I know some of these are cheap shots, but I had more than a few chuckles with this parody.
I particularly liked the monstrously bad user interface and industrial design, and how it mimics old ‘rotary’ phones.
Archive Page 3
The Fune: “It’s Really Hot!”
20Aug09When I lived in England, believe it or not, everybody had to be an amateur electrician. I’m really showing my age, but back in the mid 80’s there wasn’t a common universal plug throughout England, so you had to buy your plug separately from the ‘flex’ which they called the electrical cord. I’m serious. You bought your appliance, lamp or other electrical device (I remember that in my case, it was a radio/cassette tape recorder), and then you bought a plug ‘kit’, which let you splice the plug on to the flex. You had to attach your plug yourself to any consumer electronics. It’s almost laughable, but that’s what the state of electrical standards adoption was in late-20th century England.
Eventually, the UK did standardize on a plug, but it ended up being the largest and bulkiest plug you’ve ever seen, including a fuse inside the plug itself. It was almost as if the Brits only begrudgingly accepted this newfangled invention of electricity, and decided that they were going to only allow you to use it if you had the proper muscle power to hold and manage these huge electrical plugs. The notion that you’d carry around an electrical device that needed to be plugged in hadn’t even been entered into the equation.
When people started carrying around laptops, the large size of UK plugs became even more troublesome. In the case of a Macbook Air, the UK plug was several times thicker than the laptop itself. Enter a clever designer and an ingenious design to the rescue. This video shows how a folding approach not only allows one to carry around a slim plug and unfold it when needed, but actually creates a new, secondary standard, where all of the prongs are still accessible but in a folded state, so a whole bunch of these folded plugs can be plugged into an adapter, which is plugged into the wall in its unfolded state (or perhaps, a new sort of power strip, built for the folded prong arrangement). To see what I mean, have a look at the video. It shows that sometimes good industrial design can almost work miracles. Lets hope this idea catches on:
Information Design Gone Wild
30Mar09Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
— from Ariel’s Song, The Tempest by William Shakespeare
I loved the almost anal-retentive display of data through a heads-up display about the scenery and other details in the opening scenes of the movie ‘Stranger than Fiction’:
Now, imagine that kind of data display about everything; The chemicals in the soil around you, the wavelengths of light as they strike your skin, the building materials of the structures you walk by; all are a sea of data that is not so much invisible as it is inaccessible. Now imagine, if you had a heads-up display on your glasses (or on contact lenses, as is suggested in Vernor Vinge’s Novel Rainbow’s End). If you are ‘wearing’ as Vinge calls it, you now have the possibility of superimposing all sorts of data on top of the reality you see around you. In fact, if you prefer, you can replace that reality with one as rich and strange as you like.
Rather than a real place, what if this were done with, say, a Fairy Tale. Tomas Nilsson, a design student at Sweden’s Linköping University, decided to do just this with the Little Red Riding Hood story, which started out as a class project:
As computing and access to data becomes more ubiquitous, I think this will start to change our view of reality. It’s a subtle thing, but the fact that many people now carry some sort of device (either a smart phone or a portable GPS device), so they are never truly lost. That’s a big change of their reality, right from the start.
The other evening, my iPhone had some problems, so I headed home to try and fix it (I did, the software needed to be reinstalled). The ride on the bus felt very strange without being able to listen to podcasts or music. I couldn’t check the time. I couldn’t call anyone, or check my email. It wasn’t until then did I realize how much I rely on this little brick of metal and glass.
