design

Yesterday I had an unexpected treat from a friend, Addy, who gave me a full tour around Ideo in Palo Alto. This tour made me wistful of architecture, so many tech offices are so boring or like Google’s HQ, have slightly forced and oh so obvious eccentricity – bean bags and lava lamps and a Segway. Ideo, like many design operations has a real feel of creativity, an Exploratorium for grown ups – it has all the toys, from video editing suites, photographic studios, model shops, paint shops, electronics assembling etc. but there are some nice touches. Everywhere you look, gleaming high-tech bicycles hang from the ceiling – each desk has a pulley to hoist your bike above your desk and drawers full of high tech goodies are scattered around the office. My favorite of these was the ‘tech box’ which had drawers marked ‘cool mechanisms’ and ‘amazing materials’ full…

After a three year hiatus I bought a Mac – largely because design of PC laptops has seemingly regressed to the days before the Sony Vaio 505. When I last had a Mac, both the hardware and the software were better designed than a Windows based PC. On an Apple you didn’t have DLL’s that made it impossible to manage software installations and you could link several computers together without having to hire a full-time network administrator. Microsoft software was a pile of junk compared to Apple’s until very recently. These days, however, Apple seem to be able to produce excellent hardware design, but their software has deteriorated. Take, for example, the ‘aqua’ interface in OSX – yes there are animated events just like on an SGI (and where are they now?), but the principal interface issue, text rendering, is a joke on OSX. The latest version of the Apple…

It seems that Rube Goldberg is the American Heath Robinson, or is Heath Robinson the British Rube Goldberg? Either way, great commercial, shame about the car. Honda’s New Accord via Azeem Azhar

From the country that brought you the three armed sweater, the transparent skirt. In actual fact these skirts are not transparent but have an image printed on them to appear so. Does your bum look big in this?

More on the way to a PacketPC, John Robb would like this wireless enabled hard drive from Toshiba. Geek.com Geek News – Toshiba’s new HOPBIT wireless personal server

“Apple has to come up with something, a product, an app, a gadget of some kind, that will put a crippling hurt on another established technology or company.” Why don’t Apple compete with the consumer electronics market and come up with the definitive media PC? Applelinks: Latest Warp Core Praised

Jon Robb considers wifi enabled hardrives: “1. Digital still cameras. 2. Digital video cameras. 3. Portable radios. 4. Portable CD players. 5. TiVo (if shipped in combo with a base station that contains a hard drive). 6. Digital audio recorders. 7. Car DVD and tape players (with FM transmission add-ons for the Archos or iPod). In all of those cases, the core element is the portable hard drive. The recording and/or playback feature functionality is merely a dumb peripheral (directly connected or connected via wireless). Add wireless and server capabilities and it can power your PC, your TV, and your stereo. “ John Robb’s Radio Weblog

Sony are about to release the gadget I have been dreaming of. The size of an iPod (that great form factor that fits in your pocket), the ‘PacketPC is basically a WiFi enabled portable bootable drive. Plug this into any computer and use it as if it were your own. With 60GB internal storage this can hold most of your applications and important data. Lets face it, although many people use more disk space, the critical stuff like email and applications account for far less space than replaceable items such as MP3’s. The PacketPC has a screen and Palm Pilot style text entry capability, but is primarily designed for read only (I always used to update my palm from scraps of paper when I had it connected to my PC anyway). The built in GPS chip will make use of location aware mapping services and entertainment/travel guides. Without hooking up…

Macromedia care about software design, and there are not many companies that do. The software industry is maturing and customers are beginning to care about well designed products. A few months ago, Macromedia looked like an acquisition target for Adobe, perhaps today’s 20% surge in value will help propel them out of Adobe’s reach. Forbes.com: Macromedia shares up 20 pct on analyst upgrade

BusinessWeek runs a piece about the Segway’s lack of marketplace segue. The Segway is an example of bad design. By that I don’t mean that it isn’t a seductive and innovative object, but it is an example of innovative engineering rather than design. Design includes how something fits into context i.e. society and the Segway is a Cuckoo. Like Kamen, Clive Sinclair is an impressive innovator, after a string of successes he launched an electric vehicle the C5, which was intended ” to herald a new era of ecological personal transport”. “The Sinclair C5 was a commercial disaster. The Press hounded it as a dangerous joke. Only around 12,000 C5’s were ever produced, many sold off abroad after the project folded. “ The Segway is the new C5. BW Online | January 16, 2003 | Is Segway Going Anywhere? Workers at businesses and municipalities that have tested the transporters aren’t…

Two all beef patties, lettuce, 1GHz PowerPC G4, 1MB L3 cache, 512MB DDR333 SDRAM, 60GB Ultra ATA/100 SuperDrive, pickles and onions all in a lightweight and durable aluminum alloy enclosure. Apple – PowerBook G4 17″

I want a media PC – and by that I mean a PC that controls all the media I watch/listen to/photograph etc. I don’t want a separate Tivo, DVD player, MP3 player, digital photo archive – I want one machine to handle all of this. Apple are heading in this direction, both in terms of hardware and software – and who better than Apple to provide this most luxurious of items. The problem is that every attempt at a media PC that I have seen makes an annoying amount of noise – meaning that it gets switched off at ‘bed-time’, and then takes an interminable time to boot, ruining somewhat the spontaneity of waking up to the sound of music. Please Apple, given that reliable sleep mode never works and instant boot never will, design me a silent machine that I can leave on all the time.