Death Of Our Heroes

I have always semi-idolized Steve Jobs. The wild success of Apple, and some of his more trenchant statements indicated to me that he explicitly understood the principles that made Apple great.

For example, he was constantly referring to products as magical and beautiful. I believed that he knew that this meant attraction and minimalism. Magical meant that the design elicited interaction. The look and feel made people desire contact. Anyone who has ever caressed an iPhone 4 knows this feeling. Beauty is focus in design. No gew gaws or addenda. The perfect product is what it is and nothing more.

I also always assumed that Jobs knew that what made Apple successful was not the ideas, but Apple itself. It was the machine that generates the ideas that is valuable. This is why Apple rarely sued. It was also why they kept things so secret, because they knew that as soon as their ideas were out, people would start to copy them.

Sadly, it appears that Jobs was not explicitly aware of the latter, which makes me question my assumption about his knowledge of the former.

Gizmodo is reporting about a part of the Jobs biography where he fumed about the "stealing" of ideas for Android and wanted to see the OS destroyed. This wildly contradicts his earlier, wiser statements about "great artists" stealing. In fact, he directly said "I want you to stop using our ideas in Android," to Google CEO Eric Schmidt. He focused on the ideas instead of the implementation of those ideas.

For example, long after the iPhone came out, Nokia, LG, Microsoft, and Sony had not conjured up a legitimate response. Even if Apple had provided a blow-by-blow description of the iPhone as they designed it, they still would have been alone on the market for over a year. A year! If anything illustrates the importance of the implementation and not the idea, it's that.

Can ANYONE Do It Right?

Apple's released the new iPad2, and like so many product segments in which Apple participates, their annual release blows the competition clear out of the water. It's as though other companies honestly don't know how to make products. It pisses me off, because I refuse to buy Apple products! Everything is locked down and closed off. I hate it! Instead of something perfectly designed, I'm left with a selection of sub-par, over-priced options. HP's products all have the build quality of a 1930's Bakelite radio. Sony's are overpriced with horrendous software. Other companies manage decent software and hardware, but the design's as sexy as Margaret Thatcher. God!

The PSP And The Problem With Gadgets

I generally try to avoid writing about anything overly geeky on this blog, but Sony's PSP holds a special place in my heart because it was a gizmo that almost literally overflowed with potential, most of which was wasted by terrible design.

I've worked in the business and design world before, and if there's a word to describe most managers' perspective on designers it's "expendable." They usually inflate their own position in the hierarchy of responsibility (idea men), and reduce those who actually do the work (grunts). That design is something that anyone can do is, one would think in this Apple-fied world, is a perspective that would have quickly gotten the boot. One would be wrong. It's here and it seems here to stay.

I assume that this is because of how most executives got to their positions, namely good-ol'-boys clubs and connections formed at business school. You're encouraged to believe that you have achieved this position by some natural state, as opposed to getting there by old-fashioned elbow grease.

Regardless of why this situation is, it is, and that is all that must be addressed. Sony is one of the best examples of great engineering and horrendous design on the modern market. Everything Sony makes is wonderfully engineered, efficient, and well-made. The software, on the other hand, is usually a train-wreck, the features are poorly implemented, and actually getting the products to do what you want requires the same PhD that the engineer had.

The PSP was wonderfully engineered. It was beautiful to hold, built well, looked gorgeous, was insanely powerful, and was loaded with features. Unfortunately, it was also a grand example of a design mandate that I hold sacred: if you aren't going to implement something 100%, don't implement it at all.

The PSP had an MP3 player... that sucked. A video player... that sucked. A web-browser... that was actually OK. The LocationFree player, which was just atrocious. It's gaming feature was good, and the screen was excellent, but that was the ONLY thing it did well. And instead of dumping everything they had into expanding the gaming experience, they spent money on more useless features and on an endless cold war with hackers who kept cracking the machine's software open to futz around.

That is the reason why the Nintendo DS whomped the PSP in the market. Nintendo concentrated on the gaming experience and ways to entertain that were novel and well-implemented. If a feature didn't fit into that paradigm, it wasn't included. It was a very Apple perspective to take. Granted, Nintendo also continues to tilt against the windmill of user-modified systems.

Sony is again doing the same thing with upcoming PSP2 (known as the NGP). Instead of pushing something new and novel, they're simply upping the specs of the PSP. They have the touch surface on the back of the system, which is cool, but nothing compared to the novelty of the 3DS. I have doubts about the 3DS as well, but whereas Nintendo's absolute success with the DS and DSLite has earned them the benefit of the doubt, Sony's complete design failure with the PSP hasn't. I wouldn't be surprised to see another poorly designed interface, crippled with restrictions.

While on that subject, Sony also embodies, better than any other company, the issues with trying to release a good product while being restricted by other parts of the company. The perfect MP3 player is one that rips and stores music by itself, can browse Torrents to download music and video, plays all extensions, only has features that work perfectly, and can be accessed without some proprietary software but includes it for ease of use. As you can imagine, all of these features are incompatible with an overarching corporate philosophy of proprietary integration and anti-piracy.

And it is that philosophy that Apple has unfortunately pioneered. You do not buy ONE Apple product. You buy into Apple's entire system when you buy anything from them. They have a giant, vertically integrated system (granted, with every step wonderfully designed and user-friendly), that locks you in, locks everyone else out, and squeezes money from you every chance it can. It is an enormously profitable machine, evinced by Apple earning more than Microsoft, even though it holds relatively small percentages of most markets.

Understandably, and sadly, every company and its brother is drooling at the prospect of creating its own closed system to drain consumers of cash. As such, product features that are completely logical never see the light of day because they would punch a hole in that closed system. Too bad all of those companies seem to forget that Apple has spent decades building a loyal user base, and billions of dollars on excellent software.

But why bother with all of that? That's just design work that anyone can do. It's the idea that was difficult.

When Web Design Goes Wrong

I'm on the hunt for blogs and websites about art and design. I stumbled across one called WeHeart out of Britain. It's well-liked and has won a few awards but it fails one of the web's most important tests: the five-second test. Namely, can a user tell what your website IS in five seconds or less. If not, you have some work to do.

WeHearts website was obviously about something, but damned if I could tell at first. It took me well over a minute to determine what the navigation was, where it brought me, what I was looking at, truly, it took me over a minute to figure out what the fuck this website was telling me!

This is a website designed by an "artist." This is in comparison to Google, which is designed by engineers. I prefer the latter. If you are a website that is distributing content, like Google or a blog dedicated to content, you should be easy, readable, straight forward, and only have artistic flourishes on the edges of your design. If you're a website that is content, like sprite.com, or a band's website where the intent is to draw in listeners, feel free to have wacky-ass shit that makes no sense. But if you're trying to get words in front of people with the website as the avenue, ditch the artistic bullshit. It's annoying.

The Genius of Design

The BBC produced a five-part documentary called The Genius of Design. It's absolutely fantastic and is currently airing in the US on The Smithsonian Channel. As with lots of BBC content, they're trying their hardest to prevent it from being seen online because... I don't really know why.

I found all five parts online here. It's a Chinese website and as such takes forever to load the videos. You can also go to Isohunt.com and download a torrent for both it and the producers previous series, The Genius of Photography.

It is easily the best television retrospective on design ever produced. It's thorough, detailed, wonderfully shot, and managed to straddle the line between design porn and legitimately informative.

A Really Good Chair

Blu Dot Real Good Experiment from Real Good Chair on Vimeo.

I'm a design fanatic. I'm also a psychologist (sort of). This was an incredibly cute combination of both.

Video Game Cover Designs

Kotaku has an incredibly interesting interview with a graphic artist discussing how crappy box art for video games are in the United States.

He laments how cover art for movies and books can be much more interpretive and abstract than the default "Hero + Logo = Box art" formula. And I agree with him; video game covers are pretty bad.

But I disagree with his assertion that movie covers are any better. The VAST majority of DVD covers and movie posters are the exact same thing. I didn't use his fomula, but I referred to them as facecovers. Pick up any DVD at Wal-Mart, or go to Amazon, go to the movie section and bring up a big-ass list of DVD's. It's all a bunch of faces. Hell, some are nothing but a giant face.

The only movies that break the mold are the special editions. The ones designed to look a little special. Take, for example, the recent release of Inglorious Basterds...


It's a well-designed cover, but it's just an exercise in wedging as many faces into it as possible. They did a good job of it, but, man. So, now, take the movie's two-disc special edition.


It's amazing! It's as though the box designers are totally aware that the default design looks like the default design, and they exploit that to make the special edition cover look better.

I suppose then, if that's the case, they're brilliant. Do something for so long it looks like shit, then sell the ones that don't look like shit for more money because people want it. I like this explanation better than the interviewee's, where they simply recognize that hard-core fans are more forgiving of odd images. I think that they're just more critical of crappy covers.

Judging The Covers Of Games, And How To Make Them Better (Kotaku.com)

Good and Bad Design.

In any design project, there are two elements to the product. You have the essential elements and the non-essential elements. Both aspects have different things that make them attractive.

I read the Wikipedia page on Chris Bangle, the designer responsible for some of BMW's more bizarre design decisions of the last decade, and got to thinking about criticisms of him and his work.

I think a lot of the criticism might stem from Bangle's ostensible arrogance. After creating the Z4, he announced that they had advanced beyond Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Bilbao. More than a few people disagreed. I wasn't well-versed enough in design to really talk about it, but that didn't stop me. I thought the Z4 was hideous.


And yet, the Z4, and the 6-Series and 5-Series have aged very well. Many of the details that looked so bizarre at the time now look absolutely pedestrian, and the cars simply look alright. That was the thing, after I realized it, that showed that Bangle and Hooydonk, the other head designer, were actually very skilled. The cars aged well.

The fundamental elements of each car are incredibly solid. The proportions are absolutely perfect, and the necessary lines of the car, from the headlights to the A-pillar, the belt line that flows from the front to the back, and the proportions of the body to the height of greenhouse are all excellent. That strong foundation allows us to become used to the non-essential elements, like the 5-series headlights, and accept them as character details to an otherwise firmly designed car.

Bangle has discussed how he wants to change automotive design entirely, but he's not so pie-in-the-sky as he may want us to think. His designs played with details more than with the foundations of the cars. The Z4 is muscular and looks ready to pounce. The 6-Series is long and smooth, like it's relaxing on the road. His basic designs are rooted in long-established norms of aesthetic appeal.


Perhaps his great achievement is what he wanted all along. He got us used to wild and wacky details while supporting them with an almost invisible foundation that is classically beautiful. Cars are still cars, but they look much better, and, perhaps, we'll be more open to strange car formats that wouldn't have been accepted a few years ago, like the new 5-Series GT.

Design Today Sucks

Apple is frequently hailed as some of the best design on the planet.

WHY?!

That's not to say that Apple design isn't great, because it is. What blows my mind is the idea that what Apple is doing is somehow genius and difficult. Think about the concepts behind their work: Simplicity; ease of use; subtle beauty. These are very simply concepts that so many other companies seem damn-near incapable of getting.

You want to know why? Because every other company is trying to emulate Apple's real genius: a closed product system that fully integrates and consumes a user. If you use an iPod, that means you're tied to iTune. And that means you're tied to the App Store. And all of this is made easier if you own a Mac, which ties you to MacOS. It's a massive, vertically integrated product line with which Apple exerts an enormous amount of control over its users.

This is great for many consumers, because it makes things very easy for them. You buy all Apple, plug it all in, and it all works. The same can't be said for other companies. And for most other companies with a bit less than the genius at Apple, the desperate attempts to create a vertically integrated techno-world for their user results in disaster.

Sony has been trying it for years. EVERYTHING they make is proprietary. Their memory cards, their video and audio formats, their cables. And since Sony is actively trying to take over the world, that goes into every part of their design, which is a huge handicap.

Apple set out to make a good product, and every step they take is intended to do just that, make the best product. Steve Jobs has mentioned many times how more openness is better, and I don't think that's just lip-service to the geeks.

He's actually dedicated to the idea of openness and product freedom, but way back in the day, when the first iPod was created, a closed system worked best. The technology was haphazard and scattered amongst a variety of companies and standards. At the time, the best product was a closed product, and that just so happened to lead to a controllable system that Apple lords over.

Now all of the other companies are drooling over such power and actively limiting the products they make to try and achieve what Apple has achieved, and they end up with shit. If only they'd ask the question "what does the customer want?" as opposed to "how can we make more money off of the customer?", because contrary to popular economic retail theory, the two pursuits are not always in alignment.

What Apple does is not brilliant, it's just that all of the other companies suck.

The new iPod Grain

Buy the new iPod Grain! The size of a grain of rice, it fits into your ear canal, where, after orienting itself, it bores directly into your ear drum. The NervSync control scheme allows you control all your music with your thoughts, and allows Apple to pull a Manchurian Candidate on you when they call upon the slavering, Apple masses to form into Steve Jobs' unholy army of the night.



I've talked about design before, but this is the first time I've ever mentioned Apple. I probably should have gotten around to this sooner. Apple is, I think, the United States' premier design studio. They just happen to only design for themselves.

I'm really glad that Apple is succeeding. The number of high-profile design and engineering firms in the US is shrinking while they're growing in the rest of the world. To have an American company really competing in the cell phone space is really fantastic. Especially after Motorola drop-kicked the market to other companies following the success of the Razr. Granted, Apple outsources all of their manufacturing to Taiwanese firms like Foxconn, but that's more or less the gruntwork (not to take anything away from Foxconn. Great company).


I find the new iPod Shuffle dangerously close to the above parody. In general, I've always liked Apple's quest for simplicity. I also think, and suspect Apple also thinks, that it's the reason for Apple's meteoric success in the less-than-technically-inclined consumer market. Reduce the number of buttons, reduce the confusion.

But I think they've gone and reinvented the wheel on this one. I can't think of anyone who has a hard time controlling music. Let's face it. The basic control scheme has been around for fifty years. Anyone who would have a hard time with it are only vaguely aware that Red Skelton is no longer on the air.

I have a Nokia cell phone that has a control accessory. It has play/pause, forward, back, and pick-up/hang-up buttons. It's about 10-20% smaller than an original iPod Shuffle, weighs nothing, and allows usage of my own headphones. The control box plugs into the phone and the headphones then plug into the control box. It also has a built-in microphone for talking on the phone. (UPDATE: Apple will sell an adapter to use third-party headphones. Solves one problem, even though it costs extra.)

Why couldn't Apple do this instead of the unintuitive design they chose? I have no clue. As it stands, I see no way for the Shuffle to go back. All you can do is skip forward. Bad design. The elimination of buttons doesn't work if it necessitates the elimination of functionality. (UPDATE: You can skip back. You have to TRIPLE click within six seconds of the track start. So if you're more than six seconds in, you have to click SIX times to go back a track. That's just dumb.)

Press and hold is also a bad idea. One of the tenets of technology design is to reduce the time a user has to directly interface with a product to achieve a desired end. They try to make it simple, but holding the button for what appears to be five seconds or more is an annoyance. And then, when attempting to select playlists, if you miss the voice-over, your out of luck. The user should be able to control the list.

I like the hyper-simplistic design of the body. But 4GB is a lot of music to try and manipulate without a screen. And while on that, the lack of a screen results in a super-sleek design, but it still doesn't have a bloody screen! The Sony NW-E series of players managed to be sleek and seamless when off, but when activated a previously invisible OLED screen shone through a translucent skin. Too bad it failed because of Sony's "features" like only being compatible with Sony's music format, and only allowing access through Sony's (crappy) proprietary music program. Obviously all an attempt to copy Apple's success with iTunes, which only works because all of Apple's software is excellent. Good design can overcome restrictions. The Shuffle's restrictions are not overcome.

And if you don't care about amazing aesthetic design, the Sansa Clip is superior to Shuffle in all other ways. From a user finger standpoint, as opposed to a user eye standpoint, the Clip mops the floor with the shuffle. I think Apple has lost it's focus on the user finger with the Shuffle, and that's a critical design error. The voice tech has also missed a big opportunity for voice-controlled, as opposed to just voice announced, features. The commands could be easy and monosyllabic, like "skip," "back," and "list." If they had included that, the one-button feature would have been much more manageable since it wouldn't require the elimination of features.

As it stands, the Sansa Clip is a much more reasonable small player solution. Even the old Shuffle is more reasonable. I think the drive to make it smaller was an unwise direction for the design since it was already as small as anyone could need. A much better plan would have been an increase in features a la the Clip. And in regards to the Clip and the Shuffle's format compatibility from the above-linked AnythingButIpod comparison, the Clip now supports the two big open-source formats, FLAC and Ogg Vorbis. That gives yet another win to the Clip. Oh, and you can get a 4GB clip for $50.

S.O.D.

In an earlier post, I lamented the cost of doing business in the US, and said it has something to do with America's fall from grace in the world of architecture.

I held up Dubai as a good example, but mentioned only briefly that human rights take a back seat in that sort of development. In my plea for a middle ground, I didn't effectively communicate the degree to which human rights goes out the window.

This article for the UK's Guardian, and this one in Mother Jones, really drives home how badly the poor are treated in the pursuit of glimmering palaces and it is something anyone interested in architecture should read. It makes you feel pretty good that, even though we're not as impressive, we get some excellent buildings done while at the same time maintaining a high level of worker's rights.

That's not too bad, I think.

S.O.D.

After posting about Adam Savage's elegy for American science, it got me thinking.

I'm an amateur scientist, but I'm a professional designer and engineer. I think about design all the time and read just about every magazine or book there is on the subject. I can bemoan the same thing about American design and ingenuity.

They were once the very best in the world. While other countries may build amazing things, they would always turn to the American design and engineering firms to actually get the job done. That's no longer the case.

I can pick out any area, any focus, and the number of excellent submissions coming out of America has nearly disappeared. While there are many publications that focus on the American market, the international magazines rarely feature our country. China's new creative class is showing us how it's done, and even Europe has left us behind.

I can't even remember the last time I heard something great about an American architect. Of the 11 Pritzker Prizes for architecture handed out from its inception in 1979 to 1989, a US architect won it 6 times. From 1990 to 2008, and likely 2009, we've won it twice. And one of those years was a win by dark horse candidate Thom Mayne.

And what about American industrial design, or consumer products, or clothing? We were fairly well-represented in the IDEA awards, but those skew American because, duh, they're sponsored by BusinessWeek. And even there, of the seven design schools represented, only one was from the US. We've got Apple, but we know their language. They did the original iPod and then, six years later, the iPhone. The MacBook Air was a breakthrough only to Apple fanatics.

I think one of our major problems is exactly what these major, entrenched companies adore, our draconian and ridiculous patent and copyright system. If a company dares innovate or break new ground, they are undoubtedly sued. Apple has been sued near countless times, and Nintendo with their innovative Wii, has of course been sued. I could go on and on and ON about our patent system basically needing to be shot, but the website TechDirt explains why our system is broken apparently beyond repair in much better fashion. When your reward for breaking ground is a lawsuit, there's not much motivation to do anything.

And yet, the East Asian market (which our American companies do nothing but bitch about as a no-mans-land of piracy, lax IP laws, and terrible, uninventive, outlaws who do nothing but steal our ingenious, American ideas) is exploding on the international scene.

Yep. Oh, and back to that list of design schools: Samsung Design Membership (Korea), Hong Ik University (Korea), Seoul National (Korea), Hanyang University (Korea), Royal College of Art (United Kingdom), University of Wuppertal (Germany). Those sad, wannabe schools of design. Stealing all of our ideas and winning awards with them. Tragic.

Another grand example, and by grand, I mean GRAND. Where are all the new buildings being built? Where are all the limits being pushed? Where do the structures look like they sprang from an imagination unhindered by reality? Oh right. Dubai. And China. And Taiwan. And Russia. Hell, even South America. Just not here.

I think a lot of that has to do with how expensive the US has gotten. It's SO pricey to do anything here, nobody is bothering anymore. We have unionized workers who get paid $40 an hour to lay brick (nothing against bricklayers, it's quite a skill). The other countries may have poor workers' rights laws, but boy do they get stuff done. There has to be a middle ground.

Or insurance costs. It costs more to insure an architecture firm, the construction, and everyone involved in the US than in any other country on Earth. You can be sued because your idea is cool, sued if idea takes off, and sued if your idea fails. Big surprise no one wants to do anything in our fucked-up country, anymore.

Harping About Design

I know I'm harping about design, these past few posts, but it is a critically important subject.

Major design has taken two directions: either high-falutin' über-expensive crap aimed at people in Manhattan, or watered-down, mass-market designs aimed at the lowest common denominator. That middle ground is losing out to the large profits to be had on either extreme of the spectrum.

If we could only combine the two extremes and provide fancy designs for the masses. If only! This rant is brought to you by Motorola. Yes, Motorola, a company so caught in design doldrums that there are rumors of them selling off their entire cell phone division. They made the StarTac, then they made the Razr, and have since made shit.

Well, actually, the StarTac was cool, but Motorola's phones have been shitty for some time. The Razr was a shitty phone, it's fancy design just overshadowed that. Then, after everyone tired of the design and all the immitators, everyone realized how terrible the phone actually was. High-falutin' design covering up terrible engineering. I'll give them credit, though, it was high-falutin' design for the masses. The Razr showed it can work!

All is not well, though, as it appears Motorola is planning to shutter its entire UK development and design lab.

Motorola Firing Half its Designers at a UK Facility (Gizmodo.com)

It's Not Easy Being Green

In a recent post I said, in regards to a lack of innovation in design, "Housing and architecture is in such desperate need of it the world is now aware of it." While we have plenty of hot, edgey designers, the designs that actually make it into mass production are always sad, pale retreads of existing ideas and directions. We have not had a fundamental shift in general design trends, especially industrial design, in a long time. I attacked housing and architecture specifically because the world is cruising for an environmental bruising, and our houses are some of the worst culprits. As such, this article at SciAm was of special interest.

One thing pops into my head: regulation. The government has one tool, regulation, and when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. DO NOT REGULATE! ENCOURAGE! I have a hard time naming moments when laws actually helped a situation. Instead of simply trying to pass regulation, then, when it fails because it was a dumb fucking idea, blaming the populous who didn't want your plan, enact government funded encouragement. Subsidize environmental building. You can even come up with a cool name that you can make a logo for, like GreenHouse. Give tax breaks, hand out money, sponsor education and workshops. Make an actual difference as opposed to shooting your mouth off.

Green Buildings May Be Cheapest Way to Slow Global Warming (Scientific American)

More About Cars

In questions about "Cars of the Future," people ask designers about the future of automotive design, the designer than proceeds to lie. For exahmplay, here, Mike from Ohio asks why all cars look the same. This question is directed at Hyundai, who have been one of the most laughably blatant rip-off houses in recent memory. And, oh, lo and behold, one of his answers is CONSUMER ACCEPTANCE. When in doubt, blame the consumer as opposed to your own crap product.

"In regard [to consumer acceptance], one can look at a number of cars in the recent past with styling that was markedly different but was not accepted by the public." Recent past? What cars is he talking about? The Pontiac Aztek, which was selected as one of the 50 worst cars ever made? It failed because it was a piece of crap, not because it was hideous. For all the failures he can mention, I can mention weird-lookin' cars that succeeded. BMW's Z4, the Honda Ridgeline, and the absurd Scion xB were all great successes. They looked different. Don't confuse bad design with different design.

Cars, Again

As I posted a few days ago, I was thinking about automotive design. I was also kind of thinking about “futurists,” or arrogant jackasses who think they know how the world works. I'm a real playa' hayta' when it comes to futurists. Futurists love to talk about cars and if one of them opens their mouths you can rest pretty well-assured that they're wrong.

I wrote about how we need to re-boot design, and the auto industry is a good microcosm to discuss a lack of innovation in industry on the whole. The New York Times has a good slide show on “visions of the automotive future-ture-ture-ture!” and showcases all these hot (literally, they're all quite attractive), young designers and their concept cars as though these cars will ever be made. These are a facade to make people think that real design is taking place. As though real innovations are happening. Ha. A lie, I say!

None of these cars will be made. None. The only one that stands a chance is the Toyota A-BAT because it's quite obviously a sad rip-off of the Honda Ridgeline. There is very little innovation in its sad, pathetic lines. The Dodge Zeo not only stands little chance of being made, there's a good chance Dodge itself won't be around for much longer.

We've been waiting for the cars of the future for sixty years. Every car show, every magazine, every company PR release discusses the future and how “we're working towards it with you!” Bah. It's all shit. The words and the designs. Cars have been nothing more than a constant and measured evolution. Go back 15 years, a round number, and the “future” cars are just as futuristic and unfulfilled now as they were then. They say the concepts tell you where they are “going” with their designs. Too bad they never get there.

Look at the Mustang Mach III concept in the above photo. AMAZING car. Now look at the sad shadow of itself that it presaged for the 1994 model year. They have nothing more than a passing similarity. We need a car company either ballsy enough or desperate enough to really try something new. To actually push the envelope, as opposed to simply using cliched phrases in the brochure to convince you that this family sedan is practically the Enterprise. Do that, and I'll buy! And if you do it, and it's just a half-baked piece of crap, don't blame it on being ahead of its time. Just blame your own sad lack of skills.

Architecture as Life

In my recent post, I discussed advancing design in various areas. I thought about Frank Gehry, who has done some of the more iconic work of the 20th century, such as the Bilbao Guggenheim. I then came upon an article at the Project for Public Spaces discussing how the Bilbao museum is a piece of shit. Not artistically, mind you. The author avoids discussion of that to focus on the practical problems of such a strange building and how it has actually damaged Bilbao as much as it helped it.

I agree with the primary assertion that the building sits not to be integrated, but to literally stand out. Obviously, that was the purpose, to stand out and put Bilbao on the international map, but the building stands out in an unfriendly and impractical way. It does not accommodate life, it accommodates itself, and that's it. It has no interest in being part of anything. It is an icon that stands on its own. It has no forums, no public spaces, no areas where people can gather. You go there to marvel and then move the fuck on because there is nothing else to do.

This reminds me of an article about Frank Gehry's supposed arrogance, and how that shows through in a building that is built under the assumption that people should be grateful to have the building, to look upon it, and nothing else. I frequently deride avant garde films because they are tragically self important and tearfully unentertaining. A movie is entertainment. If it is not entertainment, then it is a very long, moving painting. Art is fine, but do not create art under the guise of making a movie, because if you call it a movie, it damn well better be entertaining. Spielberg recognizes this and makes great films that are also great to watch. The self-important wannabe film makers than call him a sellout. I scoff in their face. There's a damn good reason he's rich and you're a loser. Do I sound venomous enough?

Architecture is the same thing. A building must be a building first and art second, or it sucks. I'm sorry. If it's not a building, it's a HUGE fuck-off sculpture that a few people can sort of stand in. Not a building not a building not a building. Any great architectural achievement must, by virtue of being great, be integrated with, be absorbed with, and augment the surrounding area.

Granted, any arrogance on Gehry's part would pale in comparison to Frank Lloyd Wrights supposed arrogance. And Wright was also guilty of architecture as art when he butted heads with an engineer/contractor over some trusses at Falling Water. The engineer said part of the house would collapse unless it was reinforced, Wright disagreed. The Engineer went behind Wright's back and reinforced the building, and today if he hadn't, that section of the house would have likely collapsed. When you're not an engineer, listen to one when he speaks. Jackass.

Seeing Life From a New Angle

Well, I'm not dead. I've been concentrating on my food blog. I think about cars a lot. I'm a man and I figure that this is genetic. One of the things that strikes me is the rut that automotive design is in. I'm not talking about concept designs, those are frequently amazingly inventive, but about actual production cars.

I actually hate concept cars for that very fact. The incredible ideas and designs almost never make it into production. No matter how avant-garde or on-the-edge a car company claims to be, the designs end up derivative. The production cars are always pale shadows of the wondrous concept cars. I also hate how there's this phenomenon is explained by company insiders as a result of fear, fear that a car will be ahead of its time. The examples they inevitably cite are the Cord 810 and Ford Edsel.

They talk as though the Edsel was ahead of its time. The Cord was too fancy-looking. The public just wasn't ready and highlight all these futuristic aspects of the cars to support their idea. Well, no. The Edsel failed because it was ugly, poorly built, and aside from the flying vagina on the front, was a thoroughly conventional car. The Cord would have been a success if not for some serious quality problems, poor funding and terrible dealer support.

No, they were not too tomorrow. In fact, I don't think there's such a thing. Actually, yes. I totally agree with myself. I declare that there is no such thing as "ahead of its time." I say that there are half-baked ideas that become prescient in retrospect, but they failed not because their time hadn't come. They failed because they were irreparably crappy in some important way.

I think the auto industry and industry in general is in desperate need of fresh eyes. People who look at a situation and come up with wildly divergent ideas about providing product to that situation. Imagine a family car with three wheels, the doors consist of the entire side of the car, two seats in front, one in back, and powered by electricity. Or imagine a car that starts life is something the size of a Mini Cooper, but allows for the purchase of modules that simply snap on to the base, extending utility.

And while I say that automobiles triggered this thought line, I mean to extend this to ALL areas of design and life. This is innovation in its purest sense. Apple did a good job of this with the iPhone, but they didn't take it nearly far enough. They completely rethought the cell phone and made their eventual product purely Apple. The iPhone is also a fabulous example of innovation because it was a monstrous success because, surprise, the company actually thought it out and backed it fully! My god! What a novel concept! If it had failed, people would have undoubtedly called it ahead of its time.

This is a cry out to major corporations, not the microscopic, poorly funded ones full of edgy designers fresh from RISD or IT. The little guys are great thinkers but they suck balls at doing business. That's why none of them are successful. Edison had it 100% right. You take your profits and plow them all back into making more inventions. You innovate and you never stop innovating. His electric light was certainly ahead of its time, but he knew business first and invention second. If you make something, figure out how to sell it. If you can't sell it, you're doing something wrong.

What the hell happened to that spirit? We have wide-eyed innovators who couldn't sell fire to Eskimos because the block-headed businessmen are too busy selling them ice cubes. We are in desperate need of a complete re-thinking of our design and engineering in pick a subject. Personal computers need it, rather badly I might add. Housing and architecture is in such desperate need of it the world is now aware of it.

The businesses that develop these technologies get into such ruts that, whether they mean to or not, they never seem to get out. They become locked into a particular rule set that forces them to continue making a product according to what has come before instead of injecting re-thinks into the equation. We're limited by what we can reasonably do, for sure, but even if we dance dangerously close to the limit of practicality, what results can be a reasonable success, foment future innovation, and build strength; e.g. the original Macintosh, Frank Lloyd Wright, and the self-parking Lexus. When innovation is applied to brutal practicality, the result can be so simple it's a wonder that it isn't applied to everything, such as the environmental advances done in the Bank of American tower in New York.

For an object that was not ahead of its time, just stupid, I look to the Segway Human Transport Device. This two wheeled badge of geekiness has been an utter failure. It was hyped to the point of pain and ended up being a complete and total let-down. It's not because Dean Kamen was living in the future, it's because he has a great idea that he just can't package correctly to make it important. It's interesting that two great salesmen, not engineers, were the ones to rip the Segway a new one well before its release: Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos.

To move the world forward, we need a massive meeting of salesmen, to figure out what to make, engineers to figure out how to make it, and designers to package it in a way that truly impresses. If we could do this once a year, technological advance would probably accelerate.