Just got a catalog yesterday for ExtremeGeeks. It has a bunch of very niche products that cure very specific headaches. Two favorites:
They have a whole section devoted to power cable liberation, including squid extensions, multi-patterned surge strips, and the above mini-extensions.
Then there’s the studio in a box:
I just spent some time last weekend shooting things for my sister to sell on ebay and this is exactly the audience they pitch it to.
MAKE Magazine reports from Toy Fair, a cool idea:Â a gift card which buys time on major telescopes, time which you can control from your computer.
Telescopes have gotten amazingly good in the last 15 years and the ability to connect them to computers (for more precise movement and tracking), as well as advances in photography, allow for glorious pics. Some dude I follow on flickr has some gorgeous pictures including the one below, of the Horsehead Nebula.
I’ve been looking sporadically at this blog that purports to be by Stephen Fry and keep not believing that it’s actually him — the tech is pretty deep, and surely he can’t be all the amazing things he is (novelist, performer, wit, historian) and a gadget getter. But he is. And look at this lovely pair of sentences about open source and the Asus EEE:
he two great pillars of Open Source are the GNU project and Linux. I shan’t burden you with too much detail, I’ll just make the outrageous claim that your computer will be running some descendant of those two within the next five years and that your life will be better and happier as a result.
I am writing this article on a kind of mini John the Baptist, a system that prepares the way of the software saviour whose coming will deliver the 90% of world computer users who suffer under Windows from the expensive, clumsy, costly, ugly, pricey toils of Microsoft.
The above passage is from a regular column he does for the Guardian. The blog is here.
Nice cuts from of the XO: 1) reduced chemicals in the battery; 2) low power needs of the machine (1/30 of most devices); 3) quick clip about the non-reflective screen (one slide below):
It was a very quick moment, but the basic rap was “you have to design this without fundamentally changing the production process or altering the materials. The answer for the non-reflective surface (important for some classrooms, but also for the book reader part of the XO), was to add onto the top of the existing low-power display.
i <3 
Yesterday there was a snowstorm and I needed to rent a car. When I went to Zipcar to pick up my CD-only car (why isn’t aux in standard yet?), my card was fried, so I couldn’t rent. They quickly and politely cancelled my order. I had an iPhone moment and Google-mapped an Enterprise rental about 3/4 mile away. I call to confirm that they were open and had cars available and then made the long, sloshy walk.
I don’t want to write a narrative . . . When I get there, everyone who speaks to me shakes my hand and quietly repeats my name. The woman who handles me asks a couple questions about what kind of car I need, walks me out to the lot and shows me what’s available. When I mention an aux in, she has me wait under the awning and finds two cars that have it. The manager comes out, apologizes for interrupting, shakes my hand, mentions that we spoke on the phone and quickly gets out of the way. I pick a car and we do the paperwork.
I consider people to be a painful neccesity of life, so I’m not big on the kind of counter chat she had for me. But I’ll give her this, the annoying stream of tips on saving money on the insurance and using the GPS was mitigated by the fact that it didn’t slow down the processing of the paperwork even a second. She even gave me a web-site like status: “only two more things to do before I take you to your car for the quick check.”
Once the paperwork was done, she showed me the clear clipboard with the ruler for measuring meaningful scratches and the circle for dents. We checked the car, shook hands again, and as I pulled out, the first woman at the counter, who was returning to the office with lunch, waved and told me to have a safe trip.
If you want to build a powerful brand experience that people will talk about, care about and remember, well, you should probably read Seth Godin or Lew Carbone. But if you crave loosely-argued, questionably connected irreleventia, or can’t get enough XO, stick around.
Great post at Adobe about a neglected area of design: the holistic experience of getting to good content. I use soft-edged words in that description — “getting” rather than finding, “good” rather than right — to highlight that the experiences we craft need to allow for semi-directed, imperfectly-focused user behavior. Too often, we’re looking for the right answers rather than the right systems, we discuss user needs when they’re actually wants, or tasks that need to be completed when maybe it’s the equivalent of window shopping they’re doing.
Browsing, searching, and asking might all take place within a single attempt to find information. Finding routes are often quite circuitous, iterative, and surprising. There certainly are simple, straightforward instances of finding—say, looking up a colleague’s phone number in a staff directory. But wandering through and learning about information—with pauses to search, browse, and ask along the way—is how many of us find information and learn about both the complex (for example, determining the most appropriate health plan our employer offers) and the seemingly simple (like choosing a plumber).
As a designer who works in agency environments, I often get caught between the marketing attempt to direct a behavior (applying funnels or merchandising logic to discovery scenarios). The language of this post does a nice job of describing the user’s state(s) of mind and avoids putting too fine a point on what they’re doing.
With all of its twists and turns, finding can be lovely and life-changing. Even when we fail to find—and we often do—we still learn. Finding is arguably at the center of all user experiences. … Unfortunately, most of the systems we design don’t really support finding. We might do a bang-up job with searching, browsing, or asking. But we’ve failed at integrating them well; therefore our designs fail at helping users to shift effortlessly between these different aspects of finding, and instead impose harsh interruptions on the process.
And then a topic near and dear to my heart:Â the need for designers to broaden what they think of as in their purview:
But there is another, less-obvious form of complacency common to so many designers: they don’t design for holistic experiences—like integrated finding—because they don’t speak data. Designers haven’t paid much attention to the terabytes of user data being logged right under their noses. Fortunately, that’s changing.
Worthwhile piece in the NY Times blog section, taking up readers’ arms against Jobs’s statement that no one reads anymore. Starts out wispy, romantic reader:
The Mac, Pixar, the iPhone, the iPod, iTunes. This stuff is cool. Lighter than air. iGetit. But it’s just product, dude.
Reading is something else, an engagement of the imagination with life experience. It’s fad-resistant, precisely because human beings are hard-wired for story, and intrinsically curious. Reading is not about product.
This is a view I’m sympathetic to, but being a designer for marketing groups, I’ve learned the hard way to let go of even my most strongly held opinions (not to mention beliefs, principles and ethics 
). But it doesn’t take on the figure cited by Jobs: “the fact is that people don’t read anymore. Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year.â€?
Towards the end of the piece, the author takes on this argument. He notes that Jobs got the number from a report that has many question marks over it. Then he cites some other data, with the snobby aplomb of a serious reader:
Last year, a survey for the Associated Press found that a much smaller number — 27 percent — had not read a book lately, which means nearly three-in-four have read a book. Steve Jobs may be many things – maestro, visionary, demi-god – but he apparently isn’t a careful reader of certain market reports.
The more compelling statistic was rarely mentioned in news accounts of the A.P. story: the survey found that another 27 percent of Americans had read 15 or more books a year. That report documents a national celebration.
Most companies would kill for a market like that – more than one-fourth of the world’s biggest consumer market buying 15 or more of its items a year. And half the population bought nearly 6 books a year. If only Apple were so lucky. The latest Harry Potter book sold 9 million copies in its first 24 hours – in English. “The DaVinci Code,� a story of ideas even with its wooden characters and absurd plotting, has sold more than 60 million copies.
I’m not sure that puts the point to rest, though. The blog also acknowledges that publishing isn’t growing briskly, that some companies are merging to survive, and the industry had a puny 1% growth last year.
(Re: the picture. We still have a ways to go on search. Finding this picture took quite a bit of work: “Captain Kirk” + reading, “Captain Kirk” + eyeglasses + book, etc. Didn’t yield anything. It wasn’t until I remembered that it was Tale of Two Cities he was reading that I had any luck. Even then, I had to switch out of images and troll sites for it, and even THEN I had to settle for a picture that looks like he’s on the toilet.)
While working briefly with some environmental groups, I became convinced that the best way to reach red (or at least non-green) America was through their garages. Real men love their tools and their tinkering. Americans profess to love ingenuity and entrepreneurialism. Environmental solutions are “Popular Mechanics” all over. Ecogeek is a blog that hits some of those notes (while staying just this side of Edward Abbey).
Below is a clever solar collector, which is cheap, cheap, cheap. Rather than having to spend money on creating optimally curved mirrors, Solar Bubbles inflates a bubble where the top is clear (allowing sunlight in) and the bottom is reflective (collecting the rays). The curve is created and maintained by the air inside. Balloons aren’t exactly manly Black & Decker workmate style, but this is so much more appealing than talking about breaking the oil addiction.
Another idea on the blog this week, is a revolving door that transforms the turning of the doors into power.
What I love about this post is its honesty:
Mostly, it’s just a demostration project though. The power generated would likely not be enough to ever pay for the device and many revolving doors are already heavy enough without the added resistance of a generator.
Still, it’s hard not to find the idea pleasant.
It’s a healthy attitude about innovation, recognizing the importance of exlploring dead ends, the iterative nature of invention and design. It’s also a good demonstration of sensibility and intelligence within a community that usually doesn’t get credited for having any.
it’s weird that I like goodreads as much as I do but never raved about it. I’ve been using it regularly — partly as a reading journal, partly as a recommendation engine (one superior to Amazon’s in many ways) — but I don’t grab my friends by the arm and say “you have to try it out” the same way I do other things. And yet, it has insinuated itself into my weekly reading habits, my purchases, and has gotten me into some interesting debates. (I also learn a lot about friends since everyone on the web rates Ayn Rand a 1 or 5 and they tend to put her on their shelves.)
I’m not sure why, but the reviews are always coherent, even when harsh or sarcastic. People are putting some thought into the reviews and for the most part care about books. The whole idea of browsing other people’s to-read, read, reading shelves is personal, engaging, and extremely valuable. My friend Todd is my business literature sherpa and I follow his reading habits closely.
The funny part, though, are the reminders that you haven’t finished a book.
This is a great, useful, engaging experience . . . but a quiet one. Like the act of reading which it supports.
Doug Coates (plasticbag.org) did a review of the XO for Icon magazine (with a sexy “air” picture of the machine). He’s ambivalent, to say the least, about doing a review in this context:
There’s something troubling about reviewing Nicholas Negroponte’s XO – the so-called “$100 dollar laptop� – for a design magazine. And that I’m writing the piece on my gas-guzzling SUV of a MacBook Pro can only compound the horror.
The XO has been in the news for a while, but icon is the first magazine to actually get hold of one. The thing is, this is not a machine designed to be evaluated by people like me. In all the ways that matter, it’s not a consumer artefact. It’s not trying to wheedle itself into your living room. It has more in common with a clean water pump than it does with an iPod.
As you might imagine from the text, he’s generally behind the project. His strong feelings prompted him to republish the essay on his blog (without Icon’s editorial cuts) and with an intro, where he explicitly talks about the politics of the XO.
But at least he talks about the design from the perspective of a design critic:
Green and white with a tough, textured plastic body about the same size as a lunch-box, it has been optimised in every way to deal with the extreme conditions of its use. Its astonishingly frugal use of electricity allows it to function in areas where power is sparse or even non-existent. The screen switches into an energy-efficient black and white mode that is also readable in direct–even aggressive–sunlight. The rubberised keyboard seals the device against dust and water. Even the friendly green “ears” of the device serve a triple function - acting as latches, protective shields for USB ports and as antennae designed to extend the range of the distributed wifi networks that will connect children across the planet.
There’s more in his review, and hopefully will be more from others. I’m still intrigued.