Imran Ali

XOXO

I've long been in two-minds about the OLPC project. As a source of technical innovation, the XO-1 laptop has been a sensation; from mesh networking, clever power management to the dual-mode screen and the Sugar interface, Yves Behar's iconic green design has distilled some of the best-in-class electronics into a unique product. Indeed, the price point has enabled companies such as Intel to see low-cost portables as a viable and attactive market for their products.

After meeting Lee Felsenstein (during a midnight munchies session at Foo Camp 2006!) and understanding his concerns about the educational and social model of the OLPC Foundation, I've been less enthused about the educational philosophy of the project. Without understanding in great depth the needs of communities in the developing world - and the exclusion of adult empowerment - OLPC was guided by governments, not the consiutuents of the communities it sought to help.

Recently, the OLPC movement has begun to fragment with the launch of Mary Lou Jepsen's display technologies startup, Pixel Qi and Walter Bender's Sugar Labs, focussing on continuing the development of OLPC's operating system.

With last week's announcment of the XOXO - a $75 replacement for the XO-1, targetted for 2010 - it seems that the departure of Jepsen and Bender, coupled with OLPC's embrace of Microsoft signals a change in phiosophy for the foundation...as a concept design house. By explicitly encouraging others to copy the XOXO's design, the foundation is codifying its role in generating design capital and encouraging imitation of the sort that previously lost the foundation powerful allies such as Intel.

Though Negroponte is still persuing the educational goals of the foundation, perhaps they can avoid previous controversies and conficts by explicitly playing the role of a concept and design organisation, helping to set a vision but enabling more capable and trusted organisations to bring it to life.

Tarek Atrissi Design

I was recently asked to help a client develop an Arabic language edition of their web product. They have strong brand with a great contemporary aesthetic and some Web 2.0 flava, but there is a dearth of contemporary Arabic typefaces that would enable their brand to retain its design DNA once translated.

Aside from Saad Ahulbaab's work on Arabetics - which is largely focussed on helping non-Arabs learn Arabic - Arabic graphic design is constrained by the availability of type styles that sit well with modern graphic design.

However in researching resources for my client, I came across the work of Tarek Atriessi. In a great post on Arabic Type Design, Atrissi talks about his approach to developing typefaces for Al-Ghad, last year's Asian Games in Doha,  Bahrain's Amwaj Islands and Ayna.com.

Each is perfectly suited for use in various contemporary digital applications...I can't wait to  suggest them to our client and also use them for our own future Arabic editions of Believr :)

Children Of Men

Alfonso Cuarón's Children Of Men was one of the best films I've seen this year...great acting, a poignant and hopeful story, a haunting score and a pair of breathtaking set pieces, shot in a single take.

Unlike movies such as Minority Report and Blade Runner, the world inhabited by Cuarón's characters is realised with much more subtlety. In fact, I'd missed most of the satirical content playing in the background of the movie - government propaganda, advertising, display systems - until I saw Foreign Office's showreel of their design work for the movie.

If you enjoyed Children Of Men, this clip (14Mb Quicktime) is worth a couple minutes of your time :)

{Thanks Foe!}

How to host a product/feature design party

Ian forwarded me an intriguing post on rapid product design from Kathy Sierra's Creating Passionate Users - How to host a product/feature design party. I love the contrast between a dry focus-group and a friendlier social session.

The method looks just about complex as a regular meeting, but seemingly more inclusive, and more importantly, fun.

It'll be interesting to try this in a few months time as some of Carbon's work progresses :)

The Hills Are Alive with the Sound of Interaction Design

I take it back...I was a little unmoved by Matt Webb's playsh at ETech 2006 and conceded I might not have fully grasped the implications of his work, but after reading Schulze & Webb's recent The Hills Are Alive with the Sound of Interaction Design, I'm really taken with Matt's approach to design :)

Some of the mind-bending observations and illustrative product ideas include...

• A self-powered scanner that breaks down scanned documents organically and uses the resulting methane to power a turbine.
• Designing around experiential acts, than enrich moments of engagement - the anticipation of receiving and opening a parcel rather than simply receiving a gift.
• The experience hooks intersecting with the ownership of books, that lift services like Amazon above a simple bookstore.
• The notion of thresholds as an important moment in the experience of a product, such as unboxing a new Apple product.
• The value of simple being and expressing friendship and sociality rather than carrying out the discrete acts of friendship.
• The social letterbox printer, that allows family members and close friends to print items of interest directly into your home...a compliment to a regular printer, that acts more like an internet family-fax :)
• The parallels drawn between sport and cleaning up, leading to products such as vacuum cleaners that emulate picking up pills like Pacman, along with a built in high-score table of the best players!

Though much of this is understood intuitively, a vocabulary that defines and qualifies the underlying design patterns is immensely useful...expect to see Carbon experimenting with some of these approaches shortly. First up mee:view...

'...an actor in your social life and life with media, and is helping along something that wants to happen already: You want to have a relationship with a soap opera; you want to discuss TV with your friends tomorrow. These are the important moments of engagement a VCR is participating in, and we should focus on those, not the fact it is incidentally being used to record broadcast programming...'

UPDATE: S&W've extended their thinking a little further at this year's ETech. From Pixels To Plastic includes the notion of a desk lamp that 'looks' at what you're doing as you work...kinda like Luxo :)

Iconik

In Summer 2005, Liz designed a set of Aqua-esque icons for a proposed Orange Firefox browser that Mark and I were working on.

The project was never finished and I'd almost forgotten about Liz's mini-project until today...Liz's icons are too good to remain hidden, sO I figured I'd blog 'em for posterity :)

If things go well, you might see a whole lot more for a project we're both trying to contribute to...

Love Being

TDR go from irony to optimistic semi-psychedelia with their Love Being video for Citizen Bird's Joy...you can download it from Coke's The m5 design project.

The Coke collaboration is intra-ironic, given TDR's earlier Work Buy Consume Die pastiche of the Pepsi logo. The m5 project also includes contributions from LOBO, MK12, Caviar and Tennant McKay/REX.

TDR's also designed a very cool limited edition 'M5' bottle along with tees, posters, figurines and an iPod shuffle case...'when retro is done right, it looks more modern than the moment from which it was created'.

Wow - I'd almost forgotten how much I loved TDR's work...one day I'll get me one of those screen prints :)

Meta Kitchen

We're currently in the midst of constructing a two-storey extension and I thought I'd get some kitchen ideas from budget DIY icons, MFI.

Using MFI's online planning tool, I only needed to enter some basic room dimensions, indicate positions of doors and windows and select some appliances...the software then filled in the remaining spaces with wall and floor units. Twenty minutes later, I was presented with a bunch of elevations, a floor plan, parts list and a number of very cool 3D visualisations; here are the results.

Designed by Planit.com, the Shockwave based planning wizard is a little clunky, but the results are actually pretty good and help take a lotta pain out of designing your kitchen as well as giving you some idea of its cost and complexity. Unfortunately, the bathroom designer didn't fare as well. This may my own fault, in trying to squeeze a toilet and sink into a 0.95 x 1.6m space...

What'd be really interesting is a participatory layer...

• Could user's share and geolocate their creations for others with similar home layouts?
• Is there potential here for some value of shared value and revenue generation?
• Ten years after a user submits and purchases a design, approach them again with a suggested overhaul.
• Market to customers with a portfolio of designs illustrating how your home could look...

Next step? A Second Life showroom ;)

Money Walks

The newly redesigned Zopa site, includes a cute visualisation of the service's borrowers and lenders. Designed by Poke, the visualisation emphasises the person-to-person nature of Zopa's communal banking - humanising loans for its customers. I remember the ultra-cute Israeli IM service, Odigo, included a similar feature showing a 'radar' of all Odigo user's at a particular URL.

I wonder if the visualisation could be absracted and applied to other social networking datasets...indeed, it looks a little like Steven Blyth's Social Fabric...incidentally, Steven now works for us at France Telecom R&D's UK office :)

Carbonmade

Designers are notorious for never getting around to producing their own portfolio sites - the dilemma of the shoemaker's children. Carbonmade has just made this a whole lot easier with a free service for creating and hosting online portfolios.

Though portfolios (limited to 6 projects and 50 screenshots) can't be customised, other than profile information and project screenshots, simply being able to create a portfolio within a few minutes is immensely valuable...and I'm sure customisation options and greater storage will come with time.

Carbonmade could evolve into a very powerful directory of designers, perhaps coupled with eBay-style feedback scores and a tag-cloud of skills. There's nothing here that can't be accomplished with personal site, blog or Flickr, but it's a simple, elegant and very well designed application.

Incidentally, they swiped the name of our new company!