Amid Moradganjeh, a Masters student at the Umeå Institute of Design, dropped me an email with a link to his thesis project done in collaboration with Microsoft. Rimino, is a next generation mobile device interface concept that wants to be intuitive, prioritizes human needs, and focuses on enhancing the human experience.

Project Rimino redefines mobile experience through human factors research and design thinking. Informed by human experience, the project is guided by both observational and experimental design research methods.

The Rimino concept is an E-paper mobile device with a user interface inspired by print posters. Historically, as technology has progressed, devices have become more conspicuous. Rimino challenges this trend and presents the alternative: technology that is more integrated and more sensitive to the human experience.

Rimino basically solves one of the biggest problems we have using touch screen devices today, and that is not being able to see what is happening under our finger. With the Rimino, we tap the back of the device instead. While some of his ideas are not entirely new (especially when taken separately), the device ends up being a collection of interesting interface solutions that includes using the corner of the device as a writing tool, and the use of a flexible soft body as a way of entering commands.

Despite the technology still being at least 5-10 years ahead of us, the video of the persona and scenario story is nevertheless pretty cool. For more information on the Rimino and Amid’s extensive design process, check out Rimino.com.

EDIT: On hindsight, and after reading the boat loads of information on the Rimino site, I found that the project looked less like a research thesis and more like a design project, abet an in-depth and extensive one. As mentioned earlier, I did not see a lot of original thought, but instead a collection of ideas that was nothing really new. Data collection and testing seemed anecdotal at best, but the process was well thought out.

If this was then a pure design exercise emphasizing a designer’s critical insight, I wonder if the design of the physical phone could have been done better. There were at times in the video that I though the screen was going to peel of like a sticker (which it probably was!). But let’s not be too harsh, it is clear that the focus of Admid’s thesis was on the interface design; he was in Umeå’s Interaction Design Program after all.

John Cho Moore grew tired of the limitations of the industrial design process and is now trying to capture the essence of design with his beautifully handmade bamboo and canvas bags.

Follow John through his unique manufacturing process that challenges convention thinking about product design and the creative process.

It is wonderful to see Industrial Designers going back to working with their hands and anchoring that as part of their design process. I also noticed that there was no computer in sight.

I have a small confession. I only managed to watch Inception on the plane 3 weeks ago. Despite my fears of an over-hyped movie, I thoroughly enjoyed it! There are very few movies these days that require an audience to think deeply, connect the dots, AND do it quickly.

Click on the Image for larger view.

For those that struggled, and I know I had my moments, check out Christopher Nolan’s very cool hand sketch visualization of Inception’s plot shared during an interview with his brother Jonathan (who co-wrote The Dark Knight).

Greatness often comes from a simple but strategic sketch.

Thanks for the link @fabrikade.

Dylan Tweney, a senior editor at Wired.com, wrote on The Atlantic:

…in the 21st century, Internet standards have successfully separated design and content. The two live more interdependent lives, sometimes tightly tied and sometimes completely separated from one another.

The message is now free from the medium.

It’s that separability of design and text that has led to the third wave of the web, in which readers (or what some would call end-users) are in control of how the content they are reading looks. And, as it turns out, many of those readers like their designs to be as minimal as possible.

Call this wave The Undesigned Web.

This wave has two faces. One is the trend towards more minimal, readable designs. The other is the imperative to make content as easily reformattable as possible, separating content from the designs in which it’s initially clothed.

You can see it at work in tools like Instapaper and Readability. You can see it in applications like Flipboard, which filter and reformat news through the lens of your social network. And you can see it in news readers like Google News, which present every website’s latest articles in a consistent, quickly-scannable and easily searchable format.

It is this kind of thinking that continues to perpetuate the myth that Design is nothing but a visual activity that is only skin deep. I’m sorry, has the understanding of Design just regressed 10 years? Most designers or design thinkers would know that Design is both an activity and a process. Furthermore, an important element in this design process is a considered decision making activity where elements are added or removed to fulfill the requirements of the brief.

Apple has created a billion dollar empire doing things like not putting a camera on an iPad or not allowing early iPhones to forward SMS or be on 3G. I don’t see anyone saying Apple Undesigned the first generation iPhone so that all it did was make calls?

As a further example of what I’m trying to say, let me Undesign the quote above.

…in the 21st century, Internet standards have successfully separated design and content. The two live more interdependent lives, sometimes tightly tied and sometimes completely separated from one another. The message is now free from the medium.It’s that separability of design and text that has led to the third wave of the web, in which readers (or what some would call end-users) are in control of how the content they are reading looks. And, as it turns out, many of those readers like their designs to be as minimal as possible. Call this wave The Undesigned Web. This wave has two faces. One is the trend towards more minimal, readable designs. The other is the imperative to make content as easily reformattable as possible, separating content from the designs in which it’s initially clothed. You can see it at work in tools like Instapaper and Readability. You can see it in applications like Flipboard, which filter and reformat news through the lens of your social network. And you can see it in news readers like Google News, which present every website’s latest articles in a consistent, quickly-scannable and easily searchable format.

There you go, as Dylan says, “the message is free from the medium”. Oh, you would have probably guessed it, formatting a paragraph by deciding where to add a line break is Design.

Instapaper, Flipboard and even Google News all take a conscious effort to Design their applications for readability. (Notice I said Design for Readability?) While they avoid nice backgrounds, Twitter birds and funky fonts, I’ll bet a good bottle of wine, that they do obsess over elements such as the thickness of borders, the leading and the kerning of text. In fact, I would expect their design activity to be a very tough one, as the simplicity of their application would make every wrong design decision a very obvious one.

In most websites, even mine, the design decision is to bring some visual aesthetics into the mix, making the reading experience a different one compared to an experience that is just catered for reading. Ok, I said my piece, lets move on, nothing to see here.

Via: The Atlantic.

Francisco Inchauste, a User Experience (UX) designer passionate about all things web, writes a very insightful analysis on the difference of approach between his design of intangible digital products, to that of Architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s more analogue (or tangible) products.

He writes:

The digital medium is perhaps the most forgiving canvas we have ever been able to create on. It’s like a clay that holds shape and never dries, or a pencil with a never-ending eraser. The ability to easily change the user interface or modify how a website functions is what makes the digital stuff we make so great. To top it off, our raw material (bits/bytes) costs us nothing. If you have ever designed and built a physical product you quickly find the limitations. There is no forgiveness in creating something out of wood or metal. You can’t just quickly tweak it if you find something wrong once it has been produced. For example, putting a sticker on a table that says “beta” and then sending out a “table update” later to fix issues doesn’t work. When it’s a table, you measure twice (maybe three times) and cut once. There is no “undo” if you get it wrong. You start over.

So, with all the benefits of the digital medium, why does the final product seem to degrade so quickly? Searching through website galleries for designs that could be studied for years to come for their ingenuity and insight seems to be a fruitless endeavour. Search through something like an architecture gallery and you’ll find at least a handful of homes or buildings that will certainly stand the test of time. The work there will age well and has a better chance to be appreciated more in 10 years than it is today. Our mindset is completely different with digital products. Being able to quickly iterate on a design until we get to a superior product is something we can easily achieve. The downside is that clients have begun to expect things to be bigger, better, and faster. That final product has become an iteration, rather than a solid end product. Less time is available to think things through and get to that finely crafted solution. Every design, every piece of code, is “good enough” for now. There’s no real commitment because it can always be changed.

I think he nails it right on the head.

Furthermore in my opinion, both design disciplines can learn much from each other’s process. Product (tangible) designers can reflect on pushing through more rounds of iteration and failing earlier in the design phase before finalizing on a design.

UX or Interaction Designers should move past the easy lure of a “beta” tag and force themselves or their clients to spend more time making sure the content is at a much higher level before it is released for public consumption.

But lets take a moment to consider this. Just imagine how powerful we would be, if both disciplines attacked a design problem together?

On a small parallel, I have always enjoyed games on the Nintendo Gameboy or DS platform. The natural constraints of a memory cartridge force the software designers to ensure the highest quality content before it gets shipped. A refreshing change in an era of PC games that often forces you to download patches to cover up their bug laded software.

Via: GetFinch

Bryan over at the ZURBlog wrote that designers should focus on methods, not process.

At a glance, method and process may seem like the same thing, but a closer look reveals their distinct differences. A method is a how you do something, while process is putting methods through an established routine.

Don’t get stuck thinking a process will solve your problems because without effective methods, you’re likely to end up with an uninspired result.

Some food for thought…

However I wonder if we are “splitting hairs” by playing around with the definition of the words here, but I do see where he is coming from. Personally, I don’t see a difference between the definition of “method” and “process”, and I tend to use both words interchangeably to represent the same thing. I do use “process”, however, to help communicate a larger sense of scale.

I do believe though, that this conversation follows along the same line of thinking as my point about how in Design there is no fix process, just broad guidelines.

A slide from “Design Thinking is Killing Creativity, a Presentation Redux“.

It is pretty interesting to see how Mario’s character design has evolved through the years. If you study how the heavy pixilated Mario in 1981 became the sleek rendered Mario in 2008, you can see that a good design language needs to be distinct, consistent, simple and clear.

I know that I will be stating the obvious, but this is the reason why you can identify that the images are all the same character. The red color, cap, big nose, mustachio and the tuff of hair at the back of the head must all sit in a style guide somewhere.

And before I forget, happy 25th birthday Mario!

Via: My Extra Life

A short note today.

During my usual blog maintenance, I’ve decided to create a new category called Design Process. This category is specifically meant as a place for you to locate design process discussions and visualizations that can help you better under our complex design processes and methodology. Design process discussions have always been central to this blog, but never had its own category for organization purposes. It was often embedded in Design Leadership (or Strategy) and occasionally Designing Designers.

So it is about time that Design Process has its own well-deserved category. Check it out here!

Ariane Prin, a Masters student at RCA, shares her thinking and conceptual process behind her Air Hair Project: hair dryer for hairdressers.

As part of my survey, I visited many hairdressers and I was able to observe that they use the hairdryer for approximately 4.5 hours a day but that this was not very well adapted. They taught me that this object has to be smaller, lighter, wireless, that they often use the same nozzle, and that the switch allowing distinct levels of power is useless because they habitually use the maximum mode.

The most impressive thing is the fact that a majority of hairdressers do not use the handle because they cannot be precise, then efficient, then rapid, then have a lot of clients, and earn a lot of money. They hold it by the body of the object even if this is the hottest part. Moreover, at the end of their career, 70% of the hairdressers have wrist and shoulder articulation problems.

This is for all those reasons that I started to work on the ergonomics of the hairdryer. I have made research on different shapes in blue foam and I came back to the hairdressers to decide together what could be the three most adapted shapes.

The fascinating part of her process is what I like to call “design by making”. Ariane jumps head on into making sketch models from her sketches to test out her form. As you can see, her meaningful design solutions was because she got real quick. Sadly, this sort of “design by making” methodology is almost hardly done these days.

Designers are getting lazy due to the easy access to CAD (yes you!), as CAD is a much “cleaner” way of doing design. I myself am also guilty of this. Unfortunately by going from sketch straight to CAD, you lose the opportunity to get in touch with the “feel” of an object, its proportions, its weight, and the ergonomics.

You may say that this should be limited to products like hair dryers of mobile phones. However if the car industry still sculpts and refines the lines of a concept car in clay, I don’t see why we should give up this crucial step in our design process?

When was the last time you got “real” quick? How early in your design process did you get “real”? You might also be surprised to know that by getting “real” quick you could speed up your design process, as you can get to your design solution quicker and make less mistakes or iterations. So why not give it a try in your next design project?

Via: Core77.

Click on the image for a larger size.

@Issue Journal has shared a wonderful graphic visualization of Disney’s internal organization chart. What is interesting to note is the organization’s structure is build up around a process, in this case the creative process, instead of the usual hierarchical top down or even the so-called flat reporting structure.

Businesses who are passionate about design and creativity or want to make design thinking a central feature in their organization can learn something from this. If you look at how Disney has been set up, the organization respects the process, and all positions including management, supports the creation of the end product.

Why not eh?

Via: Fast Company