Chris Vallance of Radio 4’s excellent iPM has done a thoughtful interview with Sir Clive Sinclair, ranging across many subjects, from personal flying machines to the Asus Eee, and touching on the subject of consumer understanding of technology, and the degree to which the public […]
All posts filed under “Innovation”
Thoughtful Acts
Above & below: ‘Push’ Table by Jennifer Hing. Jane Fulton Suri‘s wonderful Thoughtless Acts? chronicles, visually, “those intuitive ways we adapt, exploit, and react to things in our environment; things we do without really thinking” – effectively, examples of valid affordances perceived by users, which […]
Buckminster Fuller on Design with Intent
Buckminster Fuller, talking to the New Yorker in 1966, quoted in this article by Elizabeth Kolbert: “I made up my mind . . . that I would never try to reform man–that’s much too difficult. What I would do was to try to modify the […]
Some thoughts on classifications
Over the last couple of years, this site has examined, mentioned, discussed or suggested around 250 examples of ‘control’ features or methods designed into products, systems and environments – many of which have come from readers’ suggestions and comments on earlier posts. I’d resisted classifying […]
Changing behaviour: water meter taps
Three student projects on show at Made in Brunel earlier this month took the idea of moving the function of a water meter to the tap (faucet) itself, to act as a ‘speedometer‘ and thus encourage users to reduce their water usage (or wastage). The […]
Design & Punishment
Design and Punishment, by Ben Cunningham. Photo from the Arts Institute at Bournemouth‘s 2007 Three Dimensional Design graduate directory. Very neatly linking the themes of the last two posts (devices to make users aware of their energy use, and intentionally uncomfortable seating) is the Design […]
Tools for ideation and problem solving: Part 1
Back in the darkest days of my PhD, I started blogging extracts from the thesis as it was being written, particularly the literature review. It helped keep me motivated when I was at a very low point, and seemed to be of interest to […]
Angular measure
A few years ago I went to a talk at the RCA by Alex Lee, president of OXO International. Apart from a statistic about how many bagel-slicing finger-chopping accidents happen each year in New York city, what stuck in my mind were the angled measuring […]
Next week: a simplified Design with Intent toolkit, v.0.9
The ‘Design with Intent method‘, on which I’m working as the first part of my PhD, has been fairly sparsely reported on this blog. This is intended to be an innovation method for helping designers faced with “behaviour change” problems come up with useful solutions, […]
Stuff that matters: Unpicking the pyramid
Most things are unnecessary. Most products, most consumption, most politics, most writing, most research, most jobs, most beliefs even, just aren’t useful, for some scope of ‘useful’. I’m sure I’m not the first person to point this out, but most of our civilisation seems to […]
What’s happening with the toolkit (Part 1)
It’s 8 months since the Design with Intent Toolkit v.0.9 went online and I’ve had incredibly useful feedback from a whole range of people who’ve tried it out on different kinds of briefs and problems. As mentioned a couple of months ago, the toolkit poster […]
frog design on Design with Intent
Robert Fabricant of frog design — with whom I had a great discussion a couple of weeks ago in London — has an insightful new article up at frog’s Design Mind, titled, oddly enough, ‘Design with Intent: how designers can influence behaviour’ — which tackles […]