GT-R. Probably my favorite performance car brand ever. Capable of spanking a Porsche 911 Turbo around the famed Nurburgring. The new version of the GT-R is here, which means it is time to start saving up my quarters. Yowsa.
Author Archives: Diego Rodriguez
All quiet at metacool
Sorry for the recent radio silence here at metacool. Everything is a-okay. Been busy at conferences, endurance car races, taking care of the family, and work. The good news is, I’m now swamped with interesting ideas. It’ll all brew up in to some good blog fodder, I reckon.
Now, it’s time to crack open a tasty new book about Porsche 550 Spyders… a wonderful form of structured procrastination if there ever was one.
Another golden insight from Indexed
metacool Thought of the Day
"It was design by
dictatorship. All else, this marketing, these focus groups, what
have you, is bullshit."
– Mini Clubman chief designer, Gerd Hildebrand.
(I love this quote because it acknowledges the unique role which talents plays in the realm of visceral design. If you have talented, highly-trained and educated designers, why would you second-guess their aesthetic judgment based on the input of folks off the street? Yes, test the hell out of the behavioral elements of your offerings — fit, function, ergonomics — but leave the visceral, and to some extent the reflective meaning, up to the people who get it)
Is a tendency toward unabashed gearhead gnarlyness genetic?
Yes.
My brother Carlos is quoted in today’s New York Times in an article about making quiet computers:
Some customers are paying attention. When Carlos Rodriguez, a
community manager for a Web start-up, built out the PC for his home
theater, he turned to a Zalman CNPS9500, a $49 cooler for the C.P.U.
that comes with hundreds of thin copper fins and weighs almost a
quarter of a pound.“It’s got huge heat-sink fins,” Mr.
Rodriguez said. “It’s got a 92-millimeter fan. I just can’t hear it at
all. It’s big, but it’s also kind of beautiful.”
Right on, bro!
Having designed the thermal system for the original Intel Xeon processor, I’m really in to cooling fins. They are beautiful.
Oh what a WoW feeling
You may not like this ad, but I do. Not just because I’m a fan (and owner) of Toyota cars, but because it’s a great example of designing a message to spread.
In this case, it is about tapping in to the seven million plus folks who play the online game World of Warcraft. That’s a lot of potential truck buyers. If you don’t play World of Warcraft, the ad is entertaining, but if you do play, the ad is just amazing. And, it seems perfectly designed to spread around the place where World of Warcraft players hang out the most, that thing called the internet. This is about designing for YouTube.
My only question is, I’m level 66, so can I get a Tundra instead?
Thanks to Carlos for showing me the video.
Random aesthetic connections
A 1966 Alfa Romeo Giulia Ti:
A 2007 BMW M5:
A 1972 Chevrolet Suburban:
It’s quite late. Perhaps I should go to sleep.
Worth paying attention to
Help me out, please
Help me out here. Last night I was putting together my argument for an upcoming speech about marketing when I realized that I don’t know what marketing is about. Or, to be precise, I do know what marketing is about (I have a very strong point of view on it, actually), but I don’t have a good definition.
What is marketing?
Can you help me? If you have a definition you’d like to share, please shoot me an email. Or, better yet, please leave a comment below. That way we can all riff off each other.
Thanks in advance.
Designing by influence
The current issue of Fast Company has a great article about the way HP’s corporate design group influences the rest of the organization. I found the article fascinating — it’s a great example of designing for business.
It’s also a good example of why there’s no silver bullet when it comes to getting an organization to integrate the design process in to the way it goes to market. I love most of Apple’s products, but I also realize that the way it goes about innovating — a centralized, low-variance, top-down approach — isn’t the answer for every organization. With HP, for example, you have a decentralized company where the leaders of individual business units are very powerful. A centralized innovation model based on power wouldn’t work well there. As the article shows, what does seem to be working at HP is an approach based on influence, as well as on showing the distributed decision makers what could happen. It’s all about looking hard at the constituent parts that make up a culture — people, resources, processes and values — and then structuring a congruent approach. Good stuff.