Category Archives: Inspiration

I went through two years of studio critiques while getting my Master’s degree in design, and have been through dozens of them in the five years since then, but I can honestly say I’ve learned more about how to appropriately give design criticism from Tim Gunn, one of the hosts of the US television show Project Runway.

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Prototypes are ways to test ideas—but where do those ideas come from? It may be that the path to better device design is best followed by creating props that help tell stories before prototypes designed to test technical feasibility. What I want to suggest in this talk is the way that design can use fiction—and fiction can use design—to help imagine how things can be designed just a little bit better.

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A talk by Dan Harden at Kicker Studio’s 2010 Device Design Day.

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A talk by Gretchen Anderson at Kicker Studio’s 2010 Device Design Day.

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A talk by Stuart Karten at Kicker Studio’s 2010 Device Design Day.

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There’s a bit of a backlash against what are called “rock stars” in the design profession (although I suppose every profession has its so-called rock stars.) When I said last year in my keynote at Interaction 09 that the role of any professional organization is to make its practitioners into stars, people groaned, saying we didn’t need more rock stars. Jeff Howard has even noted (“Rock Stars Need Not Apply”) that the rock star stance is anathema to doing service design. I’m in favor of more design rock stars, not less, for three reasons.

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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.

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There’s a tendency (at least among designers) to think that it’s designers who own the user experience. After all, designers are the ones who define it, right? This button goes there and it’s blue. But the more I think about it, the more I come to realize that ownership rests in those who provide the resources to get the product built, and in those who actually build the products: the developers and manufacturers. They are the true owners of the user experience.

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Our colleagues Matt Jones and Jack Schulze at BERG have produced concept videos of a future digital magazine reading device for Bonnier R&D. Kicker Studio is working on expanding their concepts into a robust, interactive prototype over the next several months.

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Designers often use research tools such as user observation and persona development to get into the heads of those we’re designing for. After all, approaching a problem from the point of view of the user a key component of user-centered design. But we also have the benefit of our day-to-day experience to draw from; and [...]

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