This weekly edition of links is connected by a thread that exemplifies the importance of designing, building, and delivering products and experiences.
Starting with a revealing interview with Apple’s Senior Vice President of Industrial Design, Sir Jonathan Ive about about the rigorous focus everyone at the company has on designing, prototyping, and making better products.
The ability to visualize an complex idea is important when working in teams. A new tool unveiled by Duarte Design this week helps you visualize a concept when presenting. At Diagrammer you can find and download a PowerPoint ready visual at the cost of a music track.
A third way to visualize a different perspective is putting your weight on pedals and literally transporting yourself into a world of beauty.
Designing, Building, and Delivering Products and Experiences
The three links that caught my eye this week are:
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At the Guardian, Sir Joanathan Ive is the iMan cometh. In an interview with Mark Prigg, Science and Technology Editor, the Londoner at Apple explains what the company's design process is like:
It is so important to be light on your feet, inquisitive and interested in being wrong. You have that wonderful fascination with the what if questions, but you also need absolute focus and a keen insight into the context and what is important - that is really terribly important. Its about contradictions you have to navigate.
[...] most of our competitors are interested in doing something different, or want to appear new - I think those are completely the wrong goals. A product has to be genuinely better. This requires real discipline, and that’s what drives us - a sincere, genuine appetite to do something that is better.
The people using your product come first.
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The firm that brought us Resonate is at it again with Diagrammer, a service created to make it easier for people to find the appropriate visuals for their presentations. From the press release:
To create Diagrammer, Duarte sorted through years of her designers’ sketchbooks. This search revealed patterns of diagrammatic communication, classified by a set of categories that no one else had identified. Virtually all business concepts fell within these categories, among them such ideas as SEGMENT, FLOW, JOIN, STACK and NETWORK. Diagrammer’s thousands of slide design options fall under these general categories.
Taxonomy made easy.
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While there's no substitute for actually being on a bike, Martin de Turah gets incredibly close to the feeling of riding through the countryside and the city in Expo bicycle city, a video experience that will have you run to the closest bike store in search for your model.
Part of the Danish pavilion
EXPO Shanghai 2010
The other two-wheeler. My first one.