Why is the situation changing? The green movement is probably the principal driver. Since drivers aren’t obliged to stop, there is a terrific amount of petrol saved compared to a 4-way which requires all cars to waste energy coming to a full stop before starting again. When compared to traffic lights, another pro-environment aspect of roundabouts is the fact that they don’t require electricity to operate. Traffic lights not only consume a considerable wattage (although many have now been converted to LEDs), but they also have a significant maintenance component. A third environmental component might be that many European roundabouts are literally green, comprised of grass, bushes, and flowers. They can be an oasis of nature in the city.

A couple of other significant factors in favour of the roundabout…
a) they are statistically much safer than traffic lights. Why? Well, it’s almost impossible to have a head-on accident and their design forces drivers to slow down. Any accident is more likely to be tangential.
b) throughput is much higher than either 4-ways or traffic lights.

One American, the mayor of Carmel, Indiana, has become a roundabout crusader. His passion for them was sparked after an experience as an exchange student in England. Now, Carmel has more than 70 roundabouts!

The human brain is constantly looking to identify any and all shapes as faces. Like new face-recognition cameras, it has highly specialized zones that do nothing other than find faces. For this reason, we find faces in all kind of strange places where there aren’t any. Check out FacesInPlaces for some great examples of this. Further, once we have identified the human features of a form, we can ascribe emotions to subtle deviations in form.

The nice thing here is that we all interprete expressions the same. Paul Ekman, a psychologist did the pioneering work in this field. He discovered that even in the most remote tribes tucked away in Papua New Guinea, humans all express and interpret the fundamental emotions of anger, sadness, fear, surprise, disgust, contempt and happiness with the same facial expressions.

Because our brains are so finely tuned to analysing surprisingly subtle changes in facial topology, Designers can use this to good effect.

Why have we developed this ability? The ability to imprint on the parents and then remember that look is important to almost all animals. We think that penguins all look the same, but every penguin chick can distinguish their parent from a thousand others. It’s the same with humans. If aliens landed today they would have trouble distinguishing one human from another. The differences between old and young, male and female, Asian or Caucasian are very subtle. Our brain picks this up and processes thousands of pieces of data to not only determine who we are looking at but also where they originate from how old what mood they are in and whether we like them.

What has this got to do with product design? We use the same part of our brain inadvertently when looking at inanimate objects. It doesn’t know when to turn off. It is this trick of amplifying the subtle clues that probably gives us a tendency to overly anthropomorphise non-living things.

We look at a car and make the same snap judgements based on the shape of the headlights etc. A Fiat 500 looks happy and cheeky; a BMW 7 series looks angry and threatening; Alessi products look joyful or gay in the old fashioned sense (and maybe in the mordern sense as well?).

They now appear to be taking copying to another level. Firstly, there’s the case of China’s high speed train. China did not have access to the advanced technology developed by the Japanese, French, and Germans. China acquired this technology by insisting on a technology transfer agreement from foreign companies bidding on development of new rail routes. China routinely requires this kind of agreement. This, along with their gift for facsimile, goes a long way to explaining their growth in the fields of automotive, telecommunications, and aerospace. With respect to high speed rail, the speed with which the Chinese have come back to bite the hand that fed them is surprising. From Yale Center for the Study of Globalization

Today, Chinese rail companies that were once junior partners with the likes of Kawasaki Heavy Industries Ltd., Siemens AG, Alstom SA and Bombardier Inc. are vying against them in the burgeoning global market for super-fast train systems. From the U.S. to Saudi Arabia to Brazil and in China itself, Chinese companies are selling trains that in most cases are faster than those offered by their foreign rivals.

Even more shocking is the experience that some Designers and Architects are having with the wholesale theft of intellectual property and identity by Chinese companies pretending to be established Western practices. The Guardian reports that…

reveals that at least two prominent British practices have been hit by a wave of identity theft at the hands of Chinese impostors, which have cloned their websites and submitted bids for building projects under their names. Broadway Malyan, a firm with offices in 13 cities worldwide including Shanghai, is one such practice.

Let’s hope that New Yorkers will soon get off their bums and start realizing some of the 9/11 reconstruction before the 10th anniversary comes around.

Siemens IP handsets allow you to choose from dozens of providers and change at will. I have been using a Siemens 450IP for several years now. Using the provider, Voipstunt, I can make calls to most phones in the world, including all US fixed and mobile numbers, for less than 1c per minute. That’s less than half the cost of a Skype call.

You can get a Siemens VOIP handset from Amazon. Look for the A580IP or the S675IP. Note that these work with both landline connections and internet. Thus, you can receive through your landline connection, if you don’t want to get an incoming IP number, and make calls through the internet. This also enables you to talk on both lines simultaneously.

However, there can be a very thin line between protecting an iconic design during development and dogmatically resisting change due to an oversized ego.

But how do you know when you have crossed that line? Here are some tips…

A) Your cat barely looks at you anymore.
B) You have recurring dreams in which you receive awards for your design.
C) You cannot imagine any changes that would not ruin the purity of your design.
D) Your vocabulary becomes interlaced with words like “trendsetting” and “iconic”
E) You begin to think that divine intervention had something to do with your product.

I won’t name any names, but I know one designer who believed that it was possible for a cellphone design to be so compellingly attractive that anyone who saw it would involuntarily have an orgasm. That’s all well and good but what happens when you believe you have achieved that level of design? Its very unlikely that you would be very open to potential improvements or subtle engineering changes that are nearly always necessary.

The French captain, Patrice Evra, blames the irritating vuvuzelas for his side’s poor game against Uruguay. He said, “We can’t sleep at night because of the vuvuzelas. People start playing them from 6am. We can’t hear one another out on the pitch because of them.”

Vuvuzelas are being blamed for single-handedly destroying the atmosphere inside every South African stadium. Football games are normally associated with singing and chanting by tens of thousands of fans; not the incessant buzzing of thousands of giant bees. We can only hope that World Cup organizers follow through on their suggestion to ban them.

Modern road construction – John McAdam
Bicycle – Kirkpatrick Macmillan
Television – John Logie Baird
Steam Engine – James Watt
Pneumatic Tyre – John Dunlop
Telephone – Alexander Graham Bell
Philanthropy – Andrew Carnegie
Light Bulb - James Bowman Lindsay
Penicillin – Alexander Fleming
Film Camera – William Kennedy Dickson

For countless more examples, see… Scottish inventions and discoveries

Where did it all go wrong for Ebay? When did they stop thinking about the customer? Quite likely, Ebay never stopped thinking about the customer. It’s just that their perception of the “customer” changed. He used to be the buyer (beanie babies, anyone?). Now, he is without question the seller.

At conception and for many years, during an Ebay auction, everyone could see the Ebay identities of those bidding on the auction. It was possible to see their reliability as a user and their bidding history. It was transparent to the Ebay community if unscrupulous characters were bidding on their own auction, or if fake bidders, or shills, with no history were artificially jacking up the price. The buyers protection was the transparency of the system.

Then Ebay decided to cosy up to the sellers. Ebay management realized on which side their bread was buttered. The sellers pay the commission, not the buyer. Ebay started disguising the bidders’ ID’s. Instead of “Neville3402″, a user’s ID in the bid history was disguised as n*****2. It could be Neville. It’s probably Neville. But, I can’t prove it absolutely, so it’s difficult to complain. It might be a bit unethical to support shady business deals, but as long as more sales were being made and the shareholders were happy, who cared?

More recently, Ebay decided to really get in bed with the seller (why offer just a hand-job when you can get paid to go the whole way?). They now offer to completely scramble the identification of all buyers on a particular item. What used to be transparent is now completely 100% opaque. I don’t know who I’m bidding against. It may be a legitimate buyer. It may not be. Ebay says their “protecting the buyer”!!! This is like a Republican saying they were “protecting Iraqis”.

But, then again, maybe I’m being too harsh. If the seller wanted to bid on his own items, is that really so bad? Don’t sellers have a right to buy from themselves? Maybe they decided to sell the Porsche on Saturday, regretted it on Sunday, and decided to make a bid. Yes, the price goes up. Yes, it is illegal. But Ebay makes money and that’s all that matters. What’s good for the seller (and shills) is good for Ebay.

If you are fed up with Ebay’s high prices and unethical practices there isn’t that much in the way of alternatives. Craigslist is the cheapest (it’s free!) option. Amazon has started enabling private sales. There are also some sites like ebid.net that are aiming directly at Ebay but are, unfortunately still too small to make a difference.

The photo was captured by Dr. Thomas Endlein from Cambridge University. He is studying the adhesive on ants’ feet that enable them to go anywhere. The pads on their feet increase in size when more holding power is needed and decrease in size when the ant needs to run.

Most of the time this isn’t a problem, but things can get uncomfortable for them if you’re not careful. For example, don’t say that you want to “beat the crap out of someone”. No-one wants to see that! Also, stay away from words like “douchebag” and “fudge-packer”, and, for heavens sake, don’t say, “fuck a duck”.

Personally, I enjoyed the show, but this is probably the last time we see something like this (relating to the Design profession) for a long time. There weren’t the same outrageous extroverts that we’re so familiar with from the Apprentice. Clearly, that show selects candidates who are anything but camera shy. School of Design inadvertently (by relying on a single design object) chose a bunch of shrinking violets – all except one.

I thought it was a mistake to build on the same projects over the last few weeks. The ideas were unfortunately mostly quite weak. They needed another chance. Creativity can’t be turned on like a tap.

Not sure where the jury is on this show. It would be interesting to know who came up with the format and who thought it was a good idea that Starck chose all the competitors without having met them first. While the show probably didn’t do Starck’s ego eny harm, it probably won’t endear him or his studio to anyone. They came across as a dreary group of critics. But I do like his hair!

No-one is sure waht is to blame. It could be the metric system, desperate attempts to cut costs, or just plain incompetence. What’s clear is that both the walls and doors of every american toilet stall amazingly fail to reach both the floor and the ceiling! In some cases the gaps are enormous – on the order of 40-60cm at the bottom and up to one metre at the top. In such improperly designed toilets, one’s only privacy during personal activities is a thin sheet of steel magically floating in space.

Successive generations of engineers have grappled with the great “toilet stall design challenge” and generations have failed. The results have been so disappointing that some organizations including the U.S. army have eliiminated the sorry looking walls alltogether.

Both golf and rugby sevens are sports invented in Scotland. While golf may be better known, rugby 7′s, in my opinion, is the best spectator sport in the world; is the ideal sport for American TV networks; is the perfect sport for sports widows.

Why? It is mostly due to the intensity, athleticism, and duration. A rugby 7′s game lasts for two halves of seven minutes with one minute for half-time. That’s not seven minutes with time-out that ends up lasting an hour. That’s seven minutes total. While that provides no times for advertising during the game (perfect), the games are so short that you can advertise between games. Sevens is played with essentially the same rules as the full game with 15 players. Since there are so few players covering an enormous pitch, there is lots of frequent scoring and long dramatic runs, creative passing, and there is no sense in kicking for touch.

The TV audience for women is potentiall huge. There are no helmets or body protection. You can actually see the players. They are nearly all very young, athletic men. And since a game only lasts 14 minutes, there is no chance to get bored. On the other hand, because the game is so short, it is possible to organize a whole tournament with multiple rounds that lasts for a day.

Clever students from Dalhousie invented this wheel with grass growing on the inside. It enables one to walk on grass around the city in bare feet, while simultaneously avoiding (compressing) nasty things like dog doodoo and small children. Well done guys!

Unfortunately, the prime minister will not be going to jail because he game himself personal immunity from prosecution as soon as he took office – a transparent sign of guilt. The shocking thing about living here in Italy is not that the prime minister is a criminal, it’s that everyone is aware of it and they don’t really care. They have no faith in any politicians or the criminal justice system to deal with the corruption. There are also millions of ordinary Italians that appreciate and vote for Berlusconi, despite, or because of, his criminal activities and shambolic performance; this is the third time that he has been elected to run the country. May has been quite an intersting month for him. Earlier, his wife of 19 years and mother of three of his children, had asked him for a divorce for “consorting with a minor.”

As the leader of the effort, Fabio Moneta (now with Whirlpool) received glowing praise from Lavazza. Lavazza Design Paradiso had a popular and successful exhibit in Zona Tortona of the 2009 Milan Furniture Fair. In addition, there was a very positive write-up in the book published for the event. You can read about the show, see the concepts and download a pdf copy of the book here. There are some nice images and descriptions of some of the work we were involved in.

Especially nice is the way the writer, somewhat tenuously, tries to link up the process of product development with the road to salvation…

It is only when you try to produce a design — any type of design — that you see whether you are on the right track.

It’s the same for the faithful: their words, actions and omissions are the things that open up (or block) the path to Heaven.

The Tortona area was incredibly lively. Its success seems to grow year on year. There is no doubt that it is the centre of the FuoriSalone whereas several years ago it was just one of a large number of offsite design hotspots. You can now spend several days wandering around the happenings at the endless Tortona area courtyards soaking in the atmosphere, watching the international crowd, and criticising the displays.

In fact, experiencing Milan during Design week one could be forgiven for forgetting about the global economic crisis. Certainly, having made a couple of trips to the US in the last few months, it is clear that the US is suffering much more than Europe. Part of the relative economic insulation the Italians and the rest of the continent have is no doubt due to their “European Socialism”, an apparent barb that right wing American TV and radio pundits like to use at every opportunity.

If you’re interested in some of the reality of European socialism there is this nice article by Russell Shorto in the NY times about the experience of an American in Amsterdam.

If you want to catch up on some of the new work shown in Milan this year, have a look at the following links…
The Guardian – Designs for Life
LA Times – Weird Milan
Designboom – weblog
Core77 – weblog
Inhabit – weblog