via thecoolhunter

Though a few of the pictures were compelling of cooler car parks, I was most taken by the following quote:

Innovative developers and designers are recognising just how crucial this is – it’s almost too late by the time the consumer arrives at the front door. The “experience” of good design starts well before that.

How true. An experience begins and (ext)ends well before and beyond the actual “use” of a product or service. The winners and losers in the experience economy are the ones that have influenced as many touch points as possible from first impression to a lasting impression.

Brendan Gleeson made a presentation at the Institute of Technology Sligo yesterday on Designing Child-Friendly Cities. Not to be confused with the Irish actor, this Brendan is Director of the Urban Research Program at Griffith University in Austraila. At Crayola we never addressed the concept of the child-friendly city, though we certainly agreed with the necessity of “places for wild, unstructured play” in child development.

The talk was introduced as less about “how” and more about “why.” The imperative is pretty clear when you begin to consider how the built environment affects child well-being, particularly within urban areas, where devoid of enlightened planning, gobble up green spaces, as well as market-driven compaction of housing plots. The cult of materialism and individualism has produced wealthier, yet fatter, sicker and less happy kids.

The conversation was dense with the forces that conspire against our most dependent and vulnerable citizens, yet there was enlightened commentary around how child-friendly societies are designed to be more caring and civil to all, and have longer-term outlooks around solutions. We also need to consider the benefits of getting older people together with younger people, as opposed to segregating them into specific spaces.

When I was a design manager, I always preached you could never go too far, only not far enough. By providing a range of concepts from close-in to further afield, you had a better chance of stretching your client to a more “radical” solution.

The nonobject Book is every designer’s dream. No clients. No customers. No limitations.

The principal objective of the book is to stimulate thought: What is an object? Why do we desire what we desire? Why has “functionality” been defined in such a historically narrow way? What is beauty? Nonobject is an attempt to free the imagination by disengaging it form the constraints of utility, economy and technology.

The site is worth a visit to see the preview of Tarati, a phone concept that highlights the magical empty space between telephone connections by removing keys and making dialing a function of passing your finger through the interface.

The title of the post comes from a Populuxe film from the 1950′s. My how far we have come …

via Metroplis Magazine …

Mary Foyder/courtesy IDEO

IDEO’s Smart Spaces group takes on ‘urban planning’ by applying it’s user-focused methods on capturing the spirit of a Kansas City neighborhood.

IDEO immersed themselves in “the Vine,” applying the multidisciplinary method they bring to nearly all their projects, whether bathroom cleaners or hotel rooms. They hosted “whine and dines” (focus-group dinners), walked the streets, ate in the restaurants, did historical research, took photographs, and interviewed dozens of people about the neighborhood, sometimes on videotape. Part anthropology (with IDEO’s trained anthropologists), part site exploration (with IDEO’s trained architects), part documentary filmmaking (with IDEO’s trained media artists), their approach is to seek the qualitative essence of the community from the perspective of the community.

Read the article