Design Engineering in Furniture

David Fletcher is UK based industrial/furniture designer.





...and some space saving cool intelligent furniture Design

Mithos Concept Design

Love the industrial design concept of this car and its video presentation by Italian designer Tiago Miguel Inacio


MITHOS - ELECTROMAGNETIC VEHICLE from Tiago Inácio on Vimeo.

Concept Day Made of Glass- Part 2

I had posted an earlier version of this in the past about "Corning Glass" a company in Ohio that makes Gorilla glass. From time to time they come up with concept vision videos like this about what dreams can become in glass and gadgets interfaces. My friend DAS send me this over email...so enjoy "A Day made of Glass 2. Expanded Corning Vision" - Courtesy of Corning Glass.

Design Innovation In Watches

All those who know me (well most of them) who know me know I love watches and am a collector of good watch designs. I came across this Harry Winston designs and love it.

And my favorite design of all time "Maitres-du-temps" (Masters of Time) with only custom ordering to specifications.

Enjoy and drool! Like I am doing now.

Cheers,

Sam Kurien

A Day Made of Glass

DA send me this video link, I think though still in concept its is so cool and is not far in our future as we have seen bits and pieces of all this cool research from different quarters of surface computing.

Enjoy The future is round the corner!!!

Cheers,

Sam Kurien

InOne Concept Design

The InOne concept computer is really a cool looking design and as the name suggest its a All in one Desktop (not a laptop as it may look like one) with a 22 inch screen, keyboard, enormous touch pad. My design/engineering thought on this one is as I wonder is it would be a cool idea to take the touch-pad and use gestures to light up and bring up a keyboard, or turn into a second dual screen for display, for comparing of data  images, pull and pinch and throw stuff (minority style) from the top screen to the touch-pad screen. 

Thoughts,

Sam Kurien

Concept Yacht

Look at the picture below; This actually is a Yacht? Well in concept anyway but this one can be on the high seas as well as take off into air (now that is cool.. unfortunately no space yet according to the design schematics and non-availability of alternative unlimited fuel sources). I have slight issues with the design but ah alas ...every ship designed cannot be an "Enterprise" after all  but it's cool nevertheless. These concepts of hybrid air-sea-ships come from the ekranoplanes originally invented by the Scandinavians.

However the credit actually goes to Russian hydrofoil engineer Rostislav Alexeev who perfected the art of building these behemoth air-sea-ships.There are several you-tube videos out there if you do a search on "ekranoplanes".

As I look at it again...hey it almost does looks like the..."Enterprise" almost!...or I am just dreaming

Enjoy!!

Sam Kurien

P:S My four year old daughter saw this post and she said it looks like a "Killer whale". I agree more like killer whale than an Enterprise

Cool Illusion

Is the cowboy going or coming? I thought this was a cool illusion based upon the interpretation you can formulate your own story.

Extension of An Innovation!

I recently was made aware that immediacy of objects, values and street innovation extend the product ideas that will be instrumental in making them universal. The lessons to be learnt are how do you design a product or a system that can be extended or be universally accepted. The proposed idea is to watch for ideas that come from the streets, reverse engineering, social re-engineering and innovative social uses of products or ideas.

For example to expand on this a cell phone owner in Uganda becomes an instant ATM. Strange Isn't it? People in Uganda use cell phones to transfer money and exchange minutes for cash. How does it work you may ask? So if you live in Kampala and have a cell phone and you want to send money to your parents in a small village a few hundred miles away you would buy a pre-paid phone card with minutes on it and transfer it to a person in the village where your parents live who has a cell phone. So from Kampala you would call this person and give him the card number transferring the minutes on your card. The cell phone operator on the other end who receives your call charges a 2-10% commission, collects the minutes and dispenses the remaining cash to the caller's parents.

Street innovation and extension of a  innovation or idea gives insights how the Ugandans use an everyday object like the cellphone in the absence of a sophisticated banking system. 

Thoughts?

Sam Kurien

Resonance - 'A Film about Design Strategy'

Design Strategy for a firm or project  is a complex process. Here is a video how innovation design consultancy firm "Continuum" approaches it in a film they produced called 'Resonance: A Film About Design Strategy.'
I like the concept of connecting insights to values and coming up with the right idea to produce a solution. BRILLIANT!

Enjoy!!

Continuum Resonance Video: Getting to the right idea from Continuum on Vimeo.

Insight,

Sam Kurien

Design Ideas!!!

I am a fan of industrial design and architectural design...hey heck actually the design process in general fascinates me. Here are some pics of designs that have lately that caught my eye.

A touch surface designed by Hyundai based on the Microsoft Surface coffee tables. I like this one better as it brings the overall bulkiness and weight down. The form factor allows at least some leg space while playing the touch surface games or flicking info from your home server to your phone or vice versa. 

Ireland's new Convention Centre Dublin uses ingenius engineering and an omniscient mother brain to monitor and adjust itself. The result? Zero carbon footprint. Cool Design and is magical with different colored lighting. 

A skyscraper designed and that grows underground. I wonder where the parking lot is on this one. 

This bridge is coming up in Seoul, Korea. The design includes to have shops, museums, and small art shops. Looks cools from the outside but how do you stop and park midway? The side bulges are the answer where parking time is limited. So you got to buy fast and get moving. 

Yacht Design

One of my favorite yacht design and manufacturing companies is italian called CRN yacht. They launched a new web site and just like their yachts the user interface is really cool. Check out their website at http://www.crn-yacht.com/

Check out the 2D schematics of my favorite design in their line up - "Romance"

Mind-blowing User Interface

The future of online magazines is here...Check out Time magazine's new iPad App




And btw HTML 5 can do all this...(so says Steve!)

Sam Kurien

Innovation...Is About Thinking Out of The Box!

Innovation comes in different forms/flavors and fall into different categories. Talking about categories some of them fall into expensive ones while others stare jeeringly from opposite spectrum of the price band. I love it when new product design and innovations falls in the least expensive category because more people can afford it and from the business perspective you can make much more money. Didn't Swatch the in-expensive watch maker take control over expensive brand watch companies?. Also on a different note though the automobile's internal combustion engine is a marvelous invention, the windshield wiper is an equally innovating invention that has saved millions of lives in tough weather situations.

Well today's review is on iPad stands. One of them, called the 'Joule', has the whopping sticker price of $129 and the other one, merely $0.69, was discovered by New York Time multimedia editor Andrew Devignal who picked up the cheap plastic card holder and converted it into an iPad stand. Creative ideas and innovation at its best...

The fancy-schmancy expensive 'Joule' looks nice, though...I am not going to spend $129...will gladly let the makers of 'Joule' be on their jolly good way to file chapter 11 for a dumb pricing model.

Cheers,

Sam Kurien

Mapping Kiosk User Interface Design Concepts

Last year we worked on requirements for Zion Hospital in Chicago for a mapping kiosk application, the project never reached to its implementation stage but the software UI designed was envisioned since my HKG days when I knew that touch screen kiosks were going to be big in accessing and serving up information in the easiest possible manner at public hot spots. I had first seen these beautiful touch-screen kiosk interfaces at the IFC tower in Hong Kong and the screen showed a 3D interface of all the different levels of offices and shops along with your current position and the easiest path to get to your destination. After I had seen this, the common sight on streets of Hong Kong was observing tourists holding their maps and trying to figure out where the nearest MTR station is or searching for the nearest restaurant is or where the next touristy spot was and what bus/taxi/subway connections take.

The interface attempt for the hospital sprung up from design ideas of installing standing or hanging touch screen kiosks like the ones shown below:


Here is the interface design we came up with, the idea of the touch application was to access information as fast as possible. The maintenance of these units can remotely be done with software updates released over the internet. Payment applications can also be built if there is a need for providing info on pay/access model. Click on the images below to open them in a new window.

Now you tell me what you think how  the usability of these interfaces can be improved. 

Enjoy!

Sam Kurien

Re-Design of the Parking Meter

The parking meter is an interesting piece of public equipment and many a downtowns have these weirdly shaped posts (mostly ugly) standing or planted on the sidewalks, an important source of revenue for the city. Here are some pictures to amuse you and the first definitely reveals the total chaos of people trying to figure out the condescending parking meter. Look at the images below there are at least six people trying to figure the parking meter a sight not so unusual for unfriendly user interfaces.


A closer look at these parking meters reveal traditional parking meters haven’t changed mucy from the 1930’, oh for sure once in while we see cool looking meters with easy interfaces like the one in Harvard square that look at least new agey but I have had a hard time finding one with easy to use interface. Thinking on those lines I decided to design an interface conceptualizing what it should look like.


Problems:

Unordered buttons
Most of the parking meters have a myriad of buttons all over which creates creepy and scary look first time you look at it, there is no clear order in which these buttons are laid out and placements are most haphazard not following hierarchical order to present needed input or output information.
Orientation
In most of the parking meters across the U.S the buttons are grouped well mostly in a vertical order and the user tends to input or read information in horizontal or diagonal fashion, so if there are more buttons the end user is looking down at an angle and incline of his or her vision goes lower and lower with each row, so if it’s a taller person the difficulty in reading and usability of presenting information is hampered.
Colors
The color coding on these meters is usually a mess and some of them show the standard grey with black and white and some other use bright red or green iron plates that are engraved, so if the city changes rates then new meters need to replaced escalation of cost, downtime of service and loss of revenue. Didn’t know colors and dissemination of information could cause so much harm .
Fare Plan
The Fare plans are again displayed in vertical order most of the time, it makes sense to start with the fare plan and the time plan at the same level instead of two levels.
Iconography
Most of the parking meters today still do not have neatly represented icons and most importantly from the usability point of view do I push or pull, yank them left or right, switch on or off are the kind of questions the user is face with.
Payment
Payment is most of the times done with coins, so if you don’t have the right change then you stand and beg from people who might have the change to save you from getting a ticket. There should be alternative payment methods.

Explanation of Instructions
In many newer version of parking meters there are side panels that display a cheat sheet or an explanation of instructions of how to use this complicated device again lot of use of space and if the information changes, replacement of the parking meter itself (cost increases, revenue decreases model). Another observation is most of the instructions wear out, phase out with weather conditions and do not make sense to the end user adding to their frustration levels.

Alternative Redesign
It is easy to criticize existing products without showing alternative solutions. An alternative interface is shown here from Netherlands and a proposed interface from me is shown as well for you to choose and comment as to what you think, again this is not tested with feedback or even proto-typed. The Nethterlands version is of course on the European market and seems to be working well and seem to have a better usability feedback compared to the American counterparts.

My proposed idea is to have a interface panel that is a touch screen, cost may be a concern here but cheap LCD panels that are durable and extremely thin can be manufactured at a low cost to volume ratio, one disadvantage of the product itself maybe the portability. Here are some pictures of how the meter-kiosk should look like. Now, of course these can double as other devices to dissemination information like mapping, advertisements from the city, hot spots, serve up web pages for valuable tourism information etc. The hardware device can be refined to almost a single post just like the traditional ones but with a touch screen that can even be solar powered, scratch resistant and durable for outside weathering conditions.


Proposed Parking Meter Interface


Below is my version of a touch screen interface which is almost self-explanatory and the hallmark of the good User Interface is exactly that it is “Self – Explanatory”. Please click on the image to see the zoomed in version in your browser.




Solutions:


Orientation
Unordered buttons are now replaced by color coded section on the touch screen for easy selection. The end user if handicapped can also hear the information via the built in speaker telling them what to do.
The flow of information is horizontal primarily with three basic steps
1) Choose Duration
2) Based on the Duration selected the Hourly Rate changes
3) Deposit Payment
Colors
The color coding on the redesign is distinct separating and grouping the three step process. The third section is on part of the touch screen but is integrated into the meter device displaying the information on the second panel as well.
Fare Plan
The Fare plans are again displayed based upon the selection its both informative and intutive, these can be changed at any time based upon programming and sending the information wirelessly to update rates, as well as the information on the meter.
Iconography
High level information is reprsented and outline with color codes and icons, information flows vertically and is the short summary of test. If the screen is reflected and viewing is difficult you can also hear out the informational steps to operate the parking meter.
Payment
The device will accept coins, cash tendered notes, credit and debit cards and chip enabled cards that have prepaid parking dollars/euros paid into which the machine can read and then spew out the receipts.

Final Thoughts:

Obviously the interface is not tested and followed by the iterative process that I mentioned in the last post, but hey this is a start for better usability isn't it?. If you have better ideas or alternative solutions please feel free to sketch up something and email it to me.

Wondering If Intuitive Designs should be the norm?

This post will start off with a posing question that is different from the title of the post- Should Intuitive Designs be built into systems or is the adaptability to such systems/interfaces already built into us?

I often wonder about the above question and  problems  like this do stay to bother. A architect/system designer/UI designer or a product designer always (well…not always) wrestle with these kinds of questions. On the left here is the pic of my daughter playing with my mac, when this was taken she was not even three, she is now four and knows how to use cell phones, and almost all the digital devices that her dad uses at home ranging from (ipods, iphones, wii, blu-ray player, hdtv’s etc.)….sounds scary isn’t it but again I begin to wonder if this is the world we live in now, as a parent I am confused whether to be proud of it or not? However these question still loom up in the air…

As I dissect these ponderings let me come at it from the angle of first answering the title to this post: I think as systems are designed and inventions (hardware) or software’s come to life a certain amount of intuitive behavior is always built into them no matter what and they either result into friendly or not so friendly systems. From the pictures above some of the mac fans may argue it is the ease of the system that allows this four year old to watch YouTube videos on my laptop but hold that thought that’s why I merged the two images into one, the laptops on one half is a PC laptop and on the other half is the mac and the web page Hannah is watching is YouTube on both machines. She has somehow figured out watching me for a good amount of time how to click on the favorite links in Safari as well as Firefox. So the argument that the MAC interface is easier for the child or easier to use in Hannah’s case fails. Again this may not  be a very good example but there is this truth that in the systems or interfaces designed some are easier to use and some are harder or just plainly inconvenient.

The second aspect again…”I wonder” and question is if the cognitive adaptability of the mind is strong in some (and not so strong in others) that enables the end user to just figure out the system and make use of it to satisfy a given need. In Hannah’s case her need to watch cartoons made her aware of the system (ot the tool to be used), she adapted the system and the need was satisfied. Though she hasn’t figured out that the favorites “Tom & Jerry” is bookmarked on the sites whenever she pulls up that site, her adaptive mind doesn’t care whether it’s a PC or MAC, she doesn’t care if the interfaces are convenient or not but the need to watch those cartoons is satisfied by her congnitive adaptability of the system irrespective of the intuitive design. This is true in the case of systems like SAP, the manufacturing industry really needed software products that solved problems on supply chain, managing production cycles etc and SAP systems solved that very need but the user interfaces on those systems “sucked” (pardon my expression here) big time but that is the truth. The engineers solved the problem but the interfaces were clumsy to use and soon productivity over a period of time turned into time consuming nightmares with SAP specialists rising in the market (sorry SAP guys...you are special) . So the next question that arises would be ...should designers/architects of a system even bother what the end user thinks, if the need is there, the end user will adapt and learn. Unfortunately many systems both devices and softwares are designed by technical people who believe that they know best and the end users know less or for that matter the end users don't really know what they want. The evolution of systems and the design process has come a long way and the truth of the age is far from it, we live in a age where interface designing has matured not only in the everyday machines we use but in software interfaces we design. The very competitiveness of firms to survive depends on it. An interesting point to note here would be to ask what then is the balanced approach to known as to how much intuitiveness needs to be built in so that it is easy to use, learning cycles are cut short, and finally it is easy to adapt.

Another interesting question that I will pose here is how do we measure those balances while designing such systems? We know maturity models optimize processes, procedures and product development but adaptability will be a hard one to measure as humans are capable of adapting at different levels of cognition, but at the end of the day I will settle for a system that has high form factor, high functionality and high adaptability in every area of design engineering. A design approach like the one graphically represented here from Anothony Robinson's six stage UI design work flow makes perfect sense to me if the approach is user centric, iterative. This approach though may have longer gestation periods and may be expensive in the beginning the plus's are the longer life cycle of the product and a support engineer's boon  - less maintenance and bug fixes. Now this may vary from industry to industry but this is a good start.

So in short...systems should have built in them the ease of use graphical or logical intuitiveness. System designers and Product designers should start by defining usability and utility (mind you they are different) from a the perspective of the all types of users in the mass, know the limitations that you cannot please everybody (a certain level of adaptability will be assumed from certain segments) and the result is we have a process defined for intuitive design to be the norm.

Sorry this post must have posed more questions than having answered them but these spaces are placeholders for my thoughts and I am sure I will revisit it soon.

Sam Kurien