In his last year as a student at the London School of Communications, designer Daniel Britton was diagnosed with dyslexia. When Britton told his classmates and teachers about his diagnosis though, they just stared at him. They thought he was stupid. They thought he was lazy. They thought he was just slow.
So Britton decided to show them how it felt to be dyslexic. He designed a font, also called Dyslexia, which simulates the sense of frustration a dyslexic feels when he or she tries to read. Taking Helvetica as its base, Britton's font subtracts roughly 40% of the typeface's lines, to make one of the most readable typefaces around a veritable struggle to read.
That 40% isn't scientific: Britton admits that dyslexics don't necessarily have a 40% diminished ability to read than normal. It's just the rough average of the sweet spot he reached, trying to reduce Helvetica to a median between total unreadability and just enough visual information to labor through, albeit with vastly diminished reading times.
According to Britton, he's not trying to recreate the visual experience of dyslexia, which he thinks is ridiculously mischaracterized in the media. "At least in the UK, awareness ads will represent text as seen by dyslexics as a bunch of blurry letters, or an upside-down letter form," Britton says. "At least for me, that's not what it's like at all. It's more like text looks normal, but the part of my brain that decodes it just isn't awake."
And Britton thinks he's been successful in trying to convey what the learning disability is like. "When I showed it to classmates, they were suddenly like, 'Oh! Okay. I get it,'" he says. "Which is all I needed to hear."
Britton's font didn't just make his friends and classmates better understand his condition. It got him a job.
"My professor turned out to know someone in Parliament who oversaw the local commission on raising dyslexia awareness," Britton says. So now he does that, coming up with new designs that better represent the dyslexic condition, and replacing the very awareness ads that he hated.
Dyslexia isn't yet available as a downloadable font, but Britton hopes he can make that happen soon. In the meantime, you can see more of his design work here.
Flipboards, those hypnotic relics of an analog age, are making a coming back. The latest example, now on Kickstarter, conveys anything from your Twitter followers to your company's beta countdown as a clicking susurrus of flipping cards.
The Miot is a wooden box that emulates the old departure boards in railway stations. And it works basically the same way: with six cards, each of which tumbles over itself to reveal a given character or number. The main distinction is the information it displays.
One of the central ideas behind Miot is that you should be able to use it to display any information you want. For example, the Miot can let you know you received an email, show you the temperature of your home town, show today's weather forecast, let you know how many Facebook "likes" you have, Kickstarter pledges you've raised, or even just show you the time. You can add hack any service you can think of into the Miot, and add new cards to the device so that, in addition to numbers and letters, the Miot can show the icons of your favorite Internet services.
We've seen throwback analog signage before. A couple years back, Berg tried to reinvent the message board by harnessing the technology behind old bus terminal signs. Essentially flipping analog pixels around using electromagnets, that tech is actually a lot more sophisticated than what Miot is doing. Perhaps that's why Berg never brought its sign to market, while Miot looks like it will ship by the end of the year.
Made in Valencia, Spain, the Miot Kickstarter is currently taking pre-orders. A miniature Miot which can only display one digit goes for around $167, while a full-featured Miot with up to six digits costs $300. They ship in December, and you can order one here.
The articulated desk lamp hasn't changed much over the last 100 years. The Fade Task Light, though, might be one of the best designs in table lighting since the Banker Lamp. It is sleek, it has almost no moving parts, it articulates over 120 degrees through bending alone, and it can simulate almost any natural lighting condition, from overcast noon to nuclear sunset, thanks to cutting-edge LED technology.
The Fade Task Light was designed by Fade Studio, a new lighting specific company headed by former fuseproject designers Bret Recor and Seth Murray, who broke off of fuseproject a couple years back to form Box Clever, designers of the Kube speaker and Runcible, a compass-shaped smartphone.
According to Recor, the idea for a desk lamp came to them when they changed studios, and lost the magnificent, hue-streaked sunrise and sunset vistas of their old industrial estate location. It got Box Clever thinking about how they could bring such lighting—or, indeed, any other kind of natural lighting—with them.
But how to bring it to market? Box Clever didn't want to launch a Kickstarter. "We have a lot of respect for Kickstarter, but the truth is, a lot of Kickstarters don't deliver," Recor says. "They make big promises, they rack up a lot of pledges, and then the reality of bringing a product at scale comes crashing in, leading to the design being scaled back in all sorts of ways."
So they created Fade Studio with the intent of selling the Fade Task Light directly to the public, keeping quality high by manufacturing in small batches, as needed. To do so, they teamed up with Scott Soong, a sort of Gandalfian wizard of the Taiwanese R&D and manufacturing chains. Together, they came up with a sleek, modern design that would be suitable for small batch manufacturing, while still perfectly encapsulating Dieter Ram's 10 principles of good design.
Where as most desk lamps are made up of numerous moving parts, the Fade Task Light is made up of a single piece of steel, which can bend over 120 degrees. Magnets inside the steel skeleton help the Fade hold its shape. On the base of the lamp is a floating dial which can be used to adjust the Fade's five LEDs between multiple light levels (from 30 to 280 lumens) and a temperature range of 2700 to 5600 K in color. Meanwhile, a USB port in the base allows you to also use the Fade as a smartphone or device charger.
Leaving aside such lofty concepts as elegance, designing with as few moving parts as possible is beneficial for a number of reasons. For one, less parts means less parts that can break; it also cuts down on the things that can go wrong in the manufacturing process, which is important for a company that wants to remain nimble by making production runs as small as possible. That, in turn, helps keep the price relatively low: the Fade Task light's MSRP is $250, although it is being introduced at a lower price of $200.
If you've only ever bought a lamp at Ikea, that price probably seems expensive. If you've ever tried to buy a designer lamp from anywhere else, though, it's practically a steal—especially for a design that looks this streamlined, effortless, and trim. You can order one now from Fade Studio.
Dropbear Digital is a film and animation studio based out of Melbourne, Austria. Founded by designer Jonathon Chong, Dropbear specializes in stop-motion music videos and commercials.
Its latest video, for the track Quack Fat by New Zealand born artist Opiuo, is really a delight. A stop-motion extravaganza of throwback audio accessories and vintage gaming, the video uses 240 cassettes, 56000 feet of video tape, 108 floppy discs, a vintage boomback and one retro Walkman to make it all come to life. It's like a dream you'd have if you nodded off in a Sam Goody store circa 1987.
The track itself is a little unfortunate, but even with the sound off, this is a gem of a video. Watch old analog tapes become pixels for stop-motion games of Pong, Space Invaders, 3.5-inch floppy discs become Tetris pieces, or a vintage Walkman waddle around like a mother duck.
It's all weird, and kind of random, but how else do you make a music video for a track whose signature beat is the sound of a synthesizer repetitively quacking. In another context, though, it's easy to imagine this video playing on a Children's Television Workshop show like Sesame Street or Electric Company.
I'm a chronic drinker. Water, coffee, tea, beer, cocktails, whatever's in front of me: I guzzle it down. It's basically an oral fixation, informed less by thirst than a nervous tic that good ol' Doctor Freud would doubtlessly arch an eyebrow at. My wife, on the other hand, will forget to drink water for the better part of a day.
I think I should probably get her this water bottle, then: it begins glowing to remind you to take a sip.
It's called the HidrateMe, and think of it as the water bottle equivalent of the notification light on a Blackberry. The bottle syncs with your phone over Bluetooth to track your water intake thanks to a tiny sensor inside that can tell whenever you drink and how much. A connected app then applies that to your daily water goal, which the app calculates based on your height, weight, and sex.
To be honest, the fact that we, as a species, think we need water bottles that tell us when to drink water is kind of stupid. If it weren't for the fact that my very smart wife has this exact same problem, I'd dismiss the HidrateMe as the first Kickstarter ever launched by a Darwin Award nominee. As it is, though, I find myself wondering if getting my wife a bottle like this would mean I wouldn't have to send her the following text message twice a day: "Have you had enough water today?"
It also helps that, for a water bottle, the HidrateMe is very attractive. The 24-ounce bottle itself is made of BPA-free, dishwasher-safe plastic, and features a lidded, fractal design that resembles a phosphorescent icicle. The battery lasts one year, and available colors are iceberg white, bamboo green, ocean teal, crystal pink, and obsidian black.
Now on Kickstarter, the HidrateMe is available for pre-order starting at $45. Get one here.
"Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like,"Steve Jobs once said. "That's not what we think design is. It's not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works."
It's an ironic quote, given the countless examples of Apple making "how it works" an afterthought, especially in software. What about iTunes, MobileMe, and Apple Maps? What about the unpredictable Siri, the wildly inconsistent Apple Watch UI, or, for that matter, the completely broken iOS Shift Key? How well do any of these things "work"? For a long time, Apple could get away with these occasional lapses, because in most ways, it was just light years beyond the competition when it came to industrial design and painting beautiful pixels.
How things change. Yesterday at WWDC, Apple spent a bloated 270 minutes announcing fix after fix for what's broken in the company's software and services across two new versions of its operating systems, iOS 9 and OS X El Capitan (really). For iOS 9, Apple announced a successor for Newsstand, the company's broken attempt to bring magazines to the iPhone and iPad, with News, a Flipboard-like news curating app. For both OS X El Capitan and iOS 9, Apple announced Apple Music, not just a new streaming music service but a tacit admission it was time to drag iTunes to the glue factory. And for both iOS and OS X again, the company is trying to unbreak Siri by allowing it to proactively recommend apps and tie machine learning into search results, effectively turning it into iOS's version of Google Now. And so on.
Google NowGoogle
What's important about these developments? First of all, all of the announcements are stuff other companies are already doing, from Spotify to Facebook to Android. Second: They're all about algorithms, search, curation, and deep learning, not what we usually think of as "design." This year's WWDC was a tacit admission that Apple needed to play catch-up. Cupertino spent so much energy over the past five years paying attention to the surface details of their products, it ignored a seismic shift in the industry: AI is the new UI
That's a hard pill to swallow for some. For years, Apple fans (like me!) sneered at Android. "Look at this gross-looking OS those search engine eggheads have put together," we said. Where Android stole from iOS, it was merely derivative; where it was wholly original, it was just appalling. "Why doesn't Google just leave the design to Apple and do what it does best: all that crazy search and machine learning shit no one else wants to do?" we asked ourselves.
The thing is, Google knew something we didn't. It knew that Apple's taste was a temporary advantage. It knew that designing a host of functional, universally integrated services was harder than designing pixels. And in the protracted thermonuclear war between Apple and Google, which first started when the search giant launched Android in 2008, Google knew that ultimately, it would be AI, not UI, that would win the war.
//MATERIAL DESIGN FAMILYGoogle
At this year's I/0 2015 conference, Google announced Now On Tap, the next-gen version of its Google Now digital assistant, which can contextually improve how you experience apps using machine learning and deep linking. So, for example, let's say you get a text message from a friend, who suggests meeting up that night for drinks before seeing the latest Mad Max movie. Tap and hold your Android phone's home button and Google Now On Tap will whip up a card, revealing showtimes for theaters nearby playing Mad Max: Fury Road, as well as bars around that theater, along with its Yelp reviews. It anticipates your needs.
/iOS9 Family
Apple just has nothing like this. With the newly announced iOS 9 and OS X El Capitan, Apple is trying to build these sorts of smarts into Siri, but it has an uphill battle to climb. It has to try to catch up in the wake of both unparalleled post-Snowden privacy concerns that makes us ever more worried about giving up our data, and a slate of widespread iCloud security hacks that showed that Apple couldn't be trusted with the data it already has. And this is just one example of the sort of things we take for granted from Google that Apple is only now starting to truly work on.
Apple has long relied on having better taste in design than its competitors. This has served Cupertino well enough over the years, but you can learn good taste—competitors like Google and Microsoft have (hey, what can I say? I like Windows Phone, and I'm hopeful Windows 10 will solve a lot of the pain points of Windows 8). Increasingly, the only thing that's left is how things work. And despite Steve Jobs's famous 2003 navel-gazing about design, it's something Apple hasn't been paying enough attention to. The things Google was always good at—intelligent search, robust cloud services, and predicting what its users want next—are far harder to learn. Yet as our screens get smaller and fade away, that's where the next major campaign in the war between Apple and Google needs to be won.
The big metal fire box in the middle of your kitchen hasn't changed much in the last 50 years. Some convection fans here, some LED displays there, but otherwise, the trusty range remains largely untouched by the increasingly connected march of technology.
The June Intelligent Oven wants to be the biggest game-changer in the kitchen since the microwave oven. Created by a team that brought the iPhone, the FitBit, the GoPro, and Lyft to market, the June Intelligent Oven is the first oven that can see what you're trying to cook, then do it for you, no matter how clueless you are in the kitchen.
"Technologically, there hasn't been much innovation in the kitchen since the 1970s," says June co-founder Matt van Horn. "The kitchens in Mad Men are virtually identical to the ones we have today." After meeting fellow June co-founder and ex-Apple engineer Nikhil Bhogal at the alternate social network Path, the two decided to launch June.
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Their first product is the oven, and although it features design work from the tech-centric Ammunition Group, the Intelligent Oven doesn't look that out of touch with the stainless steel appliances already in your kitchen. It's a little more premium, a little more luxe, and a lot more high-tech.
Taking a page from typical toaster oven designs, one whole side of the June is made of transparent, triple-glazed glass; instead of a bunch of temperature knobs, June only has one dial, which supplements an integrated five-inch touch screen baked into the door.
Inside, thanks to innovative coils made of carbon fiber, the June is remarkably heat-efficient, preheating to 350 degrees in just two minutes with convection fans off. Your stove, by comparison, probably takes 15 minutes to preheat to that temperature. Despite all that rapid heating, though, the June remains cool to the touch even at a temperature of 500 degrees. "We wanted it to be a good countertop citizen and be safe around kids," explains Bhogal.
But one of the major selling points of the June is that even though it heats up quickly, you also don't need to pre-heat it at all. And that's where the June's smarts come in. Providing it recognizes what you've put into the oven, the June can automatically adjust the time it cooks your food by weighing your dish as you slide it in—did we mention the June was also a kitchen scale?—and adjusting baking time according to the oven's internal temperature at the time. So if you decide to bake a batch of chocolate chip cookies without preheating the oven first, the June knows just how long to bake them from 0° to be crispy on the outside and gooey on the inside.
How does the June know what food you're trying to cook, though? It has a camera inside, another industry first.
"We've seen cameras in non-working concept ovens, but for about 500 degrees of reasons, they tend to actually be tricky to bring to market," laughs Bhogal.
But the June team has a lot of expertise in doing impossible things with cameras: Bhogal was an engineer on the iPhone and iPad's camera from the first-gen iPhone to the iPhone 5, with several Apple camera patents to his name. Not only was June able to build a camera right into their oven, but by tying it to a quad-core NVIDIA Tegra K1 chip, it was able to leverage deep machine learning algorithms (similar to the ones Google uses to let you search photos by content) to give the June the ability to recognize different types of food.
"By the time the door is closed, the June knows that you're cooking, say, a steak," Bhogal explains. "It knows how much it weighs, and if you use the integrated thermometers, it can cook that steak to your preference perfectly." And if, for any reason, you have to walk away from your kitchen while it's cooking, you can use your iPhone to tap into the camera and get a peek inside the oven, or be automatically alerted when dinner is ready.
For dedicated cooks, the June isn't going to replace a regular oven. It has no burners, no broiler, and at one cubic foot, it only has capacity for a 12-pound turkey. For these more advanced meal planners, Van Horn and Bhogal think the June could take the place of a toaster oven. But for urban city dwellers in cramped apartments who want to stop eating takeout for every meal, the June could easily make having a more traditional stove obsolete. "It's a perfect solution for amateur chefs in tight apartments who want to hone their craft," says Van Horn.
Every couple years, those of us with wanderlust feel compelled to throw everything we own into a suitcase and switch cities, states, or even countries. Enter Travelbox, a set of basic furnishings made out of aluminum and wood, all of which pack up into a single shipping box. Bonus: There's room for a bike, so you can pick up and leave whenever you want.
Designed by Stefan Juust, an Austrian architect, the Travelbox measures about 7 feet long, 4 feet tall, and about 1.5 feet wide. It's not light—it weighs about 132 pounds—but it is incredibly streamlined, consolidating all of the essentials of your life into a single package: bike, table, and chair. The Travelbox even doubles as a way to ship your bike, while the box itself turns into a bookshelves and a dresser set when it's not in use.
"In its closed position it is rigid, efficient, and ready to endure the inevitable bumps of international travel. Upon arrival the Travelbox can be unfolded to instantly transform your new abode into a comfortable home," Juust says about the project as part of its official description on his Facebook page.
Think of it as the steamer trunk of the 21st century. Just as the high-society flappers and dandies of the 1920s would pack up all of their belongings into massive trunks as they skipped between American and European cities, the Travelbox is a way to efficiently move cities without having to leave all your belongings behind each time. MIT's made a more high-tech version that might seem similar, but it's not transportable. This is.
The Travelbox is only available by custom order directly from the architect, who can be reached via his official Facebook page here.
After the twin towers toppled on September 11, 2001, it seemed inevitable that two new towers would take their place—a defiant symbol of American resilience. The reality, though, was anything but inevitable. While the first of those towers, One World Trade Center, was completed in 2013, the second tower's development has been at a virtual stall for years.
Earlier this month, The New York Postreported that Danish starchitect Bjarke Ingels would take over the design of Two World Trade Center, replacing the U.K.'s Norman Foster as its lead designer. Now, the Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) has unveiled the first conceptual designs of what the tower will look like.
Like many of BIG's recent tower designs, Two World Trade Center rises up in tiers, almost like a staircase. The 1,340-foot-tall tower is separated into seven sections, each a little smaller than the one below it. At the base of each tier is a deck, which will be landscaped to evoke varying climates, from tropical to arctic. Ingels describes it to Wired as being "like seven different buildings stacked on top of each other," and the plan is for each tier to be taken up by a different company. Rupert Murdoch's 21st Century Fox and News Corp. will take up headquarters in the bottom two tiers, while the top five will go to smaller, still unnamed tenants.
To me, Ingels's vision for Two World Trade Center looks almost like a neatly stacked pile of puzzle pieces, which seems appropriate: since 2001, the tower's design and construction has been like an unsolvable puzzle.
For years now, Larry Silverstein, the 84-year-old real estate developer who leased the Twin Towers before their destruction, has been trying to get Two World Trade Center built. He commissioned Foster back when it was believed that the anchor tenant of 2 WTC would be a bank. But as Manhattan's Financial District has been taken over by Internet and media companies, the 80-year-old British architect's design has increasingly looked out of touch. When News Corp. signed on as 2 WTC's new anchor tenant, they brought in Ingels (co-designer along with Thomas Heatherwick of the new proposed Googleplex) to give it a fresh look.
Ingels has his work cut out for him to get his vision of 2 WTC built. Because of the complexities of the World Trade Center's redevelopment, Ingels will have to retrofit his design to foundations already constructed by the Port Authority for the shopping mall located beneath the site. And as Wiredrightly notes, "Ingels will have to perform his craft on a scale—in terms of height, cost, and the degree of public scrutiny—unlike anything he has encountered before." Just look at what happened with One World Trade Center.
But maybe it's that public scrutiny that BIG should fear most. The wounds of 9/11 are still fresh. Is a tower that looks like it's slightly leaning to one side really what New Yorkers want on the site of the World Trade Center's destruction?
Every year, at the company's annual Worldwide Developer Conference, Apple distributes its annual Design Awards to recognize the best and most innovative Macintosh and iOS software and hardware produced by independent developers, with "independent" being a term of some debate: Evernote, Blizzard, NASA, and IBM have all won Design Awards over the years.
This year, Apple's Design Awards seem to have been awarded mostly to apps that tick-off boxes in their marketing department's PR priority list. Apps are given awards for "using Metal on iOS" (Apple's graphics programming API that it's currently trying to pimp as part of OS X El Capitan), for offering barebones Apple Watch app support, for supporting their new Force Touch trackpads, and for making innovative uses of in-app purchases. Really!
Still, there's a few gems in here, especially if you're a gamer. After giving the list a once-over, here's the apps we think are worth a look:
• Metamorphabet by Vectorpark, Inc. Metamorphabet is a modern, interactive alphabet that is as trippy as it is adorable. It sort of feels like a Sesame Street segment animated by the same guys who did Yellow Submarine. Unlike most alphabet primers, Metamorphabet also features better vocabulary words than normal: for example, 'A' stands for arch, amble, and antlers, not ant or apple. There's actually a Flash version online you can play with yourself, but you can also download it from the App Store here.
• Does Not Commute by Mediocre AB. In racing games, a common gameplay mechanism is the idea of a time trial. If you've ever played Mario Kart, you know what I'm talking about: as you race, you see a little ghost of your best time racing along the track with you. Does Not Commute turns this mechanism into a brilliant little narrative device. In the game, you're actually a time traveler, racing against yourself in the 1970's, and your actions have a ripple effect in the time stream, changing the game's levels a little bit every time you race yourself. You can download it for iOS here.
• Workflow by DeskConnect, Inc. There's actually a bunch of apps that piece together other apps and services to create a dashboard of shortcuts for you, from IFTTT to Launcher. Workflow's does the same thing, but with some nice little tweaks, like the ability to pin your shortcuts as icons on the iOS homescreen. But Apple gave this app an award for paying attention to accessibility, and that's the real reason I want to give it a shoutout here: it's easy to design apps for people like you, but another thing entirely to design a good app while having empathy for the color blind, the blind, and the handicapped, all of which Workflow does in various ways. You can grab it here.
• Shadowmatic by Triada Style. With a visual aesthetic that looks like a Pixar film brought to life, Triada uses Apple's advanced Metal API to create a game that is built around the concept of a shadowbox. To win, you need to solve puzzles by exercising your sense of spatial awareness, twisting three-dimensional shapes until their shadows are the proper shape.
• Fantastical 2 by Flexibits. Fantastical isn't exactly a new app—I've been using it for years—but the update last year re-skinned it for OS X Yosemite. If you have a lot of meetings and appointments to handle, I don't know anything better. Fantastical's killer feature is the ability for it to process your natural language to create calendar entries: type in "Doctor's appointment every Thursday at 9am every three weeks starting June 1st" and Fantastical will do the rest. If you haven't tried Fantastical before, it's worth it: I swear by it. You can download it here.
As for the rest of the winners, you can check them out here.
In September 2014, Yahoo unveiled an iPad version of News Digest, a slick iOS news app that only three months earlier won one of Apple's coveted Apple Design Awards.
Now, Bloomberg is questioning the originality of the iPad app's design. In a piece published last week, Bloomberg points out that many of the app's pages—for categories such as Sports, Politics, and more—appear to have been lifted wholesale from the mid-century, Swiss-inspired style of Mike Joyce, a New York graphic designer who publishes redesigned rock band posters on Swissted.com.
Yahoo denies having stolen Joyce's work, saying instead it was "inspired by the famous 1950s Swiss modernism movement."Bloomberg talks to designers, such as Pentagram's Paula Scher and the School of Visual Arts' Michael J. Walsh, who basically just shrug their shoulders at the theft. Here's Scher, hand-waving away the similarities:
"Most designers and other young artists begin by copying something," she wrote. "That's how they learn. It's hard to really know what the source of the Yahoo thing is, as Helvetica Swiss Modern revivalist style has been popular with youngish people since the end of the 1990s."
No. I'm sorry, but we shouldn't let Yahoo off the hook.
Copy Better
First of all, it looks like a pretty blatant ripoff to me. The colors, shapes, and patterns are absurdly similar. Note:
The problem isn't so much that Yahoo stole. Plenty of big companies steal from other designers. Apple's Jonathan Ive took cues from Dieter Rams. Ikea allegedly copied a chair Norman Foster designed for Emeco. The problem is that Yahoo stole something that kinda sucks. And the problem is that the theft reeks of a mismanaged design process at best and micromanagement on an epic scale at worst.
Let's rewind a bit.
Joyce's Swissted work is itself a misuse of Swiss modern style. He's making posters for rock bands. What does the rigid order of mathematical grids, pastel-hued geometric shapes and clean sans-serif typefaces have to do with Sleater Kinney, Iggy Pop, or The Stupids? But at least he created the work. When Yahoo mindlessly applies those same colors, shapes, and patterns to news category pages like Sports, Politics, or Entertainment, it's not just a design non sequitur. It's a creatively bereft design non-sequitur.
Let's look at Yahoo's Sports page in the News Digest app, which is essentially two overlapping circles with different colored hemispheres formed by the intersection of a diagonal line. It appears to be a mash-up of three different posters by Joyce. What about that resonates with "sports?" Nothing. Same thing with the two interlocking red and green squares on Yahoo's politics page. I suppose you could say it's somehow symbolic of a two-party system, but that's a stretch. It doesn't really have anything to do with politics. It's totally abstract.
It doesn't have to be this way. Swiss Modern-style graphic design can be used in highly emotive and evocative ways. Look at the work of Josef Müller-Brockmann, which Swissted studied so carefully, or the Swiss-style graphic design work for the 1972 Olympic Games by Otl Aicher. These posters are said to be a huge influence on Apple's flat design approach to iOS 7. In theory, all the design principles are the same, except that Aicher wasn't afraid to actually make his designs reference sports. His posters are filled with Olympians running races, doing pole vaults, rowing boats, or doing the butterfly. The point: If you're going to steal, steal from the greats. If you're going to counterfeit a painting, counterfeit a Rembrandt. Don't copy a painting some random dude with paintbrushes did when he was bored.
So What's Going On At Yahoo?
If I had to guess, I would say that Yahoo's design theft reeks not of a designer gone rogue, but rather a non-designer telling the creative teams, "JUST DO IT LIKE THIS!" No designer—and Yahoo has hundreds of them—would so wantonly copy the work of another, must less such middling work. The idea of some executive charging into a room full of designers and telling them what to do actually makes perfect sense in Marissa Mayer's micro-managed Yahoo.
Since 2012, Yahoo has positioned itself as a design-minded company. And yet, CEO Marissa Mayer advocates for apps that observe her three golden rules of design. Those rules are obvious at best, and oblivious at worst. Looking them over, they all refer to small-bore patterns in user experience—and they all try to stuff the messiness of countless problems into a neat set of prescriptions. You don't have to understand design to get the rules, you just have to follow them. Which sounds exactly like the sort of bone-headed approach that an engineer masquerading as a design guru would advocate.
This isn't the first time that Mayer has emphasized order over actual problem-solving. When she worked at Google, she once noticed that the company was using two different shades of blue on different pages. Instead of just making a decision on which blue to use, she ordered A/B testing on 41 different blue variants before settling on one. She seemed similarly clueless when it came to redesigning the Yahoo logo back in 2013. In a blog post explaining how she used survey data to create the the widely reviled new wordmark, Mayer wrote: "We wanted there to be a mathematical consistency to the logo, really pulling it together into one coherent mark." That was right after the part where she crowed about "rolling up her sleeves,""diving into the trenches," and tinkering with every detail of the design, hand in hand with her professional designers. How awful does that sound?
If there is one sentence... that tells the whole story, that is it. This shows that not only does she lack an understanding of design — which is fine, it's not where her strengths lie — but that she also doesn't know it; that designers consulted were unable to disabuse her of this ridiculous notion; and that the final result pleased her, when it is obviously flawed in this regard.
Mayer famously aspires to be like Steve Jobs. You know what? Steve Jobs's graphic design instincts sucked too. He's the guy who filled Apple's operating systems with faux leather and wooden textures. It wasn't until Steve Jobs died that Jonathan Ive was able to stage a coup and update Apple's adherence to outmoded ideals.
Does Mayer have to leave Yahoo for stuff like this to stop happening? Does Yahoo need a new CEO for its graphic design chops to become as good as its engineering?
Hermann Zapf—the legendary German designer and calligrapher behind the Optima, Palatino, Zapfino, and Dingbat typefaces—died in his home in Darmstadt, Germany, last Friday at the age of 96.
Zapf, who dedicated his life to creating beautiful letters, was born in Nuremberg in 1918. Although he originally intended on being an electrical engineer, troubles with the Nazi regime prevented him from pursuing these studies. But Zapf was an exquisite artist, and his teachers, noticing his drawings, encouraged him to become a lithographer. In 1935, Zapf taught himself calligraphy after taking two books out from the local library. The rest is history.
By 1948 and 1952, Zapf had designed Palatino and Optima, respectively, for Stempel, the Frankfurt-based type foundry. Although his metal typeface work has been universally admired, Zapf's fonts are household names largely due to his work in computer typography, which he started pursuing as early as the 1960s. Germans did not take his ideas about dynamic computer text seriously, so Zapf came to the United States. In 1976, the Rochester Institute of Typography offered him a professorship in typographic computer programming, the first such position in the world. Zapf had considerable influence in that position; in the 1990s, his typefaces became standardized across the Windows and Mac operating systems.
Zapf was a beloved father figure in the world of type design. Nadine Chahine, the Linotype type designer who worked with Zapf on what may have been his last project adapting Zapfino into Arabic, reacted on Twitter to the news of her mentor's death:
Other type lovers, type designers, and type foundries have also taken up the hashtag.
About seven years ago, software developer Brad Isaac gave Lifehacker some advice he'd heard on productivity from Jerry Seinfeld:
He told me to get a big wall calendar that has a whole year on one page and hang it on a prominent wall. The next step was to get a big red magic marker.
He said for each day that I do my task of writing, I get to put a big red X over that day. 'After a few days you'll have a chain. Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You'll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain.'
'Don't break the chain,' he said again for emphasis.
I'm a big believer in the Don't Break the Chain productivity method. I use it to write fiction, and it's the secret magic of one of the Nike+ Fuelband app's better features: the ability to track and record your "streaks" of exercise.
Now available on iOS, Streaks is an iPhone app that, depending on how you think about it, either applies Nike+'s Streaks system to everything, or else is a digital version of Jerry Seinfeld's productivity calendar. It's not the only such app—I used one called Chains.cc up until recently—but I think it might be the best one.
Streaks allows you to track six tasks every day. Some are activity-based, like walking 10,000 steps or running, in which case, Streaks will tie into your iPhone's HealthKit data to track them automatically. The others you have to track manually, tapping a button every time you, say, write a page of fiction or brush your teeth. And since some habits aren't meant to be daily, Streaks gives you the option to schedule "skip days" without breaking your chain.
There are a couple reasons I like Streaks. First of all, it's really simple, which is a big plus in an app like this. It automates what it can in your habit-tracking, and for the rest, all you need to remember to do is tap a big button on the central dashboard.
But I also love the self-imposed limits Streaks puts on its users. Like I said, I've tried the "Don't Break The Chain" method with a lot of apps, which usually let you to track an infinite number of tasks. The problem is that the more tasks you're tracking, the fewer habits you're forming. Streaks' upper limit of six tasks seems like a good compromise between variety and focus, forcing you make hard choices on the tasks you really want to turn into a daily part of your life.
If you ever picked up a paperback in high school English class, checked out the New York Times bestseller list, or saw the poster to Jaws, you felt Paul Bacon's influence: Bacon, the award-winning designer behind the covers of Catch 22, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, and Slaughterhouse Five, has died. He was 91.
Bacon was known for pioneering what the publishing industry calls the Big Book Look: hardcovers meant for the bestseller's list with big, bold titles and quasi-abstract designs that synthesized the book's themes down to just a couple colors and, maybe, a single quintessential image. Three generations of readers grew up reading hardcovers and paperbacks with either Bacon's covers, or covers inspired by Bacon's work, bound to the front. Bacon had 6,500 different designs to his credit.
Some of the covers are so iconic, it's difficult to imagine the book with any other cover. Consider his cover to Joseph Heller's 1961 satire Catch-22, which features the ragged red silhouette of an army soldier, dancing a jig against a blue background. His cover to Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint influenced the cover of Lena Dunham's Not That Kind of Girl. Bacon also did the original cover to Peter Benchley's Jaws, featuring the enormous, hungry mouth of a shark coming up beneath a midnight swimmer. Bacon's cover eventually became the basis for the poster to the Stephen Spielberg adaptation.
Born in Ossining, New York in 1923, Bacon was not a delicate artist, despite his broad impact on graphic design. After taking a job at an advertising agency in high school, Bacon began doing small designs for local jazz machines (besides graphic design, jazz was a lifelong passion) before eventually getting involved in publishing.
Bacon was suffering from Alzheimer's, and died of a stroke at a nursing home in Fishkill, N.Y. He was survived by a son and a sister.
Read the New York Times' obituary of Paul Bacon for more details on his extraordinary life and career. Then go to your book shelf and read a novel with a Bacon cover as tribute to the man. Don't worry: you've definitely got one.
Most maps are structured according to the world's geopolitical borders, but there are other ways to map the globe. In his latest infographic, Spanish designer Alberto Lucas López creates a globe filled not with landmasses and oceans, but mother tongues, ending up with a colorful, multi-celled bubble the planet's languages and dialects.
As López notes, there are over 7,100 known languages in the world today, yet most of them are spoken by very small pockets of people. Only 23 of those 7,100 languages have more than 50 million people speaking them. Yet those 23 languages are extremely influential: though they scarcely number two dozen, those languages account for 56% of the mother tongues on Earth.
As you can see on López's chart, Chinese is by far the most dominant language on the planet right now, with almost 1.2 billion people speaking dialects like Cantonese, Xiang, and Mandarin. Comparatively, pretty much every other language on Earth is an also-ran: Spanish (399 million speakers), English (335 million), Hindi (260 million), and Arabic (242 million) take up the next four positions. Only when you add them up do they come close to the reach Chinese has.
Although Chinese is the most popular language on Earth, it's worth noting that its influence wanes greatly outside of Asia. If you take the geographic diversity of where a language is spoken into account, English, Spanish, French, and Portuguese are the most influential languages on Earth, because of colonialism.
Another surprising revelation is the number of semi-obscure languages that are still one of the top 23 languages on Earth. Urdu, Lahnda, Tamil, and Telegu are languages that aren't known to a lot of Americans, but still account for 64, 88.7, 68.8, and 74 million speakers, respectively. That's more speakers than Persian, Vietnamese, or Italian.
All told, López's charts accounts for 4.1 of Earth's 7.2 billion people. It's worth noting, though, that his infographic only charts native languages, not the number of speakers of the 23 most popular languages in general, in which case, there'd be more combined speakers of the world's languages than there are people on the planet.
In 2017, Dutch designer Joris Laarman will wheel a robot to the brink of a canal in Amsterdam. He'll hit an "on" button. He'll walk away. And when he comes back two months later, the Netherlands will have a new, one-of-a-kind bridge, 3-D printed in a steel arc over the waters. This isn't some proof-of-concept, either: when it's done, it will be as strong and as any other bridge. People will be able to walk back and forth over it for decades.
That's the plan, anyway. To make his dream a reality, Laarman has created a new research and development company called MX3D, which specializes in building six-axis robots that can 3-D print metal and resin in mid-air. The tech allows for large-scale objects like infrastructure to be printed in the exact spot where they'll live, which has radical implications for the construction industry and opens up a wealth of new design possibilities.
MX3D isn't some high-tech concept; it actually works. In February 2014, Laarman showed off the MX3D system's ability to 3-D print gravity-defying metal sculptures in mid-air. But printing out a bridge on location is a decidedly different challenge than 3-D printing something in a lab.
"We thought to ourselves: what is the most iconic thing we could print in public that would show off what our technology is capable of?" Laarman says in a phone interview. "This being the Netherlands, we decided a bridge over an old city canal was a pretty good choice. Not only is it good for publicity, but if MX3D can construct a bridge out of thin air, it can construct anything."
The finished bridge will be around 24 feet long, support normal Amsterdam foot traffic, and feature a beautiful, intricate design that looks far more handcrafted than the detailing on most bridges. Because 3-D printing allows for a granular control of detail that industrial manufacturing does not, designs can be much more ornate, and almost bespoke in appearance.
Most 3-D printers use resin or plastic to construct objects. MX3D's bridge will be made of a new steel composite that the University of Delft created. As strong as regular steel, it can be dolloped out by a 3-D printer, drop by drop. The result? A 3-D printed bridge as strong as any other, Laarman says.
As for the printer: it isn't much like a Makerbot or any other desktop 3-D printer. For one thing, it has no printer bed. Instead, it works like a train. Except instead of running along existing tracks, it can actually print out its own tracks as it goes along. An additive printing technology that is more like welding than squirting out drops of plastic means that the tracks can go in any direction: not just horizontally, but vertically and diagonally as well. That allows the MX3D to cross gaps, like the empty space between walls, or the banks on a river, just by printing its way across them. A useful skill for a robot to have if it wants to 3-D print a bridge, or any other large structure, for that matter.
Laarman isn't going this alone. He turned to architecture and engineering software company Autodesk to help give MX3D some much-needed smarts. According to Maurice Conti, head of Autodesk's Applied Research Lab, Autodesk wanted to work with MX3D because it would help tackle other problems inherent to 3-D printing.
Take error control. Most 3-D printing occurs in a print bed under pretty stable conditions, but even so, mistakes happen. A drop of additive gets misplaced, and because the printer doesn't know how to compensate for that, the next drop gets added to the wrong place, too. The results of such errors range from the comical to the Lovecraftian. Not exactly the kind of thing you want on a bridge that's meant to handle foot traffic. Since the MX3D will be building in public, it needs to be able to compensate for a wide range of errors, from big fluxes in temperature that expand the metal to kids hurling beer bottles at the robot.
"Robots tend to assume that the universe is made of absolutes, even though that's not true," Conti says. "So we need to program them to have real-time feedback loops, and adapt in real-time, without even being told to."
That's a big challenge, but one Autodesk thinks is worth solving. Not just because the advances would also be applicable to other types of 3-D printing, but also because it opens the door to an amazing future. "Imagine some day in the future, just going somewhere, dropping off a robot, and coming back two months later to have this huge piece of infrastructure there, without any human intervention at all!" Conti marvels. The MX3D bridge project is an opportunity for Autodesk to not just flex its artificial intelligence muscles, but to test the results in the real world.
When it's built over the course of two months in fall of 2017, the MX3D's finished bridge (it doesn't have a name yet, and even the exact location is still being determined) will be the first step toward that future. If it works, who knows what's next? Ten years from now, we might watch skyscrapers be built by massive 3-D printing cranes, lifting themselves up as they squirt massive industrial steel girders beneath themselves.
But the challenges ahead are also great. Despite teaming up with some of the best bridge engineering companies in the industry, and running lots of test, MX3D won't know if their great plan will work until they actually do it. With two years to go before they're ready, a lot is riding on their preparations, and their work with Autodesk...not least of which are the first people who actually walk over the first 3-D printed bridge in the world.
Last week, Apple announced News, an algorithmically curated news recommendation app, which has been territory well-explored to middling success by services like Flipboard and Zite. As usual, developers and reporters cheered the arrival of a new Apple offering, but there was at least one person bored by the new product. Trond Werner Hansen, the veteran browser developer who helped redesign both Opera and Firefox, thought News was stupid.
"Look at how people use Spotify: you start using it, and you don't stop," says Hansen. "But is anyone doing that with Flipboard? No, because no one really wants to read news on a closed publishing platform like Flipboard, Apple News, or Facebook Instant Articles, let alone just read the things an algorithm tells them to read. It's bullshit."
Hansen's got an alternative. He's launched Kite, a new app that is a social network for sharing Internet articles with your followers, much the same way Instagram is a social network for sharing your photos. But look closer, and you'll see that Kite is more than "just" a social network for reading: it's actually a beautiful, full-featured web browser, which substitutes a social graph for the URL bar.
When you first load up Kite, it looks like any other social network. You're dumped into a stream of updates from people you follow, each one linking a story or webpage they think is worth sharing. Right now, the first three stories in my feed are an Economist piece on the Greek Euro crisis, an article on Ben Carson's bizarro presidential campaign, and a story with the provocative headline: "Interviews With Four Small-Penis Havers."
I can like these articles, save them to my reading list for later (the equivalent of favoriting them), comment, or share. There are even a few fun little tweaks there—for example, the "Like" button in Kite is an emoji, which you choose whenever you share an article. But in the end, it's all about getting recommendations on what to read from those you actually care about.
"People don't want an algorithm telling them what to read, they want to get a peek at the reading lists of people they find interesting," Hansen claims. "We've had algorithms that can tell you what to read for 20 years. No one's interested. I want to know what interesting people like President Obama and Stephen Fry are reading every day. Right now, that's not really possible—there's nothing dedicated to that. I want Kite to be able to unlock that value."
Yet Kite didn't start out as a social network. It started out as yet another attempt by Hansen to rethink the web browser.
Asked to look into creating an iPad browser for Mozilla back in 2012, Hansen had an epiphany. "On the desktop, your browser is a generic container for pretty much everything: websites, email, games, you name it," Hansen says. "But on a smartphone, that generic container is the phone. It just doesn't make sense to put a generic container within a container. It doesn't facilitate anyone's workflow."
In other words, a decent mobile browser needs to have a greater purpose than serving as a generic window into the web. For Kite, that purpose is finding things to experience on the Internet, sharing these things with others, and talking about them. Note the use of the word "purpose" instead of "problem" though.
"The reason Silicon Valley companies have been failing in this space since RSS is because they view news curation as a problem to be solved, like building a bridge," Hansen says. "But it's not a problem: content is culture. You don't 'solve' culture: you just facilitate the flow of its consumption."
That's why Kite is more than just a social network. Put as simply as possible, Kite is a web browser that you navigate by way of a social recommendations instead of through search results and URLs. Although Kite will default to showing you a stream of recommendated articles from people you follow when you load up the app, swiping to the right will also reveal an underlying layer which gives you access to a beautiful, lightning-fast web browser. You can tap on any of the news site shortcuts provided by the app, or navigate to a website of your choice and mark it a favorite. What makes Kite, as a browser, different from the likes of Chrome and Safari is that it is designed exclusively for reading and sharing. So no matter where you are, you can save the page you're reading for later, post it to your stream, or favorite its parent site so you can more easily read its content later. Every web page is presented in beautiful full screen view, with a bare minimum of UI elements distracting you from the words and pictures on the page.
Kite can also cooperate with other social networks, like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, so you can share what you're reading there. But like Instagram, Kite can remain totally self-contained if you want. It doesn't have to piggy-back off Facebook or Twitter's APIs to be "social." Kite is social all on its own.
Kite's a difficult app to sum up, something even Hansen admits. "We're struggling with the messaging," he tells me, ruefully. "We tell people: this is your app for reading and sharing. But they still need to see it and actually use it for themselves to really get it."
Over time, Hansen hopes that Kite won't just be a beloved social network, but a user's primary web browser. Any social network, though, is only as good as the strength of the community of people already trying it, and in that regard, Kite is still in infancy. Despite the polish of the software itself, Kite's network will mostly consist of raw potential until it gets more users.
If you'd like to try Kite, you can download it from the App Store here. When you sign up, it will ask you to enter a "recommender" to start piecing together your network. Tell 'em "drcrypt" sent ya, and maybe, we can make this app happen together.
Based out of Philly, the Analog Watch Company is no stranger to making watches out of unconventional materials. After starting off with wood watches, founder Lorenzo Buffa started getting worried about being known as "that wood watch company," so he started branching out. The company's last watch, the Ant Watch, was an ant farm for your wrist, complete with five living ants behind the crystal. Its latest watch, though, is a little classier: called the Mason Watch, it features a dial and case milled from solid marble.
The Analog Watch Company likens the Mason to a time-telling sculpture slash conversation starter on your wrist. Available in both white and black marble, the Mason comes in two shapes: circular and hexagonal. You'd think a hunk of marble on your wrist would be relatively heavy, but the Mason only weighs two ounces, which is less than the stainless steel Apple Watch. Even the dial is made of real marble, which posed some engineering challenges. "Dials are usually super thin, and have patterns silk-screened or painted onto them," Buffa tells me in a phone interview. "But marble, you can't really make it paper thin. So we had to work hard to find pieces of marble that were already cut to just a couple millimeters thick."
But why marble at all? "Marble is just so hot right now," Buffa laughs. "It was really fashionable in the Gatsby era, then again in the 1950's and the 1960's, and now again today." Buffa says marble's most appealing quality is it's uniqueness. Formed over eons, each piece of marble swirls with distinctive calcium deposits, exclusive to itself.
"It's a natural material, and if you want to get higher-level about it, that kind of material brings us closer to our own relationship with the natural world. And because each piece has personality, you can build a stronger relationship with marble than steel or plastic," says Buffa.
The Mason Watch is now available for pre-order on Kickstarter, starting at $180. Hey, if marble was good enough for the wrist of Michelangelo's David, it's good enough for yours.
On Sunday, a day before officially announcing his bid for the 2016 U.S. presidential election, former Florida governor Jeb Bush tweeted an image of his new campaign logo. Designed by GOP consultant Mike Murphy (who only seems to have one gear in his logo design transmission), the Jeb! logo is a variant of the same design that Bush used when he was elected governor of Florida in 1998. Does it work, or is it another Marco Rubio-sized disaster?
We asked three designers what they thought. Surprisingly, given the design world's tendency to skew left—and the right's tendency to produce some trulyawfullogos—pretty much everyone we showed it to liked it, with a few caveats. Here's what bigwigs from Siegel+Gale, Moving Brands, Doyle Partners, and Chermayeff, Geismar, & Haviv thought.
"It's a huge improvement," says Sagi Haviv, partner at Chermayeff, Geismar, & Haviv. "The last font he used was just awful. By using a more traditional serif font, and by putting it in all red, Bush is trying to send a message to Republicans: I'm one of you, and I value tradition."
But Howard Belk,* co-CEO and Chief Creative Officer of Siegel+Gale, thinks the logo falls apart when you compare the Baskerville of "Jeb!" with the sans-serif of "2016.""The mix of fonts is weak," he says. "The 2016 just has no visual relationship to the Jeb! serif. It just looks like it's about to be flattened."
Even more noticeable than the typeface in the logo is the huge exclamation point at the end. Moving Brands co-founder and chief creative officer Jim Bull says he's not sure it works.
"Historically, exclamation points have been used by many famous brands to represent their story and character; Yahoo!, BigLots!, ChipsAhoy!, E!, and Zappos!, for example. They are all striving for an openness, friendly, for-everyone feel and conversation with their consumers," Bull says, "But are these the traits that we look for in a presidential candidate? Is the American public looking for its next president to be a friend or a leader?"
Haviv thinks that the exclamation point is a little lame. "I think it's a little hokey, a little forced," Haviv says. "And a good logo shouldn't try to force you to be excited about it." Even so, Haviv says that at least the exclamation point is well-executed. "The exclamation at least balances well with the letters, unlike Marco Rubio's awful logo, which reduces the entire country of America to what looks like a tiny whale dotting the 'i.'"
Stephen Doyle, of New York Based graphic-design firm Doyle Partners, had another take. " Jeb's logo demonstrates an alarmingly genuine surprise that he's running for president at all!" he says. "I wonder if the team, while exploring punctuation, had considered 'Jeb?'"
The only designer who was unapologetically a fan of the exclamation point was Siegel+Gale's Howard Belk. "The exclamation point is saying: Don't get confused by those 14 other Republican candidate pretenders—Jeb is the answer!" Belk says.
One of the most striking things about the Jeb! 2016 logo is its lack of iconography: no stars, no stripes, no eagles—none of the usual visual clichés. Both Haviv and Belk thinks that helps the logo send a very strong message.
"With this logo, Jeb's going for a simplicity that matches his chief rival: Hillary's Arrow-H," Belk says. "It was a good decision not to try and reinterpret the standard visual clichés of political campaigns. Those all look bereft of new ideas. The tone here is confident, assertive, positive. And it was a smart move not to use the family name in the logo: with this logo, it looks like Jeb wants to establish he's not afraid to be his own man, as opposed to simply another leaf off the same old Bush."
In a year in which both Republicans and Democrats are looking to establish dynasties in the White House (the second Clinton as president, and the third Bush), Haviv also sees it as significant that both Jeb and Hillary do not use their last names in their campaign identities.
"Hillary went a step further, and didn't even use her first name," Haviv points out. "Bush is stopping just short of that, but he's still sending a very clear message: I'm not just my brother's brother, or my father's son."
Jeb! 2016. A surprise hit among designers. Has the entire world gone mad?
An earlier version of this article misspelled Howard Belk's last name. We regret the error.
What if your furniture had a day job, just like you? What if, when it wasn't being used, it worked to bring in money to pay for your quality-of-life upgrades? That's the idea behind the Aspirational Lamp, a Luxo Jr. style lamp that imagines a future in which the dumb objects around us have almost Pixar-like inner lives.
The Aspirational Lamp is an AI-controlled desk lamp that doesn't just use electricity, but can collect it, thanks to a built-in solar panel and battery pack. Created by Feild Craddock, Akshay Verma, and Michael-Owen Liston, it's designed to explore a speculative scenario in which our appliances have intelligence, goals, and—most importantly—the means to act on those goals. When the lamp isn't being used, it will soak up electricity, which it can then (theoretically) sell back to the power grid. With the money made from that, the Aspirational Lamp is then capable of investing automatically into the stock market, earning itself enough money over time to pay for upgrades and new parts for itself. You can cash your lamp out at any time, however, and if the lamp totally breaks, a check for the lamp's remaining funds would be automatically mailed to the owner.
The Aspirational Lamp came out of the Secret Life of Objects, a two-week course at Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design. The course invited students to imagine a future in which the dumb objects around us look after their owners' unspoken wants and desires.
Conceptually, there are a lot of missing pieces right now to making something like the Aspirational Lamp a reality. For example, selling your electricity back to the grid can be a very complicated task; hardly the plug-and-play affair envisioned by the Aspirational Lamp. But the goal of the Aspirational Lamp isn't to explore immediate feasibility, but rather, the possibilities of living among appliances that have their own autonomous agendas.
"Smart appliances are here already, and we can expect to continue seeing them enter into many more aspects of our lives," Craddock writes by email. "There are countless things hooked up to the internet, and we can already point to examples of objects that are starting to maintain themselves, like the Amazon Dash Button."
As the Internet of Things enters its Web 2.0 phase, Craddock says the ultimate question posed by appliances like the Aspirational Lamp is, how much of our agency are we comfortable giving up?
