Design Eye
By Dina - October 8th, 2010
The other day, my creative director and I were sketching ideas around Speck’s new branding initiatives. One thing lead to another and we got to waxing poetic about half doors. Well, Tark did. But I couldn’t help but appreciate the delightful puzzle it presented: where do half-doors come from? who invented that?
World Wide Web to the rescue!
First a definition (a la wikipedia): A Dutch door (American English) or stable door (British English) or half door (Hiberno English) is a door divided horizontally in such a fashion that the bottom half may remain shut while the top half opens.
And now, a story. This one’s from Frank Fullard, a flickr gentile: In the 1690s English monarch William III was short of money, which he attempted to rectify by the introduction of a Window Tax. As the name suggests, this was a tax levied on the windows of a property. The upper classes, having the largest houses, paid the most. Some wealthy individuals used their ability to pay as a mark of status and demonstrated their wealth by ostentatiously building homes with many windows.
However, people generally went to great pains to avoid paying the tax and many windows were bricked up for that very reason.
Irish cottagers developed their own unique and innovative approach to avoid paying the tax by inventing the half-door. It was possible to leave the bottom half closed, thus keeping children in and chickens and other animals out; while leaving the top half open thus maximizing the amount of light coming in. Because the light coming through was from a door, rather than a window, they avoided paying the tax, and in the process became daylight robbers!
And there you have it. Thanks for joining us folks!
Foresight
By Dina - October 6th, 2010
Got futurism on the mind, folks.
Been traveling through Don Norman’s future vision by way of The Design of Future Things. Norman imagines a future where today’s design shortcomings are tomorrow’s design opportunities. And in his book, he offers product design principals to leveraging them.
Norman crafts his around two, closely related trends:
- Technology’s growing capacity for automation
- Designers’ enthusiasm to automate as much as possible
Consider partial corrective controls in automobiles, where a vehicle monitors safety conditions and will automatically correct for them. A “smart” car might engage the brakes if it senses you’re too close to the vehicle in front of you. What about smart houses which change room lighting and music in response to your mood? Norman also pictures “automatic banking systems [that] already exist [and] determine whether you are eligible for a loan. Automated medical systems [that] determine whether you should receive a particular treatment or medication. Future systems [that] will monitor your eating, reading, you music and television preferences. Some systems [that] will watch where you drive, alerting the insurance company, the rental car agency, or even the police if they decide that you have violated their rules.”
The implications of these systems sound very Fahrenheit 451. But the the essence of the design problem is majestic regardless of application:
- How do we engineer the capacity for machines to intuit human behavior, anticipate and judge our actions in order to effectively respond through monitoring, reporting, or just plan taking control of the situation?
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Events
By Dina - October 4th, 2010
In just a couple of weeks you will find Speck Design at the Cisco Design Innovation Conference. The conference takes place in San Jose from October 13 – 14, during annual Cisco Design Tech Week. According to Cisco, this is a first-time collaboration between the mechanical engineering community at Cisco and the annual Cisco Product Innovation Day (CPID). It’s pretty flattering for Speck to be among one of four product design firms invited to join this closed event.
Considering our fast-paced, “go-team-go”, “on to the next project”, climate of our culture, it’s nice to add innovation day to the to-do list. It’s the ideal excuse for us to take that step back we know we always should be doing. And this particular step-back is about crafting a comprehensive survey of our thermal and mechanical innovations to-date, and synthesizing it for folks outside the studio. It will also be nice to see what everyone else has been up to.
Events
By Dina - September 11th, 2010
We enjoyed a fantastic ride, BBQ Speck Design’s annual Bike Day, this time happening in conjunction with our fascinating Through the Eyes of an Expert series event. Following our ride we will heard from coach and racer Billy Innes from the Bay Area’s renowned Bicycle Outfitter and Shimano engineer Mark Hubbell. The two will provide a demo and discussion of the Dura Ace electronic components, Di2 – new electronic shifting mechanisms. It was a fantastic time!
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Speck Observer
By Dina - September 10th, 2010
So, we’re applying for a design award.
You have to be a little more familiar with the Speck Design mind in order to really appreciate the novelty of this particular moment–but to catch you up to speed in a phrase: we don’t do design awards.
An enduring concept that’s emerged from the innovation management conversations among Speck Design’s management team, board of directors, and advisory council is this a notion that the most organic, sustainable and effective way to craft our vision of the future is to reward the behaviors and nurture the patterns that get us there. Reward systems fundamentally carve the trajectory of a person and the nature of a system, industry, or relationship. And as a principle, rewards operate irrespective from an agent’s active energy to drive toward a vision of the future or their natural impulse to reward those behaviors in which they delight.
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In the Neighborhood
By Dina - September 6th, 2010
Speck Design’s CEO Elisa Jagerson recently attended the grand opening of AQT Solar, the world’s only dedicated thin-film solar cell manufacturer, now located in Sunnyvale, California. AQT Solar leads at the forefront of the solar energy revolution, having created a new low-cost solution to solar panel production.
Providing an alternative to the wafer silicon solar cells that are the industry standard, AQT Solar leverages thin-film solar cells, which deliver a smaller, lighter and cheaper material to convert sunlight to solar power. The AQT cells convert sunlight into usable solar power at a 14 percent efficiency rate. While this is competitive with the CIGS space, it is about half the conversion rate of the wafer silicon cells; the trade-offs however, of faster production speed and greater production quantities, make them competitive with their wafer cell counterparts.
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Press Release
By Dina - August 19th, 2010
PALO ALTO, California – August 19, 2010 – Founder of Speck Design product development firm, David Law, is leading the entrepreneurship keynote at Stanford University’s 2010 Roundtable on Entrepreneurship Education. Each year, REE convenes world-class business, design, science, and engineering faculty to engage topics in entrepreneurship pedagogy. This September, REE delegates will convene in Edinburgh to problem-solve ways to stimulate innovative new ventures emerging from the labs and lecture halls of universities.
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Toolkit
By Dina - August 19th, 2010
The global economic shakedown of late has rattled and re-mixed global business; but more importantly, it’s reignited a passionate belief in creative resilience. A recent keyword search performed by the New York Times yielded 25,000 LinkedIn members with “innovation” in their job titles. This figure excludes the many more professionals who too dream, tinker, and craft the next great product, service, or business model that will change lives and move markets. The school of innovation has reemerged in force, crowning corporate dialogue as the golden arbiter of sustainable success, and wrapping the collective imagination of savvy designers and shrewd business minds alike in a halo of purpose.
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