Tag Archives: design

The luxury of convenience

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

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.

Pulse of a city

Today we took a tram ride that gave us a nice view of Barcelona. On a bus tour I heard that many areas of the city have maximum height restrictions for buildings that are under 20 metres, with a floor zero at the bottom and then 5 floors above that are for residential apartments. So, overall the city does not have many tall buildings. This was made very obvious by the way La Sagrada Famíliai, architect Guadi’s famous church, sticks out in the skyline.

We have a guided tour of the church planned for tomorrow, followed by a walking tapas tour in the evening. But we have already done a lot of walking around the city and have had a good ‘taste and feel’ of city life here.

It’s fascinating to see how the city is designed for pedestrians. Many roads are single lane and one-way with wide walkways, rather than two-way with little room for a walkway since buildings were originally built on foundations too close for both modern cars and roomy sidewalks.

Outdoor eating spaces are everywhere, and if there is a gap in the buildings, there is a courtyard with tables and/or benches.

The city is made for people to be outside, which makes sense when there are only apartments in tight spaces as opposed to single dwelling homes with back yards. Where the design falters a little is that many of these homes were original laid out with nice courtyards which made sense when they were on a single floor, but now with 5-level apartments these spaces seem to be devoured by multilevel private and semiprivate balconies and terraces. So the public outdoor spaces become even more important.

Barcelona has a pulse of people living outside their homes. Coffee and pastry shops are seen everywhere, and what looks like a back alley is also a place with storefronts and restaurants. The city is designed for people first and cars afterwards. Mopeds line the walkways, and there is a blend of bikes and scooters both electric and not, as well as skateboards making their way around pedestrians. Even as I was walking and editing this post, a car and moped came down what I thought was a sidewalk, but was actually a one-way road with a street light at the end of it. But both vehicles were going very slow and accommodating, the pedestrians walking past in both directions.

A city for people first, then cars.

Creativity with time constraints

I’ve learned over the years that whenever I try to do something creative it always takes much longer than I thought it would. The moment there is a design element to something I’m working on, I will spend too long tweaking it, and making it better. I actually need to give myself time constraints.

If I wrote in the evening with nothing on my agenda, I’d take over an hour to write this, but in the morning, I don’t want to miss my meditation or workout so I have to get writing. I have to write before I meditate, or I’ll spend my meditation time thinking about my writing.

When I edited my Halloween video I gave myself a 3 hour time limit and got it done in less than 2.5 hours. But when I watched it the next day, I thought of several clever edits I could have added. I had to convince myself that it was good enough or I would have spent well over another hour editing. It’s my nature to tinker, tweak, and just throw more time into something creative.

So for me, time constraints are a key strategy to get creative work done, because I could dive deep into something and time just flies by. I get lost in the flow of being creative, but my time isn’t well utilized. If you want me to really get my creative juices flowing then give me a realistic, but really tight timeline.

Shadow play

We recently did a first floor renovation. We created an open concept, taking down the walls between our kitchen, dining room, living room, and front entrance. We love it. A few months later I have to say that there isn’t much I’d change. But there is one surprise we didn’t expect.

It turns out that where we our our kitchen island lines up with our big from windows at a perfect angle to create a shadow line exactly on the line between the drawer shelf and the bottom cupboards at our kitchen sink. So, it looks like we painted these two sections different shades of white.

At night, when no light comes through the front window, you can see that the cupboards are the same colour, but any bright time of day the colour difference is significant. We couldn’t know this in advance. It would have looked like a shadow if the line didn’t sit right at the break between the two sections. And we are just going to have to live with it.

Not a big deal, but totally not expected. When designing our space the idea of thinking about how shadows would change the look of our furniture was not on our radar, and in all honesty, even if it was I don’t think we would have caught this.

So if you ever come over to our place in the daytime, no, we didn’t paint these cupboards two different shades of white. And we didn’t plan this… it’s just the way the shadows and light play.

Public spaces

It’s interesting how we think of social media as our main public spaces. When did that happen? I’m not going to wax poetic about the way things used to be, instead I’m going to ask what could be possible?

How could we create richer public spaces? What would draw people to these places? When is the last time you went to an evening presentation in a library? Or a concert in a park? (As opposed to a bar, nightclub, or theatre.)

Where can we close traffic to cars and create larger spaces for meeting and socializing?

Do we have to run special events or can we create spaces that people want to go to because they are public, open, and free?

Maybe what we have is enough, but I can’t help but wonder if we couldn’t design better public spaces, or even better neighbourhoods, that invite people to be more connected face to face. And if we did design these spaces better, would they be used? I think it’s worth thinking about, and trying. As more and more people flock to bigger and bigger communities and cities, high rises are taking over the landscape. With greater density comes greater opportunity to find like-minded people to be social with… and our public spaces should be designed to consider this.

Sometime technology s(UX)

I used to have one remote for my TV, now I have 3. One of them is for my sound bar. When I turn the sound bar on, (on its own, it turns on automatically for the tv), in order to connect to my phone. Before I can click the input options, I need to wait 6 or 7 seconds while the sound bar scrolls ‘WELCOME’ across its small screen 3 or 4 times.

Just now I decided I want to have a song on repeat on my phone and it took me over a minute to figure out how to do this. Sure, I was given the choice to do many things with the song…

But the simple option to hit repeat was elusive on the main screen.

Yesterday I wanted to drag a song into GarageBand and it kept being added at 4 times the speed. I found out GarageBand needs the song to be a specific speed. I checked, same speed. Then I learned it had to be a specific format, so I had to duplicate the song in the new format. Now I’ve got two versions of the song in iTunes and need to delete one, but which one, they look identical in iTunes? 3 years ago this was a seamless activity that I never struggled with no matter what format I worked with.

Is it just me or is technology getting more confusing and less user-friendly. And no, my sound bar scrolling ‘WELCOME WELCOME WELCOME WELCOME’ while being fully inoperative is NOT user friendly!

I want to use my credit card at a gas station, not only must I put in my pin, I need to say how much I want to spend as a maximum. Every instant teller I go to asks me what language I want to work in… how hard would it be for the machine to know my preference after asking once? And as for autocorrect… it’s getting worse, not better.

I love my tech, but it seems to me that technology is all about adding features, and not about user experience (UX). The user is forgotten as new bells and whistles are added. Or things are so locked down that I need Face ID, a confirmation text, and coming soon, a DNA scan. Between new features and new security measures, there seems little time spent thinking about what the experience is for the end user.

So for any tech designers out there, here is a little tip, we don’t need to be greeted by inanimate objects, and if we are, allow us to actually use the object while it’s welcoming us.