The principle behind the Chords Bridge
April 21, 2009
Diego Rodriguez, an inspirational member of the IDEO family, is working through 21 design principles he believes in on his blog, Metacool. Go check them out, it’s worth it.
Number six talks about living life in a way which gives you the tools to feed off the constraints of a difficult problem rather than be afraid of them:
Innovation needs to happen at the intersection of desirability, viability, and feasibility. These three elements make up the legs of a proverbial stool called “it’ll work in the world.” Too many innovation initiatives focus on only one or two, much to their detriment. For example, creating something without regard for its feasibility out in the world is not unlike designing a bridge without regard to the existence of gravity: it might work, but the likelihood of it being a reliable, safe, means of transport will be greatly diminished. And while it might be tempting to “really be creative” by ignoring constraints, a wiser approach is to view constraints as liberating.
The best designs are those which attack a set of constraints head on to create something that can operate within them. That’s why I was so inspired by Ernie Schenk’s book, “The Houdini Solution”, which is full of techniques for thinking inside the box.
For what it’s worth, I think this is such an important principle that it can be separated from the idea of “T-shaped” people, which is wonderful in itself (particularly for how little explanation it needs to be grokked).
All that said, I have to thank Diego for putting me on to the work of Santiago Calatrava who he uses to illustrate his point. The Chords Bridge, pictured above, is a stunning example of elegance which dances on the fine line between beauty, structural integrity (this design is apparently not the most structurally efficient) and of course cost.
This kind of structure can only be built by really understanding the limits of all those dimensions.
Design sightings in Portugal: 3) Art at the Berardo
April 17, 2009
Next up is some cool signage at the Museu Colecção Berardo’s in Lisbon’s Belém area.
As with the Cervejaria this is an example of injecting wit and character into something that usually only gets an afterthought.
What’s better. This (from the Oceanarium, also in Lisbon)?
Or this:
It’s clear which one is more likely to engage the audience.
And what about these reinterpretations of the humble toilet wo/man?
Even the floor numbering gets in on the act, showing you the number and the contents of the floor in a single chunk of typography.
As Jonathan Miller says, art is about “making the negligible considerable”, which this goes some way to doing. A great set of designs and particularly appropriate for a gallery of modern art, although it would be wonderful if utilitarian details were always this stimulating.
Design sightings in Portugal: 2) Cervejaria Trindade
April 17, 2009
Continuing the series of good designs noticed in Lisbon (after the Santos Design District yesterday), is the Cervejaria Trindade, essentially a beer hall in a convent. From Frommer’s guide:
Cervejaria Trindade is a combination German beer hall and Portuguese tavern. In operation since 1836, it’s the oldest tavern in Lisbon, owned by the brewers of Sagres beer. It was built on the foundations of the 13th-century Convento dos Frades Tinos, which was destroyed by the 1755 earthquake. Surrounded by walls tiled with Portuguese scenes, you can order tasty little steaks and heaps of crisp french-fried potatoes. Many Portuguese diners prefer the bife na frigideira (steak with mustard sauce and a fried egg, served in a clay frying pan). But the tavern also features shellfish; the house specialties are ameijoas (clams) à Trindade and giant prawns. For dessert, try a slice of queijo da serra (cheese from the mountains) and coffee. (link)
The food was awesome, although it’s worth warning that they describe as “light” a steak sauce that consists entirely of beer and butter.
The place is also known for its azulejos (traditional Portugues decorative tiles), pictured below.
The decoration, service and generally expected trappings are up there with the best. However, what sets it apart from other places with equal amounts of character and history to tell is its menu, a big leather bound book with oodles of character. It’s a great example of supporting a brand with excellent design in a usually neglected place.
Want a steak, why not order the:
Rump Steak A La Trindade – From the parts of the rump cut with mastery and art by Brother Butcher, comes this intensely flavourful tender steak. (emphasis mine)
The copywriting’s nod to Brother Butcher, the choice of paper, the script font and dropped cap which nods to old monastic tradition of illustrated manuscripts all help to bring the restaurant’s history back to the fore.
The seafood menu brings to mind medieval bestiaries.
And my favourite touch, the illustrations which separate each section of the menu.
The reason this is interesting is that the menu is often delegated to an almost utilitarian function in even the finest restaurants, forgetting that a good meal is as much about the overall experience and story the place tells as the food (a contentious statement for the foodies amongst you, I’m sure).
The Cervejaria goes out of its way to remind you of its history in a lighthearted way, which works particularly well in a place that wants to appeal to tourists who delight in this kind of cheesy/authentic storytelling. A different, more subtle approach might suit a restaurant with an equally interesting story but a less populist angle (even the most fine food focused restaurants may have an unusual story to tell).
What matters is using every channel available to get the story across. A good design should wear its personality on its sleeve so people can better understand what makes it tick and how it get there. This is what allows people relate to it, make an emotional connection and perhaps identify themselves in it.
One of the highest achievements of a design is for people to feel that they are expressing a part of themselves by using it.
More pictures after the break.
What can you do with paper?
April 9, 2009
Don’t discount the good old fashioned materials – sometimes they just need to be put together a little differently.
360 Paper Water Bottle
First off Brandimage’s smart re-imagining of the one-use bottle. The entire thing is made from sheets of whatever sustainable sheet stock is available, molded and stuck together:
“The package utilizes sustainable sheet stock of bamboo, palm leaves, etc. that is pressed into 2 halves to encapsulate a micro-thin PLA film that provides liquid/O2 barrier. The pressed material provides the form, graphical substrate and/or embellishment surface and structural integrity. It is shipped inverted and “pops open” upon filling through a conventional fill-portal at the base. The barrier material also acts as the means to fuse the 2 halves together. The top is torn off to access the liquid. To reseal, the removed component peels apart to expose a sanitary plug-fit side, and the remaining part gets tethered to the finger loop to eliminate litter. It changes the total experience of drinking water; from the way the container looks, feels and functions to the way it ends its usage.”
This design also removes the need for separate container to hold a six-pack of these bottles together:
“The 360 Paper Water Bottle is a single-serve container, but the windfall of how it is made enables the self-bundling of multiple containments to negate the use of separate “6-pack” carriers. The use of an all-natural structural board with vertical ends drastically reduces the material used in palletizing and shipping, and enables self-merchandising.”
In other words, they are stamped out six at a time and can be folded over into a structurally sound unit. As show in the top right of the picture above, four of these can then be held together with another strip of paper stock to create an easily transportable pallet.
Go to Brandimage’s site for more, there’s a PDF download that will tell all. I hope someone picks this design up and commercialises it, as I’d love to try one of these out.
Enthusem
A physical letter can still hold a hell of a lot of emotional appeal, but it’s a pain to do physical mailouts. Enthusem allows you to send paper mailers as easily as e-mail, which is interesting because it lets you get that emotional impact of paper without the pain of handling it. Moonpig meets marketing, if you will. In their own words, Enthusem is:
“An online service that makes sending postal mail (yea, the printed kind) super simple and seamlessly integrated with online content.”
“The service lets users send direct mailers one-at-a-time (or to a list of recipients) from a Web browser or through a set of web services. In addition, Enthusem mailers can include online attachments. The attachments link the printed communication to online content much like an attachment to an email message.”
“The www.enthusem.com website lets end users send Enthusem mailers while a set of web services let 3rd party applications send direct mail without all the complexities associated with your typical Web-to-print solution. So, for example, using the web services, a developer could create an add-in for Microsoft Outlook that would allow Outlook users to send direct mail in addition to email. “
Just to highlight two of the smart touches.
Number 1: the letters come in a premium, translucent envelope – just to give the receiver that extra temptation to open it:
Number 2: it’s really easy to link it back to the online world. All the person has to do is enter the pickup code below…
…here, on the front page of the site, and the get taken to the attachment (which can essentially be anything on the web)
Cardapult
On a more light hearted note, this is just neat. Go make one at Instructables!
Video below:
What can you make me feel? Presenting a master animator
March 19, 2009
Michael Dudok de Wit is a master animator and the creator of this short from 2000, which has deservedly won an Oscar, Bafta, Grand Prix at Annecy and a dozen other awards.
It’s called Father and Daughter, and really needs to be seen by any creator who wants an emotional reaction to their work.
It’s a wonderful and inspiring piece of work, not just because it is superb from a technical point of view (that alone should be an example to all interaction designers) but mostly because of the strong feelings it throws up – it’s hard not to be affected, and even drawn to tears.
Wikipedia has this to say about him:
Michael Dudok de Wit (born in 1953, Holland) is an animator, director and illustrator. In 1978, he graduated from the West Surrey College of Art with his first film The Interview. After working for a year in Barcelona, he settled in London where he directs and animates award-winning commercials for television and cinema. In 1992, he created the short film Tom Sweep, followed by The Monk and the Fish (1994), which was made in France with the studio Folimage. This film was nominated for an Oscar and has won numerous prizes including a César Award for Best Short Film and the Cartoon d’Or. Michael also writes and illustrates children’s picture books and teaches animation at art colleges in England and abroad.
His most well-known film Father and Daughter (2000) won an Academy Award, a BAFTA Award, the Grand Prix at Annecy, and dozens of other major awards. His most recent short film is “The Aroma of Tea” (2006), drawn entirely with tea.
All of his films since Tom Sweep feature Michael’s trademark brush stroke drawing and his use of ink and watercolour, very much inspired by Chinese and Japanese art.
Check out his other masterpieces below and some of his advertising work on the ACMEfilmworks site.
PS – get this book: Secrets of Oscar-winning Animation: Behind the Scenes of 13 Classic Short Animations
PSS – If you speak French, you can read an extract from the book about Father and Daughter on the publisher’s site and read an interview with the director.
Interview with Kickstart: making the anti-poverty pump
March 11, 2009
A few weeks ago I wrote about Kickstart, the innovative company which has already helped half a million poor African people to lift themselves out of poverty. By designing products like the SuperMoneyMaker pump and selling them instead of giving them away, they make sure that 80% of them are used to start businesses, which does two thing: 1) it takes the average farmer’s income from $110 dollars to $1100 a year and 2) absolutely flies in the face of conventional wisdom. Wonderful!
After the post the great folks there got in touch and Ken Weimar, Senior Development Officer at Kickstart agreed to answer a few questions. Read on below.
The tools to end poverty.
Raphael D’Amico: What Kickstart brings to poor communities is tools which allow them to help themselves, so the design is all important. When you and your designers were creating these tools for poor African farmers, what preconceptions (Western or otherwise) got in the way? How did you get into the minds of your future customers?
Ken Weimar: Probably the biggest hurdle to overcome was the very western idea of tools and technology to save time and labor. Saving labor is good, right? Well not if that “labor” is someone’s job. We love to save time because it feels so scarce and precious. But in the developing world, time and labor are a poor person’s greatest assets—they have them in abundance and they can be quite valuable. That’s why our designs are focused on turning time and labor into cash rather than “saving” them.
R: How did you involve locals in the design process?
K: This was a team effort and our team is mostly Kenyan engineers and craftsmen. As a bunch of guys our first approach was to make the pump as powerful as possible and that meant long treadles. But we quickly found that women did not like that. The bigger stride required by the longer pedals is hard to do when you are wearing a skirt. Plus the longer treadles meant the users backside was elevated to about eye level and women thought it unseemly. So we reconfigured the treadles, stepping them down to keep the user lower to the ground, and went to work to increase the power with a more efficient valve design.
R: Was there any local design ability?
K: Yes, of course. There is a tremendous amount of creativity born out of hardship. It is amazing to see how creatively EVERYTHING in Africa is reused. We have a whole team of locals in our Tech Development department. Some are trained engineers, others are skilled fabricators. In Africa we have creative craftsmen and tinkerers, and we have trained engineers. What we are missing are the entrepreneurial inventors who can create the tool or technology that can be widely adopted.
R: What made you pick IDEO as a collaborator?
K: Martin has known David and Tim for a long time and has a great deal of respect for the work they’ve done in creating the Design School at Stanford. Any engineer could do the calculations we need, but I think IDEO shares our vision and loves to work around the challenges. A lot of people would have been stumped by the limitations of the raw materials and processes available to us in East Africa. IDEO jumped in with us and said, “OK, we know the limitations, let’s work around them.”
R: What were the characteristics of your most successful designers?
K: Tenacity, of course, is a needed in any good designer. But you said “successful” so let’s interpret that to mean that a design gets widely adopted and used and maybe even changes the way we live. To be successful then means thinking way beyond the design of the “thing”. Creating a new machine is the easiest part (and this is plenty hard). But you have to be able to understand the economics, you need to be thinking about how is my “thing” going to get from my workbench to a factory to a store and ultimately into the hands of a consumer. And you need to be able to design these systems as you are working on the design of the thing.
R: In 2005 I had the privilege of visiting one the workshops where the MoneyMaker was being made. How many others like it were there, and what made you move production to China?
K: If you saw our factory, you saw one of the most advanced manufacturing plants in Africa. And I am sure you recall it was pretty primitive. You want a design challenge? How about this: you are trying to create a design that can be mass produced locally, but the raw materials can vary as much as 10% in dimensions from one batch to another. Manufacturing in China opens so many more options for manufacturing that just don’t exist in Kenya. We can also ship to anywhere in the world more easily from China. Like everyone else, we can manufacture more cheaply in China, which means we become more self sufficient.
Of course everyone asks about creating jobs. Well, we’ve created maybe 50-75 jobs in the manufacturing of our pumps, and over 100,000 jobs through the use of our pumps. Helps put that decision in perspective.
R: The most impressive thing about Kickstart is the way you’ve flipped the traditional view of aid – instead of seeing the poor as a burden to carry, you’ve realised that they can help themselves, why is why you charge for the MoneyMaker pump and created a supply chain where everyone benefits.
K: Thank you, yes! It is about sustainability. Everyone uses that term differently and often to mean “when are you going to stop asking me for money”. It’s a valid question but not the most important. The most important measure of sustainability is “will the people who are helped, stay helped?” The next is “can additional people avail themselves of this solution without additional cost to the donor?” That is the beauty of and the importance of the supply chain. As long as there is demand, and each player makes a profit, our pumps (or anything distributed this way) will be available to everyone who wants one.
R: How did you develop this approach? Did you try any others before this one?
K: Oh yes indeed. Nick Moon and Martin worked on every kind of development/aid programme you could imagine. They were both were idealistic young guys and went to Africa wanting to make things better. They built schools and ran training programs and built factories and installed huge water systems and not a single one of their projects lasted more than a few years past the end of our involvement.
Perhaps the first lesson they learned what that giveaways don’t work—not because the recipients are ungrateful, but because we tend to give away what we want to give rather than what is actually needed.
R: How did you go about creating this sustainable system? What were the challenges?
K: It wasn’t easy. We wanted our pumps in Agro-Vet stores that sell other ag inputs. Makes sense right? Well not many were interested at first. These were new and so much more expensive than anything they ever sold. Our first retailers were butchers and hairdressers. But the bigger challenge is getting funders to understand what we are trying to do and how building this supply chain means real sustainability.
R: Was there any cultural resistance as you went up against traditional methods?
K: God yes! There still is! There may have been some farmers who thought “if I wait around long enough they’ll just give it to me,” but the bigger cultural resistance was (and to a large degree still is) from the traditional aid organizations. They think we are unfair to make people invest in themselves. They think we are simplistic for insisting that the cause of poverty, the very definition of poverty, is not having enough money.
There is always the challenge of dealing with silos. We get grouped with a bunch of different organizations but don’t really fit neatly in these categories. For instance, we work with farmers and within the AG sector, but for us , Ag is an economic engine for income generation. We get grouped with the water sector because we make pumps but for us pumps are a means to an end. And we get grouped with the new technology for the developing world group, and we have a lot of friends here, but again our technology has the very specific purpose of generating income, where most other technologies are about reducing a burden of some sort. The upside is that we have a lot of friends in a lot of sectors, and even if we can’t collaborate, it’s exciting and energizing to talk with other social entrepreneurs.
The downside is that we always seem to be about ten degrees off plumb with major funders. That is the challenge of being the innovator, the first mover, the leading edge…it takes a while for the world to catch up with you!
R: Where do you see Kickstart going next?
K: We have just scratched the surface on what is possible with our pumps. There is a worldwide potential for over 40 million pumps and we’ve sold 125,000. There is a lot of room for growth. We’ve got some allied technology, like a pretty effective well-drilling technology that we’d love to get out on the market, and I’ve got a few other ideas I’d love to pursue, but for the foreseeable future, KickStart will continue to be about irrigation.
R: Finally, I wonder if there are other situations which are waiting for this kind of turnaround. Crudely speaking, your products act as a catalyst which allow a community to use the same resources they had before to reach a higher standard of living, which would could otherwise only achieve by pumping money and aid from outside. Everybody wins when this happens – the community get better off and the resources which would previously have been diverted to helping them can go to help another. In business you would crudely call this turning a cost center into a revenue center.
K: We changed our name from ApproTEC (appropriate technology for enterprise creation) to KickStart because KickStart really captures what we are trying to do—to stimulate economic growth. A lot of people think that these farmers climb up to some plateau and stay there. In reality, these people continue on this upwards spiral of prosperity—growing their businesses, diversifying, creating jobs and hiring. So yes, there is a ripple effect.
The ripple effect we talk about though is better governance. A fundamental problem in Africa is bad governance. To be fair, think about where the US was 40 or 60 years post independence—we were heading into a horrible civil war that nearly destroyed our country, so we need to keep post-colonial Africa in perspective. But in these nominal democracies, you can buy a vote for a handful of rice because people are starving. But when I have enough money to feed my family you can buy my support for dollar. When I’m not worried about basic survival, I can start demanding things like roads and schools and electricity and you, as a politician had better deliver or get voted out. That’s how an entrepreneurial middle class brings better governance. Not the other way around.
R: I’m sure this could be done elsewhere. For example, schools often see controlling kids as a necessity, hence costly investment in attendance tracking software and reporting of discipline. Maybe there is a product out there that would cast this in another light.
Have you seen any other areas ripe for this kind of shift?
K: Absolutely. There are so many goods and services that we want to give away for free that could be provided far more sustainably through the marketplace. We’ve long championed the idea of franchised, for-profit schools in Africa and our friend Jay Kimmelman is doing just that. Bridge International Academies will provide a higher quality education for less than what parents might pay to send their kids to public schools.
Medical care is another. In Kenya (and in most of Africa) the “free” public clinics are so underfunded that you have to bribe doctors and nurses to get care. Or people pay witchdoctors or charlatans for ineffective or dangerous care. Imagine if that for less what you would pay for a bribe, you could buy decent care and real medicines. Our friends at SHEF in Kenya had done some of this and work and others are taking the idea to the next level.
I know, some people recoil in horror to think about asking poor people to pay for things like medical care or education. But without a tax base these will always be dependent on external donor funding and is that really the model we want to continue? And think for just one moment about how it would feel if everything in your life was provided by some donor—your food, your clothing, your house, your church, your medicine. Is there anything “empowering” about that?
R: What lessons from solving poverty would you apply back to the first world?
K: We’ve always said that solving poverty is Africa is so much easier than solving poverty in America or the UK or Europe. In the developed world, maybe 10% of the population is a permanent underclass. These are the people with serious mental health and substance abuse issues who need a lot of “wrap around” services to get to a basic functional level.
In Africa, 80% of the people are poor. Within that 80% are all of the people who would have been solidly middle class had they been born elsewhere. More importantly, within that 80% are the people who would have been doctors and lawyers and entrepreneurs. These people still have the same basic intelligence and the same drive and determination. They just happen to live in a place where there are few opportunities.
No matter where in the world you live, poverty is about money and income (specifically the lack thereof)
Thanks for the great interview and I wish the best of luck to Kickstart getting a pump into the hands of the 40 million farmers and families who need them!
Philanthropic judo
February 23, 2009
In Tanzania, five out of every six hectares of potential arable land goes unused through lack of irrigation (sources 1, 2). I met this woman back in 2005 at her farm in Arusha, at the base of Mount of Kilimanjaro, and even though the land around was parched, she was surrounded by greenery.
There is a fascinating story behind this, with design at its very heart.
Teach someone to fish…
Her water was drawn from a groundwell 20 feet deep, efficiently pumped up by her husband using this treadle pump: the Super MoneyMaker.
The pump is the brainchild of Martin Fisher and Nick Moon, the former an engineer and the latter a craftsman and entrepreneur, who together founded Kickstart in 1991 (formerly ApproTEC). Their aim was to create products which allow poor people in the developing world to start successful businesses.
The logic is working; by investing $35 to $100 in a pump, the average farmer can increase his income from $110 to $1,100 a year.
The result?
So far, 80,000 business have been started in Kenya, Tanzania and Mali. That means over 400,000 people lifted out of poverty. Astonishing, and based on a simple insight:
The Number One Need of the Poor is a Way to Make Money
“The Poor are Not Victims”
“To define people by their conditions rather than their qualities is dehumanizing. When you look past the poverty, you see abilities, resources, and desires. The poor are extremely hard-working and entrepreneurial–they must be just to survive. They don’t want or need to be rescued. They want an opportunity to create a better life for their families.”
From the Kickstart website’s lessons learned.
Right on. Often, the best way to help is to realise that the person in trouble has the will and the capacity to help themselves if given the right tools. The Kickstart website is very clear, concise and full of insights (particularly in explaining what they do), so I won’t go into too much detail here. I have nevertheless picked out three clues on how to make a lasting difference:
1 – Make sure everyone can get stuck in
Aid is commonly seen as a one way street, but it can be provided by creating a supply chain in which everyone involved benefits. On top of increasing the farmer’s income tenfold, the Super MoneyMaker pump (and replacement parts) also provides revenue to the factories that make them the distributors who transport them and the local traders who sell them. Everybody wins.
This takes care. When I visited in 2005 we were shown around a factory where half a dozen workers were assembling pumps using comparatively rudimentary equipment. Production has mostly moved to China now that Kickstart have improved the design and employed higher tech materials and techniques, but I am struck by the simplicity of a design which could be manufactured in a workshop like the one below.
Just an aside; in this case the economics pointed towards lower cost, higher tech China, but what other designs could enrich a local economy by letting it produce them?
2 – Sell, don’t give
By making the Super MoneyMaker a commercial product which costs up to a year’s salary, Kickstart provided a strong incentive to use it properly.
There is strong evidence that the price of a product affects how we perceive its quality (apparently, expensive wine tastes better). The purchase also acts as a form of commitment to the idea that the farmer will use this pump.
Kickstart say that “less than one-third of pumps given away are used to create a new enterprise.”
It is not easy to start a successful business. The cost of the pumps selects farmers with the entrepreneurial will to actually use them to lift them and their families out of poverty.
3 – Measure!
According to Kickstart, every buck invested leads to $15 of profits and wages on the ground. How do they know this?
“Every product comes with a one-year guarantee and every buyer fills out a guarantee form when they buy the product. The guarantee reduces the perceived risk of buying the product, and the forms give KickStart a database of all pump owners.”
“From this database, we select a statistically valid sample of recent purchasers. These customers are visited within a month of purchasing the products, before any impacts have been realized, then again at eighteen months, and again three-years after purchase.”
They then send teams of two (a man and a woman) to track down these customers. This is difficult as most farmers don’t even have addresses.
I can’t stress enough how crucial these measurements are.
In my last post I mentioned a story from Atul Gawande’s great book, Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance
Cystic fibrosis is a genetic disease. It affects only a fraction of the population but is devastating if untreated, as it screws up the body’s ability to manage chloride; those affected cannot properly digest food and their lungs are slowly made useless by a thick, hardening mucosal sludge. Fifty years ago the average life expectancy for a child with this disease was a paltry 36 months – patients now live into their 40s (and perhaps longer).
The change was catalysed in the 1960s by a young pediatrician from Cleveland, called LeRoy Matthews, who claimed an annual mortality rate ten times lower than his peers. In response, the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation commissionned a survey of every patient in the 31 treatment centers active in 1964. This confirmed the difference, and pushed other centers to follow his methods and eventually set up strict, national standards, leading to the dramatic improvement described above.
The monitoring has continued ever since, and in 2006 the field of cystic fibrosis became the first in medicine to fully open up the results of the 100+ centers who treat the disease in the US. Disclosing the top centers has allowed the others to improve yet another notch.
Designing careful measurements of success is one of the most easily overlooked aspects of the design process. It should not be as it forces you to ask the question: what does success look like?
The fundamental tenet of design is iteration, which is impossible unless you measure outcomes.
A bigger thought: problems can be their own solution
Kickstart should be studied for many reasons, but the main one is this: they transformed a system, charitable aid, which is draining and unsustainable for most involved, into one which feeds off itself. They saw the poor not as a black hole of necessity but as an engine for growth.
What other areas could benefit from this counterintuitive approach? Where else are we pouring energy into a system which could fuel itself?
- Instead of seeing kids as antagonists to the teacher’s attempts at engagement, can schools find tools which make them the drivers of their own education?
- How can communities harness the entrepreneurial abilities of their criminals to reduce crime?
- How can we use people’s tendency to waste energy to solve our impending energy crisis?
Sometimes all you need is a great design to allow people to make the difference themselves.
P.S.
We can all help – I didn’t know this until recently, but the MoneyMaker pump was originally designed by IDEO was involved in their original deep lift pump and is helping design the next generation MoneyMaker. Check out this TED talk by David Kelley from back in 2002 for more.
Another point: Kickstart is one of many great businesses in this space. Read about some of the others in the Design for the Other 90% exhibition site.
Designers should also check out Design Can Change, which looks at a few ways graphic designers in particular can make a difference.
When accounting is fun
February 16, 2009
Xero is a web application which describes itself as “The world’s easiest accounting system”. Jakob Nielsen’s alertbox agrees, and goes further:
“But Xero might be a more interesting example, simply because it targets the traditionally dry domain of accounting. One of its main features lets users automatically reconcile bookkeeping entries with bank account transactions. As a match is made, the 2 matching entries are removed from the list of stuff to be reconciled. Users compared this interaction to playing Tetris and described it as fun and addictive. Come on, making accounting fun? That’s an award-winning design.”
It really is lovely. Check it out here.
What if all productivity software took its cues from classic games?
Jeav Yves Lemoigne’s nice interaction design
February 1, 2009
The other day I discovered Jean Yves Lemoigne’s art through this rather cool spread (pictured above) for Amusement magazine. His pixel (Pixxxel, even) dames have made the rounds on the blogosphere and you should check them out on jeanyveslemoigne.com.
I wanted to point out something different.
His site is a very neat example of simple, intuitive interaction design well suited to its material.
It opens up with a picture filling nearly the whole screen – exactly right for a photographer’s site. Mouseover to the left (i’ve highlighted the area below) and you get…
…this:
The pictures move up or down with your mouse (easier to see for yourself than to explain). Click, and a tiny progress bar appears in the top right…
…and then the next picture fades in.
Really quite neat.
Taking Liberties
January 4, 2009
The British Library is currently running an exhibition charting, in its own words, “the 900-year struggle for rights and freedoms in the British Isles” and by association around the world.
What rights and freedoms? Liberty and the rule of law, the right to vote, freedom from want, freedom of speech and belief, having a say in how we are governed.
If you are in London, it is worth going just to see originals of documents like the Magna Carta (which first stated many of the principles of the rule of law), the Habeas Corpus Act (which enshrined the right to freedom from unlawful imprisonment), the King James Bible (the first sanctioned English language bible), Hobbes’s Leviathan (the social contract between the ruler protector and his people), and the Bill of Rights (the closest Britain has come to a written constitution).
Most of the exhibits are online and can be seen here. Click the ‘timeline’ link next to each section to see where they fit in.
For those of us who are members of Generation Y, it pays to remember that universal suffrage (in Britain) is as old as our grandparents and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as old as our parents. We cannot take all our freedoms for granted.
“Please enter your citizen number”
However, there is another reason to write about this: the brilliant use of interactive technology. Aside from being very, very cool, the interactive booths and online visualisations make sure this exhibition stays stuck in your head.
When you enter you are invited to take one of these:
This wristband has a barcode and “citizen number” on it which you can use to register on booths scattered around the exhibition. Each booth allows you to vote on some of the issues presented in the exhibits (“Should voting be compulsory”, “Should we all have the right to die”, “How free should the press be”, etc…). The system tracks your answers, and at the end you can see how they compared to everyone else’s. You can even enter your citizen number on the Taking Liberties interactive site, where you can get more info, watch videos and check out the visualisations in the comfort of your own home (pictured below).
My citizen number is 142423, feel free to log in and see how I did, or try it yourself.
Museums are one of the purest expressions of designing information to educate, inform and entertain at the same time. This exhibit uses three of the most important tools to get you to pay attention and remember:
- Social proof: you want to take part and answer the questions because you can see everyone else is
- Attention : forcing the user to answer questions on the issues engages you in the material and frames the sometimes archaic documents presented in the exhibits
- Repetition, repetition, repetition: the best way to make a fact memorable is to repeat it, ideally in different media. With the original documents, the interactive booths, the website and the online access to your voting, Taking Liberties has it covered.
At the heart of this is the well executed technology; read on to see how it was done… Read the rest of this entry »
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