Design

Is Design Research Useless for Innovation?

December 11, 2009

Don Norman has just posted a very provocative and thoughtful piece about the value of design research, or not. “I’ve come to a disconcerting conclusion: design research is great when it comes to improving existing product categories but essentially useless when it comes to new, innovative breakthroughs.” You should read the full article, but he [...]

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Printing Your Toast

December 6, 2009

Congratulations to one of my MA students at Luzern, Othmar Mühlebach, who has just won the second prize at the Berner Design Awards for his toaster re-design. Based on the idea of a printer, you lay a stack of bread at the top and each slice runs through the toaster. Given the trend for burning [...]

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The Little Man in the Box

June 25, 2009

Hi from Multitouch Barcelona on Vimeo. All of us anthropomorphise our machines, perhaps no more so than the car and the computer. Hi, A Real Human Interface from Multitouch Barcelona (an interaction design group that explores natural communication between people and technology) is a charming example of how we think about computers and interfaces from [...]

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Writing is Design

March 3, 2009

“Verbalizing design is another act of design. I realised this while writing this book,” writes Kenya Hara in the preface to his book, Designing Design. But writing itself is an act of design, whatever the subject. Over the years I have done quite a bit of writing and recently my PhD is the largest block [...]

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Gruber on iPhone-Likeness

November 4, 2008

Good piece from John Gruber on iPhone-Likeness and why many developers don’t get it when it comes to creating apps that feel iPhone-like: I’ll put forth one central, overriding guideline for iPhone UI design: Figure out the absolute least you need to do to implement the idea, do just that, and then polish the hell [...]

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Taxi Driver With Storyboards

October 29, 2008

There’s a discussion going on over at IxDA about whether an interaction design can create great interaction without great visual design skills. My answer is “It depends”. The two are overlapping areas and whilst some interactions are really helped or hindered by the visuals, it’s also possible to have something almost entirely visually driven or [...]

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Designing Education’s Future

September 11, 2008

I gave a presentation yesterday at Northumbria University’s School of Design’s staff conference called Designing Education’s Future: online, collaborative, playful and socially aware. I just found out it has been featured on Slideshare, which is always good to hear. I’ll try and stripe the audio on it soon to help it make more sense. It’s [...]

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Omnium. The Conversation on Notes on Design

August 2, 2008

Notes On Design invited Rick Bennett and I to talk about our experiences of long-distance and global online creative collaboration within the Omnium Research Group. We suggested that some of the more interesting conversations we have had have been over a couple of beers in informal settings, so we decided to have a public conversation [...]

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LinkedIn’s Weird UI Shadows

July 11, 2008

Is it just me or does anyone else find LinkedIn’s new design tweaks weird on the perspective front? This rounded-corner box has a couple of random shadows at the bottom. The impression is that the bottom corners are lifting up, but the box remains square and the top has no shadows. Logically, that can only [...]

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SVA to offer Interaction Design MFA

June 13, 2008

New York’s School of Visual Arts has just announced that they’re offering a Masters of Fine Arts in Interaction Design as of Fall (or Autumn as we Brits quaintly like to call it) 2009. It will be chaired by Liz Danzinco who co-conceived the course with Steven Heller. The impressive faculty line-up includes: Christopher Fahey, [...]

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