Tag Archives: design

Ashtrays and Newspaper Racks

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If you are Gen X, then at some point in your schooling you probably made your parents an ashtray out of clay. I did, and my parents didn’t even smoke. And if you were in a woodworking class you probably made some sort of newspaper or magazine rack, which was something your parents might have had in your living room. Depending on how good it was, this wooden creation may or may not have been as prominently displayed in your house as the ashtray. But these were a couple ‘practical’ things we made in school ‘back in the day’.

Both my daughters, who went to different middle schools, made gum ball machines out of wood, which used a mason jar to hold the gum balls. And I think for both of them the other option was a birdhouse. These were their versions of ashtrays and newspaper racks.

I bet most kids today will come home from school at some point with a 3D printed keychain. Most houses don’t have ashtrays, or newspapers or even magazines. Most parents wouldn’t know where to go to buy loose gum balls to put in a school made gum ball machine. Times change and so do the crafts students create at school.

Some of the other things students might (and do) create at school these days include: Apps, websites, and online businesses. These are the modern day ashtrays. A bit more practical, and a lot more relevant. That said, I hope kids still get a chance to work with clay and wood. I still want to see art that is 3D but not 3D printed. No one needs a newspaper rack or gum ball machine but bird houses can still be made.

There are cookie-cutter style ‘everyone makes the same design’ kind of bird houses, and then there are versions of the same project which are open to design thinking and personalization. And it really doesn’t have to be a bird house… just a hands-on creation using tools rather than a keyboard. But when I said, “I still want to see art that is 3D but not 3D printed.” I also should have mentioned that I want kids to also 3D print things.

The message of this little, nostalgic visit down memory lane isn’t just to say bring back the old hands-on projects, and do away with the new ones. Rather it’s to say we need both. We need students creating physical crafts, with their hands, at school and we need them designing new digital products with new tools as well. I’d be a bit concerned if kids today came home with ashtrays, but I’d still love to see them producing creative works that involve building and creating physical things with their hands.

I also wonder what the 2050 version of the school made ashtray will be?

Nature-centric design

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I came across this company, Oxman.com, and it defines Nature-centric design as:

Nature-centric design views every design construct as a whole system, intrinsically connected to its environment through heterogeneous and complex interrelations that may be mediated through design. It embodies a shift from consuming Nature as a geological resource to nurturing her as a biological one.
Bringing together top-down form generation with bottom-up biological growth, designers are empowered to dream up new, dynamic design possibilities, where products and structures can grow, heal, and adapt.

Here is a video, Nature x Humanity (OXMAN), that shows how this company is using glass, biopolymers, fibres, pigments, and robotics for large scale digital manufacturing, to rethink architecture to be more in tune with nature and less of an imposition on our natural world.

Nature x Humanity (OXMAN) from OXMAN on Vimeo.

This kind of thinking, design, and innovation excites me. It makes me think of Antoni Gaudi styled architecture except with the added bonus of using materials and designs that are less about just the aesthetic and more about the symbiotic and naturally infused use of materials that help us share our world with other living organisms, rather than our constructions imposing a cancer-like imposition on our world, scarring and damaging the very environment that sustains our life.

Imagine living in a building that allows more natural air flow, is cheaper to heat and cool, and has a positive emissions footprint, while also being a place that makes you feel like you are in a natural rather than concrete environment. Less corners, less uniformity, and ultimately less institutional homes, schools, and office buildings, which are more inviting, more naturally lit, and more comfortable to be in.

This truly is architectural design of the future, and it has already started… I can’t wait to see how these kinds of innovations shape the world we live in!

Calculated Misery

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I recently watched this TikTok, about ‘calculated misery’.

It starts off with the idea that social media platforms are going to work together to get us to pay or pay more for their services. It’s no longer enough that we have to watch ads to play along. I notice it when I watch YouTube on my phone and I’m regularly asked if I want to upgrade to avoid ads. Meanwhile I’m also watching more ads that I can’t skip after 5 seconds.

My Twitter feed is filled with ‘blue checkmark’ profiles where that check costs anyone $8 a month to have, regardless of if their content or expertise is valuable to me. And meanwhile, my checkmark-less profile is being viewed less often than those who pay.

Also discussed in the video is how airlines use calculated misery to upsell you. The carry-on suitcase I bought 15 years ago used to be good on any airline, now it needs to be checked on many of them. Leg room has been reduced, and while tickets used to include choice of seats, now that’s something you need to upgrade or pay more for to get. You want a meal or beverage on a 5 hour flight? Those used to be free, but many airlines charge for them now.

It used to be that the basic price was good enough, and upgrades gave you perks, but now it seems anything less than premium is meant to suck a little bit, meant to be just enough misery to make you want to pay more. Even amusement parks are doing it, giving people privileged access in lineups if they pay more. And it’s hard to be in line and watch others get priority over you.

We’ve moved from an era of customer value and service being a priority to an era where profits matter more. It’s a world where customers are made less comfortable, unless they pay a premium, and the benefits are really to shareholders. Essentially, services are getting gradually worse, and misery is creeping in… unless you pay a little bit more.

Process, product, and purpose

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I love this quote from David Jakes:

“Design creates useful things. Much has been written by various educators about valuing process over product, but in the real world, people create things. It’s easy to value process over product when the product is a grade or points on a test. In your classroom, shift from a transactional approach to a design-based transformational one where the product has value and meaning to students and has the potential to impact intellectual growth, spark personal development, or contribute to improving the human condition.”

There is a lot of talk about process over product. However this comparison is built on a false dichotomy. It’s not about one over the other, rather it’s process with the purpose of producing a product.

For example, when looking at design thinking, we start with empathy for the end user. The final product is the goal, it’s the purpose we are designing for, but the process of design thinking is the journey we go on.

So, it’s not process over product, it’s process with purpose. The final product is important, be it a presentation, an app, a business or business plan, a play, or a piece of art. How you get there is important too. Understanding the purpose, having a real reason to produce a final product is the reason to go through the process.

What’s exciting is having students learn, value, and be motivated to go through the process to get to that final product. That’s a shift from a more traditional test, or a cookie-cutter assignment where everyone produces an identical final product. Instead the students are part of the process, and understand the purpose of getting to the final product… which they have constructed or co-constructed.

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Here is a specific example: There are a couple educators from the Northwest Territories coming to visit us at Inquiry Hub. They are heading this way to see Trevor Mackenzie on Vancouver Island, and he recommended they come visit our school. Unfortunately the only day they can come is a professional development day when there are no kids at our school. So, I asked 6 kids if they would be willing to come in and present to these teachers.

Once they agreed, I sent this in an email to the teachers coming to visit:

“As an FYI, I’ll be handing over the presentation fully to the students, they will design what it looks like. With the design thinking model in mind, the big question is “What does the end user want/need”… so, please give me a short write-up of what you are looking for.

They will give you the shape of our day, what the student experience is like, but beyond that what do you want to get out of the visit? Whatever you share is exactly what I’ll be sharing with them to prepare with.”

Our students will design the presentation, they will understand the purpose of their final product, and while the process is important, and while they have had a ton of practice producing great presentations, they know that delivering a good final presentation to an authentic audience is what will matter in the end.

It’s not one over the other, it’s process for the purpose of a good final product.

User Interface and user experience

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It’s a delicate balance: providing a multitude of options and also creating a good user interface that isn’t confusing. Today I went to an online menu and there were several options that only showed up as buttons with tiny icons on the top right of the screen. I would never had known there were other options available if my friend hadn’t mentioned these tiny bubbles were whole other menus.

The concept was good, not overwhelming the page with too many options. The interface was bad, putting tiny icons at the top of the page, which I wouldn’t be looking for as I head to the menu. These icons are not what I came to the page to see, and not having them either float on the screen as I scrolled down or added at the bottom of all the other choices, lacked usability.

This is where design thinking, and focusing on the needs of the end user are so important. Why add features a user either doesn’t see or doesn’t know how to access? Why create unnecessary steps, extra features that are challenging to use, or pop up screens that break the flow of creativity or general use? The answer is almost always that the disconnect is unintentional. Good ideas, bad user interface… bad from the perspective of the end user.

The starting question might be ‘what does the user want’? But the question that most needs to be thought about is ‘what is the user experience?’ The experience is what ultimately matters.

The luxury of convenience

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I had a chuckle today in the grocery store. A woman rushed by me, grabbed an item of of the shelf and keep going almost in a single motion. She was obviously in a hurry. She was also on her cell phone and the part of the conversation I caught was, …”Seriously, I wish our damn phones were still connected to our walls with a wire.” The irony of her saying this on a very portable phone wasn’t lost on me.

I then went to Starbucks and sat for a few minutes having a breakfast sandwich. Our local store is newly renovated and it both looks and feels really nice. They expanded the serving area without taking much seating away, and the order pickup area has a large section with the alphabet in 3 rows to help people find their order by name much faster. However, when I went to dispense my garbage I realized that the only recycling and disposal bins were at the back of the store next to the washrooms. This is not remotely convenient.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, when we were doing our main floor renovation last year, we knew we wanted a coffee station on the small counter next to our fridge. It wasn’t part of the original plan, but I requested a sink be added to the counter. I thought about how after the coffee has been pressed on our espresso machine, we would want to rinse out the portafilter, and it would be really inconvenient to walk this over to our kitchen sink about 15 feet away, while it dripped coffee. Between making coffees and rinsing out the wet cat food containers for our cat, there are days I use this sink more than the main kitchen sink.

 On a completely different topic, Zoom calls can be great to bring people together, when geography can be challenging, but it can also be a complete time suck with added opportunities for meetings to happen, when a memo or email would be faster. A memo instead of a Zoom call can free up a lot of time that a meeting can steal from the efficiency of a more productive day.

There’s no doubt that having a mobile phone provides considerable convenience compared to phones with a spiral cord connected to it, in a fixed location. But we can’t deny the distraction that these smart phones have created, taking time away from us. So their convenience comes with a fair bit of inconvenience as well. 

I think people often spend a lot of time thinking about how one thing can be convenient and through a lack of design thinking forget about how other things also need to be convenient. It is true that sometimes one convenience needs to be a sacrificed, and not everything can be equally as convenient. The new Starbucks layout is definitely more convenient for the employees, but they really missed the mark, making it less convenient for customers. That’s a luxury that shouldn’t be missed. 

Empty Malls

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We went to the mall nearest to my parent’s house and I was shocked to see about 60% of the stores closed. The grocery store and drug store were busy, but while my mom waited for a prescription I went looking for a coffee, and the rest of the mall was almost empty. The closest I got to finding coffee was a Subway and Booster Juice, both with no customers in the stores. Both had shuttered, empty sores next to them.

The strip mall and small malls that we’ve known for decades are dead. There won’t be a revival. Amazon, eBay, Etsy, and other online shopping sites are in direct competition with these malls and unless someone is pulled to these malls by the need for groceries or a prescription, none of the other few remaining stores will get a visit.

That said, all malls won’t die just the stand-alone ones. The newest form of densification in cities is to build a mall or commercial level shopping below high rises… stack the customers on top of the shopping spaces and make the mall convenient to visit. You don’t even need to put on a coat to visit the mall, it’s just a trip down the elevator, or a walk through an underground parking lot.

Goodbye strip mall. They will all be torn down and revived only when a few hundred condos are built above the mall space. You want customers in your mall? Make the mall an extension of their living space. Until that happens, you’ll see more and more empty, shut down, and abandoned stores… Malls that are mere shells of what they used to be.

Monochromatic cars

In a world of flashy outfits and accessories how has the car remained a single colour for so long? I understand that for some people resale value is important, but there are a lot of old cars out there just waiting to become someone’s work of art. We live in a world where so many people do things to stick out, but car paint has stayed monochrome. One colour per car.

I think this is going to change a lot in the next few years. We are going to see some crazy looking cars, and people will use them to express their identity, their uniqueness. Maybe not just artwork, maybe different colours for different parts of the car. Shades of a colour accented with darker hues on fenders and over wheels. A complementary colour on the hood.

It’s coming. Flashy cars for flashy personalities. And crazy artwork for people wanting to express their love for creativity. It’s just a matter of time.

Technological leaps

I’ve been very interested in bicycle gadgets for a while. I designed a backpack for bicycle commuters and patented a bicycle lock, both things that I’ll share in detail here at a later date. But today I want to share a brilliant, even revolutionary new advancement in bicycle design.

This Ultra-Efficient Bike Has No Chains and No Derailleurs

This video explains how it works:


Absolutely brilliant! No more chains, much more efficiency. Wireless electronic shifting and a split pinion that adjusts to the next gear while still engaged with the previous gear.

This isn’t just a better design, it’s a leap forward. I have questions around how it would perform in dirt and mud, and reliability in ‘the real world’, but those are things that can be tweaked over time. The reality is that this isn’t a tweak, it’s a fundamental shift in design that is going to change the future designs of bicycles, and other drive shaft designs, in the years to come.

Amazing!

La Sagrada Família

The work of architect Antoni Gaudí is something you will probably have an opinion on, but I think that opinion can vary significantly thinking him a creative designer or a wacky artist. It’s easy to wonder if he every did hallucinogenic drugs when looking at some of his work.

When we saw one of his buildings last night, Casa Batlló, my daughters said it reminded them of Whoville, from Horton Hears a Who.

Today we visited La Sangrada Família, the church that Guadí dedicated most of his life to building and that is still being constructed today. An interesting thing about this church is that the intricate decorations and religious reliefs are all outside to appeal to the masses to come to church.

Inside is grand with vastly open ceiling space, and columns that resemble trees.

And beautiful stained glass windows.

I’m a fan of unconventional design. I love the merger between art and life, pillars like trees, uniquely shaped spaces, and the blend of curves integrated neatly with straight lines. I think Gaudi was brilliant and wish that his architecture had a greater influence on buildings designed today.

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One more shot, taken later after a tapas tour.