Paper Bits

Apr 9

Obvious isn’t easy [Geek & Mild]

Designing for obviousness is hard because you have to account for existing user conventions despite their weaknesses.

Mar 25

“The failure mode of clever is “asshole.”

Click through for the whole thing. Good advice, especially if you’ve ever been tempted to be clever to impress a stranger you’ve just met, and ended up looking like an ass. Or if you’re me.

But I repeat myself.

Mar 8

“the practical limitations of 3d printing are many and varied, all the while the whole process of proper injection moulded parts is rapidly improving. Yes, that’s right: hardly anybody realizes that even though 3d printing is getting better all the time, injection moulding is also continuously improving and reinventing itself too. Going all ‘Wired’ by focusing on the eventual promise of 3d printing will likely cause you to miss out on the real manufacturing revolutions that are happening right here, right now.” Aiming (much) higher than Hackspaces and FabLabs… « Funding Startups (& other impossibilities)

Mar 1

“

People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.

You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.

Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.

You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.

”

Banksy, from Cut It Out (via zaschell) (via dharmachaos)

Have reblogged this before, but here it is again because the message needs amplification. Own the medium.

(via rainbowhill)

Nov 4

“Why do we assume that simple is good? Because with physical products, we have to feel we can dominate them. As you bring order to complexity, you find a way to make the product defer to you. Simplicity isn’t just a visual style. It’s not just minimalism or the absence of clutter. It involves digging through the depth of the complexity. To be truly simple, you have to go really deep. For example, to have no screws on something, you can end up having a product that is so convoluted and so complex. The better way is to go deeper with the simplicity, to understand everything about it and how it’s manufactured. You have to deeply understand the essence of a product in order to be able to get rid of the parts that are not essential.” (From Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson)” The Russians Used a Pencil: Jony Ive on Simplicity

Oct 24

“One day [in a high school electronics class] Jobs needed a part that was not available, so he made a collect call to the manufacturer, Burroughs in Detroit, and said he was designing new products and wanted to test out the part. It arrived by air freight a few days later. When [Jobs’s teacher] McCollum asked how he gotten it, Jobs described - with defiant pride - the collect call and the tale he had told. ‘I was furious,’ McCollum said. ‘That was not the way I wanted my students to behave.’ Jobs’s response was, ‘I don’t have the money for the phone call. They’ve got plenty of money.’”

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson (via maxistentialist)

Collect call aside, that’s exactly what to do when you need a part for a prototype.

“Hi, my name is $blah with $designcodotcom, and I’m working on a product that’s slated for an initial run of about 500,000 a year in 2012-2013. I’m evaluating contact switches. Do you have a couple of $partnum and $partnum2 I can test?”

They’ll probably suggest a couple others, and Fed-Ex you a sample pack.

You just have to ask.

Jun 10

“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”

Isaac Newton, in a letter to Robert Hooke, who was very short.

Isaac Newton was a dick.

Jun 9

“Socializing is as exhausting as giving blood. People assume we loners are misanthropes just sitting thinking, ‘Oh, people are such a bunch of assholes,’ but it’s really not like that. We just have a smaller tolerance for what it takes to be with others. It means having to perform. I get so tired of communicating.”

Anneli Rufus (via amberying)

So. Damn. True.

(via amberying)