design

Questioning Technology

Kevin at Question Technology was at the CHI 2007 conference and found a really interesting paper and presentation called “Questioning the Technological Panacea: Three Reflective Questions for Designers” (Eric Baumer and Bill Tomlinson).

They discussed three questions that product designers should ask:

  1. “Given a technological solution, are there other, possibly non-technological solutions that could address the same problem equally well, if not better?”
  2. “Is the problem being addressed perceived as a problem by the proposed users, or is the situation being unnecessarily problematized by designers?”
  3. “By focusing on a specific problem, is the solution treating a symptom and hiding the cause?”

This paper was part of the “alt.chi” program at CHI, which is a forum for unusual work that wouldn’t ordinarily get published by the conference.  Alt.chi submissions are posted and reviewed in an open public forum.

Read the paper!

Posted on by mklang

Greener Apples

No need to be cynical or pessimistic about the effect of lobby campaigns or the power of collecting people online. Greenpeace launched an environmental campaign against Appleâ??s lack of environmental policy. On 2nd May Steve Jobs published a second public letter (the first was against DRM) listing environmental hazards connected with Apple computers and the steps Apple was taking to remedy the situation.

It is generally not Appleâ??s policy to trumpet our plans for the future; we tend to talk about the things we have just accomplished. Unfortunately this policy has left our customers, shareholders, employees and the industry in the dark about Appleâ??s desires and plans to become greener. Our stakeholders deserve and expect more from us, and theyâ??re right to do so. They want us to be a leader in this area, just as we are in the other areas of our business. So today weâ??re changing our policy.

This is a good first step towards taking Apple to the forefront of environmental concerns as well as its firm position as a design leader. This approach also shows that design and environmentalism are not incompatible.

Greenpeace has responded on their campaign site with the words “We are cheering!”…

It’s not everything we asked for.  Apple has declared a phase out of the worst chemicals in its product range, Brominated Fire Retardants (BFRs) and Polyvinyl Chloride (PVC) by 2008. That beats Dell and other computer manufactures’ pledge to phase them out by 2009. Way to go Steve!

It’s nice to know that the machine of my choice has just made a little less guilty.

Posted on by mklang

Kevlar for Kids

The TimesOnline has a story about parents in the UK buying body armour for their children. What an incredible world we live in when they even make body armour for children let alone manage to sell it. Apparently the parents are concerned about the rise in murders among London teenagers.

This feels so wrong and as one of the comments to the TimesOnline story writes

Dressing up a small child in something that costs hundreds of pounds and sending the child out into a rough neighborhood doesn’t sound like it advances the child’s safety at all.

But where does the limit between paranoid parenting (Furedi 2001) and common sense really go? Obviously dressing children in bullet and knife proof clothing does not send out a good signal to the children or to others but then again it may save a life.

An interesting quote in the article was: “The cheapest version will stop any knife attack while the higher end will stop a bullet from any handgun or sub-machine gun.” Considering how fashion conscious children are today we are also running the risk of creating an attitude among children about who can afford the good stuff.

Posted on by mklang

Stress Flag

Adding a haphazard artistic touch to most cities are the street artists. They apply their art in many different ways here it is in the form of a small flag tied up to the railing of a bridge in Göteborg. The flag bears the word “stress” but is it for or against stress?

Posted on by mklang

Updating to Ella

Every time word press releases and update I go through a period of tense anticipation. Will I be able to update my software without breaking the whole thing. So when I saw in January that WordPress had released WordPress 2.1 â??Ellaâ??, named for jazz vocalist Ella Fitzgerald I was a bit tense. But everything went well with a few minor changes that needed to be made to the theme.

But it wasn’t until I tried to actually write a new post that I realised that something was seriously wrong. Ella supports a new tabbed editor which enables switching between WYSIWYG and code editing while writing a post. Unfortunately not only was there no tabs but my whole toolbar had disappeared. I eventually resolved this by deleting and re-installing the /wp-includes/js/tinymce/ folder and doing a hard refresh. Hey Presto! there was my toolbar. But my problems were not over.

Right now I have a toolbar but attempting to add a link fails since the popup window that appears has no button to press on. Hitting return does nothing either. This is all very frustrating. Oh well if you don’t know what to do you can always fill your time by upgrading software…

Update! problem solved. The loss of the cancel/insert buttons that prevented me from inserting links without going to the html editor was solved by changing my java settings in Firefox, clearing the cache and then restarting. So now everything looks fixed again (until I find the next little bug).

Posted on by mklang

Iron Harvest

If we ignore the nationalistic/romantic ramblings of some deranged people there is a consensus that war is not a good thing. Certain wars (unfortunately not all) get a great deal of media attention – which may lead to popular cries for peace. â??Secretâ?? or unpublicized wars are harder to end.

The end of war is naturally worth working for. But it also brings with it a loss of interest in the region and the people involved. This is natural since most people (me included) tend to see the end of fighting as the solution. Naturally there is a need for reconciliation and rebuilding but thatâ??s about it.

But, this complacent attitude of mine was too be rudely disturbed when I came across the term â??iron harvestâ??.

The term is used by farmers in Belgium and France to describe the yearly amount of WWI ordinance found while plowing their fields. It’s more than 80 years since the war ended and still enough war garbage appears to motivate a term of its own.  â??The French Département du Déminage recover about 900 tons of unexploded munitions every year. Since 1945, approximately 630 French démineurs have died handling unexploded munitions.â?? (Wikipedia)

But naturally the problems do not stop with an old war. As recently as 2006 the conflict between Israel and the Hezbollah in Lebanon resulted in up to one million unexploded cluster bombs (BBC News). Estimates made by U.N. officials indicate that 90 of all cluster bombs used were launched during the last 72 hours of the conflict (Washington Post)

These small lethal bombs are left lying about in fields and in ruins. This slows the pace of economic and social recovery since the fields are too dangerous to use and rebuilding takes much longer. Not to mention all the accidental casualties and fatalities which occur when people come into contact with these lethal bombs.

Theoretically such ordinance should be easily prohibited by the present rules of war but unfortunately they are not. Therefore special legislation is required. Belgium has gone the furthest among countries and banned cluster bombs completely. Other countries are also working towards this goal.

Replying to questions in Parliament, the Swedish Minister of Defence (December 2006) has stated the governments is going to play an active role in international work against cluster bombs including working for an international ban and actively participated in the coming Norwegian conference on banning cluster bombs. The minister also stated that he was going to do away with Swedenâ??s supply of a (all?) cluster bombs (bombkapsel 90), create a Swedish ban on cluster bombs, and stop the production of bombkapsel 90 for the Swedish JAS 39 Gripen fighter.
Lets hope he keeps his promise.

Unsurprisingly, the UK and US are for cluster bombs â?? or rather against the banning of the bombs (great article by Monbiot)

Somewhere behind all the politics there is a designer. Once again we need to ask â?? what kind of mind designs technology like this? After a hard day at the drawing board does he or she go home to his family and smile? What will he/she till his/her children when they ask what he does? â??Daddy designs bombs which kill childrenâ??

I donâ??t think soâ?¦

Posted on by mklang

Search by Colour

Don’t you hate it when you have an image stuck in your mind? In particular a picture of a picture. Thanks to basic information overload, the internet, and not least, Flickr there are more images than I can imagine. Occasionally one of these images flashes past my screen and I think “nice” before moving along. Later I attempt to look for the picture and fail miserably.

I try retracing my steps, thinking where I had seen it, cursing my senility and realising the picture I need has gone forever (again!). The problem is, and I think of it as a problem, that there is no really good search tool for images. Now there is a partial solution to then problem.

The Flickr Color Selectr searches Creative Commons licensed photos on Flickr by color. My problem is that after playing with it for a little while I realised that I will now see hundreds more cool images that, a few weeks later, I will never find…

Posted on by mklang

Lions among us

Lions have good PR officers. They tend to get put in the best places and are mythically protrayed as being much cooler than they really are. Just think about the four huge lions around Nelson in Trafalgar Square in London. Obviously great PR work. Nelson was a sailor and he still gets surrounded by four of the biggest lions ever.

Unfortunately there is a downside to great PR and that is that reality eventually creeps up. But somehow this does not happen to the lions. Not long ago, the Lion steps were unveiled in G̦teborg. Two large, blas̩ lions lay overlooking the main canal in G̦teborg. There air of aloofness and boredom is brilliant Рthese are not fierce wild beasts, they are city lions. Cool detached and above and beyond mere mortals that surround them.

Among lion statues there is a whole subset of the reclining lion but it is not very often that you come across a lion who is asleep. But of all the statues of lions my favorite is the sleeping lion guarding the tomb of George Wombwell, menagerist, buried at Highgate Cemetery in London. This lion is said to portray his favourite pet lion. To have the statue sleeping peacefully is a beautiful symbol. So peaceful.

But wherever did they get such good PR people?

Posted on by mklang

Mr Fixit

Today has been very practical. The day began with some website building (unfinished so I will not reveal it yet), then it was a visit to Ikea Рyes the clich̩ is fulfilled, swedes going to Ikea on Saturdays. Then it was back home to fix the washing machine, to my parents house to fix their wireless, then finally back home to begin building the infamous flat-packets. While Ikea makes ok furniture but it is very annoying to build your own furniture Рespecially with the silly little Ikea tool.

Posted on by mklang

Customisation

Have you ever held a knife which fits perfectly in your hand? Or any other tool which once you picked it up seemed to become almost a natural part of your body? If you have experienced this then you have experienced â??goodâ?? design. Often the only way to recognize â??badâ?? design is when things do not work or work badly.

During the past days the problem of good/bad design has been an issue since I managed to crash my laptop and needed to format and re-install everything. On one level this is not a complex operation but what is difficult is getting the computer back to the feeling it had before.

Since it is the tool I use the most it has been adapted from a standard factory machine into a highly personalized artifact and therefore once it was restored to factory standard working with it for longer periods was a painful experience in much the same way as working with a bad knife is a painful experience.

The process of customization is slow and getting the machine to adapt itself to my wants and needs an exhausting experience since it requires remembering hundreds (thousands?) of small pieces of software that made my machine mine.

Posted on by mklang