi Planning & Associates) + Daisuke NARUSHIMA (Narushima architecture office)
Location: Yokohama, Kanagawa, Japan
Structural Design: Yosuke KINOSHITA
Structural System: Wooden
Storeys: 2 Storeys
Maximum Height: 8,950 mm
Building Area: 81.86 sqm
Total Floor Area: 93.44 sqm
Project Year: 2012

The post ABC Center House by Kakuro Odagi
and Daisuke Narushima appeared first on Dezeen.

The Sunday Times has just published its annual Rich List. If you didn’t make it in, don’t feel too bad as you’re probably much better off than you think you are – relatively. Don’t believe us? Use Poke’s Global Rich List to find out how you measure up against the world.

Poke’s original Global Rich List website was launched in 2003. “The problems associated with the uneven distribution of wealth across the world are much the same as they were ten years ago, whilst the digital environment has changed profoundly,” says Poke co-founder Nic Roope. “So Poke has relaunched the Globalrichlist.com to help tackle this same old issue by exploiting the new channels and platforms of today.”

Log onto the new site and you are asked to enter either your net salary or your wealth (see above).The site then calculates where that places you in the grand scheme of things: we entered £20,000 as a sample net income, which would put us in the top 1.36% of the world’s earners

Users then scroll down to find out more about how their income compares to others in the world. So, someone on that £20kwould earn £10.42 per hour – the average hourly wage in Ghana is £0.06

at that rate, it would take them 173 years to earn your annual pay, the site calculates

Your monthly income could pay the wages of 121 doctors in Azerbaijan

it would only take you three minutes to earn enough to buy a can of cola, copared to two hours for a labourer in Indonesia

and, again assuming a net income of £20k per year, it would take just seven days to aford a new iPhone, copared to the 200 days it would take an average worker in Zimbabwe

The site concludes by prompting a donation to the charity Care.

“In updating the GRL, we’ve taken the chance to modernise every aspect of it, and in doing so making it fit for another 10 years of public use,” Poke say. “The biggest overhaul went into updating the data underpinning the site. We’ve made use of the wealth of open data now available, and introduced live data feeds via the World Bank’s Data API. We’ve also introduced a ‘wealth’ route to take into account property, savings and investments (instead of pure income as before). We’ve added many more currencies and locations to reflect today’s more global internet, and increased the sophistication of the statistical model to give more accurate results. Further data sources combine with animation to help render abstract numbers more understandable and intuitive.”

The obvious aesthetic overhaul belies a design that now supports smartphone, tablet and desktop use, taking careful consideration to support even the lowliest of browsers encountered in the emerging worlds,” they continue.
“And now we live in socially lubricated world, we provide multiple ways to share the results and wealth illustrations with your networked friends on Twitter,Facebook, Google Plus and Tumblr.”

The April print issue of CR presents the work of three young animators and animation teams to watch. Plus, we go in search of illustrator John Hanna, test out the claims of a new app to have uncovered the secrets of viral ad success and see how visual communications can both help keep us safe and help us recover in hospital

Buy your copy here.

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News: American architect Rick Mather, whose projects included the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, UK, and the masterplan for London’s Southbank, has died aged 75.

Mather studied architecture at the University of Oregon before moving to the UK to study at the Architectural Association. He founded his studio Rick Mather Architects in London in 1973.

Nominated for the Stirling Prize in 2010 for his extension to the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology at the University of Oxford, Mather’s practice also designed masterplans for several universities across the UK.

His other award-winning work included the £20 million extension to the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich, London, which won a Civic Trust Award after its completion in 1999, the same year he completed an extension to Dulwich Picture Gallery in south London and was appointed to masterplan the city’s Southbank development.

More recently he completed an extension to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, Virginia, USA.

Mather also served on the councils of the RIBA and the Architectural Association and was a trustee of the V&A Museum.

Photograph is by Andy Matthews.

The post Rick Mather
1937-2013 appeared first on Dezeen.