I’m trying to document the stuff I stump upon that are interesting or inspiring. This is the first issue.
Amazing story telling from S-Town
You probably heard of it, S-Town is a 7 episodes podcast produced by the folks who brought another podcast hit, Serial. I don’t want to spoil the story here, just a note: you might find it a little disturbing at some point. But nonetheless, what a great story.
Isn’t there a S-Town in each one of us?
Abstract — Documentary series on designers
Netflix’s new documentary series Abstract: the Art of Design is definitely worth watching, especially for people like me, as fellow designers. It traces the life of a few best designers/creators in their fields, such as shoe designer Tinker Hatfield, architect Bjark Ingels, graphic designer Paula Scher. For me, the best episode is the first episode on illustrator Christopher Niemann, a great peek into his process and inspirations.
Kevin Rose’s meditation app
I will not get into who Kevin Rose is, which you can easily google about. He recently opened up his process of creating a mobile app for meditation which is really educational. He is being transparent to the whole process, from creating feature lists, to selecting designers, to budgeting the tasks, everything. If you are into making apps, this is a great opportunity to learn. Just one caveat, as a UX designer, I think his portrayal of designers are falling too far on the graphic design side. He himself actually has done a lot of design work for the app such as wireframes, the key workflows etc. If you are interested, you can join his private Facebook group.
Juicero the juicer
If you’ve been following the gadget world, you should have heard of Juicero by now. Ever since Bloomberg released their video review on this unnecessary $400 juicer machine, the world has collapsed on the well funded Silicon Valley startup. Angry customers, surprised and pissed off investors, sarcastic media are swarming the web.
To be fair, it is NOT a scam. It is in fact a well made machine. The design was done by FuseProject, one of the top design agencies in the world. The machine is well engineered(in a pricey way), as shown in this product tear down report . The business model and the rationale behind the machine is nothing but normal in today’s world. Over engineering? Yes. Unnecessary? Maybe. Do our razor blades needs to be 4 layers, 5 layers? Do we need to launch an app just to dim a light bulb? What about the thick padding in the sole of your shoes? Over design and over engineering is such a ubiquitous problem in our world today caused by over consumption. Ridiculous “smart” products are everywhere. Juicero, as unlucky as they are, just happened to sit in the center of a perfect storm.
And yes, it is a perfect epitome of the problem with Silicon Valley investors: it is only worth investing if it can go bigger, faster, reaching a huge scale. And and anything they put their hands on has to be that way. But can you say it is a problem only unique to SV? Isn’t it a reflection of our modern world at large?
It is a story everyone of us should reflect upon. Do we want to let technology help us or do we want technology own us? As Mark Twain once said, to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
