I feel these feelings sometimes, too.

Futurecars and artificial spider-silk bulletproof jerkins in one day. Excellent.

BBC News | SCI/TECH | Spider scientists spin tough yarn

Also – perhaps possible to source a new business cliche from this report.

Along with the phrase “that meeting/project/event was like herding cats” we can now maybe add to the cliche-canon “that meeting/project/event was like farming spiders”

“People said ‘Why don’t we farm them [spiders] like we do with gregarious vegetarian silkworms?’,” said Dr Turner. “But spiders are territorial carnivores. They just aren’t suited to farming.”

“Put 10,000 of them in a room and a week later you’d have one mean-looking one left.”

My old university home, Cardiff, strides boldly into the future with sleek, driverless transit-pods.

Amongst the city councils’ planned innovations for the next few years are funky colour-changing crystals to be embeded in everyone’s palms, and a big festival called “Carousel” on everyone’s 30th birthday.

“A test track for a revolutionary new transport system is being launched in Cardiff Bay on Thursday.
The ULTra (Urban Light Transport) scheme involves driverless cars taking passengers around the capital on a dedicated track.”

BBC News | WALES | Supertram test to ease traffic
[link via Matt Webb’s Interconnected.org]

One to add to the list of ammenities the USA has which I wish I had access to in London (this list currently stands at: Noah’s Bagels, Jamba Juice, Taquiera Cancun and microwaveable bacon) – Zipcar is a personality mobility innnovation reminiscent of some of the Ford blue sky work of a few years ago, or the work of Dan Sturges.

Has anyone in the States used Zipcar???

One and half hour video of a lecture Larry Page (co-founder of Google) gave to the HCI course at Stanford.

He gets into his stride on product development at Google around 50 minutes in; but take the time out to enjoy his ruminations on the effects of hardware pricing, energy consumption and energy-density of battery technology!

Speaker: Larry Page Topic: Google is not an anomaly: CS547 Human-Computer Interaction Seminar
[found via Bradlauster.com]

…and more google at The Guardian today: Guardian Online: “Seeking search engine perfection”

“He’s scornful of those who use “swoopy shapes to look good, stuff that is so aggressively designed, just to catch the eye. I think that’s arrogance, it’s not done for the benefit of the user.”

Independent News: Son of iMac: Jonathan Ive on the shape of things to come
[via kottke.org]

After being Down-Under. Many thanks to Eric Scheid of IAWiki.net for showing us around and introducing us to the wonders of Cafe de Wheels in Sydney.

Eric and Mike outside Harry’s Cafe De Wheels, Woolomoloo, Sydney

Also – seen in The Powerhouse Museum, Sydney: a small perspex sign that more than adequately sums up my career…

I’m in Sydney – connecting with the surf, sun and some friends who’ve been travelling round Asia for the last year.

Inbetween sitting on the beach reading books and unsuccessfully battling the Pacific Ocean, I visited the Sydney Powerhouse museum’s Marc Newson exhibition, which showcases the product design career of the London-based Australian.

Based on my limited knowledge of his work, I’d not really been a fan – but the exhibition changed my mind on that and also stirred up some strange emotions about interaction design and practice.

It was revealing to see the chairs, couches, watches, cars and various other objects he’s designed up-close and first-hand; rather than as artfully composed photographs in a glossy design journal. Notably, his later furniture design – the Orgone chair particularly – a topological tour de force; quicksilver curves creating a palpable, tense and perhaps a little threatening enclosed space within itself.

A couple of fawning video interviews with Newson and design-pundits (including the nauseatingly shallow Alice Rawsthorn) dotted around the exhibit did little to shed light on his design philosophy or working practice, other than to identify the cultural influences in his work (Kubrick/2001, Surf/Skate culture, Verner Panton) but did show him to be a designer who’s philosophy is evolving (in fits and starts – riffs on ecological and social responsibility seem at odds with the bespoke Miu-Miu luggage in the boot of his concept-car designs) and who’s work is becoming at once more ambitious/complex, more elegant/simple and more personal.

I really enjoyed the show – I walked out with a changed opinion of Newson’s work, but also with a dark cloud over my head.

It’s the personality of his design – the sheer style he can imbue in each piece that stirred feelings of professional jealousy.

Put aside just for the moment a couple of massive factors – his sheer talent and dogged determination to create something innovative and desirable (I wouldn’t wish for a moment to compare myself to Newson – I’ve never met his little finger, but I dare say I’d have an inferiority complex to the amount of design-mojo in it) and consider what he can do that I/We can’t seem to.

He gets to create a finished thing – a chair, a watch, a car, a bicycle. Ergonomic factors, technical constraints and opportunities combine with design vision to forge an object – that is built, shipped and sold to happy people around the world. Happy people negotiate a dialogue with that object – initially one of desire, then one of use.

That dialogue, that experience is real and satisfying – for the designer and the person experiencing the designers work – far more satisfying than that of the digital/interactive. Despite or perhaps because of the higher degree of connection between the designer and the user.

That’s what I’m jealous of. Making real stuff. Stuff that the basic use and negotiation of – is so instinctive, so second-nature, that the enjoyment of it’s higher qualities is effortless.

But then again, confronted by the ‘ended-ness’ of product – shiny, shrinkwrapped, shelf-stacked straitjacket, do I really feel jealous?

The constraining cathedral of concrete completedness – contrasted against the open-ended, emergent exuberant bazaar of like-it-or-not-open-source-user-centred-user-sabotaged interconnected interactive upside-down, inside-out there-is-no-product-only-process digital design.

Yup. I’m Jealous.

Found at Sylloge, a festive feast of brainfood: Michael and Dethe on ‘Schemas or not’

“Dethe: I think of well-formed XML as core to a notion I’m beginning to form, called “Chaos Tools.” Chaos tools are the things which help us manage our lives in a free-form, organic, people-oriented world, as opposed to table-driven, math-focused, rigid tools currently populating the world’s computers.”

gets bored over the holiday period, then would you like to redesign my blog for me?

I need to get the archives and comments working with their own dedicated templates and I’d like to move over to using all that fancy stylesheet stuff, but I’m no good at it at all.

The Brief:
I’d kind of like to keep the stuff in the top-left i.e. my logotype such-as-it-is, and the ‘box nav’, and keep the look/feel tied to the homepage etc, but if you feel I am in need of a radical reconceptualisation and repositioning as a brand, then please feel free. If any of you are of a typographic bent, I’d love some nice crisp readable CSS action to be going on.

Project Process:
If you want to do some designs, post ’em up somewhere and point to them by adding a comment to this entry.

The Pay-Off:
When I get back from my holiday, we’ll have a group-crit, and a winner… instead of a blackbeltjones no-prize, I’ll reward the winners and two runners-up with a random selection from their amazon wish-list if they have one set up.

And hey, don’t think this is just because I’m a lazy charlatan who can’t code for toffee… This could be fun!