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.

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.

I love this photo.

From left to right. George Nelson, Edward Wormley, Eero Saarinen, Harry Bertoia, Charles Eames and Jens Risom.

Playboy Magazine July issue, 1961. It couldn’t be anywhere else.

You can read the original article here.

It was a happy surprise then to find out that The Getty Conservation Institute has begun a project called the Conserving Modern Architecture Initiative. Though it’s international, it’s primary focus will be L.A. The city was a wonderful breeding ground for both designers and architects exploring with new materials, new structures and new proposals. Their first effort will be the Eames House Conservation Project.

Here’s a short video about it:

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

We’re pretty big fans of this book at the studio. Javier included it in his list, ‘The 26 books that shaped me as an interaction designer‘. Thanks to Bruno Teixidor we now know that it’s available in Spanish.

Things we love about it: it’s concise without losing scope, its simple without losing depth. All in all, a book that helps you understand how much interaction design and architecture are linked. It makes you aware of the importance of process in design, the importance of space (negative space and positive space) and function.

You can buy it online here.

We used Isotype icons as a small hommage to Gerd Arntz and Otto Neurath. In Frank Hartmann’s own words: the first to really understand that information must be transformed into pictures in order to be perceived at all.

You will notice as well a restrained use of visual design. If there’s one thing we’re obsessive about at Vostok is of not overcrowding our work with a mix of shapes, sizes, colors, etc. If done right, a small visual change should suffice. Like in this video. Where a change in color means something, a change in size, a change in position. Because when trying to get information across, nothing is arbitrary: every single detail counts.

Let us know what you think.

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.

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.