Zoomii is a website that takes the books on Amazon and turns it into a more real-life like display with shelf presence. The covers of each book is arranged in neat ’shelves’ where you can pan to browse around just (almost) like when you’re in a real bookstore. This perhaps makes online book browsing somewhat more intuitive and leisurely, unlike in typical sites where book-browsing or searching is more like a task to complete rather than part of the joy.

One major flaw for me though, is when you try to search for particular genre or books (e.g. ‘Design’), Zoomii brings you a search list instead of zipping you (I’d imagine myself flying) across the shelves to the relevant section (and maybe with a librarian-sounding voice going “Here’re the books you’re looking for” - alright, maybe not the voice).

After all that hardwork convincing the user they’re in a bookstore, with one user-search you are dragged right out of that illusion and back to the 2-D world - this doesn’t make much sense for me.

Regular reader Scott asks:

We designers and innovators struggle all the time to get our name “out there” so we can more quickly push our designs into reality.  Entering (and winning) such contests as Muji can certainly help, but at what cost?

If you sit back and look at the bigger picture of what is happening, it is really quite sad.  Let’s say a huge company needs to develop a new fun dispenser for their soap product.  They can spend millions hiring a prestigious design firm to get a filtered short list of a few new ideas put together by a team of perhaps 5 designers, or they can sponsor a design competition - disguise their motive in the form of a “challenge” to the designers of the world.

As in most design competitions, it would not be surprising to see 5000 designers enter from around the world.  Each designer would carefully follow the rules, in many cases pay a FEE of up to perhaps $100 or so and then spend hours carefully and vividly illustrating their novel work, presenting it in the exact form required by the rules of the competition (and the sponsoring company).  They would then submit their invention, their design, their intellectual property to so-called “judges” who work with the sponsor to determine select winners.  During this process, the sponsoring company has the privilege of inspecting the outcome of perhaps the biggest brainstorm session in the world.

The cost to the company is minimal (pay the judges and award $10,000/ $5,000/$1,000 to the winners).  For this small cost, the company gets to see incredibly diverse and innovative concepts from great minds of many parts of the world (ideas that have not be shown before) AND they get the rights to the designs they want AND they don’t have to pay royalties or give the struggling designer any design credit to HIS or HER design, AND they also get free advertisement as a result of being the sponsoring company (it looks like great PR - a win win win for the company).

Are we fools here?  I’m surprised all companies don’t tap into this wealth of eager brains.  We need to form a union to protect our innovations from the corporate world.

If we don’t win, which is often the case, we don’t even get any constructive criticism from the judges for our fee.  So we don’t really learn from the experience (design wise) and honestly, we can’t be certain that the judges even looked at our designs.  We often don’t even get a courtesy email to let us know that we didn’t make the next round.  I wish there was a better way.

What are your thoughts?

I’d post my own thoughts in the comments section - join in with your views!

The 08 Radio is a concept that interestingly fuses technology and plain old-schoolness. The tuning bar common to most analog radio receivers is magnified to a structural scale, while the radio itself (along with the speaker) travels along the rail to seek your favorite station.

I like how the screen seem to have unfolded and stretched straight horizontally, bursting through the sides of the plastic housing of the sliding unit to display its full content in one shot. The old-schoolness of the font and calibration, as well as the colors & materials on the speaker were also a delightful nod to the bygone style of the past.

The design is by Michael Silvanto, a part of the aivan! group based in Finland, whose website seem to have an even greater affinity for simplicity than their designs.

It’s rather incredible how the details in surface treatment makes all the difference in this prefab container:

In Darmstadt, Germany, The Alice-Hospital vom Roten Kreuz has commissioned Angela Fritsch Architekten to build a pavilion in the park in front of their main building, and the final result is a really creative design. The pavilion was constructed using a conventional system of prefabricated containers. In order to integrate it into the park, the surface finish of the facade is committed to adhering sheeting system patented by Hannes Freising from architectural facade firm Huellwerk. This ZGG pavilion (Zentrum Ganzheitlicher Gesundheit) was to consist of a cheap container box with a wallpaper made out of sheet metal. This golden cover has ornamental leaves cut out of it, making it a shiny and decorative structure in the hospital’s park.

I thought the solution was really elegant - transforming the drab container into 1) a pleasant thing to look at, just like a tree shedding its autumn leaves; 2) fitting into the context of the park; and 3) doing so at a (presumably) very low cost.

[via freshome]

In the current train system design, the train has to accelerate/decelerate to a complete stop for every station to pick up passengers. The video above shows a very interesting concept for an alternative solution to mass commuter trains - it is a train that doesn’t stop.

Instead of stopping, it’d have a slider carriage on the top of the train. The slider carriage serves as an intermediary ‘pod’ where boarding and alighting passengers transit (before diffusing into the main train carriages). Commuters at the station wishing to board the train would enter the carriage (and presumably at some point before the train actually arrives, the doors are shut). The train seamlessly picks up this carriage, while depositing its own carriage to drop commuters wishing to alight.

Without having to stop for stations, train journeys can be drastically reduced without sacrificing passenger convenience - it is the best of both worlds! I’m definitely not an expert in locomotion engineering, but on the surface it does seem like a possible concept (hey, we’ve sent people onto the Moon!).

A small (social) concern for me might be how effective/efficient can passengers diffuse from the pod into the rest of the carriages. In a system like this, there is even more inertia to venture away from the sliding pod if you’re just hanging on for a few stops, and people are likely to gather in the few carriages nearest the pod. This could however probably be solved by having multiple sliding pods instead of the singular one as visualized in the video.

If you can read Chinese, here’s a more detailed explanation by the inventor Chen Jian Jun. It seems like he’s been working hard trying to pitch his ideas to various agencies (including government, rail etc), but hasn’t been particularly successful.

What are your thoughts on this?

Pulitzer Prize winner for editorial cartooning Clay Bennett is an editorial cartoonist on the Christian Science Monitor - some of his comics (I guess this would probably apply to most editorial/political cartooning) are quite astute, and I thought his drawing style was quite nice too - refined and well-colored. My favorites are above.

Back in the 1960s especially, Braun was among the very cutting edge in industrial design - they were the pioneer and the leaders that played a major role in defining and shaping conversations on aesthetics and design. Even today, modern design icons from Apple are still arguably very much inspired by the Braun aesthetics of the bygone era.

The Braun Prize is still very much a coveted prize for any design students in the world, though you’d have to admit, Braun itself as a corporation has faded somewhat significantly in its influence on the design world.

Industrial designer Joe Doucet noticed this issue, and took the initiative to start the speculative design efforts designed to reignite what made Braun great:

Doucet hopes the self-funded prototypes (presented to the manufacturer earlier this year) will help initiate a change in the Braun aesthetic, which, since Dieter Rams’ days as head of design, has “lacked distinction”. “It’s been 40 years since Braun was in the design museum,” says Doucet. “The products are still engineered very well, but there is no ethos. If you remove the Braun branding they could be by any other manufacturer.”

Here are his three speculative designs for a toaster, mobile phone and music player:

For me, I’d agree with the assessment that Braun has faded from design leadership in many (most?) of its consumer product segments. Perhaps they’ve decided that one-style-can’t-fit-all-demographics; perhaps no one could take on Dieter Ram’s hats. In any case, as I glance across the home appliances aisle now, it is difficult to pick out a Braun apart from its (imho) still very iconic BRAUN logo.

What do you think of Doucet’s proposals? Do they work for you?

[via iconeye]

Bomomo is a rather interesting (if awkward) web painting tool - instead of controlling a still cursor as you would in Photoshop and such, the cursor for Bomomo are bouncing, twisting, or moving around. You get a whole series of cursors (seen at the bottom of the screen) with various behaviors; what happens next is probably a mixture of luck and design intuition.

Try it!

The Eco-Zoo is a rather interesting website with a very light-hearted touch to be more environmentally friendly. The topic isn’t what you’d term informative or authoritative, though what I really liked is the Flash execution: whimsical, detailed, delightful and unmistakably Japanese. See it for yourself!

1969

The Apollo 11 landed on the moon, marking one of the most significant milestone in mankind’s conquest into space. It was one of the defining moments in mankind’s history - the sense of awe, hope, humility, and a basket of other indescribable emotions can still be felt through as one takes a walk back through the event transcript:

Then Armstrong said the famous words, “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.”

Shortly after landing, before preparations began for the EVA, Aldrin broadcast that: “This is the LM pilot. I’d like to take this opportunity to ask every person listening in, whoever and wherever they may be, to pause for a moment and contemplate the events of the past few hours and to give thanks in his or her own way.

He then took Communion privately.

At 2:56 UTC on July 21, Armstrong made his descent to the Moon’s surface and spoke his famous line “That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind” exactly six and a half hours after landing.Aldrin joined him, describing the view as “Magnificent desolation.”

2008

Fast forward to 2008 - the Phoenix lands, and locates one of the critical factors for possibility of life in space - water on Mars. And here’s the defining moment - a tweet:

The evolution of technology and communication?