I just got through watching this series of videos of Dean Kamen from the All Things D: D6 conference, where he talks about his team’s work on the mind blowingly cool prosthetic arm nicknamed the “Luke Arm.” Due to the increase in effectiveness of body amour and huge advances military field medicine, wounded soldiers are far more likely to survive serious injuries than they were even in the first Gulf War. Though more soldiers are coming home alive, they often do so with missing limbs. Kamen and his team were tasked to create a new generation of prosthetic arms that come as close as ingenuity and technology can to replacing a missing limb.
The results of Kamen and his team’s work shown in the videos is inspiring and a reminder of two things. Design is all about problem solving and due to that, design, along with engineering and a host of other disciplines, can make a huge difference in people’s lives.
This via BoingBoing, The US Postal Service has released Charles and Ray Eames stamps! From USPS.com:
In recognition of their groundbreaking contributions to architecture, furniture design, manufacturing and photographic arts, designers Charles and Ray Eames will be honored next summer with a pane of 16 stamps designed by Derry Noyes of Washington, DC. If you’ve ever sat in a stackable molded chair, you’ve experienced their creativity. Perhaps best known for their furniture, the Eameses were husband and wife as well as design partners. Their extraordinary body of creative work — which reflected the nation’s youthful and inventive outlook after World War II — also included architecture, films and exhibits. Without abandoning tradition, Charles and Ray Eames used new materials and technology to create high-quality products that addressed everyday problems and made modern design available to the American public.
I’m sure this has been around for a while, but I just discovered Wikiquote. And today they had a link on their main page to some of Douglas Adam’s more interesting quotes. Here one that stuck out, from Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency:
“What really is the point of trying to teach anything to anybody?”
This question seemed to provoke a murmur of sympathetic approval from up and down the table.
Richard continued, “What I mean is that if you really want to understand something, the best way is to try and explain it to someone else. That forces you to sort it out in your mind. And the more slow and dim-witted your pupil, the more you have to break things down into more and more simple ideas. And that’s really the essence of programming. By the time you’ve sorted out a complicated idea into little steps that even a stupid machine can deal with, you’ve learned something about it yourself.
I think this applies to user interface design as well. By the time you take pretty much any process and break down into actions and steps for an end user, you’ve learned a lot about a lot.
I saw this posted to one of the many blogs I read, I can’t remember which one. Someone has been cool enough to post Douglas Engelbart’s weirdly accurate demonstration on how people would use computer workstations “in the future.” Originally presented on December 9, 1968 this demo, later called The Mother of All Demos, featured such revolutionary concepts as the mouse (which Engelbart is credited with inventing), copying and pasting, hypertext, video conferencing, and a whole lot more. This demo predicted these features decades before they would see widespread use.
Brian Eno, easily one of my biggest influences as a designer. In the 70’s Eno compiled a list of phrases that he used in his creative process. At certain points during his projects, he would randomly choose one of the phrases and use it to guide his decisions. He would interpret the phrases based on how they related to what he was working on. Later, he paired up the phrases with artwork by Peter Schmidt, and created a deck of cards called Oblique Strategies. For a while, you could buy a copy of the deck, but they are pretty hard to find now a days. Unless you have a Mac.
In College I created my own version of the Oblique Strategies deck. In a conversation I had about the Oblique Strategies, a friend of mine told me about the concept Webster’s Oracle. It works in a similar way as the Oblique Strategies card deck, only with a greater degree of randomness. Basically, instead of picking a card, you randomly choose a word from the dictionary by flipping through it and blindly pointing at a spot on the page. Neat idea, I thought, but how does the internet figure into this. Because the internet had to figure into it.
I began compiling my own list of phrases that I thought might work on an Oblique Strategies style deck of cards. Some of the phrases were song lyrics, some of the phrases were ones I had actually used in past projects, some were definitions to words I randomly choose from the dictionary. So I had the phrases, now I needed art of some kind. Using Webster’s Oracle I randomly chose a word, then did a Yahoo search on that word. I saved the first image I found from the first web page that come up in the search. I collected the same number of images as I had phrases, then randomly matched them up. I ran the images through Adobe Streamline, in order to give them a common visual style, then created my own deck of cards.
