Although they may be sight impaired, the blind have heightened intuitiveness and imagination. To help them ‘see’ the bountiful beauty around them, this concept camera helps print three-dimensional images of whatever it captures. With features like adjusting the depth of the shot and its range, it offers an engaging and virtual experience. An idea worth exploring, what do you think Pentax?
Designer: Prevoteau Mathieu
– Yanko Design Timeless Designs – Explore wonderful concepts from around the world! Shop CKIE – We are more than just concepts. See what’s hot at the CKIE store by Yanko Design! (3D Pentax was originally posted on Yanko Design)
by Stefano Caggiano Everyday objects shape our lives into cognitive patterns. Often, however, these objects are ill-designed. Design thinking is then called in to untangle the not-always-coherent running of our object-related routines. However important, this design thinking—or making user-experience more seamless—cannot solve all…
Opinion: in the first of two columns about the impact of digital culture on design, Sam Jacob asks what America’s Prism surveillance program tells us about design thinking.
As details of the American National Security Aacency’s Prism programme emerge, alongside concerns about democracy, freedom, state surveillance and the complicity of corporations, something also seems to be revealed about the ways in which digital technologies are fundamentally reformulating the ways in which design – a new kind of design born out of digital culture – now organises and impacts the way we live.
Back in 1995, Richard Barbrook and the late Andy Cameron wrote an essay called The Californian Ideology. In it, they argued that digital culture – at least the digital culture of Silicon Valley – had become a fusion of the “free-wheeling spirit of the hippies and the entrepreneurial zeal of the yuppies”.
They said that the emerging information technologies provided the space in which this amalgamation of opposites could occur and they called this cocktail of libertarian values and entrepreneurship The Californian Ideology. They also said, even back then, that “the triumph of the Californian Ideology appears to be complete”.
That, of course, was long before Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook et al. had risen to become such gigantic corporations, way before they had became the supra-national entities embedded so completely in our everyday lives. Before even some of them were founded.
The designs of the hardware, software and services these companies offer are often described as ecosystems. Ecosystems, in this meaning of the word, are the virtual worlds that we find ourselves enmeshed in: places that we can’t get out of, like Apple’s Mac OS, iOS, iTunes, iPhone and so on, or Google’s services that link activities like search, calendar, documents, email, chat and so on. These environments have grown up around us like the Wild Things forest in Max’s bedroom. They’ve grown so high and wide that there is no longer a way out of them.
The term ecosystem was originally coined in 1935 to describe the physical and biological components of an environment considered in relation to each other, all as one totality. It’s all the living and non-living organisms and the interactions between them within a given space. The conflation of this concept of ecology and the digital is, as we shall later see, significant.
And it’s perhaps no accident that these digital worlds are described in terms of the natural given the half-hippy roots of its culture. Note for example the title of the 1967 techno-pastorolist poem All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace that imagined a world where advanced cybernetics allowed humankind to return to a bucolic paradise lost.
It’s also telling that in citing the natural, these private digital realms attempt to naturalise themselves. What else could there be in naming the infrastructure of the wireless internet – all those cables and power plants, those server farms and data stores in concrete bunkers, signal masts and satellites – as something as simple as a cloud? And that’s not even to mention the suggestions of weightlessness or cherub-strewn holiness that clouds also contain.
Adam Curtis used the title All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace for his documentary describing how digital technology failed to liberate humanity and instead “distorted and simplified our view of the world around us” as it twisted from hippy to zippy to yuppie. But wether you buy his argument or not, it’s clear that the digital has distorted the world. Perhaps the greatest digital distortion of the world around us is spatial and I’m not talking about the Apple Maps fiasco.
Digital space gives us access to anything, anywhere. It gives us endless proximity to our emails, photos and any other data that we’ve handed over to the various corporate clouds that surround us. It means we can be in constant contact with other places regardless of physical coordinates. That, in essence, is the beautiful liberation that digital culture has given us.
It’s these same properties of digital space that allow corporate ecosystems to be simultaneously at one’s elbow when it suits them and somewhere else (or nowhere else) when it comes to issues of taxation. Digital space – which is also the space through which global finance flows – does not necessarily recognise other definitions of space. Until, that is, it runs into something like the Great Firewall of China that acts as a digital manifestation of national territory.
These spatial slippages re-order traditional definitions of public and private, something most shockingly demonstrated in the phone hacking scandal where individuals’ voicemails stored on the servers of mobile phone companies were remotely accessed by newspapers – most disturbingly the voicemails of murdered teenager Milly Dowler. The cloud means that even the most intimate details of one’s personal life are everywhere, all the time. The cloud transforms the nature of space. It alters what we understand to be inside and outside, what is public and private.
The revelations about the US-run Prism program over the last week suggest that it’s not just the newsworthy who are effected. It’s all of us. Through Prism, the US National Security Agency apparently has access on a massive scale to individuals chat logs, stored data, voice traffic, file transfers and social networking data. According to reports, Prism can access this data though a “back door” in the servers of major technology companies including Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Paltalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple. Prism seems to be an extension to these digital ecosystems, the dark cloud.
These organisations have all denied the existence of this “back door”. Perhaps they’re telling the truth: what, after all, is this old fashioned, physical, architectural metaphor even doing in this debate? A back door suggests a spatial, architectural hierarchy of progression from public to private that simply does not exist in digital space. So why use this linguistic image at all? Perhaps it’s there to suggest that digital culture is not so radically different after all. That is does, or at least could, obey the kinds of spatial separations that physical space contains in its very nature.
Prism tells us something about design in the twenty-first century. And it’s certainly not its logo – or that of the apparently conspiracy-theorist-baiting Information Awareness Office – that recalls that Mitchell and Webb sketch featuring two SS officers wondering if the skull logo on their caps might suggest that they are actually the baddies. It tells us that design is increasingly about systems, increasingly about processes and they way these interface with the real world.
Prism is part, I would suggest, of the realm of design thinking. This is a problem-solving methodology born out of similarly strange bedfellows as The Californian Ideology. In this case it’s art school creativity hijacked by management theory. Design thinking suggests the synthetic way in which designers are (supposed to be) thinking can be applied to almost any subject. Its power is its ability to transform anything into a design problem: the way organisations work, profitability, market share, information, the gathering and processing of intelligence and, it seems, national security.
Design thinking is marked by the scale and scope of its operations. Rather than isolating particular problems, it attempts to survey the whole scenario. It conceives the field of operation as the system rather than the object. And in this, it transforms the designed world into an ecosystem. Design thinking treats this synthetic ecosystem as its project, attempting to redesign it according to particular goals, to achieve its desired outcomes.
By seeing the world through the lens of this conceptual design ecosystem, design thinking abstracts the world into a series of interactions with outputs and it remains poised to provide a solution for anything. Never mind the fact that there are many who would argue with the idea of design as a solution-focused activity, that this conception of design is pure ideological cant.
Of course, like digital culture and like late capitalism, design thinking prefers to appear a non-ideological matter of common sense. Apparently de-politicised and post-ideological, design thinking appears free of its own innate desires and tendencies in order to open-mindedly and radically reinvent the world.
I would argue that design thinking is a product of digital culture. It shares the values of innovation and entrepreneurship bound up in the digital world and follows the same open-necked babyboom commune to boardroom trajectory. It’s also a product of how digital culture shows us the world: of networks and accumulations of big data. It’s a product, in part perhaps, of the converging digital tools we use across disciplinary boundaries. But more than this, it’s a product of the the fact that the digital is both where we design and what we design, both subject and object of contemporary design activity.
Design thinking annexes the perceived power of design and folds it into the development of systems rather than things. It’s a design ideology that is now pervasive, seeping into the design of government and legislation (for example, the UK Government’s Nudge Unit which works on behavioral design) and the interfaces of democracy (see the Design of the Year award-winning .gov.uk). If these are examples of ways in which design can help develop an open-access, digital democracy, Prism is its inverted image. The black mirror of democratic design, the dark side of design thinking. Prism is, legal or illegal as it may turn out to be, a design-thinking solution to national security.
If design thinking is part of the triumph of The Californian Ideology, part of the way that digital culture is remaking the world, is Prism its Waterloo? Perhaps it is the moment Californian digital culture turned inside out, the point when these apparently pro-libertarian entities melded to become one with the state, a strange new version of the military-digital-industrial complex cooked up out of acid-soaked West Coast radicalism and frictionless global capitalism.
In next week’s column we will explore how the idea of the digital ecosystem and the tools of design thinking project out from the screen into the world, reforming ideas of landscape, nature and space.
A couple years ago, my wife and I succumbed to the fact that individual paper planners weren’t doing it for us. As much as I love jotting things down on paper and carrying a notebook of lists in my back pocket, it’s no good when two people are trying to coordinate Cub Scouts and ballet and play practice and Girl Scouts and chorus and homework, etc.
In other words, our Family, Inc., needed an appropriate tool. For us, it’s Trello.
Trello is a web-based collaboration tool that’s meant for teams, but it’s perfect for families. It runs in a browser so it doesn’t matter if you’re using a Mac or a PC, and it allows you to create “boards” that hold the tasks, assignments, reference materials, and so forth for a given project.
We have a board for each of the kids, as well as for ourselves. In addition to who needs to be where, we add things like what needs to go where (pack the script and change of ballet clothes for Tuesday drop-off) as well as who’s going to do each.
Trello’s emphasis is on speed and no-fuss teamwork. Essentially, a board holds several cards. Each card contains one item in the list of information that becomes the support material for a project. Each board (“William”) holds several boards (“Cub Scouts”). Here’s how we use Trello at Chez Caolo.
The need for quick capture of ideas and news
Items added to Trello from one device show up on another. For example, my wife can update a card on her iPhone and that edit shows up on mine. Likewise, I can make a note from my computer and it shows up on both phones. As we go about our days, it’s comforting and useful to know that we’re in touch and up to date, even on those days when we barley see each other between 7:00 a.m. and 8:00 p.m. (Perhaps you know how that goes?)
As I said, Trello works great in a modern web browser. There are apps for the iPhone, iPad, and Android devices, too. But, honestly, the website is smart enough to work and look great on a mobile device, so check it out before you install an app.
Trello is really meant to be used by business teams, but we’re getting a lot out of it as busy parents. In the end, we’re pretty happy with it. Trello is a near ubiquitous capture tool that is always in sync. Shortcuts make it fast and cloud sync lets me stay on top of things.
Whether it was in your car or at a concert, everyone’s played a wicked air guitar solo or pretended to beat the drums at some point! Now musicians and music lovers can actually make beats or practice on-the-go without an instrument! Using motion technology like Leap and Myo, the Soundbrace wearable device transforms the user’s arms and fingers into instruments!
Designer: Eugene Wang
– Yanko Design Timeless Designs – Explore wonderful concepts from around the world! Shop CKIE – We are more than just concepts. See what’s hot at the CKIE store by Yanko Design! (Air Guitar Anywhere! was originally posted on Yanko Design)
There’s no denying it, our smartphones have essentially become an extension of our bodies. Thankfully, in recent years, a handful of companies have broken ground in waterproofing these fragile pieces of technology that we depend on so much. Whether you have a summer full of aquatic activities ahead or if…
As expected, the new operating system unveiled today at Apple‘s Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco features uncluttered interfaces and marks a distinct shift away from imitating physical materials like leather and wood, bringing the brand’s software more in line with the pure and minimal style that Ive famously developed for its hardware. “We see iOS 7 as defining a important new direction, and in a way a new beginning,” said Ive in a movie shown at the launch.
“I think there is a profound and enduring beauty in simplicity, in clarity, in efficiency,” he continued. “True simplicity is derived from so much more than just the absence of clutter and ornamentation; it’s about bringing order to complexity.”
The team redesigned all the icons, stripped back typography and implemented a new colour palette
Distinct translucent layers of content are meant to help users maintain a sense of context while moving through the interface and a new “multitasking” feature means users can scroll between application windows without going back to the home screen.
“These planes combined with new approaches to animation and motion create a sense of depth and vitality,” says Ive, adding that just changing the desktop picture affects the look and feel across the entire system.
Transparent layers “create a sense of depth,” says Ive
The team has redesigned all the icons, refined and pared back the typography, and implemented a new colour palette. “In many ways we tried to create an interface that is unobtrusive and deferential, one where the design recedes and in doing so actually elevates your content,” Ive concluded.
Anticipation over the visual overhaul has been mounting since Ive was appointed head of the new Human Interface team at Apple in October, and experts have been predicting a move towards cleaner edges and flat surfaces over the textures and faux materials that came to characterise Apple’s software design.
Apple’s previous calendar design had particularly been under fire for its stitched leather look
“Obviously they didn’t go there with the hardware so why did they go there with the software? It’s a really good question,” he said. “There’s now many companies looking at it in a way that’s quite interesting and Apple actually is a little bit behind in that area.”
“Developing a grid system allowed us to achieve a much more harmonious relationship between individual elements,” said Ive of the new icons
Cherchant à expérimenter de nouvelles façons d’utiliser la Kinect de Microsoft sortie il y a quelques année dans le commerce, Mike Pelletier est parvenu à se servir de cet outil comme scanner 3D. Développant un modèle détaillé, voici une série de portraits 3D utilisant pleinement les capacités de la caméra.
1. Tom Ford’s Western When he’s not changing the face of fashion for brands like Gucci and YSL, the iconic Tom Ford spends roughly a quarter of his year on a 24,000-acre New Mexico ranch. The…
After last year’s successful partnership, Cool Hunting is happy to return as media partners once again with Europe’s Lovie Awards. A sister to the US’ Webby Awards, The…
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
