Last Saturday, Matt Webb and I hosted a short session at O’Reilly FooCamp 2010, in Sebastopol, California. The title was “Mining the Trough of Disillusionment”, referring to the place in the Gartner “Hype Cycle” that we find inspiration in – where technologies languish that have become recently mundane, cheap and widely-available but are no longer [...]

September 22nd, 2009 by Tom Armitage · 6 Comments

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Taking my iPhone to a music festival didn’t really seem like the most sensible idea: a capacitive touchscreen in a potentially muddy field? A battery that only just lasts a day? It’s not exactly suited to the wilderness, not to mention a little fragile. At the same time: it’s exactly the place that connectivity comes [...]

September 26th, 2008 by Schulze · Comments Off

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In 1977 Charles and Ray Eames made a documentary film called Powers of Ten. The second half of the film includes a slow zoom into a man’s hand, right the way through cells and molecules all the way down to an atomic structure. It’s extraordinarily engaging, beginning at a familiar human context, and visualising something [...]

Last week, Tristan Ferne who leads the R&D team in BBC Audio & Music Interactive gave a talk at Radio at the Edge (written up in Radio Today). As a part of his talk he discussed progress on Olinda. Most of the design and conceptual work for the radio is finished now. We are dealing [...]

August 20th, 2007 by Matt Webb · 11 Comments

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If you asked me to pick the two cards Schulze & Webb play with abandon in the consultancy game, they’d be Product and Experience. Products should be what toy companies call shelf-demonstrable–even sitting in a box in shop, a product can explain itself to the customer (or at least tell its simplest story in a [...]

November 30th, 2006 by Matt Webb · 9 Comments

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Since the comments on the Experience Hooks post were on unboxing, I thought I’d post about my current favourite packaging. The following video shows a CD case then a cigarette packet, both opening in an unusual way. You also get to see my neck, and my Norwegian fishing jumper. The CD, Peeping Tom (collaborations with [...]

November 23rd, 2006 by Matt Webb · 4 Comments

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To recap: Generation C demand 3C products, which are the new breed of products taking the internet and their presence in the social world for granted, and treating people as involved, creative peers, not “end users.” As a design and development approach, the route of interaction design and a focus on the product life-cycle is [...]

November 22nd, 2006 by Schulze · 3 Comments

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Last Thursday I began teaching third year graphic design students at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in Holborn, Central London. I’m teaching a group of nine with an old colleague of mine James King. James and I have each written a brief, I’ll post them both here and any exciting results that [...]

November 22nd, 2006 by Matt Webb · 3 Comments

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Products are not nouns but verbs. A product designed as a noun will sit passively in a home, an office, or pocket. It will likely have a focus on aesthetics, and a list of functions clearly bulleted in the manual… but that’s it. Products can be verbs instead, things which are happening, that we live [...]

November 21st, 2006 by Matt Webb · Comments Off

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Generation C I first heard about Generation C in September of this year, at eurofoo, from Nat. Nat had picked it up from a New Zealand magazine, Idealog, here, which I’ve since received in the post and would recommend. Idealog refer back to trendwatching.com, who first pick up on the meme. Gen C is a [...]