“We want Boba Guys to look, feel, and taste the same everywhere it appears. This not only applies to graphic design and communications, but also crosses over into presentation and perception.” (via)
(Editor’s note: Been a fun ride so far. My dream job.)
The idea behind Form Pendants for Design House Stockholm is simple. Three glass pendants are blown in Bauhaus shapes - a circle, a rectangle, and a triangle.
Happy Hacking Keyboard, built by Fujitsu, and relatively unchanged since 1996, takes a decades-old Unix-style layout, replaces lesser-used keys with key combinations, strips out all unnecessary fluff (silly dedicated arrow keys, for instance), and marries it with an only-from-Japan ultra-minimal design. It’s composed of “Topre” switches, which combine a coiled spring, a rubber dome, and a capacitive switch, for easy-to-press keys and a patented “bounce.” You can get blank keycaps, and if you really want to get technical, you can flip some DIP switches to reassign keys to your preference. Ultimately, the keyboard is designed to keep you from ever leaving the home row, relying on key combos and a perfect, near-symmetrical layout as you ease into the code haze.
Beginning in 2003, MUJI began declaring its vision for each year in newspaper advertisements. With each running to approximately 1,600 characters in length, they were rather wordy for newspaper ads. Although they were somewhat unsophisticated, they were written with the intention of prioritizing contents that would clearly communicate the thinking of the company each time, making it possible to chart the course of the brand from the ads of past years. The ad for the first year, 2003, contained two pieces. One was “The Future of MUJI,” which described the history of MUJI from its birth more than 20 years earlier and its direction for the future. The other was “MUJI on a Global Scale,” which was based on the “World MUJI” concept described in the fax that had been sent to Ikko Tanaka by Kenya Hara.
The 2005 ad pictured above was titled “Tea House and MUJI,” and featured a photo of a single bowl that MUJI had just marketed that year in the Dojinsai Tea Room at Jishoji (Ginkakuji) Temple, said to be the original model for all Japanese-style interiors. The photo taken by Yoshihiko Ueda was shot in black and white, filled with rich shades of light and dark. Through variations in the implements and items associated with a tea room, a Japanese tea room can alter its spatial reality in unlimited ways. It is because MUJI is simple that it has the freedom to flexibly accommodate the varied interpretations which people have of it. The only word on the poster was the Japanese MUJI logotype, with these four Chinese characters functioning as a receptacle to catch the thoughts of everyone who encounters it. (via Nippon Design Center)
Design and UI testing environment. If what you want doesn’t exist, build it.
Six in the morning…can no longer sleep. Must design.
Originally published in Domus 202 / October 1944
One comes home tired from working all day and finds an uncomfortable chair
Interior designers are generally concerned with making new furniture and inventing a new form for tables, chairs, hangers, armchairs. Let us consider the “armchair” which is the most obvious example. How many different armchairs have you seen in your life? Did you happen to sit on very low chairs (chairs upon which real ladies never sit) or on chairs that were so long that the nape of your neck touches the back? Twentieth century armchairs full of corners, physiological armchairs in which people who move get lost, armchairs in chrome tubes, wood, elephant’s teeth. But tell us the truth: isn’t it relaxing to sit on a cheap (100 lire) and ordinary lounge chair? Yet the bourgeoisie does not want one in their homes because it is vulgar — unless it is in silver metal and covered in snakeskin. You understand that we could go on for a thousand years (and perhaps more) inventing different furnishings, following all the trends in all the countries, the materials that the industry puts on the market at any time, stylistic tendencies, etc., all to suit the taste of the good middle-class citizen who does not want to have a chair in his house that is the same one that his colleague has in his office. Everyone wants different furniture and so the true function of a chair, for example, comfort, goes to hell.
Now I say this: do you think that this is a wise way to work? Do you believe this kind of work to be worthy of man, or that it leads to true results? Why — instead of getting a headache, every time we need to design an armchair (and this observation holds true for any piece of furniture), trying to create a rare never-before-seen original piece — don’t we try to perfect that object that has been recognized throughout the ages as the simplest and the most comfortable seat to rest upon — a common deck lounger? Why do we not point our research in this direction?
Oliver Reichenstein on the past, simulation and the state of design 
@jordanmoore: A couple of weeks ago you discussed simulation technology and how we use it to simulate “all we have left: the past”. Do you think designers are harking back to an easier time, when their works were less transient – and that digital is a format where it is difficult to leave behind relics of our work, and provides no assuring sense of longevity?
This is an extremely complex matter that I have been thinking about for the last few months. I am not seeing clear enough to give you a short answer and this is not the place to answer in full, but I’ll give it a shot.
What I know is that this nostalgic trend a lot of people are talking and writing about these days has something to do with that the socio-economic change driven by the analog-to-digital transformation. The main progress that we have made in the last 30 years is not aesthetic or mechanical. What we have seen since the mid-90s is a progress in simulation technologies. Cars look more or less the same, music and fashion is also moving into a state of simulation of what is supposed to be authentic. And often the simulation outperforms the original.
A simulation or a copy that outperforms the original is the basic principle of evolution in design. Progress in design is never a big jump. It is always a processes of copy and improve. Big jumps, as in the advent of the iPhone, are only possible if a lot of that process of copy and improve is kept in the dark. Then it looks like a genius was at work, creating something completely new. But I have never seen any genius innovation out of the blue in technology. The more we learn about Apple’s design process through the Samsung court case, the more we see that in that regard Apple is no different from anybody else.
The absolute masters at copy and improve are the Japanese. And I’m not just talking about Japanese cameras, watches and electronics. A lot of French and Italian restaurants there out-cook authentic restaurants in France and Italy. Not only do they make better food – a good French restaurant in Tokyo tastes, looks and feels more French than most French restaurants in Paris. It is a funny experience. They simulate Frenchness so well, that you feel angry and insulted at first, then you feel sorry for the original. This is not just my romantic impression, Japanese pizza bakers often win pizza world championships. Tokyo has more Michelin stars than Paris. French and Italian tourists get confused when you show them some of these places. While you don’t fully trust this better copy to be really better (especially as a European), after a while you don’t care about original or simulation anymore.
Or take those incredible new old coffee shops in San Francisco. They are evoking an originality and a quality that has never existed before. Coffee in the 70s mostly tasted like shit. And I don’t think that coffee in the 20s was much better than in the 70s. Logistics simply didn’t allow that quality. We actually have much better product quality now than we used to have, but like our grandparents we imagine that once upon a time everything was more solid. We imagine this by looking at the really solid stuff that has survived.
To get back to the question: I believe that the traditionalist trends in music, fashion, and TV, as well as Apple’s use of old metaphors and Microsoft’s return to Swiss graphic design in Windows 8, is a sign of a creative process at its beginning. We are about to experience a back and forth from the digital to analogue that will eventually lead to a different understanding of reality. As different as this future reality is, it won’t necessarily look that ‘new’. It might look like the spoof of that Mad Men episode called The Carousel. When you first look at this, especially after watching the original, it feels ridiculous. You think “something is lost” or “there is no emotion”, but the more you watch the satire the less you will see a difference and realise that the old, analogue reality was as constructed as the digital one. There is no authentic reality and there never was.
As we can learn from that episode ‘new’ always was and always will be a good sales argument.
“The most important idea in advertising is ‘new’. It creates an itch. You simply put your product in there as a kind of calamine lotion.”
Advertising is not what it used to be. Classic advertising has become that weird thing from the past. It still kind of works, but it’s becoming more and more obvious how surreal advertisement is. What used to be advertising now is ‘The Web’. The web is how we now make buying choice; the web is where we get our product information. So the promise of ‘new’ doesn’t work that well any more, because:
- Online, things just get old really fast. After the 50th retweet, new is old. And with the right account it takes less than a second to get that 50th retweet.
- ‘New’ is very easy to say, but innovation is very hard to do. A lot of things that used to be sold as new, actually were just old things with a new package. If you promise ‘new’ and don’t deliver, your product will not be seen as “a kind of calamine lotion” but as snake oil.
- The appeal of ‘new’ is part of a modernist bias. That bias is about to become conscious.
I believe that culturally, we are about to witness a capitulation in front of the modern ideology that ‘new’ or technological ‘progress’ is generally better. The above cited same Mad Men clip goes on explaining nostalgia as a “deeper bond with the product”, calling it “delicate but potent”.
The nostalgic trend is not the next ad strategy. And I don’t think that it’s just an escape back to the past. It is as a sign of distrust against the supremacy of ‘new’, that technological progress does not necessarily equal improvement. Progress can mean ‘improvement’, but it can also mean ‘even more trouble’. Whether you ‘believe in’ or ‘accept’ global warming or not – you have probably learned that we cannot escape environmental entropy with more technology. Less, more intelligent technology is a smarter way, but we might fool ourselves there. We do not fool ourselves when we accept that less consumption will lead to less chaos, but that’s much harder to accept than the idea of a deus ex machina that will save us all from the mess we are heading into.
The entropy of the ‘new’ is not a mere technological problem; we witness the same entropy affecting information. The incredible access to information we have does not lead to an overflow of information. But it doesn’t lead lead to more clarity. It leads away from the ‘either or’ ideologies that claim to know for certain which principles human knowledge must follow. The nostalgic trend is in essence postmodern. That everything you say describes a human perspective, not a divine cosm. I used to make fun of the word postmodern; I still dislike it, because the essence of postmodernism is exactly that it is not an -ism, that it has no global belief. But I am quite certain that the nostalgic trend marks the end of modernity. Especially since it treats modernity as something of the past, something that in some ways is desirable, in others not. There is a lot to say here (for instance how hard it is to fool ourselves into our grandparents’ nostalgia of our past that the internet documents in detail), but let’s move on …
“Here’s a great rule of thumb: until you create something yourself and then actually ship it, try to first find the positive in the products around you. Those products are the result of someone’s passion, hard work and innate genius. When we compare them to our own twisted, entitlement-driven expectations, we do nothing but insult their creators.
Shipping something is difficult. Shipping something is like setting a platter of precious glassware on the edge of a razor-thin knife. Shipping is an action that flirts with risk and failure. But it is an action that should be applauded rather than attacked.
We can trash an app because of the color of its icon and use powerful words like “hate” and lambast the decisions of the developers as “stupid” or “wrong”. But in doing so we ignore the multitude of positive aspects and elements that make the app worth buying and using. We, the generation of armchair developers and silver-spoon cry-babies. Shame on us.
We might be free to speak our mind, but we also need to grow up and take responsibility for the effect our words can have on others. Our entitlement needs to be taken out back and put down like Ol’ Yeller. No developer, musician or tech company is responsible for granting our every wish and desire, no matter how much we want it.
Stop moaning. Please. Just stop.”
