Why do we like designer stuff... or do we?

I have been pushed to see something bizzare by the subject line of the fwdee...






interesting isnt it..!!
Don't tell me that its hard to quickly say what's the time. I know its not that usable. but thats not the point. Its a design with personality and may or may not get thumbs up for being usable. Now here lies the tricky part which involves how a designer steers through such moments of decision where he has to drop fancy attribues of her designs and make peoples lives easier but mundane and less interesting. Thats the reason Mac designs have a definite personality. I heard they don't bother too much when they go ahead with their usability studies. There is One maxim that a camel is a horse designed by committee; I would extend it further, using a a overly normalised product by bunch of designers is worse; resulting interaction must feel like romancing with a family and not a person.

Alas, there are moments when the inner designer get immensly satisfied...

the other day in a similar mindless browsing spree landed at IDSA awards... here is one winner from IDEO : Heimspiel (german for "home play" ) .. so many amazing subtle design changes ..Ideas such as bringing a light element to a door edge that allows the light to spill into the room as the door rotates around the hinge, a radiator control knob that begins to illuminate in response to the radiator's warmth, door knob allowed to 'sink-in' if it has "do not enter" sign ..like a disbaled button... feels like a smooth fusion of Product Design and interaction design...


going through it made me conscious ...like a suddenly-vision-corrected-person-coinmg-out-of a-spects-shop.

the whole thing reiterates what a real design effort can turn into rather than a I-wrok-for-bread-n-butter work one gets accustomed to and start getting habituated to.

Some works are really outstanding.. check out ... IDSA awards

Thoughts on pot

Quantum of solace se yaad aaya... that’s what are we missing in our lives... at least let me speak for myself... I heard all the bond movie names are picked from such cheesy words from Ian Fleming’s novels...

The constant turmoil that we live into.. I mean... every dig we take on internet starts with Google... it is a new world’s web address bar... for a while think about a scenario where you are living in a room and everything you want involves a hunting ... long ago we used live in simpler times... where a book finished used to linger in our minds for days... quoting that used to be way of enjoying it... calling bro from other room and reading him passages were the fun part... something is getting lost today..maybe there are distances.,...maybe people we care about part... and there comes a need for talking with many at a time ... we are constantly hard pressed for time....
I go blank in front of blank screen and get careful and politically correct and filter my own thoughts... but true me do meet me sometime.... thoughts come rushing in...
It peaks when I am on my morning 8km run and climaxes when I am taking hot showers on my back...(my lord, ye baat note ki jaye..ye insaan aaj kal sexual metaphors bahot use karne laga hain)
But I feel the blog should not give away ..but should talk about the things that culminate out of your intense brooding over a thing, thought, issue... it should surface with more clarity than clutter.

Things I like to share I get it in that ephemeral moments when my mind is completely light and feathery .. watching over the steps one after the other and thinking nothing else... i fact these days...we hardly do anything for a prolonged period of time... something is always there to disrupt u .. a buzzing cell...talap for tea/coffee... somebody at the door... unwanted mail alert... ... we tend to get something close to this thing..that higher state of mind..on pot(I don’t have that experience as yet but my friends from arts school tell me) or on the pot... (assuming some invest good amount of time for the ROI sitting there) ... some find such lighter moments... moments of clarity in their sleep ...at 4 am... my Prof Bapat.. use to say.. sleep after a good wrestling with a tricky design problem and let the mind synthesis it ... and in the morning..it will be all clear and crystalline for u... they call it “let me sleep over it”..

For me this part of sleep comes not at 4 am but pretty late in the morning... and that supposedly design breakthrough moment actually turns out to be sleep breaking moment ,,,..

I see I write in a muddled up manner, try to be relentless. It reminds me what Sean Connery says to his prodigy in ‘Finding Forrester’ ... Don’t stop ... Keep writing...Don’t stop even for a moment.. it is a key to good writing.... but ... when unlike the seasoned writers it should be good to be able to write one full page of your state of mind... I admire those who can do this..may be through a diary .. sometime they are the one who use it to motivate themselves... for people like me.... by constantly pushing myself .. as to show me what u are capable of.. this results into a constant watchfulness I would say till the level beyond which it is difficult to call healthy.... blog is on such poking to myself... I don’t believe in mass media but I blog...I believe the key to good conversations is knowing how the listener is responding... and growing into that conversation in such a way that you both discover something more valuable and connect... sometime I feel there can be a nice tool one can develop that creates a collage of my conversations with many into a coherent publishable feed... so i tell my friend.. about this movie... and then about how was stuck in traffic... it would be nice to extract that conversation into something others like to overhear and add... no....not a chat room.... we don’t want more chaos to what we already get exposed to... we don’t want to land up in the privacy law suits also. ..

Little Miss Sunshine : Time to look back...

Its not one more in the crowd of character comedies, in fact I wont call it comedy at all. There is some good characters and pretty eccentric in their own standards too.

Our protagonist the kid who wants to participate this pre-teen beauty contest, a self-help teacher and really PITA (pain in...) practitioner at home, an adolescent and restless brother of miss sunshine who is focused to the edge of craziness to become a fighter pilot, a scholar and depressed to clinical levels uncle who just had a break up with his gay partner, mother who is trying to cope all the pressure, and the old school grandpa.

This jamboree creates this tremendous possibilities of friction, tension and drama. I mean once you have a good 'elements' identified what's left is pretty much their 'placements',...as one theater director likes to call his characters as my 'walking-talking props'.

It is of the kind of a film where you go in, have heartiest laughs without realizing that laugh is at you..the audience. In fact it ridicules the conditioning of us by mass media to have the Best in our lives and thereby making ourselves miserable. We 'all' want the best personalities and features illustrated over and over by glossy magazines, education that is intellectually stimulating and work that is rewarding and socially relevant, spouse that is sexually, emotionally stimulating and comforting, kids that listen to you and have some of your unfulfilled ambitions...anything below than this is failure and No NO. This movie has lot to say about how American living has turned into. This finds it place alongside "American Beauty" , "Requiems for a Dream" and "Ghost world". If you liked those, go for this one.

Our Indian urban-scape is slowing gonna be like that, an eventuality of set of distorted ideas that we follow about modernity and being a developed nation. Reminds me of the Eddie Vedder's song" Society" .... society, you're a crazy breed I hope you're not lonely without me ....When you want more than you have you think you need ...