What is good design? Product design is the total configuration of a product: its form, colour, material and construction. The product must serve its intended purpose efficiently.
A designer who wants to achieve good design must not regard himself as an artist who, according to taste and aesthetics, is merely dressing up products with a last-minute garment.
The designer must be the gestaltingenieur or creative engineer. They synthesise the completed product from the various elements that make up its design. Their work is largely rational, meaning that aesthetic decisions are justified by an understanding of the product’s purpose.
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In this article, I set to understand and explore fundamental thinking that examines a new design worldview. A proposal to change our ways of working as designers, first in voluntary communities (which we already have, but with different goals) and then to be better equipped to understand and explore as individuals and as a community. This is not a desperate article. Believe me when I say this is an article full of hope and wonder.
A great plea by fellow designer Angelos Arnis to transform design (and business) and get ready for the new realities and challenges of the future: Designing for the last earth.
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It’s so easy to just let people live, all you need to do is love yourself enough to not be threatened by other people’s joy.
via Instagram
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Technology is touted as an apolitical, neutral, “objectively” benevolent entity that epitomizes human creativity, innovation and is merely created to improve the quality of human life. […] However, technology like science as a whole is a tool which when created by the capitalist state is a tool of extraction, exploitation, control, repression and subjugation.
Quite a long read, but absolutely worth it: Surveillance Capitalism I: How digital platforms watch, track & control you
wokescientist.substack.com/p/surveillance-capitalism-i-how-digital
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I’m a hyperlink maximalist: everything should be a hyperlink, including everything that is hyperlinked by the author, everything that isn’t hyperlinked by the author, and the hyperlinks themselves. Words should be hyperlinked, but so should be every interesting phrase, quote, name, proper noun, paragraph, document, and collection of documents I read.
An interesting thought experiment (or concept idea?) by software engineer Linus about hyperlinks, the backbone of the independent web, published on his wonderful micro-blog.
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© Yamaha (via YouTube)
Winder (Stepping Out of the Slate #2)
A key, dedicated to just one song, like a music box. When the key is wound up, the song from the connected smartphone begins to play. Sound movements are generated according to the flutter of the spring, allowing you to enjoy the unique sound texture. The joy of interacting with the clockwork object may lead to a more intimate musical experience.
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© Yamaha (via YouTube)
RhythmBot (Stepping Out of the Slate #4)
This is an evolutionary form of metronome that supports your performance with rhythm. Each of these four small robots play a unique acoustic sound. They can be linked to your smartphone to play rhythms to the tempo you are playing, and they can even join in and accompany you in real-time. Creating a rhythm through a session-like style is a great way to enhance the experience of playing music.
I absolutely love those quirky totems Yamaha created for a series called Stepping out of the slate which aims to give music applications and sound software a more tactile layer. Curious if they manage to make more out of those little accessories than just the prototypes.
yamaha.com/en/about/design/events_topics/stepping_out_of_the_slate/
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© Acoustic Sounds (via YouTube)
From mastering to distribution, there is no company in the world quite like Acoustic Sounds. Get an inside look at each process that goes into creating the best sounding vinyl.
Sadly I haven’t managed to get my hands on a LP by Acoustic Sounds yet, but after watching this recently released Behind The Scenes video about the Kansas-based record company, I’m more eager than ever to purchase the Stan Getz & João Gilberto release I’ve been hunting for locally for quite a while already. Luckily I’ve plenty of other great records –even some high-fidelity ones by The Lost Recordings, Supersense and Impex– in my collection to satisfy my now triggered vinyl cravings.
filed under hyperlinks, articlesThe Etsy Strike raises essential questions about our relationships with the platforms we use to run our businesses. Are they service providers? Are they tools? Are these platforms our bosses?
There are some interesting thoughts about the relationship between our online platforms –in this case, especially Etsy– and the (small) businesses using them to make a living in the article Always On: The Hidden Labor We Do Every Day by Tara McMullin. Interesting regarding the role of the internet for modern work culture, but even more so if you plan to sell your craft online yourself.
filed under hyperlinks, articlesToday more than ever, there’s just no reason to assume any fit between the demands on your time – all the things you would like to do, or feel you ought to do – and the amount of time available. Thanks to capitalism, technology and human ambition, these demands keep increasing, while your capacities remain largely fixed. It follows that the attempt to “get on top of everything” is doomed. (Indeed, it’s worse than that – the more tasks you get done, the more you’ll generate.)
The upside is that you needn’t berate yourself for failing to do it all, since doing it all is structurally impossible. The only viable solution is to make a shift: from a life spent trying not to neglect anything, to one spent proactively and consciously choosing what to neglect, in favour of what matters most.
This first of Oliver Burkeman’s eight secrets to a (fairly) fulfilled life (“There will always be too much to do – and this realisation is liberating”) might as well be written just for me. I’m going to try and adopt this as a kind of mantra for the future.
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© Universal Everything / Hyundai (via Vimeo)
Ocean is an artful representation of recycling ocean plastic into the fabric used in the interiors of the all-electric Hyundai IONIQ 5 car.
Ocean is a beautiful large-scale video installation from Universal Everything, “a remote-working collective of digital artists, experience designers and future makers” to celebrate the launch of Hyundai Motorstudio in Jakarta, Indonesia.
If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.
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© emocritus Properties, LLC / Cosmos Studios, Inc. (via YouTube)
That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor, and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.
Carl Sagan is always a win.
A proposal for (re)designing tools and systems to better understand the complexity of the interrelationships and interdependencies between the digital economy and the environmental emergency.
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The Everything manifesto is a collection of proposals for changing humans complicated relationship with change. Each proposal is framed as a hypothetical question to use and debrief our collective imaginations, because hypotheticals are a fascinating way to learn how to think and can help us better understand something as complex as reality, by dealing with the powerful concept of “what if”.
There is a beautiful question encoded in hypotheticals: What would you do if the world was different?
I just came across The Everything Manifesto, written back in 2019 by IAM co-founders Lucy Black-Swan and Andres Colmenares. Still –or more than ever?– very much worth reading.
