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.

No amount of money, and no small amount of time, can buy taste.

Steve Ballmer via Marco Arment

Taste is like a language: those who know it understand you, those who don’t, never will. Taste is one of those black and white concepts: you either have it or you don’t. No middle grounds. Can you develop it? Yes. (Although aesthetic taste is something you’re born with). Does it make a difference in life? Yes. Always. Can you copy it? No. Never.

If you can’t explain your ideas to your grandmother in terms that she understands, you don’t know your subject well enough. Some people use over complex (and often meaningless!) language in an attempt to gain recognition and respect. You might have to let some of them get away with it, but don’t imitate them. Professionals who know their subject area well know how to communicate their knowledge to others in everyday language.

#48 in 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School

It’s no secret that we make a big deal about eating well at Vostok. If there’s one thing Javier, Ricardo and I have in common is just that. Sure we try to eat healthy but, what really rocks our boat is good, hearty, unpretentious food.

The correlation is quite obvious once you get your mind around it because the same reasoning that guides our design principles, guides our eating habits. Or at least, what we –with more or less luck– aspire for them to be. In other words:

In this comparison we’re not taking into account food à la Ferran Adrià. Not because we don’t consider it food or we don’t like it, but basically because it can’t be separated from Art*. In Adrià’s own words: food at El Bulli isn’t meant to nourish you (though it does), it’s meant to be an emotional experience, an event. And we don’t consider Design to be that. For Vostok, Design (with a capital letter D) is, to quote Mr. Eames, a method of action: a tool to solve problems. And therefore something that can only be compared to basic, hearty food. Food that is useful, that has a purpose. That has no artistic aspirations.

At a first glance this appreciation might be quite banal but if you take a closer look, you’ll realize it all makes sense. Because these principles aren’t just our design principles, or our food principles, they’re the principles that guide who we are and what we do.

What about pleasure, you might ask? Eating good food for the mere pleasure of it? Well, to quote Charles Eames again, who would say that pleasure is not useful?

*There’s a wonderful exception to this: La Comida de la Familia, a recipe book that has been recently edited and that includes most of the dishes the team at El Bulli had for lunch before the action started. These are all good, traditional, hearty and timeless recipes. A little gem.

Yesterday the new El País website launched and we thought we should celebrate it with a remake of our nytimes.com bar chart. To be honest, this one was much more fun to do: there are more periods of growth and restraint, more ups and downs, more information density, more pictures, less text.

But even more so because El País has gone through something The New York Times hasn’t: three very distinct identity crises. And our chart picks them up. It’s what we would call their ’5-year itch’: every 5 years El País renames itself, rebrands itself. El País digital became elpais.es in 2001, elpais.com in 2006 and today, in 2012, it’s called just plain and simply: El País.

But…What’s in a name? Especially, when you’re making the same mistakes.

I don’t think we’re being too harsh. Or are we?

Being process-oriented, not product-driven, is the most important and difficult skill for a designer to develop.

Being process-oriented means:

1. seeking to understand a design problem before chasing after solutions;
2. not force-fitting solutions to old problems onto new problems;
3. removing yourself from prideful investment in your projects and being slow to fall in love with your ideas;
4. making design investigations and decisions holistically (that address several aspects of a design problem at once) rather than sequentially (that finalize one aspect of a solution before investigating the next);
5. making decisions conditionally –that is with the awareness that they may or may not work out as you continue to a final solution;
6. knowing when to change and when to stick with previous decisions;
7. accepting as normal the anxiety that comes from not knowing what to do;
8. working fluidly between concept-scale and detail-scale to see how each informs the other.

#29 in 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School

A Vostok footnote: take 1, 4, 6 and 8 into special consideration.

The sun never knew how great it was till it struck the side of a building.

Louis Kahn

Joseph Schumpeter argued in 1909 that small companies were more inventive. In 1942 he reversed himself. Big firms have more incentive to invest in new products, he decided, because they can sell them to more people and reap greater rewards more quickly. In a competitive market, inventions are quickly imitated, so a small inventor’s investment often fails to pay off [...]

Politicians should certainly stop demonising big firms and sentimentalising small ones: an economy needs both. But they should not allow their new-found appreciation of big companies to degenerate into a taste for picking national champions. Such firms typically gobble subsidies and crowd out smaller, more creative firms. Nor should they start tolerating monopolies. The key to promoting innovation (and productivity in general) lies in allowing vigorous new companies to grow big, and inefficient old ones to die. On that, Schumpeter never changed his mind.

Schumpeter column, The Economist

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.

1. Demonstrate from the top that high quality and attention to detail are prioritized and appreciated above everything else, including being the first to market, having the most features, or having the most aggressive prices. If you can get those as well, that’s great, but quality will not be sacrificed to do so.
2. Instill these values in your staff. If you can’t, hire a staff for which you can. Better yet, hire a staff for which you don’t need to.
3. Aggressively pursue simplification, elegance, craftsmanship, and the highest-class user experiences in the product line. Ruthlessly cut or hold features or entire products that aren’t good enough.
4. Make it pretty.

How not to bring good design to a platform?
Skip steps 1–3 above.

Marco Arment