foolfillment: the blog

IDEA has just announced its ‘call for submission’ for Thaw 2007. IDEA is the Industrial Designers of Edmonton Association (so not local) and Thaw is an event which gives “visitors an opportunity to view and purchase innovative and original products and ideas.”

The brief is interesting, in short it is ‘imagine there was no oil.’ I don’t see anything stopping schools in Scotland taking up this challenge, there is no benefit of actually submitting to this event - the only prize as such would be recognition so the costs would far outweigh the benefits - but a local (within school or authority?) equivalent competition could be feasible and would tie in very nicely with areas of the curriculum, citizenship for example. Of course most of the crafting that happens in schools is with wood or metal anyway so ruling out plastic isn’t too much of a hurdle, but try coming up with a new CD case, or redesigning most of the stuff in your kitchen.

via Land+Living

[tags]idea, design, sustainable development, schools, thaw2007[/tags]

So, I was in uni today, talking with my supervisor about my project (it’s going okay, thanks) and we got talking with the course leader, who shares the same office, about the future of subjects in CDT. More and more schools are going down the route of teaching only Craft and Design, and Graphic Communication. The point that came up was that these subjects are the ones that are (apologies if this hurts any of you) easy to teach and easy to learn. This is because essentially these courses only offer up skills, there is not really any academic aspect to them, they require pupils to learn how do perform some tasks but do not require much understanding or learning to occur.

This post is a bit of a ramble and there are no fully thought out ideas here, so feel free to chip in with your ideas of CDT, or to tell me that you disagree. It’s likely I will edit this if I get more of an idea of what I think should happen.
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I’ve been playing with this idea for t-shirts for the caving club and I have to say I’m fairly chuffed so I’m putting it here as well as on the GUPA site. The chances are it won’t get made because it doesn’t work well on shirts and the idea is a little obscure unless you have lived in Glasgow.
Here it is though, click for bigger:

(or how it would be on a t-shirt)

Nowadays when I read blogs I spend most of my time reading them through bloglines without actually looking at people’s designs, this is a real shame as I used to enjoy seeing pages evolve over time and I know I’ve put a lot of though over the years putting together designs for foolfillment so that it looked good for everyone. To think that nobody actually looks at anything other than the content is disheartening especially for someone who likes to think of himself as a designer.

Using nothing but an aggregator means that all the pages look the same, the only difference being the content. My site just blends into one step on your walk through the blogosphere and I lose identity. One way to change this would be to only offer up an excerpt in the feeds (Ewan did this until recently) but is this a bit rude - forcing people to see the world through my eyes? Is it better to put the effort into making content stand out as my identity?

While trying to avoid a navel-gazing ‘why do I blog’ post of circa 2002, it does make me ask if keeping a regular blog is worth it unless people read it?

The website for the town where I grew up and still live when not at uni was recently overhauled. Before it was quite simple layout, easy to navigate and overall it was quite comfortable to use - even though it used frames. The new version though I don’t like.

Now, I do not claim to be a great designer or an expert on how information should be laid out but I am a user and I know what I like, and I find using the new site a chore. It is a user nightmare, which is a shame because it could be, and indeed was, a good tool for promoting the town. (more…)

I missed Grand Designs Revisited last night, it was the house I wrote about when they went first time round, the one in Edinburgh. Did anyone else see it, was it good finished?

? 2200.00!

John Broadhus Watson became adept at taming rats and found he could train rats to open a puzzle-box for a small food-reward. He also studied maze-learning but simplified the task dramatically.

One type of maze is simply a long straight alley with food at the end. Watson found that once the animal was well trained at running this ‘maze’ it did so almost automatically. Once started by the stimulus of the maze its behavior becomes a series of associations between movements (or their kinaesthetic consequences) rather than stimuli in the outside world. This is made plain by shortening the alleyway - the well-trained rats now run straight into the end wall. This was known as the kerplunk experiment.

Source: Universitat Wurzburg | Biozentrum

I think we are all a bit like a lab-rat. Gordon is talking about Information Design today and made this example:

if you were brought up in an environment where all the cold taps were on the left hand side of every sink, your own experience would subconciously baulk when confronted with a cold tap positioned on the right.

There are also some interesting comments. Watch someone who has only ever used Windows sit down and try to use an Apple, they’ll run straight into the wall like the trained rat. The only difference is that after the rat hits its wall it won’t throw the cheese about in a rage but the human will throw the Apple about.