Thought I’d do a quick summary of my favourite two talks from yesterday, which, predictably, were the keynotes by Bill Verplank and Lisa Strausfeld. Bill is one of the original interaction design guys, like Bill Moggridge and Gillian Crampton Smith, who did a lot of foundational work, particularly in eduction, in establishing the discipline. He
Lebbeus Woods, the architect, has started a series of posts on his notebooks. It sounds like this was a practice he went through and “finished” at some point, before moving on to other ways of working. That’s a little disappointing and goes against what I see as a lifetime practice. Still, I guess that depends
Lebbeus Woods has started a series of fantasy entries on his blog, tied to his beautiful sketches. The first is about a city built into rocky crags, the City of Earth. His prose style reminds me of H.P. Lovecraft, for some reason, creating a slight atmosphere of foreboding, that I’m not sure was intended. Maybe
I was going to recommend Haptic as my book of the year. A beautifully designed book that accompanies an exhibition of design work that toured the world recently, it features the work of Naoto Fukasawa, Shigeru Ban, Jasper Morrison and others who were each challenged to explore the design experiences of senses other than sight
Thought this was a great find from LifeHacker, about the 2003 keynote by the author Neal Stephenson at USENIX. When he wrote his first novel it was on a “modern” typewriter with a plastic ribbon that would start jamming in Iowa’s July heat. The only way to stop it jamming was to keep writing and
Poetic entry on drawing from Lebbeus Woods. “Even though I am best known for my drawings, and have spent many years as a teacher of architects, I have never taught drawing. The reason is that each person who wants to draw should devise his or her own way. It makes no sense to teach a
I have no problem with this article drawing some close comparisons between the work of Dieter Rams and the work of Jonathan Ive at Apple. It’s not blatant plagiarism, and the calculator in the iPhone already demonstrated that the respect was there. “When you look at the Braun products by Dieter Rams—many of them at
Here’s a list and explanation of Dieter Rams’ 10 Commandments for good design. Vitsœ | About / Good design…
Grumpy old curmudgeon, aka design god (Monoscope) Some great Paul Rand quotes. “Don’t try and be original, just try to be good”. “To do things with quality. I think this is what in a big sense aesthetics means”. “Order. Variety. Contrast. Symmetry. Tension. Balance. Scale. Texture. Space. Shape. Light. Shade. Color. The elements of shape.
It’s great to get some insight into how some of your heroes think. This slideshow from the New York Times shows the step by step process that John Maeda went through to design a cover for their real estate supplement, Key magazine. I’m a big believer in the use of intuition, letting your experiences and
