Hasta La Ideas

Industrial Design Intern
Fuseproject
New York City

The intern’s role within the product department is primarily to support all areas of design with specific tasks including; document layout and production, research (with image gathering), preparation for presentations as well as conceptual sketching / ideation and model-making.

Essential duties include supporting the general needs of the product design department, providing backup to all levels of designers (from junior designer to creative director), developing and seeing through design from concept to final deliverables, working with entire ID staff on projects and seeking out feedback whenever possible.

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Our current One Hour Design Challenge, The Future of Digital Reading, closes in just one week. The entries are rolling in, but we want to encourage all of you to take a stab at designing for this emerging cultural phenomenon. To give you some real traction, we’ve teamed up with Portigal Consulting, who have offered up the research generated by their Reading Ahead project as a foundation for your work.

This challenge asks that your project include the sensual; support the social side of reading; consider the varied rituals of reading; and develop an ecosystem around your proposed product. We’ve already cited lunchbreath’s Kindle as a shining example, but here are a few others to get you in the mindset.

Oh, and did we mention this One Hour Design Challenge is actually 90 minutes?

skrbnp2009 has made some nice observations about how sharing books is a part of the culture of reading. In order to encourage this behavior with digital books, the user can “lend” books to others through a bump function, transferring the text for a specific amount of time, and most importantly, requiring the readers to interact physically, just as you would when lending a paper book to a friend. Here, a constraint on digital technology is used in lieu of a material object to encourage the continuation of trading and lending in person, a valuable social interaction that might otherwise be lost.

Cameron maintains that “no device can properly mimic the analog reading experience.” Instead of going completely digital, he seeks to reconcile the benefits of both mediums through the Gutenberg Local/Global Bookmaker, a printing press that takes advantage of the connectivity of the digital realm, while still allowing users to output tangible objects. In this way, books can still be tangibly collected and experienced, but in a way that bypasses limited distribution channels and takes advantage of the digital, open-source model to disseminate and collect information.

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Detail of an XBee module in a prototype for the Tweet-a-Watt, a hacked wireless home-power monitoring system by Ladyada. Source: Flickr

One weekend this past July, an invitation-only group of 40 artists, designers, and researchers from design hotspots and leading institutions such as IDEO, Microsoft Research, NYU, Stanford, Umeå Institute of Design, Wired Magazine UK, and Yamaha, among others (complete list here), gathered in an (almost) secret location in London. During the fourth-annual Sketching In Hardware Conference (SH09), three big-impact themes emerged: tools to support the design of better, more complex experiences; the challenges of open innovation; and the basic conditions for open devices to become a reality

Jan Borchers, head of the Media Computing Group at RWTH Aachen University , demonstrates the LumiNet.

What is Sketching in Hardware?
The napkin sketch is the lingua franca of all design. We all do it because—hundreds of years since we started doing it—it’s still the best way to get inspired, to get unstuck, to get real.

Until recently, electronic-device design has been sprinting up the steep incline of Moore’s Law. Our ability to conceptualize early ideas is tripping on its shoelaces. It’s hard to simplify the inherent dynamism of an electronic device—no matter how elaborate the margin doodle; it often confuses more than clarifies. And how could it not? Electronic devices are alive and interactive. They gather information about their environment or user, process values, and respond accordingly. Even the most well-intentioned sketch quickly reaches the limitations of the medium.

If a sketch of a static device can be thought of as a noun, a sketch of an electronic device must be closer to a verb. So while a designer can create storyboards to determine whether a phone should vibrate under specific conditions, like the intensity of light in a given space, to get a feeling for what that really means, a working device—a sketch model—needs to be built.

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Interaction Designer
Intel
Beaverton, Oregon

We’re looking for an Interaction designer who not only possesses the gifts of vision, passion, and superb design skills, but also has the capacity to win over peers with insightful ideas followed through with compelling simulations of UIs that drive new user experiences, on notebooks, tablets and other hybrid mobile form factors.

In this position, you will be responsible for all aspects of user interaction design for our mobile platforms, be working with industrial designers and engineers to develop complete working prototypes, and work with OEMs/ODMs to launch the prototypes for production.

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Design Fellowships in Print/Product/Industrial Design
Chronicle Books
San Francisco, California

Chronicle Books is accepting submissions for the Winter/Spring 2010 session of our Design Fellowship. The 4 positions include, 2 Publishing Design (Print/Format), 1 Children’s Design and 1 Industrial/Product Design. These fellowships provide six-months of hands-on experience to graduates interested in embarking on a career in either book, publication, package, or product design. Portfolios are due November 2, 2009.

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