I’m posting this to all of you with a tendency to forget about cool stuff happening in your backyard (i.e., me):
The 2004 David H. Liu Memorial Lecture Series in Design at Stanford University is in swing through May 27. David was a great guy, and attending this series is a nice way to celebrate his life.
Ferrari’s factory is off limits to mere mortals, so here’s a nice peek inside from Automobile Magazine.
Or in 40 years?
Over the past year I’ve become increasingly interested in "cradle to cradle" design solutions that consider the entire lifecycle of a product, from manufacturing to marketing to use to end of use. A critical aspect of cradle to cradle design is considering how a product will age: will it get older gracefully, building a patina which enhances its value, or will it turn into a liability — the kind of thing that ends up in a dump or (heaven forbid) your front yard? I’m convinced that most designers – or at least the marketers they serve – don’t spend many brain cycles thinking about what their product will be like a month after purchase, let alone 40 years later.
A good case in point is my Sony Playstation 2 (yes, I justified it to my wife on the basis of it being a DVD player, not a videogame console). The day exterior drawings were due, some industrial designer must have had his CAD station lock up and drew the thing with a ruler instead:
It’s a great product, but all those slots and ridges in the black plastic make it a dust magnet, a real pain to keep clean. As a result, it doesn’t look Darth-Vader-cool. It just looks like dusty plastic.
Another automotive design which I’ve long admired, the Citroen Ami 6. Quite polarizing, eh?
On the spectrum of “beautiful/ugly”, this one is biased toward the ugly stick zone, but it does have a certain Gallic charm to it. I like the fact that it’s not another anonymous, bar-of-soap-Camry-Corolla-Hyundai-rectal-suppository type of design.
"beautiful-ugly"
So much of design is concerned with the beautiful object. But beauty does not always equate to interesting. As time passes, I am increasingly intrigued by the notion of purposely baking-in tension when designing objects, hence my fascination with the French concept of Jolie-Laide.
Why be beautiful when you could be interesting?
