Helen over at BusinessWeek is looking for some kick-ass questions for Alberto Alessi, who’s coming to New York and is prepared to school you on what designers might want to know. Post ’em in the comments!
Earlier this month, we reported that Design Within Reach, still in the middle of some ups and downs in the market, was contemplating selling itself off to an anonymous bidder and had begun speaking with the investment banking firm Thomas Weisel Partners to discuss its options. After all of this was announced, DWR was apparently inundated with questions and speculations, resulting in the company’s CEO, Ray Brunner, to release this statement on their blog, addressing where the company is at right now. While Brunner doesn’t reveal too much more than “we’ll have to wait and see” for most of the big questions circling around the company, he remains optimistic and highlights some of the specifics of what the company has been doing lately, from opening new outlets to streamlining the business to make things more cost effective. In the end, not a ton of new information, but certainly a well-played move to release a fairly open statement directly from the top of the company.
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Autodesk’s “Manufacturing 2010 Products Webinar” just concluded a few minutes ago; the one hour webcast serves as the official party line on what software changes are slated for release to the Industrial Design community (among others). In Autodesk’s case, this mostly means Alias and its close kin Sketchbook Pro and Showcase, but a few notable things are going on with Inventor as well. Here’s the stuff Core readers are probably curious to know:
1. Alias for the Mac – Yes. It’s true, and it’s official. According to product line manager Thomas Heermann, they’ve been building a Mac version for about a year and a half “when [Apple] started shipping really good hardware”, and expect to ship it along with the new Windows version in early April. It’s a native build, and will have all the function of the Windows version, though we’re withholding judgement on whether this constitutes a slam dunk until we actually get a look at the thing in action — there are far too many examples of crappy cross-platform translations out there for us to get excited, though we’d be shocked if things weren’t level after two or three more releases (see Adobe, for example, in the other direction). It’ll be interesting to watch the horse race that breaks out in a few months as Alias and Rhino jockey for dominance in the newly opened Mac surfacing market: Alias has more high-end clout, and is the first there with a fully-reatured release, but McNeel’s been beta testing it forever, and stands to have a more integrated “Mac-like” product up when they finally make it official.
2. Realistic Pricing – Realizing, perhaps, that a large and growing fraction of their user base work as freelancers or in small shops with shallow pockets, Autodesk is dropping the price of the most basic version to $4000, which seems to be the magic number upon which many high-end CAD packages are converging (except you, Rhino). The product line, by the way, has re-embraced the Alias name, so that DesignStudio, AutoStudio, etc are now Alias Design, Alias Surface, and Alias Automotive. Note that if you’re a car designer, you’re probably working for a big company for whom the US$65,000 on Alias Automotive is not as big a concern as the tanking market and the striking assembly line workers.
3. Alias + Inventor Collaboration – Autodesk is really pushing the pairing of these two packages, painting a very sunny picture of the ID folks passing their highly sexy suface models over to engineering, who detail and fillet the things in Inventor, all in a seamless and frictionless manner. The tacit acknowledgement that filleting in Alias is and always will be a chore is probably a good thing, and Autodesk promises that the exchange has “great round trip capability”: changes can be made to the surface model, then pushed into the related Inventor model where the details update without having to start over again. Sounds a little too good to be true, but the video we shot at AU in December gives us reason to be less skeptical.
4. Inventor as Hub Application – Alias isn’t the only product whose interoperability with Inventor got touted. Architecturally-oriented packages Revit and AutoCAD feature improved interchange too — they’re even going to start bundling AutoCAD LT together with Inventor LT — in a way that places Inventor very much at the center of the broader workflow.
5. Deep Focus on Plastic Part Design – Nearly ten minutes of the webcast concerned integrated tools for Inventor to aid in mold design, gate location, etc., and a newly simplifyied line of moldflow analysis tools called…wait for it….Moldflow. The aim is to allow users with little expertise in plastics to generate tool designs themselves, a prospect that makes Develop3D‘s Al Dean a bit nervous, and us as well.
6. Much Cheaper Rendering Software – Perhaps in response to the roar of approval for Bunkspeed’s latest products, the Showcase rendering package has gotten some nice new features (integrated raytracing, custom HDRI environments, tools for comparing design variants) and a nice price cut, from US$5000 to US$1000.
Update: Autodesk has made the entire webcast available for public viewing, so if you want to hear it from the horse’s mouth in Nightly News fashion, check the link. Bonus points for guessing which two questions at the end were mine.
I really think designers are going to save our asses and turn this economic situation around. When the economy is tanking, companies need to put more thought into redesigning their systems and products from top to bottom. If a designer can come up with a way to make my product with 25% less material, that’s a huge savings if I’m making millions of products. Better design makes that product less expensive to the consumer, more profitable for the company, and it’ll use less material resources. So we need to design our way out of this depression!
Read the rest here.
A great piece on DesignObserver last week by Dmitri Siegel.
Here’s the Yin and the Yang:
Ironically, however plastic bag problem can in large part be traced back to the quality of its design as well. Before the introduction of the ultra thin plastic bags in the 1980s groceries were packed almost exclusively in paper bags. Plastic bags were touted as a way to save trees. Within a few years plastic was dominant and now commands 80% of grocery and supermarket traffic. Comparing a plastic bag to a paper bag it is easy to see why: the ultra thin plastic bag is a vastly superior design. It consumes 40 percent less energy, generates 80 percent less solid waste, produces 70 percent fewer atmospheric emissions, and releases up to 94 percent fewer waterborne wastes. A plastic bag costs roughly a quarter as much to produce as a paper bag and is substantially lighter so it takes a great less more fossil fuel to transport. Plastic bags are among the most highly reused items in the home and are just as recyclable as paper.
The problem is that what is marvelous about an individual plastic bag becomes menacing when multiplied out to accommodate a rapidly growing global economy. The low cost of the bags allowed merchants to give them away and despite the strength of an individual bag, they are routinely packed with a single item or double-bagged unnecessarily. The bag was so cleverly designed that there is simply no barrier to their indiscriminate distribution. Their incredible durability means it can take up to hundreds of years for them to decompose (a process that releases hazardous toxins). Although plastic bags are recyclable, the evidence suggests that even after ten years, in-store recycling programs have barely managed to achieve a one percent recycle rate. It is simply too easy and efficient to keep making and distributing more plastic bags. Meanwhile consumers mistakenly try to recycle the bags through their curbside recycling programs (perhaps because of the recycle symbols printed on the bags) creating a sorting nightmare at recycling facilities across the country.
And then the best sentence of all: “Best intentions are almost immediately buried under an avalanche of conspicuous consumption and proliferation of choice.”
Oops. One more: “On the other hand, it is unclear that a consumable can counteract the effects of consumption.”
Everyone who’s everyone [sic] these days talks about Experience Design, but 8 years ago, when the book Experience Design first came out, the approach was pioneering. Nathan Shedroff, its author and the guy who basically invented the term, has just come out with a reissue of this seminal book, with new text, new examples, and a new title, appropriately Experience Design 1.1. (That’s gotta be the best usage yet.) Here’s from the release:
At the beginning of this century, many people confused Experience Design with Web, digital, or interactive design. Many didn’t connect design with the development of all experiences, whether realtime/realspace or virtual” explains, Nathan Shedroff. “Now, it’s finally become clear to most that the brand experience of any offering must be consistent, compelling, and delightful through all touchpoints in all media.” The book explains 50 topics of experience design, highlighting both a digital and non-digital example of each.
The book, a 312 page, full-color job is only US $25, but you can also get it as a PDF download for only US $10. Both are available right here.
What happened to the green consumer? Sales of hybrid cars, organic food, and solar panels are on the wane, as recession fears forced the hand of the Whole Foods class. The self-described greenies were supposed to lead as early adopters, a small but growing group of committed and conscious consumers willing to vote with their wallets and drive the green business revolution. Yet a new study published by design firm Continuum suggests that this niche understanding of green behavior may have blinded us to a less faddish and more mainstream trend that fits our more frugal times.
Over a year ago, Continuum, which was one of the first global firms to adopt the Designers Accord, launched the aptly named Colorblind research study to understand how people were re-orienting themselves to the idea of environmentally friendly design. Using sophisticated research techniques such as in context ethnography and follow up conversations with over 7,000 people in an online community setting, Continuum focused their efforts on everyday Americans who may or may not consider themselves green. Kristin Heist, one of the designers who lead the study, explained, “part of our interest in taking on the project was in exploring who we could make sustainability more part of the mainstream. We felt like there were plenty of people chasing after the leading edge ‘green’ consumers. That was a problem, because, to be completely idealistic for a moment, if we are going to save the world, we need to make everyone a part of it.”
What Continuum did differently than most standard research studies on purchase intent was to go behind the cover story everyone tells about green. When you ask the average consumer if they are interested in products that cause less environmental harm, they tend to say yes. But when you follow them around the supermarket or visit them in their own homes, you are able to get closer to the truth. What did Continuum discover?
Web-enabled devices aren’t just a one way street, you know. While the effect that new content or services online has on your daily experience with your iPhone, XBox, Blackberry, etc. is readily apparent as soon as you start browsing around, a more subtle form of influence is traveling in the opposite direction: gadget use is changing the way the web works. Slowly, perhaps, but in an enduring and ultimately profound way.
Dana Oshiro, marketing director of the “peer-to-peer tech support site” FixYa has done a handy job of teasing out what some of these effects might be, in a guest post for Mashable.com entitled 6 Gadget Trends and Their Effects on Social Media. Some of the findings are fairly obvious — location-based sites like Brightkite and Loopt, for example, owe much of their success to GPS-enable smartphones — while others are more intriguing. Curious how the web will react to pico-projector-enabled phones? Check out the article for a plausible answer.
Image: gregverdino.com
Angela Eagle MP, Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury, hosted a “Design Summit” to identify ways that designers can help government improve efficiency and value for money in public services, and the role design can play in finding innovative ways to achieve savings in government procurement.
The event, held at No 11 Downing Street, took the minister and colleagues across government through some recent examples of how design has helped transform services which, if scaled up nationally, could have a major impact on value for money and efficiency in the public sector.
>> Read article
WAY late on this, but last week Alex posted a great piece on the necessity of NASA’s role “to understand and protect our home planet.” Here’s the sweet spot:
Here’s one of the best small, free ways I can think of for America to signal that change: restore NASA’s mission statement of service.
See, back in the dark ages of 2006, Bush hacks in NASA censored the space agency’s mission statement. It had been “To understand and protect our home planet; to explore the universe and search for life; to inspire the next generation of explorers … as only NASA can.” The next thing we knew, the “understand and protect our home planet” part was cut, implying that NASA has no legitimate role in applying science to the planet’s problems.
That should change. Indeed, we should go farther, explicitly adding two key ideas which have always been part of its scientific mission: duty to the future and to the benefit of all humanity.
I think the mission statement should read, “To understand and protect our home planet for the benefit of all humanity; to explore the universe and search for life; to prepare for the future and to inspire the next generation of explorers.”
And now that a few days have passed, you get the benefit of the comments. Our favorite? “One small sentence from a man. A giant step for mankind!” Too easy!
Hey: Don’t forget to check out Designing for Space: Core77 visits NASA’s Industrial Design Team, by Glen Jackson Taylor.
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