Buzzfeed’s Jon Steinberg on Google TV:

I tried Google TV yesterday. Flying a Cessna is easier and has fewer controls than the Sony remote

Niiiiiiiiiice.
Way to go there Google, with yer engineers, engineering up some complicated shit for non-techie consumers.
Heard of design thinking?
via Gizmodo

Radiohead’s Colin Greenwood reflecting on In Rainbows, ahead of the release of their upcoming album:

With In Rainbows, we were able to be the first people to digitally release our record, directly to people’s personal computers, at 7.30am GMT on 10 October 2007. I was having breakfast, and watched as the file appeared in my email, and the album streamed onto my desktop. I spent the next day and night monitoring people’s reactions online, both to the music and the means of delivery. Journalists in America had stayed up overnight to write the first review as they received the music – again, in the pre-digital age they would have had advance copies up to three weeks before. On the torrent site bulletin boards, people were arguing over whether they should be downloading and paying for the record from our site, rather than the free torrents. Various online pundits and pamphleteers were pronouncing the end of the record business, or of Radiohead, or of both.

Hey marketing and brand gurus, you taking note of his fan-centric infused campaign of real-time value launchpad content?
People, feelings, stories, and things.

BMWBlog has a segment from an Inframe.tv documentary on former Head of Design at BMW Group Chris Bangle (via PSFK).
Man, does he get it:

I came from studios in General Motors and in Fiat, where they believed in high segregation. Their idea was if you want to treat things equally you keep them separate. If you want to make design unique and fresh you isolate it. I got the job at BMW when I was 35. So I said, let’s get rid of the walls. No doors between Rolls Royce and BMW, no doors between BMW and MINI, no doors between motorcycles and cars.

And I love this quote:

The markets guys, these guys you have to keep a little bit at bay, because their first reaction is no. No, no, no, no. You can’t create life under an atmosphere of no.

Have a watch, there’s a lot of great ideas to absorb from this guy.
Design might seem like this lofty, hippie idea, but when you see guys like this making it happen at one of the most prestigious car makers in the world, you know it’s possible.
*be sure to watch the 4 outtakes on Bangle too

Paul Bennett at Bloomberg BusinessWeek keeps it real with his plee to brand and marketing gurus to drop the bullshit jardon:

The hardest thing that marketers and brand managers have to do right now is simplify. Marketing and branding need to get back to first principles — people, feelings, stories, and things. Tangible things. Not weird words. And for all of us agencies out there, we need to feel more confident that actually the best thing we can do is to tell it simply, both to the organization we’re working for and ultimately to the consumer.

Thanks Jory

I’ve noticed more people, whether in blog posts, trade publications or comment threads, being vocal with their frustration that Apple is taking/getting credit for inventing products and technologies. What’s important to understand is many (most?) of Apple’s products and technologies they’ve turned into innovations are bases on the inventions of others.

Last week Apple announced the new MacBook Air, the first refresh in the line since the Air introduction in 2008. Then I find stories like this one at ZDNet pointing out Sony had a wafer thin laptop back in 2004 first.

The author, Brook Crothers, breaks down what separates Apple’s and Sony’s models:

When the Sony Vaio X505 came out, it was about $3,000. And that’s probably where Apple’s new Air breaks the most ground. The ultrasvelte, 2.3-pound Air–which I would argue is the most impressive Apple MacBook design–can be had for $999.

Price is the only ground that matters once something has been innovated upon – that’s what innovation is.

I’m looking forward to buying some of these amazing posters by Stanley Chow.

TechCrunch reports Sony is stopping production of the (cassette) Walkman after 30 years. While they’re at it, Sony should stop making Blu-ray players too. Love it or hate it, but physical media is over. The signs are everywhere – Netflx is prepping for streaming-only in the US, and Apple is expanding it’s optical-driveless MacBook Air line of laptops, not to mention their keeping DVD drives on their standard MacBooks.

Look closely and comprehensively at these pictures. Integrate your reactions with all your spontaneous recalls of the other experiential information of your life as well as of other lives as reported to you. Think and think some more. From time to time, humans are endowed with the capability to discover just a little more regarding the significance of their role in the cosmic scenario. You too might catch of these ‘cosmic fish’.

-R Buckminster Fuller

Experience is not what happens to you, it is what you make of what happens to you.

-Aldous Huxley

There’s spoilers in this piece by Adam Kruspe, but if you haven’t seen The Professional yet, well, shame on you.

If beautifully remixed and carefully edited film-trailer-montage-music-pieces are your thing, check out Adam’s other work. My favorite is Movie Action Reversal (He used Radiohead too, cheater).
Found via Analogue

Good Magazine has a scary/sad/inevitable piece on how Robots Are Replacing Middle Class Jobs.

The culprit, in other words, is technology. The hard truth–and you don’t see it addressed in news reports–is that the middle class is disappearing in large part because technology is rendering middle-class skills obsolete.

And:

We may be heading toward a future with plentiful high-end jobs and plentiful low-end jobs, and not much in the middle. What if only doctors, lawyers, engineers, and managers can live a decent life, buy a house or apartment, and pay for their children to get specialized degrees? What if a liberal-arts degree on its own prepares you for little more than work as a security guard? What if the skills that prepare one for a job with decent pay get increasingly hard to attain?

Scary shit to say the least.

Zeldman: iPad as the new Flash

I’m not against the iPad. I love my iPad. It’s great for storing and reading books, for browsing websites, for listening to music and watching films, for editing texts, presentations, and spreadsheets, for displaying family photos, and on and on. It’s nearly all the stuff I love about my Mac plus a great ePub reader slipped into a little glass notebook I play like a Theremin.

But:

I’m just not sold on what the magazines are doing. Masturbatory novelty is not a business strategy.

I’ve thought the same thing for a while now. There’s many iPhone and iPad apps that are adding negligible value to their website-viewable counterparts.

The designer must see the periphery as well as the core, the immediate and the ultimate, at least in the biological sense. He must anchor his special job in the complex whole. The designer must be trained not only in the use of materials and various skills, but also in appreciation of organic functions and planning. He must know that design is indivisible, that the internal and external characteristics of a dish, a chair, a table, a machine, painting, sculpture are not to be separated…

There is design in organization of emotional experiences, in family life, in labor relations, in city planning, in working together as civilized human beings. Ultimately all problems of design merge into one great problem: ‘design for life’.

-Lazlo Maholy-Nagy, from the book Vision in Motion (via 37Signals)

Great post by Jon Kolko over at frog on the maturation of the discipline of design.
He starts out with the observation:

It would appear that we’ve arrived: design has emerged as the discrete discipline of problem solving and cultural change, and the designerly ability described by Nigel Cross in 1995 as “a distinct form of intelligence” is now considered with some degree of respect in disciplines such as the sciences or the liberal arts.

But is also hesitant to apply design thinking to everything:

Simply, as important as the core ideas of “cultural immersion”, “rapid prototyping”, and “abductive reasoning” are, a cure for poverty this does not make. Teams need to execute and follow-through, and that execution takes the care familiar to most designers who were trained in (not ironically) the above type, composition, color, and two and three dimensional design activities. This is the iterative, careful, methodical, and articulate approach that designers inherited from movements of arts and crafts. It’s hard, and it takes time, patience, and experience. And while you may learn about it in business school or in the Harvard Business Review, it will take a lot more than some articles from some truly incredible thinkers to become capable of actually executing successfully.

One thing is for certain – design, in all it’s meanings and interpretations, is becoming more and more important. You see it in the categories of national magazines like HBR, BusinessWeek, Fast Company to the dashboards of new cars to new approaches in healthcare.