Writing

Core77 Columnista

by Andy Polaine on August 11, 2010

in General

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I’m very pleased to have been asked to be a columnist for the Core77 blog. It’s been in the works for a few weeks, but my recent trip to Ethiopia and our new daughter delayed my ability to get down to some writing.

I’ve long been a fan of “industrial design supersite” Core77 (now re-taglined with “design magazine & resource). They have consistently grown Core77 into a rich location for design articles and insights as well as providing great resources such as the Coroflot portfolio and job board and the Core77 Design Directory. They’ve managed some great scoops, such as their rare interview with Jonathan Ive on the design of the iPhone 4.

I have contributed to the Core77 broadcasts in the past (Nik Roope, Hector Serrano, Troika,Jason Bruges, and Matt Clark from UVA) as well as a few other articles, such as 19 Books Every Professional Should Own, A peek inside the Revo Heritage and Talk to the hand: Dan Saffer and gestural interfaces. So it’s nice to become a more regular contributor in the form of a columnist (a Columnista sounds more glamourous, don’t you think?).

With other columnists including Bill Moggridge and Liz Danzico, I feel I’m in far better company than I deserve.

My opening piece argues for access, not ownership of products as not only a more sustainable approach to production and consumerism, but also for a better customer experience.

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Mentoring Creative Minds

by Andy Polaine on July 4, 2010

in General

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The current issue of COFA’s Incubate magazine has a piece by me in it called Mentoring Creative Minds, which is a reflection on 15 years of teaching (that I have been teaching that long came as a bit of a shock). They also used a scarily large version of my head logo (I can see some bezier points that need work there).

You can download a PDF copy of the magazine here (14.4 MB) to read the whole thing (my piece is on page 33), but here is an excerpt I wanted to share:

Unfortunately, the Vice-Chancellor does not whisper the secret to success in your ear while handing over your testamur. Fortunately, I can deliver it to you here: there is no secret.

Getting students to trust in this, and the knowledge that some projects succeed, others fail and that there is always another one around the corner, is really what teaching is all about. I’m sure there are academics who thrive on being the source of brilliant knowledge. For me, nothing beats the moment when the smart, creative student sitting opposite me realises their own brilliance and doesn’t need me anymore.

I’m sure my current students will be only too willing to remind me of this, but it’s true.

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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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Interview and profile of Dan Saffer

February 2, 2009

Core77 have just posted an interview and profile I wrote on Dan Saffer and hhis new book, Designing Gestural Interfaces. Dan talks about his vision for future devices and the way design agencies need to shift to a much more multi-disciplinary way of working if they are to survive. I’ll just point you to “Talk [...]

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Jonathan Harris on the Creative Review Blog

December 31, 2008

I seem to have been writing about Jonathan Harris rather a lot recently. Following the piece on Flash on the Beach I wrote in Creative Review in November, an interview I did with Harris has just been published on the Creative Review blog. He had some interesting things to say about the nature of software [...]

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Iron Man’s HUD and interaction design

May 30, 2008

The current issue of Desktop has a snippet from my interview with Dav Mrozek Rauch from The Orphanage talking about their work on the HUD for Iron Man. If you click on video and then “Run Before You Can Walk” in the widget above, you’ll get a reasonable taster of it. One of my favourite [...]

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From the Archives: Interview with Daniel Brown

May 21, 2008

Daniel Brown – Flower Power (In an earlier unpublished draft of this I so wanted to title it “Dan Brown – The Da Vinci Coder”, but good taste prevailed. Now I get the chance to share the awful pun with the world. I still prefer it to ‘Flower Power’ though. – AP) Some of the [...]

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From the archives: Dialogue with IKEA’s Monika Mulder

February 4, 2008

Continuing the From The Archives series, here is an interview I did a while ago with one of the IKEA designers, Monika Mulder. Monika was really interesting to chat to about the IKEA process and culture, especially as many of these items are in either my or friends’ houses. She also talked about design in [...]

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From the Archives: Jonathan Harris – Man of the Hour

January 10, 2008

I have been promising that I would like to upload all of the articles I have written over the years so that they might be of use for people rather than them languishing on my hard drive, but I’ve been a bit slack at actually doing so because converting them to decent HTML and fixing [...]

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More playful goodies from Jamie Wieck

September 5, 2007

I have just been taking a deeper look at the work of Jamie Wieck, who did the Don’t Play With Your Food plates in the previous post. Not only is his body of work along a similar witty, clever and playful vein – of which there really isn’t enough in design, in my opinion – [...]

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