The Vostok blog

Edwin Land once told me…
‘Those people who can stand at the intersection
of the humanities and science, the liberal arts and technology,
that intersection, are the people who can change the world’.

Steve Jobs

Yesterday Edwin H. Land, Polaroid co-founder and the brains behind the SX-70 would have turned 103. Quite a number.

The London’s Design Museum launched a couple of days ago version 1.1 of their free Collection iPad app. In our bookcase you’ll find this app’s distant cousin from the paper world: Charlotte and Peter Fiell’s Industrial Design A-Z. Put one next to the other one of the pros is blatantly obvious. The rest though have less to do with heftiness and more to do with practicality:

• Products are searchable by date, color, material, location and manufacturer.
• You’ve got pretty good audio and video content by museum director Deyan Sudjic, museum head of learning Helen Charman, and founding director Stephen Bayley.

This app is worth downloading and revising every so often. For those just starting out, it’s  a great read alongside Donald Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things. An overview of good, solid basics on product design that give many more insights into fundamental interaction design principles than most design courses out there today.

So the news is that the IFC Center  will premiere Eames: Architect and Painter by directors Jason Cohn and Bill Jersey. PBS will air it in December as part of their American Masters series. From this interview (Part 1 and Part 2) I get the impression that the documentary will be really good. Cohn’s devotion to the project (he has spent five years working on it: fundraising, documenting and filming) and his passion for both the Eames’ work and work ethos gives me confidence. The fact that he’s a journalist with a design sensibility and not a designer with a journalist sensibility is also a good sign. It’s a subtle but important difference.

The difference between telling the story of two people that happened to do great design and were able to convey the value of it to non-designers, making “the best for the most for the least” and something more centered on doing an appraisal of their work and the value of their legacy. I’m not saying that a designer wouldn’t have done a great job, I’m just saying it’s a matter of focus.

Sometimes people who are not designers are good at explaining the value of certain design concepts in layman’s terms. Sometimes not. We’ll see.

Until then, here’s the trailer:

Honest design is what we try to pursue by logical thinking. An ideal form is derived naturally through the process of attempting to maximize the potential of client’s demand, material and its function. I realized that it was important to make ‘honest’ design by going back and forth and to be surrounded by different materials to be used in the experimental process. In architecture or interior, product and furniture design the attitude does not change. I try to maintain a similar philosophy.

Keiji Ashizawa

We stand by every single word.

Ashizawa Design Co. is based in Tokyo. For an overview of some of his work in interior design, architecture and furniture take a look at this image search.

We have a thing for Japanese knives at Vostok. Javier brought with him from Japan three beauties with engraved blades and wooden handles for Ricardo and myself. It’s not that we’re great cooks (though we’d like to think we are), it’s just that there’s something about the craft behind the surgical precision of a sharp metal blade and the raw familiar smoothness of wood that’s timeless and beautiful.

Today I came across this knife box made by Keiji Ashizawa Design via Tokyo Art Beat:

In Ashizawa’s own words:

Hirosaki Knives have been around for approximately 1000 years. The cases for the knives are made from paulowina wood and apple tree wood. These woods are used not only for the unique look of the design, but also the efficiency of the protection of the knives. Paulownia is unique to the history and culture of Japan. Finally, the apple tree that is used as the rail and connection comes from the apple tree in Hirosaki which is the most famous producer of apples in Japan.

Remember that psychedelic TV show Bill Murray’s invited to in Lost in Translation? Well, that to me is modern Japan in a nutshell. Wild, maniac, riotous, and completely out of this world. Japanese pay enormous attention to things we’d be oblivious to and find satisfaction in places that are an absolute mystery to us. I admire them for that.

It seems as though they find –or at least prior to the earthquake they did– great pleasure in portraying themselves that way to the world. “We’re weird, we’re geeky but we’re awesome”. And few people have done as much to get that message accross than Morinosuke Kawaguchi. His first book, Geeky-Girly Innovation: A Japanese Subculturalist’s Guide to Technology and Design is an ode to that.

Happens to be that Mr. Kawaguchi will be in Madrid next week in the third edition of Asia Geek, an event organized by Casa Asia and Fundación Japón. We’ll be there so if you happen to drop by, come on over and say hi.

‘Til then, here’s his conference on TEDx Tokyo on…above all things, Japanese toilets, to keep you entertained.

Eri and I headed to the Tokyo Good Design Expo last week. I heard that it’s supposed to be one of the most important Asian event on design, plus they host the Good Design Award, so we had to take a look. Here’s a super-quick review on what we saw.

The expo was huge. We were mostly for the interactive and mobile stuff although you could find many other design areas represented by all sorts of products: cars, domotics, furniture, pottery, home appliances…

After overlooking the whole expo we headed to the mobile design stands. I have to say most of what we saw was not surprising at all: tablets and phones whose only difference was exterior styling (shape and color) but were the same on the inside: android. Perhaps the most interesting was the IIDA infobar, designed by Naoto Fukasawa and Yugo Nakamura. The Infobar has a complete different approach both on UI and exterior design. Also, its marketing campaign is very intense, focusing on the personalization factor. Check the commercial:

I confess I was a bit deceived with the whole thing. Well, I’m an iPhone user, therefore I will judge anything up to those standards. But isn’t IIDA’s Infobar competing with the iPhone after all? There is one thing that really impressed me, though: it’s lightness. It looks heavier than it is. That is a good thing but the counterpart is that It’s not as solid as one might expect.

But the best piece of the whole expo, as seen with interaction design eyes -Eri and I agreed on this- were the vending machines, which happened to be working by the way. A big crisp, colorful touchscreen to chose your favorite beverage. Motion, layers, and directionality all very well applied. Check it by yourself on this video (sorry about the quality, I think I messed up with the frame ratio):

Overall it was a very interesting visit. We are looking forward to come back next year and perhaps display some of the products we’ve designed during this last year at Vostok Studio.

PS: check this post for more info on the Good Design Award and this other post for pics and more info on the expo (in Spanish)

We knew about the iida infobar a couple of months ago. Yes, that eye candy phone from Japan designed by one of the demigods of product design: Naoto Fukasawa. Take a look at the user interface (Android based):

What do you think? We are dying to put our hands on one so we can check by ourselves.

We were hired by Movistar, a high-powered Spanish telecom with important international presence, to envision the best solution for what their online video and television service should be like. We have spent the last few months designing it and collaborating with Movistar’s UX team. And we are incredibly proud of the results.

It’s the product of months of work but, most importantly, it’s a representation of Vostok’s design principles: it’s simple, it’s elegant, it’s honest.

The premise: An online service for film, TV series and linear TV that could be accessed anytime, anywhere. For clients and non-clients. Our solution: a native grid system that responds to a set pattern of interactions that work across all platforms (PC, TV and mobile phones).

To share our thought process we have uploaded a slideshow that puts together the design premises we kicked off with. And a webpage that shows a selection of the design aspects in the final product we find most interesting.

Last, but not least we release a video made in collaboration with Riot Cinema that is the perfect accompaniment to this product. Don’t forget to check it out

Curious to know what you think.

Javier gave a conference about iPad design a few months ago in the iPadMadCamp conference. We thought it’d be interesting to recover what we said and share it with those of you out there giving iPad design a shot.

If you want a copy, here’s the PDF.