DesignAday

Speaking of old...

The majority of the objects at my vacation spot, both natural and man-made, are far older than I am. As we were making dinner Saturday evening (the same evening as as the power outage), I was wrapping some ground turkey in aluminum foil to brown on the grill. The box, while physically the same as aluminum foil packaging today, was obviously designed in the sixties. The brand name was Alcoa Wrap. Although I am aware of the company, I had never heard of the product. I happened to finish the roll, and in the bottom of the box found the piece of paper shown below.

Sure enough, the Rambler that was being given away was a “new” 1961 Rambler station wagon. It was an amusing find, but it also made me think about brands and consumer culture. Neither Alcoa Wrap nor Ramblers are on the market today, although Alcoa purchased Reynolds Metals, makers of the top brand of aluminum foil, Reynolds Wrap, and the manufacturer of the Rambler, through a series of mergers, ended up as AMC, which was finally purchased by Chrysler. In another fifty years, where will our brands be? What will become of Apple, Nike, and McDonalds? It is hard to imagine them disappearing, and yet the recent negotiations between Microsoft and Yahoo! are a perfect reminder that the tectonic plates of consumerism are shifting.

Other brands/products mentioned on the flyer:

Rival - still making kitchen appliances, but not an electric home food slicer.

Hammond - still making organs after merging with Suzuki.

Heilite - As far as I can tell, they are out of business, but their camping trailers are still popular.

Duraflite - discontinued boat model made by Duracraft, currently owned by Bentley Industries, which still produces Duracraft boats.

Fairchild - then makers of sound cameras and projectors, later played a large role in silicon valley, and is now a major supplier of power management products.

Tappan - manufactured ranges and microwave ovens, but was later purchased by Electrolux.

Can-O-Matic - from what I can tell, this was one of the first, patented electric can openers, which was eventually acquired by Rival, but they no longer make can openers.

Zebco - still selling fishing reels.

Hallite - cookware by Wear-Ever, a company that has vanished, leaving items to sell on eBay.

Old-Time Interaction Design

The General Electric clock in the photo below belonged to my Great-Grandpa, Hartzel Smith. It used to hang in his kitchen. It now hangs in the kitchen of my grandparent’s log cabin, where I spent my vacation last week. Saturday evening, just before we started to make dinner, the electricity went out. I was surprised to learn that the clock has a mechanism for alerting one to the fact that it has lost power, and is therefore likely displaying incorrect time.

Notice the small hole in the clock face below the “12”, just to the left of the minute hand. When the clock loses power, the surface seen through the hole shifts, so that it turns red. It remains in that position until the clock hands are set (by the small knob on the bottom), at which point it shifts back to white.

Our plethora of digital timepieces flash after and electrical outage, but this is the only analog clock I’ve seen with such an indicator.

In the Details: D

I have another small qualm with my Mazda5. The current position of the gear shift is indicated by a large, lit, digital letter on the dashboard. So, when the car is in reverse, it is an “R”. When it is in park, it is a “P”. This isn’t so bad. The problem is the color. The letter is lit in red. So, when I’m driving, there is a big, red, “D” on my dash. Red is the color for warnings, but drive is a desired state—the state that the car is most often in while the engine is running. The red letter is the biggest attention grabber on the dash, and is therefore quite distracting. I keep thinking there is something wrong. Of course, I’ll likely become desensitized to it, and then when something does go wrong, I won’t notice it.

Missed Opportunity: MMTRG

A few weeks back I was in the shower (where all the best ideas come from), and I was thinking about the iPhone 3G. Specifically, I was thinking about the built-in GPS and how it might be utilized by applications. Suddenly, I struck on a great idea for a game. Imagine a virtual world that exists in the same space as the real world, but you need a device (like the iPhone) to be able to see and interact with it. To get to locations in the virtual world, you have to travel to the corresponding location in the real world. The game would borrow traits from geocaching, role-playing, and Pokemon allowing players to find virtual objects, fight virtual beasties, and either cooperate or compete with each other. I started capturing my ideas and fleshing them out.

Then two Fridays ago, just before I left for vacation, I was checking out the newly released App Store and came across this preview of Parallel Kingdom. They refer to it as a Mobile Multiplayer Trans-Reality Game (MMTRG).

Well, to be fair, my own concepts for content and gameplay are significantly different—not quite as cliché and using the actual location to better effect. So, maybe I shouldn’t give up on this one.

My Worthless Skills

I won’t be posting next week. I’m off for another week in the woods of West Virginia. Before I leave, I’m installing the iPhone 2.0 update and getting the applications I downloaded last night onto my phone. That’s kind of silly, considering that I’ll be spending a week in a location where everything that the iPhone is useful for is meaningless. There is no cell coverage. There is no WiFi. I won’t be able to check real-time weather radar maps with WeatherBug. Nor will I be able to chat with anyone using AIM. I certainly won’t be controlling my Apple TV with it.

Come to think of it, most of the skills I have developed in my career are of questionable use there. Which makes me wonder, what would I have been doing if I had been born a century or more ago? Would I have been a blacksmith? Perhaps an inventor? Would I have been an artist, or a typesetter?

Have a great week everyone.

T-Fault

My wife was working on the french fries while I manned the grill. We’ve been using a T-Fal deep fryer for about ten years. I happened to walk through the kitchen just as the grease started bubbling up through the vent on the top. Upon checking the manual, the problem was clear. We hadn’t cleaned or replaced the charcoal filter in the lid. Ever. I scoured the web for the specific filter we need, and I eventually found them. They are only available directly from T-Fal, meaning they must be shipped from Europe. And while a pack of three costs only $5.00, the shipping costs $15.00. A new fryer will only cost ten to twenty dollars more than that.

So, I’m going to be committing a fine, functioning appliance to a landfill, simply because I can’t economically replace the filter.

I’ll also be buying a different brand of fryer—one that has filters available through Amazon. The green movement is seeing companies start to think about the complete lifespan of their products, from factory to end-of-life. How long should a company be expected to support its products in a financially feasible manner? Is ten years too much to ask for a kitchen appliance?

UI Design First Aid

For a variety of reasons, not least of which being that I am the sole interaction designer, there are situations in which I am inaccessible to the developers. I was asked to give a presentation during our Summer Sharing Series. Titled “UI Design First Aid”, my presentation covered the basics of my design process—how to approach UI design problems—and then proceeded to give an overview of interaction design and visual design principles and patterns. Every point was illustrated with examples from software screens, including some good examples and some bad, most of them coming from our own products.

Many of the developers had expressed interest prior to the presentation, and it seemed to be well received. The presentation was video taped so that those who couldn’t attend will be able to view it, and my notated slides are being made available on our Wiki. I’ve decided to take advantage of this renewed awareness within the company by introducing a UI design pattern library for their reference.

I count myself lucky to work in a company that respects good design and understands its value.

I.D. 2008 Winners

I.D. has announced the winners of their 2008 Annual Design Review. I was expecting to find a number of inspiring designs, and there were several, but there were two things that stood out for me.

First was the prevalence of Apple:

1. Packaging - Honorable Mention for iPhone packaging
   
2. Interactive - Design Distinction for Apple.com
   
3. Consumer Products - Best of Category for the iPhone
   
4. Consumer Products - Design Distinction for their Wireless Keyboard
   

Apple strives for excellence in design across the board, and it shows. They know that it is important to consider the total experience of their customers.

The second thing I noticed was the paucity of visual representations of the winners on I.D.’s website. Each winner had a single photo about 350 pixels wide. However, most of these were photos of multiple images. For example, the interactive works were shown on a monitor and a laptop, both artfully staged and shot as a single image. In the Environments category, the Olympic Sculpture Park, which one Best of Category, is represented by a shot of three, large scale, printed photos. These images may work fine in the printed magazine—I haven’t seen it. On the website, however, they are too small. You can’t make out details. The Honorable Mentions have no photos and no descriptions. They should have at least provided access to higher resolution images, if not multiple images for each winner (where appropriate).