The Citroen ID Break

(why settle for beautiful when you could be interesting?)

"To me, doing design doesn’t mean giving form to a more or less stupid product for a more or less sophisticated industry.  Design for me is a way of discussing life, sociality, politics, food and even design."

– Ettore Sottsass

Do you care — really care — about expressing your brand as best you can?

The people at Nikon really care.  They recently reissued their famed SP 35mm camera from 1957, and it’s incredible the length they went to make this new offering look, feel, and even sound like the brand-defining original. 

How incredible?  Well, Nikon engineers used computers to create a sonic "fingerprint" of the original and then fine-tuned the materials of the new SP to make it sound exactly the same.  For example, rather than using modern titanium for the focal plane shutter, they chose to employ rubberized silk — the way things were circa 1957.  This is an expensive design decision, not to be taken lightly.  Assembly lines for this kind of shutter are way more expensive to run because the fabric precludes a modular, streamlined production flow, and demands a very tricky fine tuning of each unit.  By the way, this is not the sort of thing they teach you at Harvard Business School.  Can you imagine standing up in your next marketing meeting and saying "We’re going to go with this production method from the Eisenhower decade because it’s the best thing for our brand.  Oh, and it costs a bundle and isn’t technically advanced, either."?  It would be tough for me, too.

But it’s absolutely the right choice, because it makes the new SP sound right, and that’s worth everything here.  Sound really does matter.  How far would you go to make your brand sound the way it needs to sound?

Read Sound Matters & Sound Matters, part 2

thanks to Valentin Sama for the reference

Seth Godin is blogging about English Cut’s bespoke suits.   "In an era where you don’t have to wear a suit," says Seth, "a $3,000 suit is nothing but remarkable."

He has a point, but at a time where progressive organizations have dumped formal job titles, and where title inflation runs rampant in those companies where they’re still in use, to be truly remarkable one needs to go beyond mere Savile Row tailoring.  No, in this era of the post-modern economy, to be well and truly remarkable demands nothing less than a good old fashioned peerage.  If it’s clothes that make the man, it’s a royal title which makes The Man.

I’d quite fancy an org chart tag like Consignore Rodriguez. 

Want to be remarkable?  Why not do it to the hilt?

thanks to Alex for the tip

I get quite a few questions that go something like this: "How does a busy fellow like you find the time to blog?"

To which I answer,  "Blogito ergo sum" — "I blog therefore I am (creative)". 

I try to make blogging an integral part of my creative process.  I find it a great way to slosh thoughts across the right and left sides of my brain and, on occasion, come up with something interesting.  This humble blog of mine is a sandbox, a place for creating quick idea probes which I launch on a whim.  Blogging is a nice way to be fast, cheap and out of control.

It does take time, but a lot less than you might think.  Along with flying planes and racing cars, being a writer was something I aspired to even as young boy.  Actually, books, writing, and literature have always played a more central role in my life than even cars (and if you know me, that’s really saying something).  However, though I wanted to be a writer, I never thought I had the time to be a good writer.  But while perusing William Gibson’s blog early last year, I came to understand why it might be worthwhile to start doing even a little bit of writing here and there.  And how little time it might take.  Says Gibson:

I suspect I have spent just about exactly as much time actually writing as the average person my age has spent watching television, and that, as much as anything, may be the real secret here.

That’s a remarkable thought, isn’t it?  And so I took Gibson’s word for it and started writing this blog.  I don’t know what I dropped in my schedule to make it happen, for I wasn’t a big watcher of TV, nor did I feel like I had oodles of empty time sitting around waiting to be used.  But still, I find the time and by finding it, I make the time.

I honestly believe that blogging has made me more creative, if creativity can be defined the ability to see patterns and make connections.  Forcing myself to write on an almost daily basis about foggy topics has been like an injection of neural lube for my design-thinking brain cells.  I may not actually be creative, but for sure my fingers are more limber and thoughts flow more easily through to full expression — much as they did musically back when I used to play my saxophone at least three hours a day.

Perhaps blogging is a perfect form of structured procrastination, a term coined by Stanford professor John Perry.  Structured procrastination, Perry says, is a way to ".. be motivated to do difficult, timely and important tasks, as long as these tasks are a way of not doing something more important."  Think about that.  Instead of procrastinating and not getting anything done, why not procrastinate as a way to get some other cool stuff done while you’re mustering the will to tackle that big gnarly thing slouched over in the corner?  Per Perry’s definition, blogging certainly qualifies as difficult, and if you believe that at least one soul, somewhere, somehow is hoping that you’ll post something soon, well, then you’ve got the timely and important part there, too.

Blogging isn’t the most important or urgent or important/urgent thing I do.  Far from it. But it is a way of getting to good stuff that makes the really important stuff I do work better. 

The Yamaha Chivicker  

Some Sony designers have come up with five prototypes showing alternatives to the standard keyboard/mouse computer interface.

I find the Gummi-Bend concept particularly compelling.  With commercially viable flexible electronic "paper" right around the corner, Gummi shows how this technology could be used to help people get more out of maps.  Having recently spent four days tromping around Manhattan with only one, fixed-scale map in my pocket, Gummi would have been very useful.  It looks like a lot of fun to use, too.  And when it comes to designing interfaces, pleasure matters.

The Wally 118 wallypower

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