Hasta La Ideas

The Red Arrows, officially known as the Royal Air Force Aerobatic Team, is the aerobatics display team of the Royal Air Force based at RAF Scampton, UK…(Read…)

Crazy Blooper On A Movie Set..(Read…)

This can only be ordered out of the back of Lamborghini Driver magazine.

This is for when you want to fall asleep in an airport lounge and wake up in an interrogation room.

What I want to say to the designer of this motorized lift for the disabled: “Yeah, looks real cool. Where the fuck is the rest of it?”

“I’m calling it ‘Active Seating.’ The idea is that you have to pick the chair up off of the floor, carefully transfer your weight into it, then concentrate on not tipping over. So you’re not just sitting, you’re having an experience.”

“I’m calling this one ‘Active Seating 2.’ Getting in and out of it is still tricky, but with this one you have a flat piece of metal pressing down on the top of your knees to help you balance.”

“This was a tough one–I wanted the shape of the tables to not make sense whether they were separate or joined together. So I managed to make it work on both levels.”

“If you’re afraid of indoor snakes, we’ve got the bed for you!”

“It’s called the Oreo Dipper, but it also works with Hydrox cookies. As a designer solving important problems, you have to put yourself in the consumer’s shoes, and our research showed that not everyone goes Oreo.”

“Our 3D wallpaper designs add a calming, spacious feel to any room. This pattern is called Collapsing Mineshaft.”

“The client loves our Ceiling-Suspended Fixed-Height Cell Phone Privacy Cylinders. They allow the user to express themselves with how they enter it; you can crouch, squat, duck or even limbo!”

During the Cold War, Switzerland built a complex network of underground nuclear fallout shelters. The bunkers are sometimes used to temporarily house people in need, like homeless populations during the winter. Between 2014 and 2016, Switzerland received a huge influx of asylum-seeking refugees and turned to the bunkers to provide much-needed additional shelter. When they were built, the underground spaces were only intended for extremely short stays in dire emergency situations, but at the height of the refugee crisis, migrants were often housed there for six months to a year, while they awaited more permanent placement.

Even though asylum applications in Switzerland have drastically reduced in number since then, designer Iskander Guetta was inspired to think of a simple, but powerful design solution that could make those spaces more habitable, should the situation arise again. “Everybody knows the living conditions in these bunkers are rough, but no serious conversations are held about potential solutions because nobody thinks it’s worth investing in finding a solution for a ‘temporary’ case,” Guetta explained in an interview.

During his third year of design studies at the Lausanne University of Art and Design, Guetta had an opportunity to tour the bunkers and better understand the living conditions within them. “Everything had the same color, the same tables, chairs, walls,” he found. “It made me think of a prison.” He noticed that residents were finding ad-hoc ways of creating a bit more privacy for themselves—using bedsheets as curtains, for examples—and was inspired to make more durable, practical solutions for these types of problems.

“Every single piece of furniture, from the shower curtain to the cushion, is standardized and has to fit within the federal norms for these fallout bunkers,” he said. “As a designer, this was an interesting starting point, because it meant that I could produce a standard object that would again fit within these Swiss norms, which meant it could be used in any bunker in the country.”

As part of his graduation project, Guetta designed a series of accessories to give residents “a little more intimacy and privacy, using the only space they have for themselves: their spot in one of those bunk beds.”

Development process of the hook

The award-winning Abri+ collection is comprised of an individual curtain system, a magnetic reading lamp, and a pouch for storing personal objects. It all stems from a simple hook that serves as the core of the collection and allows for further extensions of the system. “As I was trying to find a way to hang the curtain and the pocket, I realized that having just one piece to install all the elements would be cheaper and more efficient,” he explains. “So the same element can be used to stretch the curtain, to hang the pocket, and also simply as a hook. From that, I was able to develop the whole set.”

Guetta’s project is deeply rooted in the specific context he was designing for, but ultimately he wanted to have a more universal appeal. Looking at the project images, “if you don’t know the original context of the project, you would think it’s just objects made for [any] bunk bed,” Guetta notes. “That kind of neutrality was very important to me…had I designed or framed the objects with too much of a visual reference to the original political context, I would have further stigmatized the people affected by it as ‘migrants,’ as something ‘other,’ while they should be considered as simply part of ‘everyone.'” After all, everyone deserves basic human comforts and a sense of privacy and safety—that’s exactly what Guetta’s project underscores.

Watch Guetta talk about the project in greater detail here:

(H/t Metropolis Magazine)

This article responds to The Augmented Designer panel discussion, which took place during NYCxDESIGN 2019, and which was sponsored by Augmented Review, ID8TRS, the IDSA, Hardware Massive and Superventures.

Special thanks to panelists Ori Inbar, Founder, Super Ventures and Co-Founder of Augmented World Expo; Marcel Botha, Founder & CEO of 10XBeta; and Leonidas Trampoukis, Founding Partner of LOT and Objects of Common Interest.

The opening remarks were delivered by moderator Stephan Clambaneva

The Inflection Point: Design and AR/VR

Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality have revolutionized product design. Because of capabilities like high-end visualization, infinite capacity for computing, limitless connectivity, affordability, and characteristics like remote collaboration, both the design process and high-level product development are on the verge of significant advancement.

And with mobile-augmented AR/VR, the technology has been made widely, publicly accessible, denoting a turning point the industry has been anticipating for years. As the efficiency of AR and VR surges forward, yet another inflection point is upon us – one whose significance feels as momentous as the internet boom.

Ori Inbar, Founder of Super Ventures and Co-Founder of Augmented World Expo, recognizes why finally, in 2019, these technologies are on the verge of exponential growth. He points to four distinct market indicators:

Tech giants’ investment: Billions of dollars of investment from the likes of Google, Apple, Lenovo, and Microsoft have removed previous barriers to usage.

Corporate trend: 70% of enterprises have either implemented AR/VR or plan to do so. Interestingly, they’re using it regardless of whether or not they have complete faith in its ROI, because they’re recognizing that their competitors use it, and it’s become a necessary asset to keep pace with them.

Critical mass: There’s an extraordinary base of consumers and usage through mobile-AR. As of today, the grand total of AR-compatible devices is estimated at about 1.05 billion, with just as many users. Even if some interaction is only through low-level platforms such as Pokémon Go or Snapchat Lenses, the education and familiarization is wide-reaching.

Further foreseeable growth: Additional powerful investment has occurred at an all-time record high in new AR/VR technologies. (The sector received $7 billion in investment last year alone.) Analysts only predict the industry’s expansion from here, including influence beyond experiential and into real use cases.

Implications and Implementations

AR/VR as a tool and new medium for designers is not only about better, faster, cheaper design; For Product Designers it will mean an opportunity for more empathy – a connective tissue between design, its practitioners, and its community of user-consumers (that is, clients and non-designers). The technology also signals opportunity for more design in context and, last but not least, it will enable non-designers to step in during the course of the design process to engage with it – to even complete it.

Bleeding edge companies are starting to explore even further how their businesses could be disrupted using AR/VR, and have been researching how human-centered design and design thinking can enable the technology to solve problems.

With AR/VR, technology is no longer a middleman, interpreting our intent; there are no longer the limitations of the X-Y movements of a mouse, or those of CAD tools. Your natural hand gestures and the way you interact in the real world become the UI.

These mediums allow for full immersion, enabling designers to operate in augmented contexts that can maintain the nuances of behavior, action, and intent. And crucially, they open up a world of possibility for designers to design, create, innovate and problem solve directly in 3D. What you see in your mind’s eye can now take form right in front of you.

A few recognizable usage trends among adopters of the technology are identified as follows:

Augmented communication of business cases: This capability allows companies to support a complex business case by enhancing it with the appropriate contextual information through more realistic visual and other communications systems.

Powerful multisensory experiences: Allowing companies to engage consumers and clients on an emotional level in turn paves the way for deepened relationship and connectivity.

Contextually supported case studies: Similar to augmented business cases, this allows for more robust systems of communication to support disparate stakeholders in their collective decision-making.

For Marcel Botha, Founder and CEO of 10XBeta, the increased possibility for workflow optimization strongly supports another reason for AR/VR implementation in the design process. He provides the example of collaborative design validation apps (such as Augmented Review, listed below), which are easy-to-use workflow tools for customers who are not necessarily tech savvy, thus removing the challenge to train the client to use a new platform.

Echoing a similar point of view, Leonidas Trampoukis, Founding Partner of LOT and Objects of Common Interest, states that the tech’s most exciting attributes relate to user efficiency, remote work, and cross-disciplinary versus traditional ways of working. He suggests that in these senses, AR/VR may be a particularly impactful tool for boutique design studios.

For Botha, AR/VR also enables him to put concept into play very early on in the design workflow. He points out that at the preliminary design stage, the technology is highly effective in communicating a vision; a working concept that customers can play with and latch onto may be more efficient and effective, at this stage, than hyper-realistic renderings.

Overall, it’s all about which level of precision designers need for each stage of their process. Because although, as we’ve acknowledged, the tools and technology exist, the next challenge is figuring out which ones work most effectively for each project touchpoint.

The Augmented Designer: Our Role in the AR/VR Evolution

As advanced as these technologies are, they are no doubt in the early stages of their evolution. Anticipating where that evolution will take us, Inbar sees mobile AR as a stepping stone toward the true future of design. It’s at its most powerful, he predicts, when it can be experienced hands-free (though that technology is not quite yet widely accessible). A smartphone, then, offers us a window into the AR/VR world, where it’s going, and how it can service us.

Additionally, Botha shared that to keep up with the evolution of the technologies and their capabilities, 10Xbeta adjusted its office infrastructure to accommodate experimentation with AR/VR. Also informing that adjustment was the inching of AR/VR into the mainstream. Soon, their usage will be the norm, so the earlier adopters will be advantaged with having become more familiar with them.

Designers – boutique and large studios alike – owe it to themselves to invest moderately and continuously into exploring new apps, software, and hardware, in order to figure out which solutions and services are most beneficial to their operations. After all, this new tech, like most tools for creativity, is not one-size-fits-all, nor are it or its implications completely predictable.

In closing, a key takeaway from the panel was the collective belief that this is the time for designers and content creators to shine. The challenge, then, is to define what “good” design is, and how these new tools can get us there; and to designate what amounts to the best and most just form of interaction in a world which surpasses the keyboard and the mouse. Because the frontier will continue to expand. New AR/VR techniques will continue to emerge, forging paths for new methods of design. With this expansion in mind, the panelists’ urgent call to action was for designers to take the lead on this progress. The Augmented Designer is most certainly already here, and it is their – our – time to act.

What tech are the panelists using?

As AR/VR technology continues to evolve, its accessibility ever increases. For now, here are some vertical apps that the panelists have flagged as incredibly productive for designers and product developers, to name only a few of the many available:

Sketching

Gravity Sketch is a platform for ideating, visualizing, and communicating concepts in real-time through VR.

Design reviews

MindeskVR allows for 3D model reviews in VR, operating natively from CAD systems.

Instant collaboration

Augmented Review, a collaborative platform, streamlines the design process using AR.

Feasibility investigations

VRify.io offers a real-time web-VR service for assembly and disassembly.

You can watch the full recording of the panel discussion published on YouTube: