Category Archives: Industrial Design

We’ve been been digging deep into the industrial design and mechanical engineering for the teapot. Continue reading Kicker Tea Project: Industrial Design Refinement and Mechanical Engineering >>

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We didn’t pay too much attention to it at the time, since it was one sketch out of the dozens we made, and we were focusing a lot for a time on a tea stick concept instead of a tea pot. But one of our industrial designers, Emily, remembered the idea and worked up some sketches around what became known as the H— concept. Continue reading Kicker Tea Project: Selecting a Direction, Functional Cartography >>

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As our tea project progresses, we’re looking at many of the products in the space and what people are saying about them, focusing on forms, materials, and any issues tea drinkers have encountered. Continue reading Kicker Tea Project: Competitive Analysis, Design Principles, and Initial Concepting >>

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As consultants who specialize in new technology, a lot of our work is under NDA, so every once in a while, we do a project just for ourselves, to strut. (Last year it was the Kicker Conference Phone.) This time, we wanted to design a product for the home and we focused on an activity many of us enjoy: tea drinking. Continue reading Kicker Tea Project: Introduction >>

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The Language of Things: Understanding the World of Desirable Objects by Deyan Sudjic, director of Design Museum in London, is a curious, interesting book. It looks at the world of objects through several lenses: language, archetypes, luxury, fashion, and art. Some of these (language, archetypes) I found more interesting than others (fashion), but it has some smart ideas about the objects that surround us, and how we should design them. Continue reading Review: The Language of Things >>

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My hometown San Francisco is probably one of the most beautiful cities in the world. Tourism accounts for a substantial portion of the city’s revenue, and I have to believe the city’s aesthetics have a lot to do with why people come here. Imagine my surprise, then, on a beautiful day yesterday, to discover this is what the city seems to be installing as red light cameras. Continue reading How to Uglify a City >>

Filed in Industrial Design, Interactive Environments | Comments (6)

I read with some interest Carla Diana’s Core77 report on this year’s CHI conference. (It’s always better to get a summary of CHi than to actually go.) Buried in the article is this line: “Industrial design is the new interface design” was the mantra of the week.

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