Talk to any Industrial Designer and if they have any experience they’ll probably tell you that many design competitions are a deceptive way for greedy companies to get designs at little or no cost. One competition not so long ago offered as a prize a small cash payout and a job. Oh, and all those entries sent in by designers too wet behind the ears to know better? Those concepts belonged to the company as part of their condition for entry. If they decided to manufacture the first runner-up and make hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit from it, they sent a big, fat check for… $400.

Nice, huh? Well, at least they paid some compensation. Many don’t bother. They’ll change a minor detail and claim the design is new. And who’s going to do anything about it? Some design student halfway around the world. Not likely.
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When I talk to people about the possibilities of rapid-manufacturing (RM), I wonder if I should start by pointing them to this toaster I caught over on MoCo Loco (Link). It’s still apparently fabricated using regular old manufacturing processes (the sides look like stamped metal riveted to the standard internal box), so it’s not an accurate representation; however, it’s sufficiently over-the-top that maybe the aesthetic as defined by high-volume manufacturing processes will be jarred loose inside their heads. Continue reading →

Did this ever come out of left field. C|Net is reporting (Link) that Motorola is buying Symbol Technologies. I’ve followed both companies for over a decade; having had friends who worked as designers at Motorola (including fellow CIA alumnus Frank Tyneski who, last I heard, was the Director of Design Integration at Research In Motion – the Blackberry company) and an old business acquaintance, Curt Croley, who is/was Manager of Industrial Design at Symbol. Symbol is also the company that swallowed an old client, Telxon, for whom I did design work in the mid-90’s. Even so, I’ve never considered the two companies merging. This is a big deal. What happens when a technology powerhouse like Motorola – which happens to also be a major cell phone manufacturer – gets access to Symbol’s RFID technology (and their patents)? I’ll have to take some time to wrap my head around this one.

A couple of weeks ago I happened across a video showing some very realistic movement for a hexabot which was similar to another one about which I had posted (reLink). Truth is, I didn’t like seeing it tethered which is why I didn’t post another entry (yeah, I know, that’s irrelevant; but still…). So while taking a look at my YouTube subscriptions this morning I noticed that the tether is now gone and the creepy little crawly robot is dancing for the folks at WETA. Very cool.

There’s a blog entry posted by HP’s Vice President of Global Marketing Strategy & Excellence, Eric Kintz, (Link) that might be of interest to some of you. He discusses the issue of how marketers and advertisers should deal with the multiple identities people create for their various online activities (I wish he’d stuck to the customer/consumer issue, but that’s not really what he’s addressing here). His response to it is what he calls “dissociative identity marketing”.

…”dissociative identity” refers to the existence in an individual of two or more distinct identities, each with its own pattern of perceiving and interacting with the environment. “Dissociative identity marketing” would refer to the relationship a brand establishes with the various personas of a consumer, from the blogging persona, to the social network persona or the gaming persona.

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