Design Sojourn

It has been a while since I’ve written a quality meaty post here at Design Sojourn and for that I apologize to you dear reader. In the last 4-5 months, I have been experimenting with different types of posts just to see which type of posts works and which did not. To me a post that works needs to not only resonate with you but also with the little time I have due to my work schedule. To top it all off, working on kick ass (I hope) personal projects like: Spaces for Ideas, has caused quality blogging, at least in my mind, to take a hit.

The most astute of all of you regular readers would have noticed that these test posts gravitated towards the type that reflects my time constraints, i.e. short and easy to write. The posts were often on industrial design work, “link loving” (or link sharing), commentaries, quotations and daily photos etc.

However, while I was conducting blog maintenance, I noticed that my meaty posts were bringing back the bacon, so to speak. I discovered that 80% of my most popular posts were Design Articles that were more than 500 words long, with many beyond 800 words. I realized that these longer Design Articles were what defined Design Sojourn in the past, and based on their popularity numbers to date, were what readers wanted.

Interestingly enough, these short posts were damn hard to write, often taking me 20-30 minutes just to proof read a post, simply because I did not like the way I wrote it. I’m known to be anal about details on occasion. So I guess what they say is right, it’s hard to write short posts that are concise. Also, considering the frequency these posts do come up (I just want to share!), it all adds up to the time that I could have used for a meaty post.

So going forward, I will attempt to increase the publishing frequency of longer Design Articles, which is a nod towards quality over quantity. That does not mean that there would not be any well thought out shorter posts on exceptional industrial design work, commentaries or links to great content. It is the Internet after all, and the “world” in there is all about sharing and adding to the conversation.

Some of you may be familiar with my micro-blog The Design of Everyday Things: Todet.com. That site will still be around, but it will not be a source of information anymore. It does not make sense to maintain content on two sites and then asking you to visit both sites when at the end of the day I’m the same author! I respect that you are as busy as I am. However, I will leverage on Posterous’s awesome blog posting system, to help me speed up getting these shorter “appetizer” posts mentioned above published at Design Sojourn.

So with all that, and going into the new year, I love to hear your feedback on the types of posts you have enjoyed here, and the types of posts you would like to see more off?

Thanks for your feedback and have a great 2010 ahead!

Image: Christmas in Love…

I would just like to thank all Design Sojourn readers for their tremendous support and readership in 2009. I have really enjoyed all the comments and experiences you have shared with me, and this has made Design Sojourn an enjoyable blog for all. So thank you very much!

Here’s wishing all you a very Merry Christmas and a Happy 2010!

This post went out a little later than I expected, but I just wanted to remind all of you that the Icsid congress 2009 is but a less than a week away!

If you are not planning on going, you can keep up to date with the action as I will be Tweeting live from the congress at my @designsojourn or the official ICSID congress @design2050 Twitter accounts. By the way if you can’t up with my Tweets, don’t worry as you can search out the #icsid09 hashtag so that you can review the Tweets later at your leisure! I will also do a full congress write up either at the end of each day or if not at the end of it all.

The highlight of this congress is the Design 2050 studios where we can catch design leaders share their thought leadership on what the world will be like in 2050. In particular I’m looking forward to the Studios by Chris Bangle on Personal Emotional Mobility 2050, Feng Zhu on Entertainment 2050 and Ravi Naidoo on Protofarm 2050.

As a member of the congress organizing committee, I will be at the congress, so if you are going to be here in Singapore next week (23-25 Nov), do drop me a note on my contact page or email me at dt [at] designsojourn.com. I would love to catch up with you for a coffee and/or a chat?

From what the experts tell me about comment moderation, the best tactic is to leave a little note to remind visitors the following:

Commenting Rules: I love reading your comments as it allows me to interact and learn from you. Being critical is fine, giving constructive criticism, even better. However if you are rude, I will delete your comment. Repeat, and I will blacklist you. The world is full of negativity, so I don’t need anymore on my blog, which I consider my online home. Would you encourage Neanderthal behavior in your home? Neither would I.

Finally please use your personal name or initials and not your business name. By doing the latter, it comes off like spam, and that’s an auto delete. Thank you and I hope you enjoy being part of the conversation!

How true it is. If you consider your blog/website as precious as your home, deciding to delete or spam certain comments gets really easy. I practice a zero tolerance rule against spammers and flamers, but fear not, I often dig through my spam box and fish out the legitimate comments.

Here’s to the never-ending improvement of your experience at Design Sojourn. Thank you!

This was inspired by Tim Ferriss who was in turn inspired by Brian Oberkirch.

Design Sojourn is currently experiencing server side problems.

According to Media Temple tech support, it is an errant Wordpress plugin that was causing excessive call ups on the Wordpress database causing the server to crash and return a 500 error.

BS.

I have been running the same set of plugins for almost a year. Ok I give MT the benefit of the doubt, maybe an updated plugin broke the server.

Even though I doubt this was the case, on the advice of tech support, I reinstalled Wordpress.

Guess what?

Well you probably already know, the server is still spitting back intermittent 500 server side errors. Even better, Media Temple can’t seem to reproduce the errors when the rest of the world seems to be able to.

Competent.

I keep on receiving multiple site up and down email notifications from independent site monitoring services like Siteuptime or Monitor.us. Furthermore friends from around the world also report similar incidents.

Damn server is bouncing up and down like a ping pong ball.

This is really unacceptable and I apologize that you have to hit a number of browser refreshes to get the site up. I will try to get to the bottom of this, even if I have to move to another server host.

Not something I want to take care off during my long weekend.

Edit 1: Currently 1 out of 4-5 pageviews will get a 500 server side error.

Edit 2: Two days later, the MT Tech Support still insists that nothing is wrong. I consider myself an educated man, but I am that close swearing at the Support Staff. I still get a number of random of 500 server side errors and I’m now full blown trouble shooting my site myself.

Edit 3: I’m not going to waste anymore time ranting about it here, but the long and short of it is I have decided to leave Media Temple for better pastures. I’ll give you the full update when I get the site up an running at 100% efficiency.

So I will be migrating this site in the next 48 hours. Please expect down times and sorry for any inconvenience caused.

Edit 4: Media Temple and I have come to a mutual understanding on this issue which has not really been resolved. Separately the up time of this blog, still at MT, seems to have stabilized. Whatever that has been causing the random 500 server side error seems to have been flushed out of the system. Hopefully for good. I have told MT that I am “watching you”, and will be tracking the reliability of the site in the next few days. Please let me know if you experience any down time? Meanwhile its back to regular programming while I make that final decision to move or not.

Some time in May I announced that I am helping organize the ICSID World Design Congress 2009 that will run in sunny Singapore from the 23 to 25 November 2009.

I have a small update (or a big one depending on the viewpoint) for you. I would like to let you know that Design Sojourn is an official online media partner with the ICSID World Design Congress 2009!

I’m really excited with this partnership as this ICSID Congress will be a congress like no other. You see, in most congresses you invite a speaker and he will come with a well prepared speech. If you are a regular visitor in the congress circuit, it is likely you will find that the speeches are repeated or are just modifications of similar content.

Here is what makes The ICSID World Design Congress 09 different. With a theme of “What can be the world can be in 2050?”, nine design leaders will, in the time leading up to the congress, run nine workshops to explore original thinking and design trend explorations in areas such as Mobility (Chris Bangle), Sustainable living (Chris Luebkeman), Healthcare (Stefano Marzano), Entertainment (Feng Zhu) and even Urban Farming (Ravi Naidoo).

To round out the design thought leader’s discussions, we will also invite keynote speakers who will bring to the congress existing thinking and activities they are doing to ensure our safe future.

However the highlight of the congress will be that the nine design though leaders will share their original workshop findings with all the congress attendees.

Prof. Carlos Hinrichsen, Icsid President notes:

“Attendees will contribute to this discussion, and should be prepared to be engaged in a thought provoking, and creatively-enriching experience. The congress will be a wonderful occasion for all
those inspired by the power of design to deliver a better world.”

That’s right! The way this congress will be organized, you can get to interact with these design leaders in small plenary groups, share your thoughts and have a chance to influence the future. Really exciting stuff!

Not only this, with an early outreach to the design community through online media partners like Yanko Design, Behance.net, Product Design Hub and Design Sojourn, we hope to start the conversation of Designing 2050 much earlier and with a much larger audience.

If you sign up now for this ICSID Word Congress 2009, you can enjoy an Early Bird Discount that is 25% off the regular price! Better hurry as the Early Bird Discount ends tomorrow 09/09/09!

Still not convinced?

Well, I have a special treat for you, if you enter the coupon code “Design Sojourn” when you sign up, you can get an additional 5% off the Early Bird Discount and if you miss that, 5% off the regular price. It is not much more, but a small something for regular Design Sojourn readers.

I hope to see all of you at the congress as I will be there as well. I would love to catch up with all of you over a few drinks so please let me know if you are coming and we can arrange to meet up and network!

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Official Press Release:

The 50th Anniversary Icsid World Design Congress Sets to
Make a “Design Difference” in the Future

Four keynote speakers and nine symposia leaders will invite participants to map out a design vision for the world of 2050

The 50th Anniversary ICSID Congress will be held in Singapore from 23 to 25 November 2009. The congress, subtitled “Design Difference: Designing our World 2050”, will involve participants helping create and debate potential design solutions to some of the key challenges facing the world of tomorrow. The solutions which are developed will have a life beyond the conference, as they will be shared with other design groups and with stakeholders such as governments around the world.
Already delegates from 25 countries have confirmed their attendance.

The event itself embraces the future by featuring “Design2050 Studios”, inter-active and participative mini-symposia, led by world-renowned creative experts, including Chris Bangle of Chris Bangle Associates, and Stefano Marzano of Philips Design (refer to Appendix I for a full list of Design Leaders). In the months leading to the Congress, each of the Design Leaders will head up a team of four to six individuals from multi-discipline backgrounds to create a Design2050 proposition, by imagining, conceptualising and visualising a desired future. Participants at the Congress will be invited to transform these ideas into practical realities.

The nine confirmed symposia leaders and their studio topics are:

1. Chris Luebkeman, Arup Group: NetZero 2050
2. Bill Mitchell, MIT Media Lab: Reinventing the Automobile 2050
3. Richard Hassell and Wong Munn Sum, WOHA: Architects save the World
4. Ravi Naidoo, Design Indaba: Protofarm 2050
5. Chris Bangle, Chris Bangle Associates: Personal Emotional Mobility 2050
6. Stefano Marzano and Clive van Heerden, Philips Design: Healthcare 2050
7. Feng Zhu, FZD School of Design: Entertainment 2050
8. Toshiko Mori, Robert P. Hubbard Prof, of Architecture at Harvard University: Blindspots of Design 2050
9. David Nelson and Stefan Behling of Foster + Partners: Sustainable Cities 2050

Confirmed keynote speakers for the conference are:
1. Emily Pilloton, founder and executive director of Project H Design, a non-profit organisation that enables product design initiatives for Humanity, Habitats, Health, and Happiness, and author of “Design Revolution: 100 Products that Empower People” (release date Sept. 2009).

2. Ged Davis, Co-President, Global Energy Assessment, advisor to international institutions and companies, director of Low Carbon Accelerator Limited, governor of the International Development Research Centre in Ottawa, and a member of the INDEX Design Awards Jury.

3. Thomas Heatherwick, Honorary Fellow of the RIBA and a Senior Fellow at the Royal College of Art in the UK. Heatherwick has won the Prince Philip Designers Prize, and in 2004 was the youngest practitioner to be appointed as a Royal Designer for Industry.

4. William Halal, Professor Emeritus of Science, Technology & Innovation at George Washington University. Macmillan’s Encyclopedia of the Future ranked Prof. Halal among “The World’s 100 Most Influential Futurists”, a list that includes the likes of H.G. Wells, Sir
Arthur C. Clarke and Daniel Bell.

Panel discussions at the end of each of the three days of deliberations at the congress will be chaired by Paola Antonelli, senior curator of architecture and design at The Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Prof. Carlos Hinrichsen, Icsid President said: “The experience of the keynote speakers and their combined backgrounds in government, industry, and the non-profit sectors, further strengthen the purpose of the Congress – to stimulate a dialogue about the discipline of design and how it has and will continue to shape the future of the world.

Attendees will contribute to this discussion, and should be prepared to be engaged in a thought provoking, and creatively-enriching experience. The congress will be a wonderful occasion for all those inspired by the power of design to deliver a better world.”

Dr Milton Tan, Director of DesignSingapore Council, and Chairman of the International Advisory Panel of the Congress said: “This year’s Icsid World Design Congress will be different. Nine international design leaders will be in Singapore not simply to give speeches but to make visionary design propositions for the year 2050. Anyone concerned about how we should live in the future, and what we can do about it, should feel compelled to be here!”

More information on the Icsid World Design Congress, the Design2050 Studios, speakers and registration is available at: www.icsidcongress09.com.

The deadline for the special discounted “early bird price” is fast approaching. To be eligible one must book prior to the 9th of September.

The Congress will be held during the biennial Singapore Design Festival (20 to 30 November).

For more information, please contact:
Nicky Wang, nicky.wang@sg.grayling.com;
Robin Williams, robin.williams@sg.grayling.com;
Chris Davies. chris.davies@sg.grayling.com
T +65 6325 4606
Grayling

About Icsid
The International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (Icsid) is an international nongovernmental organisation for professional industrial design. Founded in 1957, Icsid facilitates cooperation and interaction among professional associations, promotional societies, educational institutions, government bodies, corporations and institutions with the aim of contributing to the development of the profession of industrial design. Through shared interests, experiences, and resources, Icsid provides an international platform for its members to be heard as a powerful voice.

Icsid also holds consultative status with UNESCO, UNIDO, ISO and WIPO to support and highlight design in international forums. www.icsid.org

About DesignSingapore Council
Design changes and improves lives, inspires creativity and new forms of expression. It also enhances business competitiveness in today’s crowded marketplace. DesignSingapore Council is Singapore’s response to these propositions and opportunities. As a national initiative, the Council aims to place Singapore on the world map for design creativity. It looks to develop a thriving, multi-disciplinary design cluster of industries and activities in Singapore that has relevance and impact globally. The initiative also aims to bring design to business boardrooms, new audiences and new markets.

The DesignSingaporeCouncil was formed in August 2003 as a department within the Ministry of Information, Communications and the Arts, as the national agency for the promotion and development of Singapore design.
www.designsingapore.org

Edit: We have now an easy to remember Facebook page URL:
http://www.facebook.com/designsojourn. Thanks for all your support and see you there!

The last time we announced we had a Facebook goup and we have a really good response for our loyal Design Sojourn readers. Thank you! Unfortunately, Facebook’s Groups functionality did not really match our needs as much of it, such as a discussion forum, would already be satisfied here.

However Facebook’s Fan Pages is a much better solution! Not only does it have similar Groups functionality, you can have a bigger membership ceiling, the integration of Facebook applications, and most important of all the information on Pages that you follow will appear on your News feed on your Facebook page. Heavy Facebook users will find this useful, as it is another means where you can get fresh Design Sojourn content directly to you.

Also another great thing with Fan Pages is I finally get to see a face. I know there are a lot of Design Sojourn readers who come to the site, but don’t really comment. So by adding yourself as a Fan, I get to be your fan as well! This is one of my goals when I started Design Sojourn, that is to connect with as many designers (from all disciplines and all over the world) as I can.

So don’t wait and come “Fan” us at the official Design Sojourn Fan Page.

This has really been a long time coming, but I never really had the time to get down to doing it. Now at home and nursing the flu, I have decided to spend a little time putting the finishing touches on my new Design Sojourn logo and hence brand.

First, a few points on the intent of the original logo.

1) Design Sojourn is really about a journey, or a design journey to be exact. The logo’s handwritten font was envisage to reflect this journey. As we all know the creation of a design is never an easy process and filled with ups and downs. The roughness of the type was meant to signify this.

2) The old logo font was also tweaked to look like a left pointing arrow with a tail.

3) The tail was also mean to represent how at the end of our design journey we come to a single (hopefully right) solution or point.

With this in mind, I would like to now introduce to you the refresh of the Design Sojourn brand identity!

Old Design

Here are some of my thoughts in how I came about developing this logo refresh. Do note, that I have been thinking of this refresh or almost a year since I got Charfish Charlie to help me out. Thanks again Charlie!

Revision 1:

1) The original logo was created in Photoshop and I asked Charlie to help me transcribe the logo into a vector format.

2) As it was also meant to be a refresh, Charlie and I also looked into reversing the direction of the arrow (point to the right) but still keep to the idea of a tail that lead to a point.

3) Unfortunately I decided not to implement the end result of this exercise as I still was not sure really needed to get my mind what I wanted the new look to be.

4) I thank Charlie for his help, as I knew It would not be fair to keep Charlie on if I was undecided on what I wanted.

Many Revisions Later:

1) After saying goodbye to Charlie, I continued to experiment with different colors as well as the tilt and angle of the logo.

2) I even started from scratch by sketching out a number of different logo designs to explore. None, however, had the simplicity or impact of the original.

3) I knew I still wanted to go with a logo based on a font, as the Design Sojourn name is long and I can’t seem to figure out a symbol design that works. I even created a design that looked like an alien crop circle! Thus I started back where I was.

4) l was clear that the logo must still represent a journey and its bumps, but I realized that the tail was getting arbitrary.

5) Thus in today’s final articulation, when I removed the tail, it all seem to fall into place. This final incarnation is a lot tighter and cleaner than the original, though it still reflects the core character of the brand. However this refresh now has a much stronger directional feel of the journey going or getting somewhere. Much like the quote from Disney’s “Meet the Robinsons” : “Keep moving forward!”

This logo is still a work in progress, but before I do decide to implement this logo site wide and update all my banners, I would love to hear your feedback? I always believe that branding is a two way process, what the brand owner thinks it should be, and what his audience thinks it is. Ideally the two should be the same. So please do have you say by leaving a comment below?

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Update: 1

Old Design

Thank you very much for all your feedback! I have made the following revisions:

1) Reduced the size and width of “Design” and made it more balanced with “Sojourn”. It was not the intention to make either word more prominent. It is a combined journey in design. However it was hell adjusting the word sizing and still keep to that reducing arrow/funnel look. In the original revision the “Design” would naturally be a larger word if I wanted this arrow head idea to still work.

2) I agree with some of the feedback on the readability issues with “rn” and spent some time to tweek the letters. I made “r” more defined, and increased the width of “n”. Hope its better now.

3) I also took a look at the shearing (leaning) angle and after trying a bunch of different angles I still like this “forward” accelerating angle the best. It looks progressive.

In my opinion, the end result looks a lot more balanced, but still keeping to the new logo’s tightness. The new revision does look a little more considered, where as the original looks more aggressive. I’m still on the fence, but am leaning towards the revision. Would probably let it sit a little more as I will need a bit more time to get a feel of what represents me best. By the way, just ignore the color, I’m working on it right now.

Update: 2

I took a few more hours to tighten up the spacing of the letters. This is the sort of thing you never really notice, until someone with a practice eye brings it up! Thanks Kevin. Well the final logo is up top, so enjoy and let me know what you think!

Sorry for the lack of updates on this blog as I was on vacation all last week. I had hope to get back into the swing of things this week, but unfortunately I have manged to catch the flu instead. According to the symptoms it looks like that of the Swine variety, so I will need some additional downtime to recover. The constant fever does not help as well. Otherwise I’m still alive and kicking, and I will touch base with all of you soon. Oink oink!

Sorry friends. It has been a while since I made contact with anyone via this blog. It was partly due to the fact that I got pretty sick and sadly I still am. It’s one ailment after another in never ending vicious cycle. I cannot seem to shake it off completely. I must be a germ magnet!

Fortunately during my sick leave, I had the opportunity to do some serious thinking and reflection. In particular, what I wanted to do with this blog and it’s role in my life.

Early in January this year, I announced the launch of Design Sojourn Version 4.0. It was a good revamp of the site and as well as refocusing its content. Particularly important was that I shared a new blog description and focus which was “How to master the business of strategic industrial design”.

However at the back of my mind I still could not decide what I wanted to get out of this blog. As it is now 6 months since the last update, I thought it might be a good time to share with you how I see my blog going forward.

I have this bad habit. My attention to things get somewhat shorten due to my very wide and diverse interests. Luckily this blog has prevailed as it is not like the 95% of the other blogs out there that have not been updated in the last 120 days. So I decided to focus my activities to keep things simple and in perspective.

I made a list of in all the things that I did or things that were important to me. I then reorganized a few things and painfully “deleted” the others. In particular, I searched out for synergies in my interests, activities and personal goals. As part of this analysis, I had to asked myself again: Why do I blog?

I felt in many instances that this blog was drifting aimlessly. What I realized was that while this blog had a focus, it did not have a purpose or an end goal. While some bloggers may be happy with this, as in blogging when they feel like it, this lack of purpose did not sit too well with me.

I learned early on that as I have so many things to do, I need to be selective in what I end up doing. Therefore, I needed to be clear why I would invest the time to write and maintain this blog. Life is too short to waste doing pointless or senseless things.

Thus I have decided to evolve this blog into a conversation platform that will lead towards my writing a book called “The Art of Design Leadership” or something close to that.

I find a lot of comfort in this decision, and making it was a lot easier then I expected. I have been blogging for almost 4 years and this blog has more than 500 posts of rich Strategic Design content. Compiling all this time an effort into a book just makes sense to me.

Going forward, my posts will still be a journey in Strategic Design, but it will now have a higher purpose and over arcing structure towards the creation of the different chapters in my book. Finally, in true Web 2.0 fashion, you will be able to interact, feedback, and comment on the book’s content as I develop it.

So with this new purpose in mind, I have spent the last couple of weeks cleaning up my blog with the focus on readability and navigation. I removed “chicklets” that were redundant, reformatted the site to improve logical flow and reduced the amount of ads you would see.

However the biggest change is in simplifying my categories to reflect this new blog direction. Here they are with quick descriptions.

About Design Sojourn: What’s new at the Design Sojourn Blog or what I am up to in my adventures in design. A place to put the more general and non-design administrative stuff like this post!

Design Articles: Pillar and foundation articles on Strategic Industrial Design and Design Leadership that define what Design Sojourn is all about.

Design Leadership: Short reads about Design Strategy and Managing the Business of Design. This new category combines these two old topics in a logical manner that also reflects this blog’s new direction.

Designer Lifehack: Quick tips, hints, random musings and activities that could help make you a better designer. Majority of this content was written during in this blog’s first 3 years, much of which are still relevant today.

Entrepreneurship: Thoughts on my experiences being a design entrepreneur. More legacy content that can still be an interesting read.

Industrial Design: Multi-disciplinary Industrial Design related discussions and critiques. I used to have to have another category called Meta Design, but as Industrial Design has evolved into more than what it used to be, I felt comfortable to use this as a general description for both categories.

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So what do you think? Does this make a lot more sense to you? I am looking forward to reading all your awesome feedback. Thanks in advance and do stay tuned, as regular programming will resume shortly!