75th birthday for Phillips (the screw)

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On July 7th 1936 (almost 75 years ago) Mr. Henry F Phillips received a patent for a type of screw and the accompanying screwdriver – the Phillips screw. The Phillips screw has been around for so long, and have been taken for granted for so long that I’ve never pondered about its birth – why did someone come up with a “+” shaped head to go along with the “-” shape. The only thing that went off in my mind was probably, “+” shape has four arms and somehow that makes it easier to turn and less likely to slip.

It was of course that, and more:

The Phillips-head screw and Phillips screwdriver were designed for power tools, especially power tools on assembly lines. The shallow, cruciform slot in the screw allows the tapering cruciform shape of the screwdriver to seat itself automatically when contact and rotation are achieved. That saves a second or two, and if you’ve got hundreds of screws in thousands of units (say, cars), you’re talking big time here.

And not only does a power Phillips driver get engaged fast, it stays engaged and doesn’t tend to slide out of the screw from centrifugal force. Another advantage: It’s hard to overscrew with a power tool. The screwdriver will likely just pop out when the screw is completely fastened.

Ah! That additional bit of engineering, design and thoughtfulness that almost everyone have taken for granted – and I suppose, that’s why it became such a popular fastener.

That said, consumer electronics do seem to increasingly treat screws with disdain – it is now seen more as a blot in the aesthetics, if you will. Could the screw ever one day disappear from manufactured products altogether?

[via WIRED]

Bypassing Chinese Censor

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It is well known that the Chinese government proactively clamp down on any media that it deems to run contrary to its own interest. Besides keeping a tight lid on official press such as newspapers and TV reports, popular online forums are also actively patrolled to keep a tight patrol on dissidents that run contrary to their appetites.

Chinese netizens, of course, aren’t simply willing to lie low and submit to that. Apart from technical solutions such as proxy surfing, they’ve also been quite creative in forum posts. Chinese forums are commonly littered with different-but-phonetically-similar words in place of more sensitive terms. But that too, gets caught by the officials pretty quickly.

The latest round in this cat-and-mice game is rather ingenious – rearranging words to read from a different orientation to fool the (very likely computerized) scanning. For instance, instead of writing from left to right, the posts are authored from right to left, or even scrambled to a top-bottom arrangement. This, in fact, heralds back to the traditional Chinese script back when the times where it was written on bamboo strips vertically from right-to-left. Thus, it makes perfect sense for human readers, but State computers may have a tougher time combing.

An example of the scrambling software:

bypassing-chinese-censor

Which made me ponder – captchas have come to become an integral part of the Internet landscape to verify if one is a human or not. This could mean having to recognize jumbled-up digits or alphabets, or recognizing cats from dogs. These are tasks deemed easy for the average human being, but tough for computers to crack.

Could there be other similar hacks around censored forums that are easy for humans to decipher, but difficult for computers to crack? What are some of the methods that defies simple computing power? And tools to achieve this in a forum setting? Scrambling orientation is one of them – could there be more (and more interesting ones too)?

[via WSJ]

Zoomii – Bringing Real Life to Amazon – Fail

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Zoomii was a website that took the books on Amazon and turned them into a more real-life like display with shelf presence. The covers of each book was arranged in neat ‘shelves’ where you could 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 attempted to search for particular genre or books (e.g. ‘Design’), Zoomii brought 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 hard work convincing the user they’re in a bookstore, with one user-search you were dragged right out of that illusion and back to the 2-D world – this did not make much sense to me.  I suppose that is why the web site is now history.

Discussion: Design Competitions worth it?

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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?

Sliding Radio

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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.

Perforated Container Architecture

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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]

Political Cartoons – Clay Bennett

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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.

Re-Braun

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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:

rebraun

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?

Bomomo Painter

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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

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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!