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This is great… A blog describing new acquisitions and goings-on at the library.

I have no idea if this is widespread now in libraries but it’s the first I’ve come across in my everyday life.

Fantastic.

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A fantastic picture from Porthcawl, the town that I grew up in – taken earlier this evening by Will.

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I wish I’d made it to Geneva in time for the ‘objects that blog’ workshop – this looks to be some of the output: Blog-e-mon.

This sort of kiddie-crack spimeplay-fun will be coming sooner rather than later I imagine…

The more I read, the more I think he is the Magister Ludens.

From a profile in sunday’s Observer:

Now 75, he is able to say: ‘I know who I am and what I like to do, and all I ever wanted was to splosh around with my brushes and palette and show people that painting can be fun. My advice is to just do something you love to do.

‘You need to do something that means you wake up with a smile on your face, and look in the mirror and say, “I really love you, son. Good on ya. Get on with it!” I just feel about 20, still.’

Oh, and George – he’s Welsh-born.

Again – without warranty, very incomplete notes from DUX 2005.

dux day two

————–
“out in the world”
exepriences beyond the desktop

robert fabricant: frog
——-
emotion and culture are the big issues in design for the next 10 yrs
subject is deep relaxation

entrepreneur who had an idea for a new way of managing stress
no concrete ideas – but he did have a name ‘stresseraser’
multi-d team from frog design came together to discover what it would be

what is behind stress:
(piece in HBR this mopnth)

vagus nerve: primary pacifiying nerve in the body
heart rate varialibity

handheld devices: a leading contributor to stress and mobility

big challenge to connect user research to insight and design

talked to people who did yog and meditation
and their ‘mentors’ – teachers etc

principles: touch / routine / ritual
tech responses: feedback / rhythm / reward

on market / people have fallen in love with it…

——
Shelley Evanson: The Sense Chair
people and robots at CMU
compelling robot products for aging communities

developed and prioritised 22 concepts from user research with elders

(shows video of sense chair – lots of disbelief, shaking of heads and giggles from audience about machine that assists people. Extreme lack of empathy with the old and infirm? or with robots? The uncanny. WOuld this response be different if we were in Japan?)

——
SICS / Anna Stahl : EMoto
Emmotional communication in mobile

enhance texts with animations, colour, graphics
colour theory, animation principles

——
Designing an arabic user experience

the talk doesn’t seem to illustrating any deep difference – perhaps cos there isn’t? or is it that I preconceived that there would be some baffling ‘otherness’ about doing it?

——
ritual of coffee making in s. india
the ritual and affordances of the vessels are interconnected – embedded in the utensils

movements involved echo the shapes of the tools = U n

aethestics of the movements in the ritual important

sudden yearning for personal identity in growing countries

cultural languages and movement grammars

——
designing for the chinese migrant worker
neema moraveji: MSR Asia

largest migration in human history: 120m people from villages to cities…

– levels of literacy: not binary – multiple layers of literacy: none/some/local/dialect/more/full/mandarin/pinyin/english
– privacy: community not individuals: not a sin to read someone elses mail
– sync: calling ahead to schedule another call on a shared phone
– no unique ID (official)
– kids trump cost: family and offspring important
– shared displays: shared newspaper reading – pinned out on noticeboards

stylus input
used to spelling by writing in the air with a finger

lists better than maps when it came to identifying home towns

——

Syncromate: supporting digital intimacy
Uni of Melbourne

phatic interactions
stregthen social bonds – create ooportunity
often a neglected part of communications
what goal could tech play?

Well, so far, all I can say definitively is that it’s fully Web2.0 gradient-fill compliant.

Following through a link from Andrew Otwell’s post on Ning, to see in the comments a bottlerocket from Dav Coleman, perhaps reflecting that providing people with Lego-like code lets them ‘play well’:

“they’re a bit like descendants of MUDs when you think about it”

Oh my.

Yes.

Paging Yoz to the red courtesy phone.

A fairly interesting talk, but IMO ducked some major issues, e.g. the rise in discussion about design and ‘design thinking’ (!) in business circles. One of the questioners, Cathal McKee pointedly asked whether he could give the talk the other way round.

Soren Pommer-Hansen
Philips Global Marketing
“How to sell design to business people”

“Our brand is credibility – you can see it from the blue of my powerpoint!”
We asked consumers what our brand would be if it were a person: “middle aged slightly conservative european guy”

450 design professionals out of 164,000 employees
R&D = 11% of sales

like most big organisations, sometimes too much silo thinking – but – design can be a silo too – become inbred! lose ability to communicate to non-designers…

histroy of innovation, but perhaps not great communication behind it – lots of philips inventions are mistakenly credited commonly to sony (audio cassette, CD)

philips invented the ‘play’ button…

new brand positioning

Strong user focus

“simplicity”
|
—————————————————————————–
| | |
designed around you easy to experience advanced

all three of these sub qualities need to be in the product for it to go to market in order to meet the new brand promise: “sense and simplicity”

A mea-culpa on complexity – moritorium on explicit new features…?
people have little tolerance for error on existing understood devices: people donöt want their TV to bluescreen
improve and deliver on the basic promise of devices

business people and design people don’t speak the same language

business people (generally) talk about existing production capabities, markets and channels…

(quotes from manolo blahnik and tom ford… on slide about being realistic about design)

Even when designers and business people speak the same language – the rarely understand each other…

Lack of shared background, “absorptive capacity”, jargon
importance of gatekeepers having translation, diplomatic spanning role.

There are different starting points and little common ground between design and business (?)
collaboration is incredibly difficult in this case.

Where can we find the common ground?

Competing logics on how people (working for the company) see the company – but what does the customer want to see it the company as?

Designer needs to understand the marketeer’s view of the business logic and the customer’s view.

(I’m reminded of the Eames sketch of what designers should think – Soren’s view is missing the societal/global view though…)

Pitching a philips.com redesign: 4 simple messages to the business

websites aligned with all consumer facing initiatives
companies change, so must website (modularity)
success only when business objectives = user requirements
no true website success without constant measuring and evaluation

Value proposition of using philips design for website as given to the business:

understand the phillips brand, the processes of product creation
can use this to align all consumer interaction points: web with packaging, product ,POS etc..

Design seen as user scenarios with business case for each.
performance tracking around design, rather than subjective arguements and debate or design by committee = gradual improvement

Picture of website printout of a product in someone’s hand as they are in the carpark of bestbuy – everything on the site is about getting to this moment!!!

Relate all your points to user-value, and user-value to business value

make sure there are some facts to takeaway – don’t just look for emotional response in the audience to the design work…