Hasta La Ideas

Most folks assume that credit card companies take the hit for fraudulent transactions. They do–some of the time. But small retailers like us take most of the losses, especially online.

I’ve spent nearly two decades as an internet retailer combating online fraud. I’m not alone; sometimes I get calls from friendly competitors who want to alert others of the rip-offs and scams that have recently ensnared them. Lately we have gotten hit with a series of smaller frauds that you should be aware of, since it involves the woodworking customer.

Over the course of eBay’s existence it has been pretty common for some random seller to steal a picture and description of an item off a regular e-commerce site and then flog it on eBay at more than the retail price. If the item sells, the seller then buys the item and has it dropped shipped to the eBay customer. This system exploited the buyer’s ignorance but isn’t theft. It was pretty common, and I guess it still goes on. However with easy price discovery and the ubiquity of Amazon, this method of sales is hard to pull off unless the seller can get the merchandise wholesale (which the legit resellers do).

Much further along the dark road is this: sell the item on eBay for whatever you can get, then buy the item with stolen credit card information you can pick up on the Dark Net for a few bucks. You don’t need to buy wholesale! Since you aren’t actually paying for the merchandise – but you get the money from the buyer – it’s win-win. Oh right, except for the merchant in the middle, acting in good faith (and in our case, conscientiously including tips, any available rebate information and a friendly salutation on the packing slip). We and other merchants ship the merchandise, happy for the sale, and then a month later we discover that the person who “bought” the item didn’t actually do so at all. Since we thought we were sending a present bought from one person to another (with different shipping and billing addresses) we get charged by the credit card company – the stolen amount plus a penalty fee – because it’s obviously our fault.

Why am I telling you this?

If you buy new tools on eBay, and the seller does not have a lot of feedback, and the price is below normal retail, chances are you are the unwittingly participating in a fraud. Obviously this might not be true 100% of the time, but if a price is too good to be true, it’s too good to be true. One other tip to watch out for: the item is listed as in the US but the seller profile shows another country. I buy on eBay, although rarely new stuff, and the overwhelming number of buyers and sellers are honest folk. But the tiny percentage of rotten apples is keeping me up at night.

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This “Tools & Craft” section is provided courtesy of Joel Moskowitz, founder of Tools for Working Wood, the Brooklyn-based catalog retailer of everything from hand tools to Festool; check out their online shop here. Joel also founded Gramercy Tools, the award-winning boutique manufacturer of hand tools made the old-fashioned way: Built to work and built to last.

Granby Workshop, the social enterprise set up by Turner Prize-winning architecture collective Assemble, has launched a range of brightly coloured tiles.

The marble-patterned Encaustic Tiles were launched during London Design Festival.

The are produced using the traditional encaustic method, a process where colours and patterns are not surface-applied, but are instead formed from the colouring of the clay itself. This means that the designs do not fade as they wear.

Minerals such as iron and cobalt are added to the clay mix to create different blue and yellow shades.

These different shades are then marbled together by hand and pressed into a tile shape using a 60-tonne hydraulic press. The tiles are then trimmed and dried for a week before being fired at 1,200 degrees centigrade.

The resulting tiles are frost-proof and non-slip, meaning that they are suitable for internal and external use.

Assemble‘s team launched the Liverpool-based Granby Workshop shortly after finding out they had won the Turner Prize – the UK’s most important art prize.

The studio has previously launched various homeware products, but has found a specialism in ceramics. In 2016 it unveiled a range of “smoked” tiles, while in 2017 it launched Splatware, a range of tableware featuring squished clay blobs.

The latest collection sees the designers experiment with making encaustic tiles for the first time. They have also created a range of limited-edition bowls and cups to match.

Suitable for use on both floors and wall, the marble-pattern tiles are available in six “extremely vibrant” colours: blue,  green,  yellow, sienna, charcoal and slate.

“We were interested in rethinking the encaustic tile by applying our experimental manufacturing ethos to this historic process,” said Assemble.

“The development of the process grew out of research into historic encaustic tile clay recipes and the invention of a modern equivalent, which is slip resistant and vitrifies at a low temperature, meaning less energy is used in its production.”

Granby Workshop is operated day-to-day by a group of residents in Liverpool’s Toxteth area, who have been trained by Assemble. They use local materials – many collected from the disused Victorian terraced houses in the Granby Street neighbourhood – to craft their products.

The team see their move into encaustic tiles as a tribute to the floor tile traditionally found in the hallways and patios of these old properties.

“Encaustic tiles were originally popularised by the Victorians, who valued their durability and vibrancy, using them to pave the floors of many of that era’s grandest buildings,” added Assemble.

Assemble made history when it became the first non-artist to win the Turner Prize in 2015.

The team are best known for their public installations, which include a brutalist-inspired playground and a temporary cinema constructed beneath a flyover. They also recently completed a “raw and robust” art centre for London’s Goldsmiths.

The post Assemble’s Granby Workshop releases “extremely vibrant” Encaustic Tiles appeared first on Dezeen.

Jobs, jobs, jobs. You can’t live with them, you can’t live without them!
While the job search can be grueling, the utmost frustration happens when you go through all the hoops of applying for that job only to fail at the interview level. And the worst part is, you don’t get to know what went wrong in the interview that led to the rejection. To understand what happens behind the closed interview doors when they make the final decisions, Steven Ma (UX designer, instructor, and mentor) gives you thoughts of what could have gone wrong in your interview.

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So you wonder

“My interviews went so well. The panel members all seemed to like me. Why didn’t I get that job?”

One of the more frustrating things about job interviews is that you rarely receive feedback on why you didn’t get the job. Even if they wanted to, companies are advised NOT to give feedback due to concerns about lawsuits and other complications.

While there are thousands of reasons why you didn’t get the job, I can outline some of the main reasons. Let’s see if they resonate with you.

It’s you…

Ouch! This hurts. It really is you, but don’t take it personally. Take it as a lesson and learn from it. Think back to the interviews, did you commit any of these mistakes?

In no particular order…

• You said the wrong things. Did you sound a bit too cynical? Did you complain too much when talking about why a project didn’t work out? Did you use “me” too much when you should be using “us”? Did you place the blame on everyone but yourself? Did you make an insensitive joke and upset someone without realizing it?
• You talked too much. Some candidates have the urge to talk A LOT during interviews because they feel like it’s time to sell. During your interview, did you talk too much and not listen enough? If you did, you might have left the impression you were dominant and difficult to collaborate with, and that could be considered a red flag that eliminated you from contention.
• Your body language betrayed you. Research suggests that communication is 93% non-verbal. While you thought you said all the right thing during your interviews, what you said only accounted for 7% of what was actually communicated. Your tone and your body could have expressed a different message. Did you smile during your interview or did you appear grumpy? Did you look uptight or perhaps appeared to lack confidence when you spoke? When you were challenged did you appear defensive — not through what you said but how you acted?

• Your portfolio presentation wasn’t good. Communication is such as huge part of what UXers do so it shouldn’t be surprising that portfolio presentation is a critical factor in the evaluation process. When you pitched your portfolio, did you put efforts in your preparation to customize your pitch to your audience? Did you make sure your presentation had a logical flow? Did you make sure every person sitting in that conference room could read the texts on the screen and/or see the details of the wireframes /mockups you were showing? Did you make sure they could hear you when you spoke?
• You failed the whiteboard challenge, but not in the way you think. So you think you had come up with an amazing solution to the design challenge they gave you, but that isn’t what this is about. No interviewer expects candidates to come in an ace a design challenge on the spot, but interviewers do look at the challenge as a proxy for how you think, how you attack a design problem, and how you collaborate with others. Did you ask good clarifying questions on the business requirements? Did you try to understand who the users are? And did you explore different approaches in solving the challenges, and could weigh the pros and cons of each of your approaches?
• You set the wrong expectation. Some UXers are really into their title because it makes them feel good: Chief UX designer, Head of UX, Lead UX strategist, UX architect… If you marketed yourself as much, but your experience didn’t back your title, it might have set the interviewers up for much higher expectation than what your accomplishments showed. Interviewers could be left feeling disappointed and in some cases, feeling deceived. And yeah, that’s not good.

The above is not the comprehensive list of reasons as there literally could be a thousand reasons, but hopefully, it gives you an idea what could have gone wrong in your interviews if you didn’t get the job. In my career I’ve certainly made a lot of these mistakes so by sharing these I hope it’ll save you from making them.

It’s not you. It’s them…

When things don’t work out sometimes we blame ourselves. Sure, you might have made one or multiple mistakes I outlined above, but the reason you didn’t get the job could be entirely something else — something beyond your control. For examples,

• They found someone who was just a better skill fit. Each UXer offers a unique combination of skill set and experience. However, this is not a game of finding someone with the best skill, it’s a game of finding the best match. Even though on paper, you might appear to be the best fit, they could have found someone with the combination of skills and experience they couldn’t turn down.
• They found someone who was more of a situational fit. In the evaluation process, the hiring panel often thinks about how a new hire would fit in and what role s/he would play. Even though they liked you, they might have opted to go with another candidate who was more skilled in ______ (verbal communication, UX research, motion design, information architecture, rapid prototyping…. you get the idea) because that was an area of weakness they wanted to address, and that was why they ended up choosing someone else.
• The team’s culture & fit. The decision might have come down to choosing between you and Mary Jane. Mary Jane and you are both great designers, but they just liked Mary Jane a bit more because of her easy-going attitude, her wicked sense of self-deprecating humor, and her ability to work through great deals of ambiguity. This combination was just too good for them to pass up because that’s what working on this team is like and the kind of personality they need. They might have liked you too, but she was just that missing puzzle piece.

It’s … well, it is what it is

An interview is a crap shoot. As much as we like to explain and justify decisions from a logical angle, it isn’t necessarily all that. Sometimes, it is just not meant to be.

Getting a job offer comes down to having all — or at least most —of the stars aligned. On the day of your onsite, perhaps everyone on the interview panel was in a giddy mood because the company just went IPO the week before and the stock was trending up. Their judgment might have been subconsciously influenced by this mood without evening knowing of their bias.

On the other hand, you could have a star falling out of alignment on the day of your interview. An interviewer who was supposed to interview you got sick, and she was replaced by someone who was your design nemesis. You had what you thought was a decent interview but he ended up being the one and only person on the panel who failed you.

Most don’t want to admit it, but there’s an element of luck in this somewhere.

Final words

Hopefully, this article helps demystify why you didn’t get that job after a seemingly successful interview. Don’t feel discouraged if things didn’t work out. The interview is a process, it’s a journey. Control what you can control. You get better with more practices and experience. While there’s no magic recipe that guarantees successes, you can improve your chance for your next interview if you keep practicing and trying to get better at it.

Good luck, and I sincerely hope this article helps you land your next job!

YD has published the best of Industrial Design for over 15 years, so the designers you want are already on our network. YD Job Board is our endeavor to connect recruiters with our super talented audience.

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The original write up by Steven Ma published on Medium can be found here.

Hugh Hayden est un artiste né au Texas, qui fabrique des meubles en bois ayant une grosse particularité. En effet, travaillant avec tous types de bois, l’artiste omet volontairement de leur retirer leurs branches et brindilles d’origine. L’utilisation de ses meubles est donc, par conséquent, presque impossible d’un point de vue fonctionnel.

La volonté de l’artiste est de prouver qu’un meuble peut se fondre dans un environnement naturel sans embûche. Pour sa dernière exposition, Hayden a utilisé des matériaux récupérés à la frontière entre les Etats-Unis et le Mexique, posant ainsi la question du litige qui oppose les deux pays quant à leur frontière commune.

Occasionally while working we can get into a rhythm and begin to power through the task at hand, at which point, we do not wish to be disturbed. However, not being interrupted is far easier said than done when working in a busy environment or a shared office, and a lot of the time it can feel like nothing short of impossible!

The Balance clock is here to provide a solution to this productivity-draining problem and transform the way you work! For the majority of time, Balance will remain in its upright position where the clock will face the user, clearly displaying the time. This is up until they require undisturbed focus, and then Balance’s primary function is unveiled. By placing the device face-down, a light is switched on and emitted through the translucent rear casing. This visual indicator informs co-workers that the user does not which to be disturbed.

Designer: BKID Co