Category: Design

Next week there’ll be another conference on Design Research in Rio De Janeiro. Unfortunatly the conference website is extremely lousy. I can’t even remember a conference website with so superficial and useless information. Obviously the organizers don’t want to get too international. First of all I was suprised to read “3rd international conference” in the…

Christopher Gee is running a weblog subtitled »a blog about the graphic design industry«. He is doing interviews with people from the design profession about various topics. It is very helpful that Christopher listed some issues raised within each interview. So you get an overview before listening to the audio. I quote from an interview…

I am currently working on defining three seminars that lay out a foundation for design education. These courses are not oriented towards the formal and technological aspects of media, but rather focus on the psychological and cognitive questions involved with almost any design work. This is what I came up with: Density: Designing for effectiveness…

Ecolanguage.net uses visual animations to explain economical and ecological processes. The animations are planned for a common visual code to represent all issues involved with economy and ecology. They have just three types of transaction: yellow represent energy, red represents money and black represents information. It comes pretty close to what I intended with the…

I have been doing HTML pages since 1994 when xMosaic 1.0 hit the FTP servers worldwide. The only really radical changes to webdesign for a very very long time had been a) JavaScript, b) tables and c) frames. I hesitate to include CSS, because it was kind of buggy and browser specific for a long…

Jason Kottke is an invited weblog author at AIGA conference in San Francisco. He wrote some useful commentary and round-ups: Preparation, Lonely in a packed room, 20 courses not taken in design school, Friday round-up.

I am reading John Maeda’s Simplicity-Weblog from time to time – especially because I offered a seminar about this topic a while ago. Most of the posts of John are typical day-in-day out observations of a designer sensible for the details: sometimes I feel he can make an article out of anything (which tends to…

I am busy doing things that I can’t learn anything from right now (which is always kind of hard work!). But I am trying to catch up with what is going on at the NextD initiative (I wrote about that before). NextD is currently a spot where designers are thinking about »design thinking«. An example…

Colleen Taugher is speaking out what many (me too) are propagating for a long time now: It is clear that the most exciting design professionals work in complex, multi-disciplinary, dispersed teams in order to develop innovative solutions to some of modern life’s slipperiest problems. While design students will still need some old-school training in basic…

Technorati is running a new »Blog finder« feature: You can find weblogs that cover a certain topic. I looked for »Design« and I got the usual suspects but also some (to me) unknown gems – like Drawn, a blog about illustrators. This blog doesn’t even list (I guess there is an issue with the tagging…

Andrew Dillon in December 2004 joined the group of thinkers that question simplistic approaches to effiiciency of communication that ask for speed instead of pace: Is there a temporal aspect to interaction that we should acknowledge? Surely there is a pace that leads to the best fit for each of us between tool and task,…

The KDE project has issued a short list of things the’re aiming for in a future release of Linux desktop. Interestingly the first item on their list is »breathtaking beauty«: Breathtaking Beauty putting an emphasis on the form and style of software in addition to the function of it creating visually impactful interfaces that support…

I am glad to see music video creators running formal experiments and pushing styles forward. Here are some: The video of Agenda Suicide by The Faint the former reminds me a lot of the song Remind Me by Röyksopp also a must see is Let Forever Be by Chemical Brother (directed by Michael Gondry) Facing…

There have been three convents of the German Association of Design Theory and Research (DGTF). These are available online now. There are audio recordings of the latest convent available.

I just came across the NextD site – an organisation located in New York – with some interesting interviews – the latest with Richard Saul Wurman. NextDesign Leadership Institute was created as an experiment in innovation acceleration. We wondered if it might be possible for a small team of practicing designers to help speed the…