One Question...

Came across this video tonight through Kate Andrews' blog. I hate to use the word "lovely", but I think this qualifies as "lovely".



Simple premise, ask one question to fifty different people on the streets of Brooklyn and record the answers they give. I took it as a social research experiment designed to see where one pretty obscure question can lead to.

I'm really starting to look at these experiments with a focused view now, before I used to pan them off as nonsensical and pointless, believing that there was no use in the findings.

I'm struggling to explain why my opinion has changed, I can't seem to put my finger on the reason. Feel free to suggest a reason.

Anyway with my view changed I look at these social research experiments and find them really interesting. In the case of this one, it shows you how diverse peoples' answers can be (ranging from "my bed" to "my fathers tombstone") stemming from one simple question.

It makes me think, if the question was deeper and more omminous, e.g "How can people prevent climate change and pass on sustainability knowledge?" then would the answers be more restricted and almost forced?

I love the simplicity of the question in this video, and the depth in which people go into with their answers, is this what design should be like? Simple but provoking?

Answers on a postcard.

My 8 Sustainability Issues

Following Josh's attendance at the recent Sustainability forum, and his last post on the forum, Unbox had an extremely interesting meeting with Professor Seaton Baxtor, Hamid Von Koten and graphic design pupil Struan. Here we discussed what the next step would be to implementing some of the ideas, and tackling some of the problems that had been raised during the forum. To get a better understanding of the all of the issues felt to be important to those involved, Professor Baxtor suggested sending him a list of no more than 10 key issues which you felt needed to be addressed. The issues I feel need mentioning are below.

1. The language of sustainability needs to change to be more inclusive for all people, regardless of their depth of understanding of the subject. The language should be appropriate for the context.

2. we must learn FROM, not just ABOUT nature. (Bio Mimicry)

3. The education system should change so that sustainability is as integral as learning to read, write and add at primary school.

4. To live sustainably needs to be as easy as the non-sustainable way we are currently living (if not easier!)

5. The topic should be addressed on micro (bio mimicry) and macro (large global systems and cultures eg. production techniques) level systems.

6. A bottom up approach needs to be met with a top down approach. Leaders need to be working in conjunction and towards the same goals as the common people.

7. A larger emphasis should be put on Service Design to promote a "use not consume" culture. Where is the ISD (Innovative Service Design) course? Or else, could it be better incorporated into all disciplines?

8. Sustainability should be included in all projects, not just in the design school, to show its practical use and real world implications, rather than having "sustainable projects" just done by "arty people" as some people see it.

These of course are just my personal views. If you have an opinion on them, please comment, or if you have aset of your own, email: s.z.baxtor@dundee.ac.uk

P

Grandpa Interviews

It's taken me a while to get onto this blog but here I am, 25%Unbox.
These videos are interviews that I filmed in January as initial research for this project. They brought about a number of very useful insights as they conflicted with the usual stereotype of an 'old person'. Something my grandpa is adamant not to be!

Food Is Fun.

Yes, I do feel bad for stopping the more serious posts, but I just had to show this off.


It's Alphabites and fishcakes. With tomato sauce.

Good Design? Bad Design?

Recently I had to visit my local GP surgery (don't worry, nothing serious!). I was waiting in the reception area, enduring the usual poor service design that is associated with this type of experience, when I saw these flyers about prostate and bowel cancer.

These are of course very important issues to be aware of, and I was glad to see that they were being advertised and commented about. However, looking at the flyers, I was puzzled as to the correlation between apples and bowel cancer, and oak leaves and prostate cancer? Does eating too many/not enough apples give you bowel cancer? Can oak leaves provide some clue towards prostate cancer?

After wonder about all the possible links between these seemingly unconnected things, I remembered a lecture given by Jonathan Baldwin last year. In it Jonathan Baldwin used the example of pizza flyers to provoke mixed opinions on its graphical design merrit. Most people in the audience (especially the graphic design students) saw the overly intense colours, loud busy text, unclear font and haphazard layout and where in no doubt that these were examples of the worst graphic design they had seen!

In response to this, Jonathan argued that they were actually example of excellent graphic design. Through their overly intense colours, loud busy text, unclear font and haphazard layout, they successfully communicate exactly the type of experience and product you will get. The pizza will most likely by quick, cheap, unhealthy, greasy and delicious! Would the same message be communicated if the flyers where professionally designed and slickly produced? I doubt it! Meaning is determined by situation and buy the end user.

How does this relate to my medical flyers? I'm not really sure yet. The colours are certainly soothing, but I'm still not sure about the images. I will continue to ponder, but if any of you have any thoughts on the topic, please let us know!

To read Jonathan Baldwin's great article on pizza flyers go to : http://www.underconsideration.com/speakup/archives/002462.html

Also turns out its top of the list on google!


P

Students + Sustainablity = NOW!

Tuesday 10th Feburary 2009, spelled the day of Josh Liandu's awakening to the importance of sustainability in design, and in the shaping of our future. The discussion took place over a lunchtime, and was heavily attended by students and tutors alike, over a wide spread of the design disciplines. I'm not going to lie, walking into a room full of the likes of Mike Press, Seaton Baxter and Jonathan Baldwin, is fairly daunting. Especially when you know that they're now not lecturing you, but are there on a level par to listen to and comment on YOUR views.
Orchestrating this all was young Graphic Design student, Struan Pendriech, currently a 2nd year at our very own Duncan of Jordanstone. It was some-what inspiring to see someone my age so passionate about the issues surrounding sustainability - but I'll spiel more about that later.

Basically, the discussion was a student led workshop on the subject of embedding sustainability in the curriculum. Advertised as a real opportunity for students and staff to listen and talk with other students in a cross disciplinary setting, about how our briefs, workshops, teaching and such, might be improved or even radicalized, in order to meet student expectations and ethical issues.

Here's what I took from it...

The main issue in connection with sustainability, being addressed, was 'How do we make our students more receptive to sustainability?'. Struan began by bringing a figure, that Jonathan Baldwin had pointed out to him from a section in The Higher Education Academy's 'Networks magazine'. The figure [shown above] points out the pro-sustainability influences on a student, whilst they're at college or university. I found the diagram useful as it began to provoke thoughts in my mind that I hadn't tackled before, it also opened up the floor of the discussion and got the ball rolling.

The briefs were one of the first factors that were brought to the table. Issues raised were that we've successfully managed to get sustainability and force it into a box that we can neatly tag on the end of a brief, but that we need to make sustainability the main issue that the briefs are based on. People talked about maybe looking into the materials we get to use as students, whilst others complained about the time scales we are given. I agreed with what was said about looking at making the briefs about sustainability rather than just trying to incorporate it into them. This was also touched on a little later on in the workshop, by Seaton Baxter, an honorary Professor in Duncan of Jordanstone's School of Design. He said that because of our changing world, the new briefs for our projects should be coming from the "real world", and should be integral to how we as students are taught. All these points were good, but they didn't REALLY answer the question for me. He also said that the magnitude of the problem is great, and that it's how we really UNDERSTAND the problem that's going to start making a difference.

Someone who I was surprised to see at this discussion, was Grant Payne, a 1st year Product Design student at the university. He was sat on the main table, and had a few good things to say on the issue. One of those being that we need to, "Set a date for change.", I believe is how he worded it - reminding me a lot of something President Obama would have said on his historical road to the White House! This statement was well received and led to many of the points raised. Good job kid.
I think it was Jonathan Baldwin who raised the point which dwells in the back of all designers minds, that primarily, a lot of the problems with the environment today have been brought about by POOR design and a shear lack of forward planning from designers. This was a good point, as it reminds us that we can look back at the mistakes that have been made, and make sure that we learn from them and aim to design for a more sustainable world.

Mike Press, the university's 'Chair of Design Policy', was also attending the discussion and acted as the physical representation of college management, and this meant he had to field many of the somewhat "awkward" questions directed at the board. Nevertheless, he shared many useful insights, and put across loads of good points. One of the questions put to him, was querying the aims of the University in the re-design of Duncan of Jordanstone College, to make it more ecologically sound. His reply referred to the recently erected Queen Mother Building on the Dundee University campus, and it's good example of ecological architecture.
He spoke on sustainability not just being an attitude change, but also being a 'lifestyle' change, and believed that many designers' ethics would be continually challenged over the course of their careers. An example of this that I have encountered, was when Visiting Professor at Dundee University, Colin Burns, came to speak to our 2nd year Product Design class last semester. He shared with us his run in with a major superstore retailer [that will remain unnamed], that he said he'd never work for, then was offered a project by them that paid extremely well, and was put into this complex situation.
A couple of other key things he said were that when you need something to change, and just looking at ideas in general, things from the top down never work. I felt this was an interesting statement, obviously fairly generalised, but an interesting statement none the less. And also, he really believed that the key engine of radical and revolutionary change had arrived, and that we should strike while the iron is hot.

Because of the open floor, this discussion allowed for many interesting and radical views. A young foreign student, who I thinks name was Gonzalez, brought one of these such views. He said that sustainability was about how we lived today, and that it was based on what our ethics were. this was all based around his 'Concept of Human Conversation', and it's importance to everything. I liked how he said that how we're going to live tomorrow, all revolves around how we live today. working together, we should aim to say that EVERYTHING we design WILL be sustainable and therefore, inevitably take full responsibility for our own actions if they're not.

I, Josh Liandu, am speaking as "the Converted". I began my University career a year and a half ago with the notion that recycling and sustainability, and such like issues, were "not cool" and, at most, lurking in the background of design today. Over the past 18 months, I have soaked up a fresh set of ethics and views from my projects, lectures and chats with my tutors, etc. Sometimes it's felt like the media are creating a panic or a "media-frenzy", and it's that factor that has put me off worrying about sustainability in the past. I believe that sustainability is not a matter of us trying to preserve the earth, as it's been around for billions of years and will easily be able to rectify itself. I feel it's a lot more selfish than that, and that it's all about looking after ourselves, as humans, and preserving our descendants. And as far as the issue of sustainability in the curriculum, I agree that the briefs need to be based ON designing for sustainability, and not just trying to work it in at the end, even making it a pass parameter in every brief..I'm not sure. What do YOU think?
This workshop or discussion, or whatever you want to call it, was a huge learning experience for me. It allowed me to absorb heaps useful information and lots of views [some I agreed with and some I didn't], but most importantly, it raised my awareness surrounding the issue of sustainability in design an in the world we live in today. And this I feel deemed this event a success.

The next meeting was arranged for 27th March 2009, and is aimed to bring together not only the people who met up this week, but also a whole load more people, and hopefully, Unbox's involvement will help to bring this issue to the forefront. Also look out for the 'Sustainability Forum', that Jackie Malcolm heads up. More information on - https://secure.dundee.ac.uk/design/TLforum.php.
Hit us back with your views and tell me what you think should be done about this issue of making our students more receptive to sustainability, and how it should come about.
Would love to see you all in the Reception Room [above the library] on the 27th March. Things will kick off around 12.30.


Cheeers.


*_*

"A Law Without Logic - Redjotter"

After searching the blogsphere I recently came across a really interesting and relevant post by Redjotter called "A Law Without Logic". It is concerning a Dispatches program called "Too old to work." I am gutted I missed this program as it would have given another really useful insight into the social aspect of older people staying on in a formal sense of work.

One of the quotes taken from the program by Redjotter says, "I want to use my brain." This struck a cord with me, as my Granny is extremely clever, but is quite inactive in a physical sense. Is extending working ages going to get over this feeling of wasted mental capital? I feel that the thing coming from this is that older people need mental stimulation in any form, perhaps over the structure of formal work. How can we "upcycle" our grandparents knowledge and skills instead of them being wasted and put into the "landfill" of a retirement home?

PS. check out Redjotter's blog redjotter.wordpress.com, some really interesting and fun stuff.


P

First Contact With Richard Banks

Yesterday, Richard Banks from Microsoft's offices in Cambridge braced the cold and flew up to Dundee to host a workshop with us and talk about how we were advancing with the project.

I found Richard's input really positive, and it was really helpful to get a totally fresh and new perspective on how we were progressing. One of the things Richard talked about was how he thought the "Work" aspect of the brief could be interpreted. From this, I was able to see how this constraint could be more easily fitted in. A large part of something to be classed as work, is determining whether or not it has any public relevance and is of any value to the public. This is of course not saying that walking the family dog, or looking after the grand kids is not work. Personal family stories are really great and should be cherished and passed down through the family, but what broader social value do they have? How else gives a damn that this is where you found your old kitchen table? Should people care? I don't know. I feel that for this project, with its definite WORK theme, we must be able to give work some sort of definition without being callus and brutish.

What are your thoughts on the issue of what is work? When is enough enough, and older people should be allowed/encouraged to move out of the workplace? Should they be?

Let us know.

P

The brand new "Wrist-pod"?

You thought the iPhone was revolutionary...well, check this futuristic piece of design out.

Mr. Mac Funamizu has returned to the design scene with another one of his epic-ly futuristic designs. This concept is nothing other than mind blowing. A transparent music player that slaps round your wrist. Boom. But get this, it's fully customisable, so if you don't want it clear then it allows you to upload your own image or colour graphic, and it can double up as a sweet-ass wrist accessory!

All this united with earphones that bring a "concert performance" to your ears; a microphone that recognizes, locates, then plays tunes from your library that are hummed into it; a heartbeat regulator; and to top it off, it's all mobile compatible.

Unfortunately, we're all just going to wait and see if this actually materialises into anything, or if it's just going to be another one of Mac's unique, yet improbable designs.

PS. Good spot from Jack of 'breadandbutterdesign.blogspot.com'. check them out.

*_*

Soup Roulette.

Just a quick note to say that as of today, whenever I buy soup I'm gonna take the labels off every can of soup I buy, thus creating soup roulette.

An idea created through the medium of Josh.

Hopefully this simple process brings some excitement back into soup.


So I would like to encourage you all to join me. Or you can comment me back and call me and idiot.

PS, I apologise for the crappy istock photo.

x

"Drugs Can Be Puzzling."

A huge congratulations must go to the group Product Design students at Dundee University who came up with the "Drugs Can Be Puzzling" campaign in response to a service design breif to improve the area of Lochee. Their witty yet thought provoking campaign to get more information to the friends and families of drug users has been chosen to be taken forward by the Dundee City Council. More information will be posted as the project develops.

Good work guys!


P

justhearit.com

Credit goes to Blair from Flamingo for this spot, absolutely genius website that will no doubt get hacked and provide the world with any song they desire.

It doesn't need anymore explanation, just go and have a play with it.

With websites like this, is it becoming more and more easy to rip the music industry off?

www.justhearit.com

X

Undox Design

I'm now proud to announce that www.unboxdesign.co.uk is now online at long last!


Please check it out and let us know what you think.

We're always open to comments.
(the "Projects" page is currently being updated so looks rather blank to say the least.)

Janelle Is Crafty

Hola.

One of my good friends has just started making and selling her own crafts and such. The first in her collection are these Free-motion Embroidery headbands. Using the technique of free-motion embroidery, she has been able to create 3 very unique, natural and affordable designs, that marry nature and craft beautifully.

Fear not! These are for sale. If you are interested you can order them through her etsy account. They are $23 each. Check them out at - www.janelleiscrafty.etsy.com

All photos by Raychel Mendez.

cheers.

*_*

wefeelfine.

Jon, our head of year at Dundee's Product Design course, prompted us to check out what's going on over at 'wefeelfine.org', so I did.


And this is what it's all about -

"Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world's newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling". When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the "feeling" expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.

The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 - 20,000 new feelings per day. Using a series of playful interfaces, the feelings can be searched and sorted across a number of demographic slices, offering responses to specific questions like: do Europeans feel sad more often than Americans? Do women feel fat more often than men? Does rainy weather affect how we feel? What are the most representative feelings of female New Yorkers in their 20s? What do people feel right now in Baghdad? What were people feeling on Valentine's Day? Which are the happiest cities in the world? The saddest? And so on.

The interface to this data is a self-organizing particle system, where each particle represents a single feeling posted by a single individual. The particles' properties – color, size, shape, opacity – indicate the nature of the feeling inside, and any particle can be clicked to reveal the full sentence or photograph it contains. The particles careen wildly around the screen until asked to self-organize along any number of axes, expressing various pictures of human emotion. We Feel Fine paints these pictures in six formal movements titled: Madness, Murmurs, Montage, Mobs, Metrics, and Mounds.

At its core, We Feel Fine is an artwork authored by everyone. It will grow and change as we grow and change, reflecting what's on our blogs, what's in our hearts, what's in our minds. We hope it makes the world seem a little smaller, and we hope it helps people see beauty in the everyday ups and downs of life."

- Written in May of 2006.

At first, I was unsure of what to think, as the concept seemed pretty cool, but I had no idea how well they'd portray it. On browsing the website, I was easily able to find out what they're aims and purpose were, and was also able to see where the creators of 'We Feel Fine', Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar, had originated from. I was then led on to the main attraction, the 'We Feel Fine' applet.

As soon as I opened it up, I was met with this...
...and I loved it!

The crazy collection of dots you see on screen is 'Madness', just one of the interfaces that allows you to surf through 100s of 1000s of different peoples' feelings and emotions all over the world. This network goes far and wide, yet still keeps it's messages intimate and personal. We Feel Fine is divided into six discrete movements - 'Madness', 'Murmurs', 'Montage', 'Mobs', 'Metric' and 'Mounds' - each illuminating a different aspect of the chosen population. Some of these movements have been broken down further into 'Feeling', 'Gender', 'Age', 'Weather' and 'Location'. Each of these utilizes a self-organizing particle system to configure its shape, color, distribution and physics to best express the different zeitgeists of: feeling, gender, age, weather, and geographical location.


That's just a basic run down of what goes on at 'We Feel Fine.', to get the full experience you have to visit 'wefeelfine.org' for yourself!



I'll leave you with some of the photos from their gallery that stood out to me.


cheers.

*_*

Insight Wall

To start off the process of developing ideas and initial insights for the Microsoft project, we have produced an "Insight Wall" to collect any information relevant to the project.



Throughout the project we will keep adding to this, as will the other groups. Hopefully this will help us appreciate all aspects of brief and view these in new ways. Einstein once said something along the lines of, "to solve a problem, we must change or way of seeing to when the problem occured." Hopefully this process will go some way to enabling us to do this!

Being Human

Following a recent talk by Richard Harper from Microsoft at Dundee University, I was prompted to read his book "Being Human : Human-Computer Interaction In The Year 2020". His lecture was also based on his book, and although was interesting, I wanted to read into some of the points he made in more depth.

The issues explored in his book are concerned with how the ever growing prominence of technology affects us today, and more so, in the year 2020. It examines technical and social issues which will need to be given increasing consideration in order to utilise these technological advancements to their full potential.

It also touches on the point that the next generation of elderly people will be increasingly computer literate and technology savvy. This is of course very relevant to the project Unbox Design is doing with Microsoft. However, I do wonder about the level of technological literacy that the likes of my mum's generation will have. Will they be comfortable with current technology or that that has been developed by then, which may have changed radically?

Harper puts forward that we are at "the end of interface stability...what an interface might be, where it is, what it allows, is there one at all?" Harper goes on to say that these interfaces should be "disappearing into the richness and complexity of the world around us." I agree with both of these insights, and believe that less really will be more. However, it is also vital that we consider the appropriateness of embedded devices. It does bring up this point later in the book when Harper write "If everything we see, touch or walk past is interactive, how will we know and control how to inter act?"

This leads ominously into the realm of "extreme connectivity". This term strikes fear into me, as the distinction between home and work is increasingly blurred (is this post work or play?!). We have more and more digital friends whom we may have never met in real life. But surely real communication uses all of the senses and the need for this can not be fulfilled by digital relationships. Similarly, we are communicating more and more and at an increasing pace, but at what cost? What are we saying, and are we less intimate?

One of the most interesting points made in this book is that of the importance of memories, of the lack of them. "Memories tend to fade over time and change through interpretation. Digital records are more static, tending to persist in a stable form. Many systems are built on the assumption that the more data we capture the better. In contrast, humans place great value on being selective in what they remember." There is surly the basis for a brilliant project here!

Overall, I enjoyed "Being Human" a lot, and found it more interesting than Richard Harper's original talk. There are many other great points in the book so go and read it yourself and see what you think. Better still tell me what you think! If you have a comment to make on this book of any point made, please post a comment below.

Paddy