The Vostok blog

Last friday all the interaction design students and I attended the “Design, Greatest Hits” exhibit at the Círculo de Bellas Artes. I found the curation to be weak. It was a fun evening though.

Via oscar (an anonymous commentator in our blog) we find an incredible section in MONOmoda,that puts together a great list of design related films. All in all, a great research tool. Although we already knew most of the films’ highlighted (cause many of you directed us to them a few months ago), it’ll be a really helpful post to help us curate our own design cinemathéque. The best way to welcome 2011

Two guys and an awesome idea but no money to make it real: The Glif, an iPhone 4 tripod mount + stand.

Want to help?

Learn about the past from the future. Or was it the other way around. Nevermind. Paleofuture.tv, by retrofuture researcher Matt Novak goes right to our instafave-ultrafan video playlist. Enjoy episode 0000:

What would you say it’s wrong at Nokia?
This is what a former software engineer at Nokia told John Gruber:

Here’s the problem: Hardware Rules at Nokia. The software is written by the software groups inside of Nokia, and it is then given to the hardware group, which gets to decide what software goes on the device, and the environment in which it runs. All schedules are driven by the hardware timelines. It was not uncommon for us to give them code that ran perfectly by their own test, only to have them do things like reduce the available memory for the software to 25% the specified allocation, and then point the finger back at software when things failed in the field.

In addition, I read their “competitive analysis” of the iPhone. It was a short powerpoint deck that proceeded to lay out all of the reasons why Nokia did not have to change what they were doing at all. They even included “developer annoyance at the App Store submission process” as a reason why the iPhone would ultimately fail (this was around the time that the 3GS was released, so they had no excuse).

Bottom Line: Nokia is a hardware company that hates software.

Sad.

Here’s a good way to fresh-start from vacation: finding that this little gem arrived home while you were away and awaits for a relaxed reading:

It’s a first edition of Design This Day by Walter Dorwin Teague, one of the first industrial designers and founder of a design firm that’s still out there after 80 years keeping a no-nonsense approach focused on creating quality products.

Mark Adams, managing director of Vitsoe, states it very clear when talking about their furniture. They make furniture that’s timeless because they don’t believe in recycling, they believe in designing adaptive systems that can be rearranged over time to suit different needs and scenarios.

the concept is to reuse your furniture…we see recycling as a defeat

Modularity and no-aesthetics as design is my big obsession when designing interactive products (mostly websites). It’s not about designing a good website, it’s about designing a system of elements that can be arranged in certain ways and that can fulfill the company needs over time and for different reasons. If done well, when there is a need for some module that’s not designed, its shape, look and behavior comes out of intuition, it’s evident. My goal is to leave something in the hands of my client that will be there in 4 years, probably rearranged, perhaps with more pieces but within the same system.

When I fist read the Ten Principles for Good Design (that was back in 2004) I was shocked. It was like a revelation that made reconsider all I knew about information architecture and HCI. Here are the ones that hit me harder:

4. Good Design helps a product be understood
6. Good Design is honest
7. Good Design is durable
10. Good Design is as little design as possible

In Dieter Rams’ words: less but better.

The difference between product design and architecture is in human scale and that has to do with political power.

There is something subduing in the creation of structures we humans inhabit or use in any way, something about those structures condioning our moves and behaviors. Architecture and (even more) urbanism have that powerful quality.

Architects project their structures to influence in the way we feel and behave. They manage flows of people, they regulate our exposition to daylight to condition our feelings or they make us feel free and empowered through space and height. They make structures that manipulate us.

Architecture and urbanism could be the use of power though means of space. That could explain why politicians have always flirted with architecture, and dictators love to have scale models of their dreamt cities.

Designers instead, have never been that interesting for the powerful (with some interesting exceptions). Their work is usually not that influencing. Designers make things that tend to be smaller than humans. Their structures may condition but don’t force us to do anything. It’s not the space which conditions the individual but the individual who manipulates the object.

Acabo de publicar toda la información sobre el próximo curso para formar a diseñadores de interacción. Será la tercera edición del Programa Vostok.

We want to build the best list of design (interaction, information, industrial, product design and architecture) movies and documentaries of all times. Here’s the deal: write down in the comment section the name of a film or doc that’s somehow design related and, in return, we’ll give you a code to watch any movie in Filmin‘s (Spain’s best streaming service for indie film) catalog for free.

We also have a promo code for a premium account at Filmin (any movie, any time anywhere) which we’ll give to the person who makes the best list (it’s ok to repeat some movie suggested by someone else). Easy peasy japanesey. A neat gift for little effort.

These are the movies/docs we have so far:

Kitchen Stories (Bent Hamer, 2003)

The Fountainhead (King Vidor, 1949)

Tucker: The Man and his Dream (Francis Ford Coppola, 1988)

Helvetica (Gary Hustwit, 2007)

Powers of 10 (and other films by Ray y Charles Eames, 1977)

The RTVE series ‘Elogio de la luz‘, each episode covering an architect

The Belly of an Architect (Peter Greenaway, 1987)

Sketches of Frank Gehry (Sydney Pollack, 2005)

Play Time (Jacques Tati, 1967)

Full disclosure: We’ve done Filmin’s web redesign and we love it (the service, not the redesign. Well… both). We’ll go into details in a future post.