My name is
Jack Moffett. I am an Interaction Designer with over ten years of experience. According to
Herb Simon, that makes me an expert, so I must have something worth sharing. I have started this venture as an exercise to spur critical thinking about my chosen profession. I hope that others may find it thought provoking as well.
DesignAday will present a brief thought about Design every weekday.
The program for Interaction 10 has been posted, and it looks like it will be another outstanding conference. The keynote speakers will be Paola Antonelli, Dan Hill, Jon Kolko, Ezio Manzini, Nathan Shedroff, and a true legend in the field, Bill Moggridge. Additional invited speakers are Timo Arnall, Cindy Chastain, Liz Danzico, Shelley Evenson, Dave Gray, Tom Igoe, Peter Morville, and Denise Wilton. Looking at this list and the 28 speakers selected from 250 session submissions, it appears that Service Design and sustainability with both be significant themes running through the conference.
Registration is now open, and early bird pricing is in effect through November. The past two conferences have sold out, and I see no reason for this one to not follow suit. I’m hoping to attend again, but that’s likely dependent on at least partial support from my company. Here’s hoping.
Back in January, our local IxDA chapter participated in an event titled Back of the Envelope: A Sustainable Restaurant Crawl. My report on the event can be seen on the IxDA discussion forum. We hosted the final stop.
Onny Chatterjee and Bill Bernstein had a large map of Pittsburgh on the wall (labeled using Ecofont, and we had 30% recycled post-consumer waste Post-it Notes on the tables. As we ate, we wrote down all of the sustainable businesses and other relevant organizations in the Pittsburgh area and placed them on the map in their relative locations.
Onny transferred the locations recorded on the physical map into Google Maps. This is a great resource, and I would encourage designers to do the same in their own cities.
I love my PT Cruiser. I’ve had it eight and a half years now, and I’m about to break 100,000 miles. It has been a great car. My only complaints, and I knew them going in, are the turning radius and the gas mileage. The former I’ve learned to compensate for and the latter… well, it’s been on my mind more lately than when I bought it.
I’ve been hoping to keep it for about another year or so. There are a lot of interesting cars scheduled for release between now and 2011, and I would really like my next car to be an innovative hybrid, if not completely electric. However, I may have a transmission problem on my hands. I’ll be taking it in to have checked in the next week, but I’m preparing for bad news. I don’t want to put much money into it, so I’m starting to look for a new car now.
My criteria are as follows:
- Good gas mileage - in the 30’s.
- Unique, stylish design - I need something with personality.
- Relatively inexpensive - no more than $22,000 well equipped (which knocks the Prius out of the running).
- Must be capable of highway driving - no NEVs, but I love the look of the Peapod.
- Must be available within the next couple months.
I’m currently considering:
- Smart fortwo
- Mini Cooper
- Toyota Yaris
- Scion xD
-
Nissan Cube (available this Spring)
I’m just starting my search. What else should I be thinking about?
I arrived in Vancouver Thursday morning in time for the workshop I wrote about yesterday. I took a cab from the airport to my hotel, The Four Seasons, where the conference was held. As the car pulled away from the terminal, I noticed that something was different. Looking at the dash, I saw a display that was monitoring the vehicle’s fuel efficiency. I confirmed with the driver that the vehicle was indeed a hybrid.
It was my first ride in one. The engine was dead silent when we stopped at a traffic light. The driver informed me that there were a lot of hybrid taxis in Vancouver. As he put it, “We wouldn’t be able to stay in business otherwise.”
That makes a lot of sense to me, and it made me hopeful. Every city should be working towards making all public transportation hybrids or otherwise alternative fuel vehicles. That encounter was repeatedly brought to mind throughout the conference as three of the six keynotes centered around sustainability and how design can play an important part in solving our current, wicked problems.
It’s often stated that you shouldn’t reinvent the wheel. Michelin obviously doesn’t follow that mantra. The company founders were the first to clothe the wheel in a tire back in 1895. Today, while the big three American auto manufacturers are asking for a bail-out, Michelin is introducing a new design that has the potential to revolutionize the industry. Their new Active Wheel system builds a motor and suspension into every wheel, removing the need for an engine, traditional suspension system, gear box, or drive shaft. And what happens when the car no longer needs to be designed around those technologies? You can re-think the entire car!
From the press release:
The Michelin Active Wheel inaugurates a new era in road transportation in which a car’s road, safety, energy and environmental performance achieve unprecedented levels. This is because of a miniature drive engine and an electrical suspension system incorporated into the wheel. These technologies developed by Michelin have made it possible to completely rethink the car.
I find this breakthrough extremely exciting. I hope they are able to rapidly bring it to market. As mentioned in a previous post, I’ve been completely dissatisfied with the auto industry’s inability to bring the creativity found in concept cars to consumers. I find it quite ironic that this invention is the offspring of a “tire company”, rather than an auto manufacturer.
Occasionally, reinventing the wheel is the right thing to do.
A couple weeks ago, I posted Graham Curry’s visualization about the potential of wind energy in West Virginia. This is another of his visualizations narrating the generation and distribution of electricity. It depicts the mechanics within a wind generator, explaining how wind is transformed into electricity, and then illustrates the movement of that electricity to the locations at which it will be used.
It’s a well-executed diagram that matches the visual style of the other visualizations in the series. The large arrow representing the wind gives a clear indication of where to start, and the narration smoothly progresses in a rectangular spiral that ends with a representation of 600 homes on a power grid—the number of homes that can be sustained by a single wind generator. One major point of the entire piece is that the generators will easy plug into the infrastructure already in place.
It is very satisfying to bring my professional skills into other important aspects of my life. In the past week, I’ve been helping prepare for Vacation Bible School at my church. Thinking back to my childhood, the one really solid memory of VBS I have is of a ship that was built in the church basement. I remember it as a large, wooden boat with a mast and nets. It may have actually been cardboard and much smaller, but there is no denying that it was impressive to me as a child. So, one of the approaches I took was to think big, and try to create an immersive experience.
The program this year uses a tropical rainforest theme. Using the Rainforest Cafe as inspiration, I decided to turn the social hall into a jungle. Our planning committee further decided to supplement the main theme with one of conservation and recycling. We decided to buy as few decorations as possible—to make them out of recycled materials instead. We collected newspapers, paper bags, gallon milk jugs, two-liter bottles, old clothing and linens, cardboard boxes, and packing materials. The newspapers became leaves that were strung across the high-ceilinged room. The paper bags became vines. A box from a kitchen stove was turned into a tree trunk on the stage. Milk jugs were cut in half and stacked to form very realistic palm trees. With the addition of borrowed, plush animals, house plants, and sound effects, we were able to create an immersive environment that will provide kids with lasting memories. And due to a lot of creativity and ingenuity, we were able to do it in an environmentally friendly and cost-effective fashion.
That’s good design.
Last night saw our third, and best attended, programmed event for the local Pittsburgh chapter of IxDA. We were hosted by Fit Associates in their Shadyside studio. I’m afraid I missed the first thirty minutes of socializing, but I arrived just in time for the their presentation. Marc Rettig and Jenna Date gave us a compelling overview of their firm’s philosophy and their approach to solving problems. They cited examples from a few interesting projects and painted a clear picture of where they want their work to take them. In a nutshell, they affect change by creating ripples that extend from their customers to the users, and into the community. Their hope is to create ripples that eventually influence global society and the world itself. As stated on their website:
We believe in creating change for the greater good. By understanding people, we inform the ideas, design and products that make lives better. By putting our time, talents and experience to work for important causes, we put our energy where it will do the most good. By nurturing, leading and equipping our valued clients, we help them create ideas that change companies, organizations and lives. By looking toward the future, we make a difference every day.
However, the presentation wasn’t simply for the sake of tooting their own horn. They used the context of their work to initiate discussions about sustainability, the influence designers can have (at various levels), and the responsibility of designers to design with intent. They finished the program with an invitation. They are looking for other local designers that are interested in working together to improve Pittsburgh. This could very well be the beginning of something interesting.
