Dieter Rams - Good design in 10 Commandments

Dieter Rams - Good design in 10 Commandments on Vitsoe.
Good design makes a product useful
"A product is bought in order to be used. It must serve a defined purpose – in both primary and additional functions. The most important task of design is to optimise the utility of a product."

Amen.

Sustainable design links

Cradle to Cradle links:
The NEXT Industrial Revolution, by McDonough & Braungart, 1998 (Essential primer).
Prof. Dr. Michael Braungart
Ted Talk - William McDonough: The wisdom of designing Cradle to Cradle.
Waste = Food - Cradle to Cradle movie.
EPEA - Environmental Protection and Encouragement Agency.
McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry

Eco-Design and Eco-Efficiency links:
Okala from IDSA - Industrial Design Society of America. Super resource for eco-design in their links and PDFs.

Speedlinks

Form inspiration? 12 Futuristic Cellular Structures
Over on Makezine 3 videos of the work of one of the UK's finest Automata makers - Keith Newstead.
Macbook pro dissasembly
How car's are made - big industrial robots.
Keyboards - time for a change? So remind me again why we use qwerty? - A system devised to slow down typists. On my current keyboard the "designers" were so lame that they didn't even see fit to add a delete key.

Top 40 Arduino Projects of the Web -Physical Computing

Top 40 projects on the web using Arduino Micro-controllers, many with tutorials.
The rise of low cost micro-controllers, such as the open source Arduino will be one of the big driving forces in ID / product innovation over the next decade. I used one to build a system to take the milk drop picture in the banner (pics).

Our newly developing course in "smart products" should start to ride that wave.
The web of things and all that jazz.

Bill Gross on TED - Idealab

Bill Gross on TED.com, here is innovation.
Idealab is one of the most inventive and successful Technology companies, with projects such as Aptera (high efficiency vehicle), desktop factory ($5000 Rapid prototyping machine!), and their work on solar energy - all truly revolutionary.

Last week, some of the PDT 1st year were grumbling, "Why to we have to do the maths module?" (Engineering for Designers), here Bill Gross is giving you an answer. Industrial Design is obsessed with novelty and innovation, technology IS one of the biggest drivers for innovation. In order to develop this level of innovative products, services and solutions, designers need to be "in bed" with Engineers and Scientists.

If you want to work with Engineers, you got to be able to talk their language - that language is Maths.

What is Industrial Design?

It's an interesting question. A question that I often ask to interviewees applying for the course, rarely do I get an excellent answer. That's not surprising really, I'd argue that it's an exceptionally difficult question to answer in an interview:

"Design, itself, is often difficult to define to non-designers because the meaning accepted by the design community is not one made of words...."

I wonder how many of our UWE PD 1st year students actually know what is Industrial design, and what it means to be a professional designer.

That quote is from the Wikipedia page of Industrial Design, the first 2 paragraphs are (currently) one of the best descriptions of Industrial Design I have read.
(Although the section on "Process" is a bit weak, but that's a section that really needs to be expressed using images and diagrams, rather than paragraphs.)

I'm currently reading Vance Packard's 1960's classic, The Waste Makers, which is an altogether different definition of Industrial Design!

Electronic Waste / birth defects

The daily RSS feed juxtaposed 2 articles.
Time magazine Photos:China's Electronic Waste Village
Treehugger: In China, Pollution Causes Two Birth Defects a Minute: Official
We started the briefing for the first years on sustainable design today, I don't think that they quite have a clue of where this project is going.....

Meanwhile David and I were hugely impressed when one group dropped a project report on us, and our jaws dropped, Pro-quality stuff from Undergraduates - the bar has been raised.