I took this picture of the shelf (I guess that’s all you can really call it) while standing in the queue at Trader Joe’s. For the uninitiated, Trader Joe’s is a fabulous grocery store for people who want Whole Foods variety without the exorbitant price tag. sidenote: this is how I end [...]
Archive for the 'Design' Category
Overheard at the Foster El stop in Evanston between two [seemingly] college-aged students, one donning a black hoodie and the other slightly larger built wearing a red coat.
black hoodie: I didn’t even finish my homework for this class, I was addicted to second life last night talking to Erica and I fell asleep.
red coat: Are [...]
We are committed to your success
21Feb08There’s nothing quite like installing a piece of software and seeing more and more tiny green blocks on your screen is there?
I can’t say I miss the days of installing windows applications since I made the Switch(tm). I’ve gotten kinda used to doing the old drag-and-drop into my “Applications” folder.
In any event, I witnessed [...]
As most of my friends and some of my readers may know, design school [graduate school in general] is an incubated environment for me to test out new ideas with great people, every day. To find people that I would love working with on a regular basis on interesting projects that are meaningful and, [...]
Intense Experiences
01Feb08Disclaimer: I don’t smoke, so I can’t say that I can definitively speak about the smoker experience.
The WSJ recently ran a story about a new type of cigarette that Marlboro plans to launch in the United States, called “Marlboro Intense”. It’s a cigarette that is shorter than most regular 8 puff plus cigs.
A topic [...]
How To Make Things “moddable”
23Jan08
image
source: Tyler Hicks, NYTimes
Game developers have known for a long time now that a clever way to win consumers is by making their games “modifiable” — That is, adding custom levels in Quake, or creating scenarios in strategy games like Civilization.
As designers/innovators, we all know it’s particularly insightful to observe extreme/lead users and [...]
When I went to China last summer, I met a lot of [mostly businessmen] who had dual sim card phones.
In the late 90’s I remember clearly a device released that fit over your phone jack or connected to your phone and automatically dialed internationally using the cheapest provider for the call. (Nowadays, [...]
It would appear that growing enterprises and [buffalo wing] restaurants really do have a lot in common.
From Business Week:
Restaurant owners weren’t failing because they had ill-defined competitive strategies. They weren’t failing because they lacked access to capital, or because they chose poor locations, either. (These are factors, Parsa says, just not typically make-or-break [...]
It’s a phone, thus, a mic to capture audio.
It’s got a pretty swift safari browser that’s AJAX compatible.
Why haven’t people made voice activated web apps yet? It confounds me.
The only thing I’ve found that’s remotely close is this inelegant solution by Ask.com that seems cobbled together. (SMS + Web + Voice?)
(Actually, [...]
Prophetic. Jeepers.
18Jan08“Our enormously productive economy … demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption…. we need things consumed, burned up, replaced, and discarded at an ever-accelerating rate.”
– Victor Lebow, 1955
Someone just sent me [...]
Well boys and girls, it’s going to be a busy semester again here at ID, but meh, might as well be, this spring break will be all the more restful and relaxing. Maybe I’ll even skip taking an intersession and go on a two week vacation?
Cultural Human Factors
Social Human Factors
Design Analysis
Design Synthesis
Design Languages
Advanced Design [...]
This guy is my hero…
28Dec07… Not because his car is particularly good looking, because it definitely got beat with the ugly stick a few times, but because he adapted an old (1992!) car to enable him to hypermile by changing the body style of the car– No engine mods necessary. This is what Amory Lovins has been campaigning [...]
Simple yet ingenious packaging
23Dec07When I was growing up, I used to travel back to India on occasion to see the large percentage of my family that still resides there. I distinctly remember going to my uncles house and having to walk a short distance outdoors to get to the shower. (Yeah, I guess that’s kinda like [...]
10 Types of Gorillas
22Dec07Can I just say, that sometimes, I feel like I’m in Pee Wee’s playhouse when I’m reading some random blog entry, design observer, or the latest McK Quarterly and I see the word “innovation“. All the fun creatures and puppets in the playhouse start screaming and yelling around me and I become anxious and [...]
Sometimes, while in the very fragile state of mind, during ideation sessions you bolt out with a flash of inspiration and a great idea, someone in your team (or an rss-feed-equipped-photographic-memory troll from the deep recesses of your brain) will leap up and pull up the website of a company that is–to be blunt–already doing [...]
