Lucky for us though, Canal+ Spain will premiere the film sometime in May. Take note of the date because this one’s definitely not worth missing. The amount of archive material these men had access to is astonishing and the way Jason Cohn’s script interweaves private and public aspects of their lives, pretty enlightening.

But, movie-aspects aside, this is a great opportunity to revisit the Eames’ work and, especially, their philosophy. El Pais’ Anatxu Zabalbeascoa did a pretty good job at grasping what this event was all about in her article a few weeks ago: Eames for times of crisis. Charles and Ray taught us that difficult times are a great opportunity to change things: to do more and better.

They injected some of this ‘good design is good business’ mantra in companies like Herman Miller, IBM and Polaroid but they also engrained this in future generations of designers. Like us. Many years after them. This is the main reason why we decided to do this event in the first place and share it with the people we respect. For those of you who came: thank you. This is the first time we do something like this. Hopefully it won’t be the last.

We’d also like to thank the great team behind us in this event: Pelayo and Marta. And Vitra Spain for their generosity.

The first time I saw Robert Frank‘s photos for his project ‘The Americans‘ I got a glimpse of the connection between exhausting road trips and great photographs. Perhaps it has to do with the lack of sleep, the lack of good food, the monotony of endless roads that push your body –and your head– to the limit. After all, extreme fatigue does develop a sense of acute awareness and sensitivity that’s difficult to replicate with non-chemical (and may I say, legal) substances.

Unlike Frank’s compilation, Tina Bagué and Tori Morimoto‘s Japan Photo Project is less about Japanese society and more about the culture and beautiful landscapes of the country, less about capturing instants and more about knowing the right towns. But the veil of fatigueness-channeled perception is there. No question about it.

Plus, the JPP blog is the perfect traveller’s guide. In 365 days they visit all sorts of towns and meet all sorts of people. Next time I’m in the country, I’ll be sure to throw away my Lonely Planet and instead, read their blog carefully and save every single stop in a map.

A compilation of the photographs has recently been published. The book is called, ‘Japan’. Published in collaboration with the Catalan publisher, The Private Space, Japan’s first edition is officially sold out but, after December 8th you’ll be able to order the book here.

Only two companies were featured in RTVE‘s (a Spanish national TV channel) coverage of FICOD (Spain’s most acclaimed forum for digital content) last night. We’re proud to say both of them are Vostok’s clients with whom we’ve been working and desigining together for some time now.

Are we bragging? You bet. It’s not every day that two products you did strategy and design for receive this kind of offline attention. We’re thrilled. Kudos to Filmin and Minube :)

You can watch it online here.

Jean Prouvé was once quoted saying: never design anything that cannot be made. Part designer, part architect he always conceived himself primarily as a craftsman, a builder. In Norman Foster‘s own words, in Prouvé’s work “technical imagination is placed at the service of function and economy”.

And that’s infinitely apparent when you understand the thought process behind his first attempts at prefabrication. How to produce furnishings and components that were simple to ship and easy to erect? How to create structures that were both solid and adaptable; temporary and long-lasting? Simple: modular design. His structures tended to be light, flexible, and even mobile, combining traditional building materials with aluminum and steel.

At the time, Mr. Prouvé was revolutionizing the concept of construction so he went back to the basics. He kew that if he was to create a new language, he first needed to devise an alphabet and that’s what he did, he created “L’alphabet des structures”. Because once you devise the basic elements of a system, it doesn’t matter what the future holds; you’ll know what to do, how to react.

Most of the problems we face as designers today aren’t new so it’s always refreshing and inspiring to see how others have tackled them before. And then it’s just a matter of learning, adapting and applying.

If you have a chance, Industrial Beauty (though I like the name in Spanish better, Belleza Fabricada), is an exhibition at Ivory Press Madrid of some of Prouvé’s most significant work, including drawings, sketches and furniture. It will be open until November 12th.

For an overview of some of his work, this Flickr compilation is a good start.

It’s quite discouraging to see so many failed attempts at adapting a product as important to society as newspapers that we felt we needed to ask the guy to go to for this subject to share his thoughts on what has changed, what newspapers are doing to adapt and why their changes are so timid. We encourage you to watch the full-length interview in case you want more information or, like me, are just curious about the man. If not, here’s a good 4min compilation of snippets of the most important things we touched on.

On a side note… One of Vostok‘s dream jobs would be, without a doubt, to design an online newspaper. It would also be one of our worst job nightmares…You have to deal with infinite layers and inevitable complex structures, not to mention the frustration of having to play by the rules when you know the rules are no longer valid. It’s not an easy task. You can read a compilation of what our stance is when it comes to online news design here.

Agree? Not agree? Let us know what you think.

Bernardo, for those of you who don’t know him already, is Worldwide Director of Emerging Products at Google.

Website credits:
Vostok has done the design, Pep Gómez has supervised the implementation and Jorge González from Wakalaka has done the mockup and CSS.

www.bernardohernandez.com

Among the many enchanting stories, there is one in particular that caught our eye: a design consultant/ adviser/ counsellor/guide personified in a wedding wardrober. Mr. Kramer- Metraux talks about certain aspects of life that are particularly close to our hearts: elegance, beauty, timeless design.

The series received a Silver award in the Best of Multimedia Design 2009 competition organized by The Society of News Design.

Take a minute to browse through the rest of the stories, they’re certainly worth your time.

We’d like to thank our clients and Riot Cinema for this video.

I don’t want to find out that much more. I want to shoot them the way I see them. As opposed to really creating an essence of who they truly are; it’s my idea of who they are.

The words of a true aesthete.

Vostok is just speechless.

Why does Twitter work better for news than Google Reader? Simple, Twitter gives you what’s new now. You don’t have to hunt around to find the newest stuff. And it doesn’t waste your time by telling you how many unread items you have. Who cares. (It’s like asking how many NYT articles you haven’t read. It would be gargantuan. I don’t bother you with the number of Scripting News posts you haven’t read, so why does Google?)

Dave Winer- How to Reboot RSS

To me, methodology and techniques are very important for a designer but nothing great comes out if there isn’t personal involvement in it. Feelings are indispensable. Values are a must (honesty, truth, beauty…) are the drivers of our work. That’s why I respect so much Ale Muñoz’s approach when he talks about love and design all in the same sentence:

I really wish every web developer out there poured so much love into every form as we did with this one.

Ale Muñoz

Go check his forms for BeBanjo and you’ll understand.

This article on The Design Observer about Massimo Vignelli’s desk has introduced us to a new little gem: Lines. A wonderful addition to our list of movies on design.

In their own words:

Lines consists of mini-documentaries, running 5 to 7 minutes in length, highlighting the beauty and importance of the architecture in everyday objects, and details how the design and structure of these objects affect and reflect our lifestyles.

Highlights: The Desk and The High Heel.

In case you’re not familiar with The Guardian‘s beautiful series on writer’s rooms that the Design Observer article touches on, check it out: you don’t know what you’ve been missing. El País has tried to do something similar, missing the mark by a long shot unfortunately.

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.

Here’s video proof:

Seen at the always entertaining I love charts.

Well.. Being a telecommunications engineer as he is, he’ll obviously add more WARP’s to our programming and systems engines. He is already taking care of all the stuff related to thecosmonaut.org (Riot Cinema’s movie) and will soon start doing other übercool and experimental stuff that’s not been disclosed yet.

Welcome on board, Hunter S. Tyler!

Where Search does a “classic search”, Re-find looks on what I already have seen (and starts digging on my social info up in the cloud) and Discover does te opposite bringing results I’ve never seen before.

It makes sense to me, ¿Does it to you?

Japanese cooks who have special skills prefer knives without any ergonomic shape. A flat handle is not seen as raw or poorly crafted. On the contrary, its perfect plainness is meant to say, “You can use me whichever way suits your skills.” The Japanese knife adapts to the cook’s skill (not to the cook’s thumb). This is, in a nutshell, Japanese simplicity.

The piece, translated by Oliver Reichenstein is also part of a larger article about Japanese aesthetics published at the NYTimes under the title Beauty and the Bento Box where also John Maeda, Nick Currie and Denis Dutton go through the subject.

Worth reading.

María, a Journalist by formation (jack-of-all-trades in practice) brings serious communication and organization skills to the table, plus some design fire power for the ultra-cool projects lining up at Vostok for 2009. María lived two years in Turin, and speaks fluent Italian. She also claims to make a mean tiramisu. This, however, has not been personally verified by the rest of the team (hint hint).

Despite looking and acting vampirishly dark, María is the sunshine of the office. She has geeky sense of humor, and will laugh at almost any joke you make, no matter how dorky and stupid. Or probably she is just being condescending with us. In any case, we are extremely pleased to have a great talent and personality at the office.

Mark is half Canadian half Mexican (bilingual), he holds a degree in Information Design (something pretty rare) and has a very good eye for design (you can see that from the picture). His Spanish blog (Duopixel) is probably one of the best I know when it comes to design, although he will never mention it.

Welcome aboard the Vostok spaceship!

He recently blogged about recombination and heat stoves. He described the technique with an extremely creative excercise of imagining the stove of the near future

A real must if you are into good interaction design reading.

He enlightened us on the convergence point between interaction design and biotechnology. The main point was that biological systems are being created with more and more levels of abstraction and that one day in the near future designers will be needed to determine how these systems will be used by people. The fact that DNA sequences and machine code have a very similar structure (I am simplifying here, I know) leads to the building of new levels of abstraction just as we did on machine code, making it possible to design biosystems that have sensory interfaces a person could interact with:

Have you ever think about a cell as a machine?. They really behave like it whether they are yeast or pluripotent cells in your bone marrow. In fact, as Drew Endy define them, they act as computational systems. They receive inputs, and behave accordingly as outputs. Cells have measurements tools, priorities to satisfy and self awareness of different kinds.

As interaction designers we can apply all the inherited knowledge in our discipline to new horizons like biotech. It’s just a new framework with new variables.

Agustín Jiménez is an interaction designer who always has one foot at the side of technology and another one on the biomedical edge. His post on the talk: Biotechnology and Interaction Design is worth a relaxed reading.

As some of you know, the course took place during these last six months both in Madrid and Barcelona. Ariel Guersenzvaig, professor in Barcelona, wrote a post summarizing the experience. It’s worth a look if you are interested in the course and live around that city or plan to be there next year.

I have to say that I am very happy with the results for the Madrid crew too. We now have a group of six cosmonauts who have been trained in many issues, almost all of them on the list of subjects (esp-pdf) anounced and on many more.

This year we had some talks by invited people:

• Jesús Carreras gave us a workshop on Card Sorting.
• Ale Muñoz talked about data visualization.
• María Martínez did a pre-release private demo of iwannagothere.net and explained some of the design decisions behind it.
• Clarisa Doval talked about user dynamics in websites for dating.
• Nauzet Santana gave us an introduction to Robotics and Lego Mindstorms.

Pretty intense, yeah!

This is my second year teaching the course. Now I see that each course gets to be unique in its own way. Students are different (this year there was less homogeneity), I am motivated with different subjects and of course I get better at explaining some things compared to last year but some others get worse. I’d prefer some variability over making something scriptized and completely predictable. It’s more fun this way.

All 12 students (6 in Madrid and 6 in Barcelona) are now professionals who can face most of the usual tasks an interaction designer does on his professional life. They’ve seen many examples (good and bad) and they’ve done a lot of work by themselves. Even some of the projects they started may become reality soon (stay tuned to Projekt Bahnhof).

That makes a total of 17 great professionals who will always be part of Vostok. I feel very proud of them.

Congratulations, especially to the new ones!