waste
Ending is better than mending
Less, but better
Flying a kiwi
The mirror-image economy
Wasting light
- Poured
A timeless quality
Of all Rams’s products, the 606 Universal Shelving System is perhaps his most successful in fulfilling his own principles of good design. It is still in production today, some fifty years after its conception. The system is distinctive yet unobtrusive, and when the shelves and cabinets are filled, its slim profile allows it to fade quietly into the background.
Its ‘plainness’ lends it a timeless quality that has transcended the vagaries of fashion like no other of Rams’s designs. It was conceived in such a way as to optimize its function as simply and in as many different situations as possible, while still permitting upgrades and alterations without falling into obsolescence: all later adaptations and additions could still be integrated into the original structure and sizes.
"Fashion objects are not capable of being long-lived," said Rams in 2007. "We simply cannot afford this throw-away mentality anymore. Good design has to have built-in longevity. I believe that the secret of the longevity of my furniture lies in its simplicity and restraint. Furniture should not dominate, it should be quiet, pleasant, understandable and durable."
Consumption
The proponents of technology in the 1840s were very enthusiastic about replacing workers with machines. But somehow I find no indication that they realized that while production could be carried out with few workers and still run to high outputs, buyers would be needed for those outputs. The realization that though the need for workers decreased, the need for purchasers could increase, did not seem to be part of the discourse on the machinery question. Since then, however, technology and its promoters have had to create a social institution – the consumer – in order to deal with the increasingly tricky problem that machines can produce but it is usually people who consume.
The Factory Photographs
A Book by David LynchI love industry. Pipes. I love fluid and smoke. I love man-made things. I like to see people hard at work, and I like to see sludge and man-made waste.
Bowellism
A DefinitionLloyd’s Building, London.
Bowellism is a modern architectural style heavily associated with Richard Rogers. The premise is that the services for the building, such as ducts, sewage pipes and lifts, are located on the exterior to maximise space in the interior.
Muda, Muri, Mura
An ArticleEliminating waste is the key to efficiency – in the Toyota Production System, this is termed as:
Muda (waste),
Muri (overburden),
and Mura (irregularity).Working with Brian Eno on design principles for streets
- Think like a gardener, not an architect: design beginnings, not endings
- Unfinished = fertile
- Artists are to cities what worms are to soil.
- A city’s waste should be on public display.
- Make places that are easy for people to change and adapt (wood and plaster, as opposed to steel and concrete.)
- Places which accommodate the very young and the very old are loved by everybody else too.
- Low rent = high life
- Make places for people to look at each other, to show off to each other.
- Shared public space is the crucible of community.
- A really smart city is the one that harnesses the intelligence and creativity of its inhabitants.
Skeleton, Organs, Circulation, Sinew, Skin
I’m concerned with how I witness the work of user experience practitioners getting treated: like it’s just a set of motions toward a product’s all-important implementation, and one that we try to compress, due to its ostensible superfluity. Once the implementation is finished, the UX work appears to usually get discarded.
Tracing the answer back
I submit that the materials that form the precursors to a product’s implementation have considerable value on their own.
My vision is that I will be able to ask a question as mundane as one about the wording of a single button, and trace the answer all the way back to the overarching business strategy to see that it makes sense.
The UX coral reef
It isn’t a site, or a service, or even an identifiable product at all, but rather a system for creating a skin around and connective tissue between things like:
Demographic studies
Contextual inquiries
Stakeholder and user interviews
Surveys
The business ecosystem
Personas
Scenarios
Sketches, storyboards, wireframes
Mockups, models and prototypes
Email and IM conversations
Meeting notes
Content inventories and audits
Concept schemes, taxonomies, thesauri
A UI style guide
A branding and visual identity guide
A voice and tone guide
A code style guide
...etcThe individual elements of such a corpus represent the work of half a dozen specialist sub-disciplines, and are useful for realizing a product’s implementation. But if you hook them all up together, they merge to become a strategic artifact that transcends products and operates as a critical control surface for the business. This is because what such an artifact represents is a coral reef of deeply-considered and hard-fought decisions, and a story of the process that yielded them.