Tuesday 22 February 2011

Edwin Himself is Edwin Negado » 10 lessons for young designers. By John C Jay of Wieden+Kennedy

Some thing is better put them just as they come, so here it goes.
1: Be authentic. The most powerful asset you have is your individuality, what makes you unique. It’s time to stop listening to others on what you should do. 2: Work harder than anyone else and you will always benefit from the effort. 3: Get off the computer and connect with real people and culture. Life is visceral. 4: Constantly improve your craft. Make things with your hands. Innovation in thinking is not enough. 5: Travel as much as you can. It is a humbling and inspiring experience to learn just how much you don’t know. 6: Being original is still king, especially in this tech-driven, group-grope world. 7: Try not to work for stupid people or you’ll soon become one of them. 8: Instinct and intuition are all-powerful. Learn to trust them. 9: The Golden Rule actually works. Do good. 10: If all else fails, No. 2 is the greatest competitive advantage of any career.
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Edwin Himself is Edwin Negado » 10 lessons for young designers. By John C Jay of Wieden+Kennedy

Sunday 20 February 2011

the creators project: Stefan Sagmeister

The Creators Project its an initiative that put together people whose work is connected with the use of new media in their creative processes and/or products. It's a really interesting sample of works and visions from different areas of the creative practice such as Design, Music, Film and Art just for name a few, but also is a tasteful gathering of different culture flavors that show us the singularities of every culture in the approach to creative work.
Between the featured personalities are big names like Spike Jones, MOS Architects, Peaches, and Phoenix, but my personal selection is one of my favorites graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister, who is also a big fish, but never the less, always fun.

Monday 7 February 2011

James Dyson:Design what it should be


James Dyson, founder of Dyson corporation and responsible for the world famous machine looking vacuum cleaners, share his achievements and inspirations in a relaxed show-and-tell talk called ''the art of engineering'' at MIT. Dyson, graduated from the Royal College of Art, tell the story of how he went into engineering and how important it is not to be only a Designer or a Engineer, but to be a Designer/Engineer, and inventor as he said, and the relevance to make mistakes: ''...I think the schools got all wrong, they should be giving good grades to the ones that makes mistakes and learn from them.'' something that himself take to the limit, for his first cyclone vacuum cleaner he spend almost 5 years and did 5,126 prototypes!

The British inventor also criticized the definition of Design as a marketing tool arguing a more meaningful and systemic view that he inherit from one of his heroes, Buckminster Fuller, from whom also borrow the beautiful advice: ''...you see what needs to be done and do it.''

At he end of the talk, in Q&A, he discuss how he manage the creative processes within his organization and how he see the future regarding the rising of the new Asian productive power. Surely an invigorating example of how to make you way through with a huge accent on innovation.

Saturday 5 February 2011

The hard side of Opensource

Arduino The Documentary (2010) English HD from gnd on Vimeo.

Opensource is probably the most philosophically relevant idea coming from the computer sciences. Actually the idea of sharing knowledge it's, of course, not new but it the age on which patent and rights have drag the technical knowledge to a exclusive corporate corner sharing information about how things work it's a revolutionary endeavor. In a good metaphor expressed in this documentary the Opensource is compared with Gutenberg's movable type printer. Before Gutenberg the production of books were in hands of a few, mostly cleric,that controlled what could be read, hence what could be know, after him the amount and more important the variety of books explode given the people the chance of build themselves for themselves a body of knowledge to understand the world. Gutenberg's printer was a very important piece of Open hardware that boost society into a new direction.

Today we are confronting a similar scenario. We are surrounding by technological devices like cellphones, computers, consoles, mp-players, etc. That we barely know how to use and we are even less inform about how they actually works. This disinformation has huge consecuenses in a world on which the number of this kind of devices may be even bigger than the actual population. Think on what is lost every time that a computer or a cellphone goes to the trash, maybe the system as a whole doesn't work but, what about all those little parts that give life to that cellphone or that computer? what if we can do something with those parts? what if we can play and tinker with that old low resolution cellphone camera or that screen? what about the spinning wheel of that broken mouse or the optics of that old digital camera? the possibilities are amazingly wide. For doing that we need knowledge and tools, but as we know big part of the knowledge comes from playing with the tools and here is where Arduino comes into scene. this piece of very cheap and non-exclusive piece of hardware is the tool which allow us to start connecting all those little parts and give them a purpose, whatever this purpose would be. Here is the potential of this little device that have been revolutionizing the digital world, and the revolution consist on materialize the digital world itself for sake of fun, what purpose beautiful and productive than that.

Following fun and with the help of Opensource tools as Arduino and Processing amazing things have come to life like 3d printers that cost little more than a thousand dollars or new music instrument and a lot of new robots. Opensource tools like Arduino bring down the technical threshold of electronic devices world to a level that allow not specialized people to start to interact in a expressive and creative way with it, and the best part... in a social way too, because is not about what I can do and how I can make profit out of that (not only at least) but what We can do and how we take this thing into the next level.

Opensource means sharing knowledge, and sharing knowledge means better and faster understanding and develop of communities. It may not be new but as a movement based on the technologies that are changing the face of our daily living surely, is a philosophy to adopt.