Noisy Decent Graphics

Heatherwick talk at the Design Museum

I went to see Thomas Heatherwick talk at the Design Museum the other night. It's been a busy week for talks.

Heatherwick is, of course, a genius. Lovely bloke, very down to earth humble way of presenting. 

He even had a picture of the Tellytubbes outside of the Seed Pavillion.

 

One small concern. At the end there was lots of future work which was a bit Starchitect. I hope he doesn't turn into one of those. I always loved his ability to take pretty mundane things and design them as wonderful, interesting, beautifully functional, clever objects. I hope he doesn't end up all wavy line buildings in Dubai. He's better than that.

Clay Shirky and the need for better filters

 

Clay Shirky came into the office yesterday.

One of the many interesting points he made was people moan about there being information overload these days, which is nonsense, ever since Gutenberg it's been impossible to keep up with all the "information".

What's changed is that your filters don't work as well as they used to. The filters you use to choose which books you read don't work for the internet, twitter, 24 hours news etc etc.

I love this.

If we distill that as - there isn't too much information, you just need better filters - you can then swap information for almost anything and it still works.

There isn't too much TV, you just need better filters.

There isn't too much email, you just need better filters.

There aren't too many meetings, you just need better filters.

Interesting thought to apply to work. What filters do you need to be able to get stuff done? How do you create better filters?  How can you make filters that others would find useful.

Systems. Filters. Good.

Anyway.

 

Jeremy Deller talk

I went to a Q&A thing with Jeremy Deller. The theme was loosely - what is modern art? It was fairly sedate until someone asked - what is the role of the gallery in modern art?

Deller replied, "They're dry, well lit and secure."

 

 

"a small beta test of a personalised newspaper service"

 

 

So so good. More soon.

Korab's law - Don't buy IT products or services advertised in airports

For many reasons. Original tweet here.

Good quote

 

And he wrote it mirrored as quickly as you and I could write normally.

Good Us

 

But wouldn't you have done the same to the H?

 

Self parking - terrifying and brilliant

We have a Prius. It parks itself. Looks a bit like this.

CLICK HERE to watch the video because I can't understand Flickr anymore.

The technology is way ahead of the design, or of the limitations of the design. Or the interface.

Or something.

Anyway.

How can you tell if hummus is off?

I wrote this on a tub of hummus the other day. We always open a tub of hummus and then a few days later we have no idea when it was opened. We can't tell if it's gone off or not. Chaos ensues.

I uploaded this pic to Flickr and jokingly typed, "Internet of Dad UI. See also Old GitHub, RuriComb etc."

And this too.

But this has nothing to do with Dads, or Mums or old people or rural people. But there is probably a point about looking at the behaviours of people who have lots of experience of using one particular thing and then designing around that.

Designing with data + user needs. 

Anyway.

 

 

Design Indaba

I've been watching with a pang of jealously the tweets coming out of this year's Design Indaba in South Africa. I went last year and it's a wonderful conference.

Ravi curates a brilliant mix of speakers, big names and unknowns. 45 minutes and 5 minute talks. Design, architecure, digital and then the odd band thrown in. An inspiring, entertaining and educational mix.

  

 

Michael Bierut MCs every year, entertains every night and then goes running along the beach with whoever makes it at 7am.

 

I'm not really doing it justice. Some good write ups here and here and here.

Feels like a long time ago now. We hadn't yet transitioned all departments over to GOV.UK that wouldn't happen for another two months, and the nominatons for Design of the Year had only just been announced.