drucker.ca

Through the usual way that one stum­bles upon some­thing on the Inter­net (by…stumbling upon it), I found the web site of the Art Lebe­dev stu­dio, who have become known because of a break­through key­board that has been talked about (and wished for) for quite some time. The key­board has struck a chord (pun intended) with a lot of geeks, because it’s one of those ‘I wish I’d thought of that’ kind of prod­ucts. Each key is an LCD, and can be pro­grammed to both dis­play a dif­fer­ent char­ac­ter and type that char­ac­ter (or per­form that func­tion) when pressed. Here’s what that could mean:

Set for Eng­lish: (lower case)

Those same keys set for Photoshop:

Wait, what it if was set for the game Quake?

On top of this extra­or­di­nary key­board, there is also a bril­liant, if less ergonom­i­cally spot-on mouse:

In addi­tion to these bits of Indus­trial design (and geek fancy-tickling), Mr. Lebe­dev, who along with his stu­dio, is in Moscow, also writes a sort of blog, although it is not an RSS feed (but I wish he would make it so) called Man­der­ship. Accord­ing to Mr. Lebe­dev, it’s been a project since 1997 (which would account for it’s pre-RSS struc­ture). I also notice that the most recent entry is in 2006. I hope he does another few this year. Nearly all of the posts I read were gems of clear think­ing about design, the way the world works, and the way peo­ple think. No won­der he and his com­pa­tri­ots at his stu­dio keep com­ing up with such bril­liant prod­ucts, even if some of them are harder to bring out of the con­cept stage.