Tag Archives: #industrialdesign

design applied to products that are to be manufactured through the techniques of mass production

RetroRevolution

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Silent Revolution handbag

File this one in the “What-goes-round-comes-round” category. Via Josh Spear’s blog I came across an entry that took me to an interesting bit of indy product: Silent Revolution‘s clothing accessories for the hyper-connected cyberculture. The idea behind this start-up being “an effort to create futuristic, minimal bags and clothing reflective of the digital age in which we live.” Okay. But what struck me was how un-cyber these things seemed to me. They didn’t look to me like “minimal, sophisticated, cyber-influenced” bags. They’re nice, but they looked a bit like something else.

What got me in particular was the use of the term “cyber-influenced”. For me the look of all things cyber will probably forever be visually linked to the cover of William Gibson’s short story collection Burning Chrome (the book I owned back in ’88 consisted of only the graphic shown on the new one – no white border and no blown-out hype). That was the look of cyberspace in the mid-80’s when Apple computers were changing the print world with desktop publishing and dot-matrix printouts, frogdesign was designing “Snow White” computer housings for their gear, and videogames were still mostly colorful coin-op machines at arcades that assaulted your auditory system the minute you stepped within earshot. It wasn’t the clean, sophisticated computer-aesthetic of Syd Mead’s earlier Tron work. Nope. The word “cyber” instead evoked the famous first line from Gibson’s first novel Neuromancer, “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.” Cyber has always been a street term – people remixing technology to their own purpose and sometimes even merging with it. For me it’s always sounded dirty and looked noisy. It’s even now slang for virtual sex.

So what do I see when I look at these bags? Interestingly enough, I see pre-cyberspace. I see clean retro computer aesthetics. Stuff from the 70’s. Looking at these designs reminds me of the days when I was coding Fortran, hole-punching cards and sticking them into a card reader to run my program. Is that cyber? I don’t know. Not to me it isn’t. Maybe we need a new description for this aesthetic; a look which I have to admit I see elsewhere. How about PreCyber Retro? We could use another label before everything gets swallowed up into the singularity soup.

{Image source: Silent Revolution}

…and BW on Pro Gaming

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Let the (video)game sponsorship frenzy begin! From BW’s article “Pro Gaming Attracting Big Corporate Sponsors“:

PC hardware companies have been sponsoring Counter-Strike teams and individual pro gamers for over seven years, but more general youth-oriented brands and corporations have been slow to catch on to the phenomenon. In fact, last week’s announcement that Johnson & Johnson subsidiary McNeil Consumer & Specialty Pharmaceuticals (makers of Tylenol) was sponsoring pro CS team Ouch is believed to be the first of its kind.

I can’t help but think someone inside Johnson & Johnson has been working feverishly for years trying to convince a bunch of out-of-touch upper management types to do this. This news kinda makes my earlier post on CPL a little more interesting. Wonder if I can create something branded with a fake pain-reliever and let it go head-to-head with Tylenol. Or should that be headache-to-headache? It’s about time corporate America realized the importance of videogames in reaching a portion of their market, I just wonder if they also realize they’re now on a different playing field. Literally and figuratively. This could get interesting.

FusePercentage

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AdAge is reporting (registration required) that agency Crispin Porter & Bogusky has bought a stake in Fuseproject, the industrial design consultancy headed by Yves Behar. I don’t often hear of these sorts of deals. The last one I recall was Plantronics taking over frogdesign. Hard to miss as that got plenty of press.

Of course in many parts of the world – especially Asia – design firms are joined at the hip with large partners; usually factories. Whether that kind of thing will become the norm in the U.S. I’m unsure. It might be worth keeping an eye out for more of these relationships.

Now Playing Elsewhere

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Here are links to some recent posts on other blogs should you be inclined to want to read them:

I’m now also blogging on the Core home page:
Cure for Depression? Colorful Reporting
BW on MoMA’s Safe Design Show

and here’s a few on their Software&Technology page:

Modding the Bod
More Dreams, Less Sleep
The Move to Micropayments
If It’s Good Enough for Football…
Pics of a Moovie
Behold, the NanoTube Telly
The Golden Age of Wireless
From T-Squares to T-Splines

And over on the SL Future Salon blog:

Avoiding A Short Shot (still waiting for someone to ask what a “short shot” is)

Future Blog

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I’ve been asked to give some indication of what’s in store for this blog and whether it will be continued. The short answer is “Yes”. However, the next incarnation will be at a different URL… though still within the rebang.com domain.

Further, because blogspam is such a bandwidth ripper and because I’d rather leave this ad-free, comments and trackbacks will likely not be permitted. I’m instead looking at other options for discussion and hope to have some way to facilitate it. Trackbacks will likely not be opened as it’s simply too ripe for abuse. Perhaps if I wanted to dedicate more time to deleting the spam and/or keeping up with extensions to control it, but I don’t; it might be of interest to those of you who visit this site that after all this time I still have zombie PC’s pinging to try to post their worthless messages on outdated entries. That’s the net.

Also, while I’d like to have my new website up and running by 1 Oct, the truth is that what I’m doing goes well beyond just a blog. This incarnation of the weblog was really an overly-successful test… never intended to be permanent. If you recall my focus, then you might get some hint of where I’ll be taking this website. Unfortunately that means stretching out into a lot of seemingly unrelated areas. I hope that when I’m done you’ll appreciate what can only be a modest effort.