Category Archives: designing

My new car is a…

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… bike.  In fact it’s this tasty number made by Breezer:

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I’ve had the bike for about three months now, and have grown to love it on several levels:

  • It’s an integrated experience:  I could have spent a bit less money by cobbling together an equivalent bike from bits and pieces, but the Breezer works really well as a unified whole.  Its designer, Joe Breeze, has a strong point of view on what makes a good bike, and I can feel that as I ride it.
  • It’s fun:  I spent a significant percentage of my childhood free time messing around with bikes.  I lived for my BMX bike.  I was either jumping it off of tall things, riding it through deep pits of mud, fixing it and cleaning it due to the previous two activites, or finding a way to get moneoy tobuy upgrade parts.  Over the course of about six years I took it from being a $80 Huffy to being a mean, lean, nickle-plated jumping machine.  A Mongoose that flew through the air and even landed safely more often than not. By the time I was done modifying it, the only original parts left were the wheels (the original ones ran strong and true), and the chain.  I’m looking forward to hacking on this bike (because as Facebook has taught us, it’s all about user-hackable platforms), and I just love the feel of the wind through what is left of my hair.  Fun fun fun.
  • It looks killer:  Amsterdam is the New LA.  Or Paris.  In other words, the cool look these days is fenders plus bells plus black paint.  Forget spandex and your aero tuck on that carbon fiber frame; sitting upright and maximizing your coefficient of drag is the way to go.  Admittedly, I’ve been unduly influenced by the editors of Monocle on this dimension, but I see the general rise in popularity of the Dutch bike aesthetic as a search for consumptive sobriety for sombre times; the Prius is statement about remorse for over exuberant car-ness, and I think black bikes with fenders are like wearing Timberland boots in a world of Blahniks — the durable, practical,sensible choice.  That happens to also look killer in its own way.

Is the commuter bike the new Prius?

Yes.

There’s something about GINA.

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I’ve received a large number of emails from folks asking my opinion of the BMW GINA concept car.

Here’s what I think:

  • GINA is about being remarkable.  And being remarkable, whether it be in the domains of design, engineering or marketing, takes guts.  BMW excels across all three of these domains, and does so in no small part due to having the courage of its convictions.  Sometimes these convictions are too strongly held, witness iDrive in all of its befuddling infamy.  But from iDrives to flame surfaces to Bangle Butts, BMW seems to be a place where errors of commission are forgiven.  It’s about guts, in other words, and GINA is an tangible expression of those held by the brave folks from Munich.
  • GINA is about a return to a paradigm of flexible, articulating structures.  GINA’s anthropomorhpic nature is quite sticky from an emotional point of view, but I find it most interesting in terms of a return to a structural paradigm used by early aviation pioneer such as Louis Bleriot.  Being covered with a fabric is not a new idea — many cars used to have
    leather bodywork (and we still have lingering fabric convertible tops
    out there) — but combining that fabric with an articulating structure
    is new for automobiles.  The wing of a Bleriot monoplane flexed in response to pilot control inputs.  To see that wing in motion is to see organic motion very different to the mechanistic slides and pivots that characterize modern airplanes.  When the light hits it just right, there are few mechanical structures more beautiful than a semi-translucent Bleriot wing.
  • GINA is a platform for a new age of open innovation and co-creation.  As Chris Bangle states in the video, attaching the fabric covering to the space frame does not require a great deal of time.  Imagine the cool stuff that could happen if BMW enabled "civilians" to riff on their own fabric covering patterns.  Or perhaps non-structural elements of the space frame could be easily modified within specified parameters to allow for surface improvisations.  And even the parameters controlling the wink of GINA’s eyes could be made available for public hacking, so that you could upload new software routines and choose to have a sleepy car or a caffeinated autobahn stormer.  Most BMW’s, I’d wager, would be the latter.

I’ll take mine in a matte finish.

Glass Houses

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A pretty good Billy Joel album, and a simply great day of design thinking I experienced just the other week at the Philip Johnson Glass House.  I was fortunate to take part in a Glass House Conversation hosted by John Maeda on the subject of Simplicity.  Keen readers of metacool will no doubt recall that Professor Maeda’s book The Laws of Simplicity is one of my all-time favorites (be sure to watch his brilliant TED talk here).  His thinking has had an enormous influence on my work.

Each of the attendees were asked to be the guru for one of the ten laws of simplicity.  I chose the 5th law, Differences, which states that simplicity and complexity need each other.  I spend a lot of my time designing and implementing organizational systems which enable people to do things they otherwise couldn’t.  I find time and time again that solutions that aspire only to simplicity tend toward the simplistic, and those that embrace only complexity veer off toward a morass of complexity.  Balancing the two, and figuring out where to place the complexity so that it creates value, and how to position the simplicity to extract that value, is the art.  Here’s the illustrative example I brought with me to the Glass House, a snapshot of the dashboard from a Toyota Prius (you were expecting something other than a car from me?):

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The cockpit of the Prius is one of the simplest on the market.  A digital readout replaces traditional gauges, buttons are few in number and highly considered in placement, and even the gearshift is just about going foward or backward or not.  And yet the Prius is arguably the most complex car you can buy.  Its gas-sipping nature stems from having not one but two motors, connected to the driving wheels by a fiendishly clever transmission orchestrated by a suite of chips of immense processing power.  All of that complexity without a mediating layer wouldn’t be the car that non-car people love to own and operate.  The Prius is a great example of the 5th law.

I saw the law of Differences in action at the Glass House.  Having only ever seen the Glass House in history books, I didn’t have a feel for the complexity of the campus on which it stands.  Over time, Philip Johnson built a family of structures which work together in quite interesting ways.  For example, did you know that the Glass House has a sister structure in the Brick House?  Here’s a view of the two of them:

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All of the mechanical needs of the Glass House are met by the Brick House.  An underground umbilical shaft connects the Glass House to a feed of heat from the Brick House.  The Brick House also contains a bedroom for those times when one might like to engage in… er, some more complex acts of human nature than would be appropriate in a public setting.  A Glass House without a Brick House to power and feed it would be untenable.  Even from a purely formal aesthetic sense, the two houses work better together than apart.  Simplicity and complexity need each other.

I really enjoyed the afternoon of conversation on design, business, technology and life.  I’ve had a fortunate life of exposure to some pretty amazing people and experiences, and this was right up there.  I’d like to show you some photos, not to gloat, but to share some fun stuff from the day in the name of creativity and openness. 

An amazing group of chefs prepared a meal for us in the Glass House.  It centered on themes of simplicty.  Wine was served.

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We sat at table together and talked and ate and watched the weather go from stormy to sunny and back again.  You can’t help but be immersed in the weather in this architecture.

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We had assigned seats.  I sat in a white chair and ate more than my fair share of the edible centerpiece, which was quite tasty in its own right.  This is my favorite photo from the day:

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It’s in the mail…

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I feel blessed to live with four Eames-authored items in my household.  Especially my book-laden nightstand,  which means a vision of Eames is the last thing I see before shutting my eyes.  That little Eames wire table is the first thing I bought after getting a real job out of college.

Simple pleasures.

Speaking of which, these lovely stamps, to be issued this summer, will be a nice way to send a friend a little kiss of design thinking at its best.

Director’s Commentary: Amia Chair

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Here’s a marvellous Director’s Commentary about the Amia chair.  Thomas Overthun, a colleague of mine from IDEO, and Bruce Smith of Steelcase take us through its genesis.

Watch the video, and find out why an integral part of innovating is being willing to cut everything in half.  It’s all about strategy that makes your hands bleed: I challenge you to find something in your work life that you should cut in half on the bandsaw, if only metaphorically.

Why not?

TEDding…

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I’m blogging a bit from TED this week over at the TEDBlog.  I’m not trying to blog about big stuff said on stage, as there’s lots of "small" interesting stuff scattered around the conference.  I just wrote one post, more to come if I can tear myself away from the Google coffee bar.