2. Showing people how long it takes for certain types of trash to biodegrade if they toss it at the beach
3. Having a refill station in your college so whenever people run out of different kinds of soap, they can just use the machine to dispense more.
Do you scratch your head whenever you look at abstract art? I know I do sometimes. Perhaps it’s easier to understand when you break it down as a transition from realism, which humans have struggled to depict for centuries, to styles that more fully express the artist’s point of view about the scene or feeling in front of them.
For example, one of Monet’s earliest paintings looks like this:
He studied art classically for years before experimenting with looser brushstrokes and more vivid colors while working with other great artists of his era.
Art becomes interesting when it’s not just a mirror of real life, but an interpretation of real life. Once people were fully able to paint the world accurately, they began to seek other ways of expressing the atmosphere. Impressionism, seeing below (another by Monet), is an example of a scene that has been abstracted to some degree.
Another example is Picasso. His early work looks like this:
It’s incredibly realistic with rich details and classical lighting. He learned formal drawing techniques from his father before he ever dabbled with cubism. It was only later that he developed his own personal style, seen below.
Picasso developed cubism as a way to challenge the idea that art should be an exact copy of nature. Rather than continue painting with perspective and foreshortening, he introduce the idea that you can paint one subject from many different angles and perspective. This is what makes his work famous.
Mark Rothko’s early work looks like this:
It’s a traditional watercolor landscape. His later work, on the other hand, looked like this:
and then even later like this:
These are large paintings that required your participation. He’s implying, by hanging the paintings close to where observers would stand, that the painting is an alternative to real life. There’s a different reality altogether and that it is expressed in the work.
In order to understand abstract art, it’s important to think about these aspects of art – that we started from first being able to full capture a scene realistically with painting to experimenting how the painting could enhance the real world or create a different world. Not many people dare to do this, which is why those artists are famous.
That’s all for now. Until next time, happy museuming.
This amazing planter, Lua, gives your plant emotions! It uses sensors to measure the soil’s moisture, temperature and light exposure. It also measure your movement, so it peers at you when you walk by. The emotions help you know when it’s thirsty, sick, too hot, etc.
I’m always a sucker for sustainable houseware and packaging of any kind. Gaurav Wali uses pine needles here to create holders and organizers. He uses natural binders and waxes to make this a completely bio-degradable product. The material can also be colored with natural dyes made from vegetables and spices. What a cool way to use something that’s all around us!
I would use this Twin Utensil Set daily. When you switch from chopsticks back to western utensils, there’s even an interlock between the fork and knife so that they become one interlock.
A bell for runners so you can tell people when you’re coming up behind them – similar to a bell on a bicycle. I think this is pretty genius. This could also just be an app, but I suspect the ring reverberates better if it’s a physical one.
Designer: Kevin John Nadolny
An LED that helps you communicate with other drivers. You can view it up to 50 feet away. There are shortcuts to the most used messages, and the controller has large buttons.
Designers: John Stanley, Nina Stanley, Harsha Venna & Harshit Aggarwal
A clock that shows you the time in a new way. Because I work as a UX designer, I’m always looking for new interaction patterns and new interfaces – both digital and physical. This one is simply and unique.
Designer: Mattis Boets
A bookshelf that stacks vertically and doubles as a staircase so you can reach the top shelves. Made by Danny Kuo.
The floor chair. Simple in form and graceful to look at. By Jordi Ribaudi.
The flexible ladle that gets into all the corners. This is so smart. Well done, Jeho Yoon.
In Singapore, senior citizens can tap their identity card on the sensor at the pedestrian crossing so that they can have 3-13 more seconds depending on the size of the crossing. This takes into consideration everyone’s mobility levels.
This hotel has fire escape plans at ground level, because chances are if it’s smokey you’ll be low to the ground.
Parking lines that go up the wall so you can actually see if you’re parking in the right position. All garages should have this.
Creativity is originality and fluency of ideas. It’s something designers ought to be good at. But every now and then, we get stuck too. There are so many constraints. How do we make all of the stakeholders happy? What about that deadline?
Let’s go back to a space where we can play, because, as I learned at a UX conference two years ago, when people view an activity as play, they come up with twice as many ideas as people who view the activity as work.
Here’s a practice for getting back to idea generation: Give yourself a plain object with no instructions. How can uses can you find for it?
In Japan, the seat pattern tells you where priority seating is.
This sheet of paper is given to riders to excuse their tardiness at work when the train is late. The top and bottom of the sheet are days of the month to indicate date and the sides indicate how much later the train was than usual.
They give seniors a place to hold their cane when they sit on the subway.
This foot hammock.
This honey packaging
This clock, where the frame also moves with the hands
This dynamic piece of furniture
Terraced Bowls. Who knew soy sauce could be so beautiful.
The PIPO chair. (by Alejandro Estrada) Probably the most elegant chair I’ve ever seen.
“Look at this website,” my coworker said with his eyes rolled. I swivel my chair and peer at his screen. The website features a multi-colored word art title with a textured background that may have been popular twenty years ago. We both groan at the lack of professionalism the site shows.
We’ve all experienced the frustration of seeing bad design. Our gut reaction as designers is “someone ought to fix it.” Sometimes, we take it upon ourselves to fix it.
Several years ago, I saw a popular website that was promoting goods made in the US. The content was great, the navigation worked, but the styling of the website was appalling. There were boxes upon boxes, unnecessary drop shadows and weird illustrations that didn’t really make sense to me. I decided right there and then that I was going to redesign the site and then send the site owner my work.
I spent a weekend coming up with a new design for the site. “This is so much better,” I thought as I stepped back from it. I emailed it to the owner, happy with the result.
A few days later, I got an email back. It went something like this: “Your designs are lovely, and I really like the ideas you came up with. But I’m really proud of the little drawings I did for this site, and I want to keep them.” I was exasperated. The drawings on the current site were, in my opinion, terrible.
It was then that I realized something. Even though my execution of the website was more modern and professional, the site owner clearly wanted her personal mark on it. I realized that maybe she wanted the website to be funky and unpolished. I was the arrogant designer, coming in and telling her to change something that she clearly did not want to change.
Jared Spool, keynote speaker at the User Experience Professionals’ Association Conference (held yesterday), spoke about this exact topic. In his presentation, a designer named Tyler Thompson saw the boarding pass for Delta Airlines, which can be difficult to comprehend at first glance, and decided to redesign it so that it could be “better.”
Tyler’s design is beautiful. It uses modern fonts and rich colors. The flight, gate, seat and zone are clear to the customer. But Jared pointed out a few things about this design: the colors bleed out to the edge, it uses white stock, and it uses high-definition fonts that require printing at 300dpi. Delta’s low-resolution, thermal printers can’t do these things.
If Delta were to actually use Tyler’s design, it would have to replace 10,000+ boarding pass printers, change paper size and add cutting for bleeds on top of creating a new supply chain for colored inks.
Which design is better now? It’s easy to create designs without understanding the real constraints, but the best design is the end is one that satisfies real world needs. As Jared said, “to improve design, we must work on both the intention and the skills of rendering.” We can’t only improve the rendering.
Both my own website redesign from years ago and Jared’s talk have taught me that we, designers, need to have a little bit of humility. We can’t just tell someone how to do something “right” if we don’t know the context around which the original design was created. It’s easy to be nit-picky, and there are circumstances where better design is absolutely called for. But it’s time we stop to understand what situation we’re in so that we can do things with the right intention and execution.
The Design Ocean 