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Most of the time creative competitions follow the typical blue sky approach to issuing a challenge; they don't tend to define parameters or any kind of real brief.

Creatives then have the huge task of narrowing their thinking down to something meaningful and strategic. You see this a lot with students with their challenges and projects, even at places that supposedly teach planning; the two disciplines sit at opposite end of the table and the strategists often have to force their way into the conversation.

Quite simply, a brief is not mandated and neither and the the creative work is rarely accountable.

Refreshingly, Steve Portigal, the king of design strategy, has made a move in the right direction.

Teaming up with Core 77 and 826 Valencia he's contributed a ton of research thinking to the challenge of imagining The Future of Reading. It's not simply a data dump, they've translated their findings into something close to a real brief with lots of juicy information to feast on.

BRIEF:

What will reading look in the future? Will we be using printed books, rectangular electronic devices, embedded technologies?This competition challenges designers to envision a rich future digital reading experience, based on a defined set of design research.

Recently, Portigal Consulting undertook an exploratory research project on reading, books, and digital reading devices, entitled Reading Ahead. Here's what they found:

• Books are more than just pages with words and pictures; they are imbued with personal history, future aspirations, and signifiers of identity
• The unabridged reading experience includes crucial events that take place before and after the elemental moments of eyes-looking-at-words
• Digital reading privileges access to content while neglecting other essential aspects of this complete reading experience
• There are opportunities to enhance digital reading by replicating, referencing, and replacing social (and other) aspects of traditional book reading

And here's what they suggest for your design explorations:

• Include the sensual
• Support the social side of reading
• Consider the varied modes and rituals of reading
• Develop an ecosystem

More info can be found here.



Posted by Ed Cotton The idea of producing less stuff, but better stuff is a hard one to grasp, but something that makes sense to people outside the marketing world.

Nicholas Nova discovered this interview with legendary designer Dieter Rams, who lays the blame on marketing for pushing more stuff out there.

"no one wants to admit that at some point they have reached the end of the line. Yet you can’t always be making a new shaver or a new coffee machine unless you come up with a real innovation – and here I’m not talking about tinkering with the shape or the colour. And then people think that this will increase sales a bit more. They’re dreaming! Yet for all this it seems as if most managers still believe that just having a sheer mass of products on the market achieves something. Right now, that is the problem with the car industry. They have been shoving more and more cars onto the market yet it is obvious that the markets have long been saturated. And yet these are precisely the development programme targets being set by the design divisions of larger companies. But I still maintain that the way is to produce less, but better. “

Posted by Ed Cotton Most conversations about interaction these days tend to revolve around the digital landscape. It's especially interesting that the more digital we become the less of a physical connection we have to real money and for many the physical presence of coins has become an annoying obstacle to convenience.

It's therefore surprising to hear that Matt Dent, a 26 year-old graphic designer won a D&AD Black Pencil for a competition entry he submitted to the Royal Mint in the UK.

His coins are not only beautiful, but as Dent explained in an interview there's some real thought gone into the design and in particular, how people could interact with them.

"I thought the six coins could make up a shield by arranging the coins both horizontally, as with the landscape idea, as well as vertically, in a sort of jigsaw style. I liked the idea and symbolism of using the Royal Arms, where individually the coins could focus on specific elements and when placed together they reveal the complete Royal Arms.

I found the idea that members of the public could interact with the coins the most exciting aspect of this concept. It's easy to imagine the coins pushed around a school classroom table or fumbled around with on a bar - being pieced together as a jigsaw and just having fun with them.'

Posted by Ed Cotton The once great Dell is trying to re-invent itself for a world that's radically changed since it first came into being. As the company shifted away from it's focus on the customer, the social network and the blog rose up to call them out, a resurgent Apple has re-defined computing, not just for a small niche, but for masses and computers themselves have shifted from desktops to laptops.

Dell is trying to cope with this radical change and makeover the brand to be more relevant.

Throughout its history, the company has hardly been a champion of design, it's simply not part of the DNA for the very functional, custom built, price driven brand.

It appears, design is also on the change list at Dell who are making some bold moves upmarket with the Adamo sub-brand.



Can this shift upmarket work for Dell?

It seems like a complete case of Apple envy and a bad rip off of Apple's Air laptop. However, one could argue that it's a start and Dell needs to do radical things like this to pull itself from the mire.

BTW- Are there any American industrial designers?


Posted by Ed Cotton Last weekend's Financial Times has a good piece written by the editor of Country Life, giving us ten ways in which homes are going to change. Obviously, this refers mainly to homes for the wealthy..

Here's the list in brief..

1. More privacy because of increasing populations
2. Greener- less reliant on cars- the creation of communities that allow more walking
3. A return to traditional ways of building- rubble will be used, not thrown away
4. People will grow their own
5. Plastics will be ruled out and become like smoking and fatty fooods
6. A return to simple pleasures-small dinner parties, warn out couches, natural materials- the end of designer minimalism
7. Nature becomes more precious- so homes will blend the inside with the outside
8. Computers will run homes
9. Homes will become centers of interest and intellectual pursuit- it will not be about showing off- think of a lab as the next important room

Clearly, much of this stuff has been with us for years, but clearly the changing economy is going to be forcing this through at a faster pacer. Anyone in the home/housing business is going to need to take action.

One big example is Ikea, who has recently been pushing its sustainability policy pretty hard

Posted by Ed Cotton One thing I've been noticing recently with the iPhone, is how interested people are in adding very analog applications to their phones. Things that seem pretty mundane and basic and somewhat counter to the technological advances of our time. Many of the most successful applications simply take something solid and dependable from the real world and put it onto the phone- flashlights, pints of beer, flames from Zippos and clocks like the one you can see below.



A have a couple of thoughts on this.

1. It's almost as if we cherish these icons as perhaps relevant relics from the past and revel in the irony that we are installing them on an uber-sophisticated piece of technology. "Look what my iPhone can do"- and humanizing the technology.

2. There's value in show. Turning on an application and showing someone you have a lighter or a pint of beer has share and social value. They can be talked about and the obvious joke is that they aren't physical things or they have limited functionality compared to the real thing.

3. It's also about the emotive power of design in the physical world and our desire to hang on and keep a little bit of this. The first software for the iPhone had a calculator that was modeled on the original Braun, the latest version uses the classic HP scientific calculator, both are iconic and in the real world versions.

4. Perhaps if there's one weakness of the digital world, it's hard to experience the sense of "touch and "feel", these applications remind us of the power of the feeling we have in an analog world and an acknowledgment that it's something we are losing. 

5. It also serves as a reminder to designers that perhaps the most powerful applications aren't so high tech, but instead ones that stir up emotions and feelings inside us- such as nostalgia.

Clock via Core 77


Posted by Ed Cotton