Archive Page 3

The Fune: “It’s Really Hot!”

20Aug09

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.

Solving England’s Plug Size Problem

23Jun09

When 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

30Mar09

Full 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.