I was recently going through my bookshelves at home, trying to find some books I could sell or donate. After scanning past titles like The Ghastly One: The Sex-Gore Netherworld of Filmmaker Andy Milligan and Bitter is the New Black, I came across all my old textbooks. It got me thinking about my days in college and all the people I used to look up to when I was a student, people like Molly Holzschlag, Dan Cederholm, Elliot Jay Stocks, Derek Featherstone and Jason Santa Maria.  I looked up to these people as mentors and inspiration, hoping that one day I would be just as bad-ass as they were.  I remember asking myself on every project “How would Dan build this?” or “Would Molly be satisfied with how my site validated?”. At some point, I became out of touch with these people. I didn’t have enough time to keep up with their blogs. I didn’t read their new books. I lost interest. And during that time, I had somehow become ok with it.

Often times my friends and family ask how we get any work done, here at Teehan+Lax. Based on the stories they hear from me – it’s all fun and games! And guess what? It is. But as it turns out, that’s not a bad thing.

In the new Ted.com presentation (:30 minutes in length), Tim Brown demonstrates how, as adults we learn to fear the judgment of our peers. He explains how professionals need to relearn how to be playful in the work place. Go back to the things we learned as a child: Exploration, Building and Role Play.

Quickly conducting several games from the stage to the audience, Tim demonstrates how as adults we:

• self-edit as we are coming up with ideas – our desire to be original is a form of editing
• forget to be open to the questions: what is it? AND what can I do with it?
• need to use the materials around us to get our point across (lots of great prototyping examples in the last half of the presentation)

• should “try-on” experiences, as a form of role play

  I can’t say that in this day and age we’d ever go as far as the Peyote tests conducted in 1960s (another example cited by Tim) to get over our adult habits. But luckily, at T+L we don’t need to.

Here’s an interesting demo of augmented reality from the folks at Digital Pictures Interactive. Using nothing but a webcam and Flash player, they’ve managed to blend virtual content in real time with a webcam feed. The possibilities here are endless and it’s great to see work being done with such ubiquitous technology. The accessibility of this project reminds me of Jonny Lee’s Wii based demos, in which he used a $40 Wii controller to hack together a sophisticated touch screen and a head mounted 3D viewer (still waiting for a killer game from Nintendo based off this tech). It’s exciting to see technology once limited to science fiction making its way to consumer level devices. Augmented reality seems like it’s still in its infancy, but all it needs is that one killer app to break into the mainstream. Whether that comes in the form of a game, or an Android app, I have a feeling it’s not too far off.

15 years ago, Dave Gray founded XPLANE, a visual communications company that has been pumping out beautiful graphical explanations for all sorts of clients, products and services ever since.

His presentation at CanUX kept up the theme of drawing and sketching, but flipped the emphasis: while the other presentations were about communicating design ideas visually, this one was about designing visual ideas for communication. In other words, it was about designing for visual literacy.

Dave’s passion is for explaining complicated stuff in ways that leverage perception, invite collaboration, and spark the imagination. He suggested that although people can generally “read” visual artifacts, most cannot “write.” After a brief primer on the visual alphabet (check out symbols.com for more info), he took the group through a few exercises developed at XPLANE for stoking creative process. The basic premise was that everyone can learn how to draw.

What’s next for Dave Gray? We chatted a bit about his desire to advocate for visual literacy in academic and professional communities. Pretty cool stuff. Check out these links here and here for a sense of where he’s going with this stuff.
 
The idea of visual literacy is one that I’ve been really keen to explore over the last couple years—first from an applied linguistics perspective at school, then from a practitioners perspective as an illustrator and now an interaction designer. It’s a really interesting topic, and I’d highly recommend the book Reading Images as a great starting point for anyone interested.

You can also check out a paper and presentation I gave on the topic of vis lit and web-based graphic design back in grad school…sort of geeky though, so be forewarned!

I’m going to forego summarizing this one, since for me the topic of sketching was developed more fully in the next couple of sessions. (I’m probably biased though, because those sessions applied more directly to our specific practice at T+L.)

Not that I didn’t enjoy the presentation. Jerome was probably the most entertaining speaker at the conference, all things being equal, and a few CanUX buddies and I enjoyed a great follow-up chat with him over dinner.

One thing that Jerome mentioned at the outset got me thinking introspectively. He talked about how people who express different “cognitive preferences” are important to creative process: generators, conceptualizers, optimizers and implementors.

This sort of hit home because, well, I think I’m sort of important to creative processes every once in a while…so which one am I? What’s probably most important, and definitely most humbling here is that the answer probably isn’t: d) all of the above. Probably can’t be.

There’s this sort of epic (for interaction designers, at least) 60 Minutes episode where they profiled IDEO back in 1999. Towards the end, one of the folks being interviewed throws out this aphorism that’s stuck with me: something like “enlightened trial and error triumphs over the wisdom of the lone genius.” It’s a blatantly obvious insight, but easy to forget when the pencil hits the page.

Jerome and others at CanUX08 reminded me that the best design emerges out of humble collaboration.

By the way, noticed that Mack Male put up CanUX resources for those who’re interested here.

Industrial product design can be a frustrating thing. Tens of years and millions of dollars can go to waste in a failed concept or prototype. The risk however is shadowed by the reward when you start thinking about the possible outcomes – saving lives, energy or time for starters.

A side benefit of product design is that its successes (and failures) can be used to heavily influence what we do as designers in the digital realm. (And, of course, our R&D costs are usually much, much lower.)

Here’s three innovative product designs that have caught our eye over the last couple of weeks.

Athletic Innovation

No surprise that with the Olympics going on Nike, a company we championed in our UX Fund, has been unveiling a slew of products that are aimed at improving comfort, speed, durability and material reduction. The Nike Lunar Racer, weighing a little more than a new iPhone, is a perfect example of product innovation. It’s a light, comfortable, stylish shoe made for marathon runners. It doesn’t seem like much but perhaps that’s because we’ve become so accustomed to Nike making strides in shoe design like this so frequently. (Note: Resident designer/sneaker freak/shutterbug Greg Washington will be in New York for the 21 Mercer St. Nike Sportswear Store launch, so hopefully we’ll find out more about the Lunar Racers in a later post.)

Electronic Innovation

OLED-based screens are paving the way for a world where the surface is the light (think a screen without a projector). Currently even our most powerful LCD screens are backlit. A luminous surface promises to be brighter and use less energy than any lighting technology we currently use in displays.

Transportation Innovation

Bombardier is in the process of constructing newly designed subway cars for the TTC that have improvements in everything from ergonomics to way-finding to accessibility (not all unrelated of course). They won’t save lives but they’ll certainly improve the quality of life for all commuters.

I know these examples are just a drop in the bucket. If you’ve been inspired by industrial product design lately, post a comment below.

Update: I can’t believe I didn’t link up to the Objectified site. Objectified – the new film from Helvetica’s Gary Huswit – focuses on industrial design and inspiration from a product designers perspective. The site includes a great ‘Objectify Me’ category that features designers discussing a favorite object of theirs, like AKPC_IDS += "446,";

Neither inspiration or copying… maybe both, but I look at these as more like coincidences. Link

So what’s really good about this site? Well… again, we have a language barrier but once you manage to get into the site, the design is dope, the navigation is pretty cool… and so is the music (typing as I dance).

A collection of some of the most interesting, eyebrow raising, life questioning images found anywhere… a must see!

FFFFound this funny poster within Shaz Madani’s portfolio.