The Sum of Product Development

Posted on by

Just wanted to call attention to a post over on Brand Noise (Link) regarding Nokia and some recent comments by one of their researchers. The observations aren’t especially amazing, in my opinion, but I always like hearing news that corporations are thinking beyond the accounting ledger. Because product development isn’t just running some numbers based on marketing projections, engineering a device to meet numerical constraints, and creating an ad campaign to “capture eyeballs”. Every project needs to truly consider the whole package, including “the sum of human experiences”.

Now that more and more business people seem to be understanding the value of Design, I wonder if designers are also increasingly understanding the value of what others bring to the table.

I don’t know.

Virtual Goods Summit 2007 Roundup

Posted on by

Virtual World News has done an excellent job posting a record of the Virtual Goods Summit I mentioned earlier (reLink), and there’s plenty of documentation elsewhere. I’ve not read everything yet but wanted to at least make those people who stop in here – especially Industrial Designers – aware of the interesting and relevant topics being discussed.

Here’s a list of VWN’s posts as well as a few others that pop up with a quick look around. And if you’re an Industrial Designer unfamiliar with all this “virtual” talk, you might first want to check out an earlier post of mine on micropayments for virtual goods (reLink) that includes links to various articles on the topic, or an earlier entry that gets to the point pretty quickly and references the Kart Rider videogame mentioned during the summit (reLink).

{List after the fold}
Continue reading →

Progressing Toward Realistic Simulation {*Update*}

Posted on by

I recall reading some time ago that a team at Purdue University were involved in a project to simulate the September 11 attacks and was seeing an occasional blog headline regarding their effort. It’s been getting some increased attention again these past couple of weeks, but it was only yesterday that I bothered to watch the video people have been discussing. I guess my lack of interest had to do with my having seen plenty of simulations, so this wasn’t particularly intriguing to me.

That’s now changed.

– Continue reading →