Hasta La Ideas

Walter de’Silva has influenced the design of many Alfa Romeos, Seats, Audis and now, as head of design for the entire Volkswagen Group, is responsible for the design direction of everything from Bentleys and Lamborghinis to the new VW Golf. Leica, the iconic German optics company, recently asked de’Silva design a limited titanium edition of their M9. De’Silva follows in the footsteps of fellow car designer Giorgetto Giugiaro, who designed for Canon and whose ItalDesign studio de’Silva’s employers recently acquired.

Only 500 examples of the limited-edition, de’Silva-designed Leica M9 Titanium will be produced, going for (cough) $31,300 apiece… it seems you don’t get a free VW with it though….

Disregarding the exorbitant princely sum it takes to purchase one of these, I do love how restrained the the M9 Titanium is with a focus on function and materiality. I wish Mr de’Silva could influence his teams at the VW group to maintain a similar design ethic. In my opinion, the VW and Audi lines of product of late have ever creeping amounts of superfluously stylized surfaces, moving away from the appropriately Bauhaus inspired styles Freeman Thomas and Jay Mays designed in the early 2000’s. For reference, below is a comparison between the 2001 and 2010 Audi TT.

via Autoblog

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Buyer
Target
Minneapolis, MN

Help bring our guests what they want, when they want it, at whichever Target store they shop. From electronics to apparel to food and toys, you’ll develop business strategies, marketing plans and merchandise assortments to drive profitable sales, great value, quality and style. Use your skills, experience and talents to be a part of groundbreaking thinking and visionary goals. As a Buyer, you’ll take the lead as you…
Have immediate general management responsibility and P&L accountability for a $100-$250M business.

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The best design jobs and portfolios hang out at Coroflot.

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Senior Designers
Fitbit
San Francisco, CA

Fitbit is a San Francisco startup that makes a tiny fitness tracking device that connects to a personal health management website. We place a lot of emphasis on design across all aspects of our products from industrial design to packaging to website interaction and aesthetics. We’re building a design team of epic awesomeness. Are you awesome?

You’ll be part of a design team that is responsible for: designing the interaction, layout, and visual look of our personal health management website/dashboard at Fitbit.com. This will require a strong focus on data visualization infographics; developing the UI and interaction for personal fitness hardware products; conducting and/or participating in informal usability tests; designing intuitive packaging, manuals, and retail displays, kiosks, and the like.

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The best design jobs and portfolios hang out at Coroflot.

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It’s not an obsession and it’s not quite a hobby. However, for almost two years, between 2004 and 2006, I checked Ebay nearly every day for Concorde in-flight service items. In the interim, I’ve amassed a substantial collection, mostly from the last British Airways fitting, co-designed by Conran and Factory Design. My friends call it my “Concorde thing” and some joke about the size of the collection (I have service for 16, including full placesettings down to the official linen napkins and placemats, plus a bevy of serving utensils, a thermos, coffee pot, creamers, salt & pepper shakers, etc.). Although I have a bunch of the official Concorde gift items, including some from earlier fittings, the focus of my collection is on the in-flight food service. After all, that’s really what the experience was about.

I don’t want to take anything away from the Mach 2.0 speed that had you landing in JFK before you took off from Heathrow, but the flight itself wasn’t so different. It was a much smaller fuselage, with seats the size of current economy seats (though better appointed), but there wasn’t much sensation of the speed—just a digital speedometer on the wall at the front of the cabin and, if you were lucky to have a relatively clear day, a glimpse out the window of the curvature of the Earth. It didn’t feel any faster when you were in the Concorde—not even on takeoff. However, landing was FAST! Two quick banks after landfall and you were immediately landing. No circling for this bird.

So, the real sensation of flying the Concorde was all inside: impeccable service, good food and great wine, and by the time dessert was finished, they were already packing up for landing.

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Rich Gilbert’s Energy Trumps, a creative tool to think about energy at the start of the design process. They provide a fast visual reference for embodied energy to facilitate easy comparison of materials.

It is normally taken for granted that economic growth is vital for maintaining economic health, but research has shown that wellbeing depends less on material goods than on our lifestyles. The New Economics Foundation in the UK publishes a global Happy Planet Index, which measures the combination of environmental impact and wellbeing, to quantify the environmental efficiency with which—country by country—people live long and happy lives.

So what can we as educators do to enhance those valuable skills that designers have and get them using those skills to redesign not only the products that we buy but also the lifestyles that we live and the systems that organise our lives, making them better for people? Design education needs to position itself in such a way that designers are trained to design good customer experiences with the lowest possible environmental impact.

Conventional design education trains designers to drive consumerism, which drives growth, and is the established way of achieving prosperity; like many art and design institutions the Royal College of Art is beginning to grapple with the apparent contradiction in the sustainability debate, and is looking for ways to encourage students to explore what this might mean in both their work and their future lives.

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