“The interface of a cheeseburger” is one of these Blog entries that validate those 30 Million other blogs with random noise in one simple swoop. If you ever contemplated to create anything that get’s used by a human, be it nuclear power plant, condom or breakfirst table for your dearest one, you could find some great insight in this text from Oliver Reichenstein. At least I think it’s by him. While content and form of the text are pretty nice it seems almost a relief that ‘Information Architects Japan’ messed up the branding for themselves. Sticking Lego’s on business cards won’t help either. Die Kinder des Schuhmachers tragen immer kaputte Schuhe.
Democracy is based on people casting a vote. Making the act to vote more complicated than it needs to be is a simply a criminal act against the spirit of Democracy. In developed Democracies you vote by taking a thick pencil and making a cross inside of a circle. That’s it. Since decades. Works always and there is nothing wrong with that. It’s the best way of doing this. In 2000 there was a bit of a stir up in the USA around punch cards, butterfly ballots and hanging chads. The remedy was not to abandon complicated things. It was to add more layers of technology. Which defies logic and furhter dilutes the act of voting. This kind of story is to be expected. Actually the whole vote fraud idea deters people from voting, instead of motivating them. Which means that democracy looses it’s foundation.
If you have any doubts about mal intend around the voting process just look up “Gerrymandering”. But sure the US has all the rights to wage war on the other side of the planet to find WMD, retaliate 911 spread Democracy. I wonder if those painted index fingers were collored diebold. Probably not, since the color would dissapear within seconds in that case.
Advertising Age is raving about Dove’s “Evolution”. Their headline reads “Better ROI From YouTube Video Than Super Bowl Spot”. Now that’s what some people want to hear. And it leaves reason behind. Jumping head over heals into the current media internet bubble bath.
The Dove campaign is great. How often is there an ad for a cosmetic product that I want to show to my daughter? It certainly works on the internet. Because of it’s content. Certain content will work well on the internet. But let’s face it, if something works really well it will get killed by it’s own success: Today you can find a video of mentos + coke on Google Video. It is prominently featured on the google Blog.
Dove is great since it’s decent and sells soap. Are you feeling having a Diet-Coke or Mentos after watching the latest and lamest sticky liquid orgy? Certainly not. Actually with todays video dropping Mentos into big soda bottles becomes officially lame. The Meme has suffocated itself under it’s own weight.
Update:
Cnet however sings a different song. I wonder how many kids run around now with the video cameras to do the ‘next big thing’.
Thus we may know that there are five essentials for victory:
1. He will win who knows when to fight and when not to fight.
2. He will win who knows how to handle both superior and inferior forces.
3. He will win whose army is animated by the same spirit throughout all its ranks.
4. He will win who, prepared himself, waits to take the enemy unprepared.
5. He will win who has military capacity and is not interfered with by the sovereign.
Sun Tzu aprox 600 BC (copy pasted from wikisource)
looks like we are fucked.
for my last post I googled around for ‘calculation slide’. And so I found [again] the website of John Walker. He started AutoDesk. The companies second product “AutoCAD” became rather successful. Among other things that I plan to read, I found his anagram creator and learned -after tweaking the dictionary- that my name could be rearranged into draw neck areas or ransacked ware.
According to wikipedia it was the first World War that brought the wrist watch into wide use. Only sixty years later people tought that it would be a brilliant idea to have a calculator in your wrist watch. As brilliant as having a PDA or a camera in your cell phone I suppose.
Before the were pocket calculators there were slide rules. I did like them. Thinking about it, I should get one. Or even better: create one with megabytes, megabit etc scales. Having the common technologies like USB2 etc marked. OK, neat, but obsolete in about a year. Still, it would be fun to wip out a slide scale in a meeting when asked how long xyz would take. Actually I am pretty convinced now that I want a slide scale. Good thing my dad tought me how to use one.
In 1962 the DoD came up with a slide scale to compute the impact of nuclear bombs. Somehow I could see Kennedy operating one of these after a brief introduction. Now imagine your job would be to teach George W. Bush to operate and use this device.
The scary part about this is, that both people have the power to push the same button. People then were fast to say that Mr B. had so many great advisors. Those that gave him that darn good intelligence.
it’s the little things that matter. Apple recipe is so simple: Just make things better. As much as you can. And don’t stop there. Jobs could say for years “Our products look from the back better than the other guys from the front”. Yet nobody really started to compete with Apple in the design league. Sony was good in the 80s and early ninetees. Right now there isn’t much industrial design that would be worth mentioning. Despite the fact that Apple makes a killing, vastly based on design. Go figure.
When I was a teenager I worked during the school vacations in order to afford a stereo system. One that was loud and sounded decent. Those came in modules back in the day. It took me a couple of years to make the system complete. I started with an amplifier, speakers and a tape deck.
Basically I wanted to steal music. But those terms were not around back in the day. All I knew was that Albums would cost 20 DM when a pack of Cigarettes ‘only’ cost 3. Both we could not afford. So we rolled our own and taped records. I borrowed my parents record player and my friends albums to get to the music that I liked. That was more than twenty five years ago, and the record industry obviously survived me stealing their music. But they could have noticed a trend a long time ago. They decided not to. They thought their business is to sell physical artifacts that happen to make sounds in the right equipment. First Vinyl then Compact Disc and finally Super CD / Audio DVD. It seems pretty obvious that the record industry got stuck on some model that became irrelevant.
Napster came along at the same time those super high tech next generation audio formats were introduced. Surprisingly people cared about music not about the latest amount of quality that those industry suggestions had to offer.