Yesterday I caught an entry on Core77 about a Forbes article, “Tastemakers: Industrial Designers“. It’s always great to have Industrial Design in the spotlight. And I can forgive the author calling Symbol Technologies “an industrial design firm in Holtsville, N.Y.”, when they’re obviously a manufacture of scanners (I’m wondering if the Forbes website software automatically added the NYSE link/symbol in the piece since it doesn’t seem like the author ever checked the company profile page on their site). However, a review of their Top Designer List slideshow had me thinking the author or whichever people making these lists and writing these stories need to do a bit more research into the field (and then maybe they won’t make boner mistakes like the one above).

Rather than just post this entry when I first read the article, I decided to post a thread on the Core77 Industrial Design forum. You can read the issue I have with the List there. The discussion has been remarkably good for an unregistered space and you can check it out at this Link.

MIT’s Advertising Lab posted an entry about in-game advertising that caught my attention. I’m fairly sure this is the same report that’s gotten some earlier play, but the last excerpt in the post taken from a Boston Globe article is what made me look twice:

Costs for advertising in video games have grown exponentially. They can range from $5,000 to $500,000, prices that rival spots in small films, according to some agencies.”

I know what I should be doing which seemingly so few people can do. Have to give it some consideration.

Excellent post over on Brand Autopsy about the Broken Window Theory and how author Michael Levine applied it to business practices in his book, “Broken Windows| Broken Business“. Brand Autopsy includes an excerpt from an online introduction and when I read it I couldn’t help but mentally add the line “When a consumer struggles with a product that didn’t benefit from an industrial designer ensuring their interaction was pleasant and their experience satisfying it’s a broken window.” Great post.

As already mentioned, my host lost yesterday’s blog entries and so I’m re-entering them. I believe this is the last one, but I forgot the headline, it was a bit longer than the others and I don’t recall specifically what I said. And it’s not really all that important of course, so I’ll cut to the chase with something brief.

The lost post included this entry from We Make Money Not Art about a “Chameleon-Object” designed/fabricated by Janek Jonas (see above image) and this comment I made over on a Clickable Culture entry:

There are things I can code into objects that simply cannot happen to real objects. As gaming becomes increasingly immersive, that unreality becomes significant (it’s a little like some new videogame characters that give people the creeps similarly to how the movie “Polar Express” creeped out people).

I’ve started playing with scripting to do things that fall into this. Not over-the-top stuff that people immediately recognize as unreal; subtle things that make you blink. It’s a fun area.

It also included me recognizing I’d stuck my foot in my mouth and being backed up into the one thing I know we can’t do right now in real world product design: llDie().

{Image Copyright © 2004 Janek Jonas}

Another one lost to my host’s hardware problems. I recall this one pretty well so here’s a basic rehash.

BusinessWeek is carrying a surprisingly good article originating from Car Design News (if you recall, I noted that some recent entries seemed not to be up to their usual high quality; glad that might not be the case after all). The article (link) features design firm Motorcity Europe and has an accompanying slideshow (link). I’ll post a small piece of the article here:

With an international base of talent, a high proportion of value creation done digitally, and a network of associate organizations and individuals with specific capabilities, Motorcity Europe is perhaps the pioneer of this type of new leaner, fitter 21st century independent design studio.

Gives you some idea of where I’m coming from when I say my favorite images in the slideshow are the page of rough sketches and the Alias surfacing for the Galaxy headlamps.