Sunday, June 22, 2008

Design History: R. Buckminster Fuller

Richard Buckminster Fuller can not be easily defined as a designer per se but he was a visionary that tried to link the future, science with the now through the architecture and products he proposed like the dymaxion car.

NYTimes Slide Show

NYTimes Article

Whitney Exhibition

New Yorker Profile

Tuesday, June 17, 2008

What is Package Design?

I will be looking into the elements of good package design in preparation for teaching a class on the subject in the fall. There are many influences involved in the package solutions we see daily.


Who is responsible for the package design:does it fall under the marketing umbrella,what role do graphic designers play; or does the manufacturing process determine the package type?

Examples of Package Design

More Examples

Sunday, June 15, 2008

New Magazine: Apartmento

The spaces we live in are rarely as perfect as the slick styling found in the pages of the glossy publications like dwell or architectual digest, apartmento's plans to profile real spaces.

Apartmento

Friday, June 13, 2008

Reality TV Show for Designers

Phillip Starck is looking for young product designers in the UK to participate in a new TV show.


Design Week Article

Reality Show for Designers

Application

Tuesday, June 10, 2008

Auto Design: Why Beemers are Beautiful

I will hopefully own a BMW one day because I love what Chris Bangle, BMW's design director, has done to refine the form language as well as the technological advancements that is extending the tradition of BMW's as the ultimate driving machine.

Bangle has codified the driving (pun intended) philosophy that hold within it a vision of the future of auto design.

"Successful design arouses desire. In order to achieve this, it is more crucial than ever before that car manufacturers create the conditions that allow customers to establish a close relationship with their cars. Therefore, designers seek ways to promote and intensify people's identification with their car that reach beyond pure aesthetics. In the premium segment in particular, customers demand cars that stir emotions and allow them to express their individuality. BMW Group Design has set another deepened objective for designing new cars that moves today's consumers and their demand for enhanced utility and more versatility to the top of their agenda. An innovative concept introduced by BMW Group Design prepares the ground for this new approach: the GINA (Geometry and Functions In "N" Adaptions) principle grants more freedom for car design. It allows the creation of products with a design and functional range that express individuality and meet the wide variety of requirements of those who are using them."


--Auto Channel


BMW's Design Philosophy

Wired Article

Design and the 2008 Primary Campgain

It is nice to see how literate America is becoming on the role design plays in our lives.

The following media reports take a looked at design and political messages.

Video:ABC News Report

Business Week Article

Monday, June 09, 2008

Design Critic: Alice Rawsthorn

Alice Rawsthorn writes a weekly column on design for the International Herald Tribune.

She has access to a design world that can lend to general insights and identifying trends but you can decide if she is mining any new ground.

What is Good Design?

Friday, June 06, 2008

Package Design: The Bar Code

I really like the visual quality of barcodes, if I were to consider getting a tattoo it would make use of the same graphic elements (e.g. lines using positive and negative space maybe with an eye readable pharse underneath).

This tracking tool has become a fundamental component of all packages, providing essentail information to allow effiecent business processing of all kinds.

History of the Bar Code

More History

How it Works

Product Design: Puma's Bike for Urban Environs

I came across this bike in downtown Washington DC and thought it was unique. In the city where space is a premium this collapsible solution offers a few real advantages, like storage within a home closet. It also addresses another issue - traveling with a bike. It would be so much more convenient to store this inside the trunk of my car on my next trip to NYC.

It comes in an 8 or single speed version for about $800.

Puma Online

Design History/ Exhibition: Shaping the Future

The National Building Museum here in DC has a wonderful exhibition on the work of Eero Saarinen (b.1910-1961) called "Shaping the Future" running through August 2008.

Eero's work was part of the maturing modern aesthetic that explored new materials, technology and processes that ultimately soften the hard edges of modernism with the inclusion of organic forms. Major corporate projects like the IBM training, General Motors Tech Center, Gateway Arch of St. Louis, JFK and Dulles airline terminals etc. he captured the an optimistic postwar American cultural identity.

Shaping the Future

Design Policy: United Nations Report

The first report produced by the UN to seek understanding of the class of economic assets defined by images, sounds, text and symbols.

Creative Economy Report 2008

Wednesday, June 04, 2008

Design Thinking: Tim Brown of IDEO

IDEO, a leading product development firm, founder writes about design thinking in the Harvard Business Review (June 2008).

"The design process is best described metaphorically as a system of spaces rather than a predefined series of orderly steps. The spaces demarcate different sorts of related activities that together form the continuum of innovation. Design thinking can feel chaotic to those experiencing it for the first time. But over the life of a project participants come to see—as they did at Kaiser—that the process makes sense and achieves results, even though its architecture differs from the linear, milestone-based processes typical of other kinds of business activities."

Article :Design Thinking