Research BLOG

This blog is dedicated to Creative/Art Direction, Brand Management, Interaction Design, UX, Usability, Industrial Design, Interface Design,  Storytelling ...and related areas of interest. 

____________________________________________________________________________________

Flat Design was just a Trend, Apparently.

Before Flat design we had skeuomorphism; before skeuomorphism we had Flash; and before that still we had Text-based sites.

From Art Deco, to Pop Art, history shows us that design trends merely ebb and flow – from one into another. Once bored of one style, we move to a new one. Is this the case of Flat Design? It is what the people appear to believe.

Google’s insistence on Material Design certainly proves that a “next best thing” is on its way. Recent promotion of Material Design may even explain the trend shown in the above graph. Designers sure that Flat is on its way out as they move to incorporate Google’s own design guidelines. Material Design supplanting Flat as the next design trend.

But how different is Flat from Material Design really?

Read more

 

Apple CarPlay in the Volvo Concept Estate

From the Geneva Motor Show 2014, Apple's Ed Langstroth demonstrates the Apple CarPlay in the Volvo Concept Estate. Starting with the upcoming all-new XC90, Apple CarPlay will seamlessly integrate your iOS device with future Volvo models, allowing you to intuitively access both Apple and third-party applications -- all with full Siri voice control.

Journeys in Design

Wallpaper* and Volvo have come together to take you deep into the heart of the Swedish design story. Our series of four short films present a visual journey through the country's best architecture, design and visual culture, as well as the very best of Volvo, past, present and future.

Read more here

Screen shot 2014-02-20 at 10.51.40.png

Explorer Story: Alex Blaszczuk

In 2011, a car accident en route to a camping trip left Alex paralyzed and unable to use her hands. Recently, Alex finally made it camping and shared her story through Google Glass.

The simple reason products fail: Consumers don’t understand what they do

segway.jpg

The Holy Grail for innovators often is not simply to win in an existing market, but also to create an entirely new product category. But doing so raises a critical question for the entrepreneur: How do you get potential customers and investors to understand what it is you are doing?

It’s harder than it sounds. Consumers make sense of unfamiliar products by mapping them onto categories of things they already understand. So when Apple comes out with its iPhone 6, for example, it’s pretty easy for customers to understand that it’s a lot like the previous iterations. But genuinely novel products don’t fit neatly into one category or another. Indeed, their novelty stems from the very fact that the ideas and technologies that came together to create the new concept existed previously in domains or categories that were thought to be entirely distinct.

As a result, innovations that are totally new to the market are often extremely difficult to describe. Things that are difficult to describe are hard to understand.And things that are hard for consumers and investors to understand typically face two outcomes: They are either ignored or devalued...

Jesper Sørensen is a professor of Organizational Behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Read his full article here

Responsive Design is Not About Screen Sizes Any More

In March 2012, Guy Podjarny ran a test comparing the performance of hundreds of shiny new responsive websites across four different screen resolutions. The results were very disappointing. Two years into the rise of Responsive Web Design, after every imaginable sort of designer and developer had jumped into the train, it took a test to almost rock the theory to its foundations. Guy proved that almost every known responsive site was overweight.But, more importantly, every mobile user was receiving the same kilobyte overload as a desktop user.

Read the full article here

inFORM Dynamic Shape Display

inFORM is a Dynamic Shape Display that can render 3D content physically, so users can interact with digital information in a tangible way. inFORM can also interact with the physical world around it, for example moving objects on the table's surface. Remote participants in a video conference can be displayed physically, allowing for a strong sense of presence and the ability to interact physically at a distance. inFORM is a step toward our vision of Radical Atoms.

You Lookin’ at Me? Reflections on Google Glass.

Google_Glass.jpg

With the public beta launch of Google Glass, there has been a lot of discussion on why it will or won’t fail. The ultimate benchmark for success is high: After someone has tried Glass, can they imagine life without it?

It’s the wrong question.

Glass is Google’s unintentional public service announcement on the future of privacy. Our traditional bogeyman for privacy was Big Brother and its physical manifestation — closed-circuit TV — but the reality today is closer to what I call Little Sister, and she is socially active, curious, sufficiently tech-savvy, growing up in the land of “free,” getting on with life and creating a digital exhaust that is there for the taking.

The sustained conversation around Glass will be sufficient to lead to a societal shift in how we think about the ownership of data, and to extrapolate a bit, the kind of cities we want to live in. For me, the argument that Glass is somehow inherently nefarious misses a more interesting point: It is a physical and obvious manifestation of things that already exist and are widely deployed today, whose lack of physical, obvious presence has limited a mainstream critical discourse.

Read Jan Chipchase's full article here

The First 15 Seconds: How Great Products Thrive

I'd propose that, in the first 15 seconds of every new experience, people are lazy, vain, and selfish.

This is not intended as cynical jibe at humanity. It is an essential insight for building great products and experiences both online and off. It is a humbling realization that everyone you meet - and everyone that visits your website or uses your products - has an entirely different mindset before they’re ready to make the effort to care.

In this article, Scott Belsky explains why...

Meet the 24 most creative people in advertising of 2013

Snoop.jpg

Recently, Business Insider asked the major ad agencies and the more significant boutiques to name the people they felt were the most creative in the business. To prevent the nominations from being self-serving, they asked each agency to also nominate someone from a competing agency—the sort of person they'd hire, given a free hand. They then pored over recent award winners and creatives who have generated new and exciting buzz. The result is a ranking that they feel represents advertising's creative elite.

Meet the 24 most creative people in advertising of 2013.

Jony Ive Explains Why He Decided To Gut Skeuomorphism From iOS 7

Jony Ive, Senior Vice President Design.

Jony Ive, Senior Vice President Design.

With the launch of iOS 7 Apple made some bold steps to ditch the rich textures, shadowing, and other skeuomorphic elements that have been a staple on the iPhone since 2007. Consumers and professionals has reacted to this, which is exampled by previous article When flat design falls flat.

Jony Ive explains:

“When we sat down last November (to work on iOS 7), we understood that people had already become comfortable with touching glass, they didn’t need physical buttons, they understood the benefits,” says Ive. “So there was an incredible liberty in not having to reference the physical world so literally. We were trying to create an environment that was less specific. It got design out of the way.”

Thanks to the departure of iOS Software Chief Scott Forstall back in October, Sir Jony Ive was given a bigger role in iOS software development, so to hype up the launch of Jony’s first software masterpiece, he and Apple’s new SVP of Software Engineering, Craig Federighi, sat down with USA Today to give some details on what went into the creation of iOS 7. 

Read the full article here

 

Blueprints For Web And Print: Specctr, A Free Adobe Illustrator Plugin

Have you ever submitted design files to a development team for production and a few weeks later gotten something back that looks nothing like your original work? Many designers and design teams make the mistake of thinking that their work is done once they’ve completed the visual design stage.

Specctr is a plugin for Adobe applications. Specctr transitions a visual design to production by enabling you to specify form (spacing, width and height, colors, fonts, etc.) and function (hover states, transitions, user flows, etc.). It automatically generates a specification and creates a blueprint for the design, which saves time.

Read article

ExampleWebsiteSpecctr-02.png

Why cards are the future of the web

Cards are fast becoming the best design pattern for mobile devices.

We are currently witnessing a re-architecture of the web, away from pages and destinations, towards completely personalised experiences built on an aggregation of many individual pieces of content. Content being broken down into individual components and re-aggregated is the result of the rise of mobile technologies, billions of screens of all shapes and sizes, and unprecedented access to data from all kinds of sources through APIs and SDKs. This is driving the web away from many pages of content linked together, towards individual pieces of content aggregated together into one experience.


 

The Accidental History of the @ Symbol

 Although the first documented use of @ was in 1536, the symbol did not rise from modern obscurity until 1971. (Illustration by Erik Marinovich) 

 

Although the first documented use of @ was in 1536, the symbol did not rise from modern obscurity until 1971. (Illustration by Erik Marinovich) 

By William F. Allman for Smithsonian magazine

Once a rarely used key on the typewriter, the graceful character has become the very symbol of modern electronic communication. 

Called the “snail” by Italians and the “monkey tail” by the Dutch, @ is the sine qua non of electronic communication, thanks to e-mail addresses and Twitter handles. @ has even been inducted into the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, which cited its modern use as an example of “elegance, economy, intellectual transparency, and a sense of the possible future directions that are embedded in the arts of our time.”

The origin of the symbol itself, one of the most graceful characters on the keyboard, is something of a mystery. One theory is that medieval monks, looking for shortcuts while copying manuscripts, converted the Latin word for “toward”—ad—to “a” with the back part of the “d” as a tail. Or it came from the French word for “at”—à—and scribes, striving for efficiency, swept the nib of the pen around the top and side. Or the symbol evolved from an abbreviation of “each at”—the “a” being encased by an “e.” The first documented use was in 1536, in a letter by Francesco Lapi, a Florentine merchant, who used @ to denote units of wine called amphorae, which were shipped in large clay jars...

 

Road Testing Prototype Tools

Emily Schwartzman's useful article on Prototype Tools for Cooper:

"We’ve all been there: you’ve got a few days to throw together a prototype. For expedience sake, you go to one of your large, well known tools to get the job done. The files quickly become bloated and crash— hours of hard work lost. There’s got to be a way to create prototypes at a similar level of fidelity with a lighter weight tool..."