The Never-Hungry Caterpillar: Empathy in design...

That white blob sketched into the image above is the Never-Hungry Caterpillar, a concept designed and/or written about by Marc Hassenzahl and Evgeny Morozov which calls users' attention to the power wasted by electronics in standby mode. Here's how: "The Caterpillar has three different modes: It breathes slowly in the case of 'normal' energy consumption through a device, such as a TV. If the TV is switched to stand-by, the Caterpillar starts to twist and turn awkwardly, as if in pain. This can be resolved by disconnecting the TV entirely. The metaphor of a caterpillar touches upon people's tendency to help and take care of living things."  What's innovative here is the play on guilt and empathy - this isn't a blinking light or a buzzing alarm, it's a living thing in agony! Or at least that's the trick; they're counting on a very basic, almost lizard-brain instinct to help something in pain. As we grow desensitized to various alerts and messages, this is essentially an escalation in the arms race for our attention. Shrewd, manipulative... and possibly, effective!

Kombo: Fun with specialized tools!

I have a soft spot for specialized tools: niche products refined through decades or centuries of iterations by and for the experts. As a layperson, seeing a product of this type is like looking into a parallel universe where they're ubiquitous - it's amazing not merely that they exist, but that they're so well-developed. The Kombo Tool fits in this category, and if you couldn't tell by looking (I sure couldn't), it's for fishing. It's a bonker (yes!), a filet knife, a scooper, and a sharpener - of course, it's waterproof and it floats in case it's dropped overboard. It sounds like a well-designed product that I'll never use - but it just makes me happy that it exists!
[via Gizmodo]

The Aspirin Point: Shrinking ingredients liberate design

Rain Noe recently wrote in Core77 about the "Aspirin Point", where the functional component of a product (a few milligrams of the drug) becomes so small that the physical design of the product (the pill) becomes essentially independent. This is incredibly liberating from a design point of view, because the product can be designed purely for the best possible use case. The Aspirin Point is gradually reaching consumer electronics, and USB flash drives are one of the first products to get there. In the tiny drive shown here (images from Rain), the cylinder that protrudes from the port isn't needed for electronics - it's purely ergonomic and aesthetic. What's the right shape? The right diameter, edge, and surface for a user to be able to remove it easily but prevent snagging on things? It's great to consider those questions all by themselves!

The Yellow Dog Project: Designing a message...

As a dog owner - especially since my dog is an energetic pit bull - I try to be responsible when my dog is approached by other animals or children. But it can be difficult, when even the humans don't always ask before interacting with her - and when they do, the question often carries a distinct connotation: "Is she friendly?"  I don't want to answer "no" because she is friendly, but she also needs her space, so the answer to that question is longer and more awkward than the asker expected. The Yellow Dog Project is trying to make that answer both easier and preemptive, suggesting a yellow ribbon or bow on the leash of any dog who needs this kind of consideration. It's a good attempt so far: the yellow-ribbon signal is flexible enough to be easy but specific enough to be recognizable. The trick is getting word of it to catch on, because its effectiveness will depend on reaching a critical mass. An awareness campaign by the ASPCA would be a good ol' 20th-century method, but the Yellow Dog Project currently has over 23,000 likes on Facebook. That's a start - now if only other dogs could be taught what that yellow ribbon means, too...

Good Design Starts with the Right Problem

I recently attended a workshop on the Stanford d.school's design innovation methodology given by Jeremy Utley, and he shared an excellent story about defining the right problem before designing the solution. Paraphrasing and simplifying: a project brief called for less-expensive infant incubators (about $2k) for use in Nepalese hospitals, where normal incubators (about $20k) were too costly to purchase and maintain. It sounded like a straightforward, well-defined project - until the team went to Nepal and noticed that there were no babies in the hospital. They learned that most babies were actually born in rural areas because parents couldn't make the long trip to a faraway hospital - and so the problem was redefined. Instead of "a low-cost incubator for hospitals," the real need was to "keep infants warm in rural areas" - in a way that's easy, portable, and works without electricity.  The result of the effort became the Embrace Infant Warmer, a $25 sleeping-bag-like pouch that uses a phase-change material ("rechargeable" in boiling water) to keep a constant temperature. It's a fantastic example of how assumptions should always be questioned as a first step in design - it can mean the difference between merely giving the client what they ask for, versus truly giving  users what they need!

eBooks Stuck in the Physical World

I do a lot of reading on my digital devices: I read Kindle books on my phone and my tablet (until I left the dang thing on a plane), and read plenty of newspaper, magazine, and blog articles on mobile and laptop screens. Strangely, only one of these sources seems stuck in the past: eBooks, which insist on dividing the text into pages. Pages have no meaning on digital devices - just look at all the content that's happy to scroll vertically - but eBook software seems to insist that users want the "page" metaphor to live on. Gizmodo recently asked why, and Wired (where this image comes from!) did the same a year ago. Long story short: it's a crowd-pleaser, more a showpiece to entice buyers than a feature that helps users. At least for now - it could be argued that by comforting reluctant users with familiar paradigms, eBook apps are positioning themselves to usher those users gradually into the future. If so, I'm eagerly awaiting that future, where the versatility of digital content can be leveraged instead of dumbed down - and in the meantime, having the option to de-paginate wouldn't hurt!

No (Connected) Product is an Island

Products these days are tending away from being stand-alone entities, and are instead gateways connected to ecosystems of other products and services. An iPhone isn't an island; the App Store, iTunes, iCloud, and all of Apple's services are critical parts of what it is. This is a shrewd play for companies with good ecosystem offerings like Apple, Android, and Amazon - but for those without solid accompanying ecosystems, it means that even very strong product design isn't enough. Gizmodo pointed out a few well-designed products that are suffering this fate in a post titled Hardware Comes Last: the Blackberry Z10, Nokia Lumia 920, and Chromebook Pixel. In each case, the individual product is excellent - but the ecosystems are so lacking that the whole product falls short. Perhaps the best hope is that some design elements will be stolen from these orphaned products and find their way into major ecosystems!