October 2010
1 post
September 2010
1 post
1 tag
IOALUMNI - 100%CYAAN
After a good pizza session the batteries of the 100%CYAAN innovation network (an initiative that used to be known as IO-ALUMNI) have been fully recharged and is already planning some great offline manifestations.
8th of October, introducing of the network and its story at the DUT-wide alumni day
3rd of December: “Everything but the product”. An event hosted by the Dialogues House...
May 2010
7 posts
A Tale of Two Smartphones: U.S. vs Rest of World... →
This is not going to be brief. It cannot be brief. A smartphone is at the top end of complexity for celluar/mobile telecoms. As a computing device, it merges all the ability of a modern laptop with far more complexity of the cellular telecoms networking. Cellphones are the most complex electronic gadgets on the planet and mobile telecoms itself the biggest interconnected system and one with the...
Smoke alarms
Simon Willison: I hate, hate, hate our smoke alarm. Blinking LEDs with no indication of what they mean are bad enough on printers.
Aegir Hallmundur: Why do none of them have a ‘toast reset’ - turns it off for 10 minutes. No wonder so many are broken.
3 tags
rsstroom reader - toilet paper printer! →
3 tags
The Sustainable World and the Triangle of Hope
Sustainability is a trend and a good one at that. I think this quote sums it up quite nicely:
“Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”
A quote from: World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED). Our common future. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987 p. 43. Lets not...
Wire framing kit for Google drawings →
Rise and fall of a UI convention: The search... →
Marlboro tries to evade EU smoking advertisement... →
“In January, Ferrari presented the new Scuderia Marlboro F1 single-seater. (Ferrari is the only Formula One team with a tobacco brand in its formal title, Scuderia Ferrari Marlboro.)
At first glance the car is void of major sponsorship per the rules and has gone relatively unnoticed over the last four months.
Now, however, 4 races into the year, the EU portion of the Formula One season is...
April 2010
31 posts
Free vector silhouettes resource →
“Mostly, designers get paid to negotiate the difficult terrain of individual...”
– Paula Scher in “What they don’t teach you about (identity) design in design schools”
5 tags
Sustainable packaging: PUMA
This shoe box was designed by Yves Behar of Fuseproject. Something they like to call a “Clever Little Bag”.
Teaming up with PUMA to design a new shoe box they set out a goal to design a new shoe box that would greatly reduce their impact on our world. Worth 21 months of research into how to fold them, transport them and how to reduce them they seem to have succeeded in their goal:
“The tens of...
Industrial Design Sketching and Drawing Video... →
Jan Chipchase (former member of the Nokia design... →
Also see his weblog and his TED talk on mobile phones.
“Relativism is fashionable at the moment, and that may hamper you from thinking...”
– Paul Graham in Taste for Makers
“It’s so appealing to think that the work we do can be reduced from infinite...”
– Don’t listen to Le Corbusier or Jakob Nielsen
Dan Ariely’s presentation on TED.com: Are we in... →
Behavioral economist Dan Ariely, the author of Predictably Irrational, uses classic visual illusions and his own counterintuitive (and sometimes shocking) research findings to show how we’re not as rational as we think when we make decisions. With the Dutch organ donor registration as an example.
Why all promotional images of the iPhone show the... →
“Why’s the time changed? Heck, why does the iPhone show 9:42 in the first place?”
Scott Forstall looked around conspiratorially, and then chuckled.
“You want to know the real reason for that time?”
I nodded, with no small amount of eager anticipation.
“We design the keynotes so that the big reveal of the product happens around 40 minutes into the presentation. When the big image of the...
iFixit’s teardowns are an industrial designer’s... →
“User-contributed sneak peeks inside the hottest new gadgets. Comprehensive disassembly photos, hardware analysis, and witty commentary.”
“The way quality works on the web is through links. It works because reputable...”
– Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the web, in Blogging is Great
Why marketing should make the user manuals →
Kathy Sierra of Creating Passionate Users wrote:
“Why do so many companies treat potential users so much better than existing users? Think about it. The brochure is a thing of beauty, while the user manual is a thing of boredom. The brochure gets the big budget while the manual gets the big index.
What if we stopped making the docs we give away for free so much nicer than the ones the user...
Statistical analysis: Republicans cohere,... →
Dating site OkCupid writes:
“Despite the recent hopeful spate of Democratic victories, the fact that Republicans form an exceptionally effective opposition party is undeniable.
Today, we’re going to perform a data-driven investigation of this—and discover some fascinating things about the American electorate along the way. Our data set for this post is 172,853 people.”
If you like this...
The end of SolidWorks as we know it? Hello,... →
“At the recent SolidWorks World Event, held in California last month, SolidWorks CEO Jeff Ray was joined on stage by Dassault Systèmes CEO, Bernard Charlès. This was the first time this had happened and it soon became clear why.
Charlès and Ray were about to present a future vision of SolidWorks based on technology from Dassault’s V6 platform, which includes Catia V6 for design and Enovia V6...
The shrinking middle of the consumer market →
The New Yorker writes:
“In many businesses, high- and low-end producers are taking more and more of the market. In fashion, both H. & M. and Hermès have prospered during the recession. In the auto industry, luxury-car sales are reemerging as one of the most profitable segments of the market. And, in the computer business, the Taiwanese company Acer has become a dominant player by making cheap,...
The making of a ‘handmade-look’ typeface: the 5... →
“Why took the development of the typeface Liza 5 years? After answering this question regularly, we thought it makes sense to write a short text about OpenType-randomness based on the making of Liza Pro.”
“I have learned more about web design from YouPorn.com than from all industry...”
– Marko Bijelic, who claims to be ‘the best web designer alive’
“The iPads are literally chained to the desk with steel cable and a lock. Apple...”
– Michael Arrington explains the precautions Apple took when it delivered iPads to developers before the public launch, in The Unauthorized TechCrunch iPad Review
“Don’t spend money on marketing, do offer flexibility and data exporting to...”
– Case Studies in Freemium: Pandora, Dropbox, Evernote, Automattic and MailChimp on GigaOm
Publications by Hans de Heij on banknote design... →
Delft University of Technology 1979 alumnus Hans de Heij managed the introduction of five new banknotes on behalf of De Nederlandsche Bank (Dutch central bank) during the period 1981-1997. In 2008 he started a Ph.D. research to ‘Key elements in banknote design’ at his old Industrial Design Engineering faculty in Delft.
3 tags
“The Flip’s success stunned the industry, but it shouldn’t have. It’s just the...”
– The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple Is Just Fine in Wired
WatchNOS redacteur Ronald Swart over de evolutie van de vormgeving van Teletekst (3 minuten)
March 2010
7 posts
Energy Star certified 15 out of 20 submitted fake... →
Popular Mechanics writes:
“The Government Accountability Office Punk’d Energy Star recently by submitting fake products and companies for certification. The Environmental Protection Agency’s arbiters of efficiency standards rubber-stamped 15 out of 20 bogus products and a handful of fake firms became Energy Star Partners.”
The more painful the Bloomberg Terminal user... →
“Simplifying the interface of the terminal would not be accepted by most users because, as ethnographic studies show, they take pride on manipulating Bloomberg’s current ‘complex’ interface.
The pain inflicted by blatant UI flaws such as black background color and yellow and orange text is strangely transformed into the rewarding experience of feeling and looking like a hard-core...
“Here is where I make a Big Point. What we want from our technology, in its most...”
– Adam Lisagor, in Adaption
Features gain customers, details keep them
Often the hardest part while designing a product is to decide which features you will support and which you will not. It is easy to just put in that one extra feature, especially with digital systems. And most of the time we, designers, do. We succumb to pressure from the marketing department or a client, so that they can put that one extra bullet point on the functionality list. Nobody cares if...
NOS Election Show, or How Not To Use A Touchscreen
Last week, it was election day for local government in the Netherlands. With voting stations closing at 21:00 hour (GMT+1), the national public broadcaster (NOS) started its live show to present the results per municipality as soon as they were known. Like all election result shows nowadays, it had a mix of presenters, reporters on location, political analysts, and even a Twitter-reporter this...
Starting the Delft Design blog
This weblog will be about design in a broad sense, but mostly about design with common sense. Its origin is rooted in the TU Delft’s IO Alumni association, but the weblog is and will remain editorially independent. There is now one author, me, but there should soon be an extra person. Expect about two to four posts per month, and no ability to comment on posts.
We are based in the Netherlands,...