Design story: The Decanter from Landor Associates on Vimeo.



(thanks to Craig for sharing it!)

This photograph of the earth at night is a visualization of concentrations of artificial light. Someone didn’t design a visualization from a set of data, instead they captured or documented a situation that conveys the information.

Or, as Golan Levin talks about it in his TED Talk, “This is a photograph of the desktop of a student of mine. And when I say desktop, I don’t just mean the actual desk where his mouse has worn away the surface of the desk. If you look carefully, you can even see a hint of the Apple menu, up here in the upper left, where the virtual world has literally punched through to the physical”. It’s another self generated visualization.

Or, Subway Lines by Meaghan Kombol visualizing the New York subway lines’ bumps and kinks. In her words “This is about the motion, within the locomotion of the New York City subway system. To document this, I attempted to draw a straight line, on a piece of paper, mid-journey, while riding each of the twenty-three of the New York City subway lines”. (From the book Speck by Peter Buchanan-Smith)

I wouldn’t say I learned a lot from being there (to be fair I was only there for half of the course), but I am glad I experienced it, and I am very glad that I got his books because they are beautiful.  One thing I really enjoyed was to see that the language in Tufte’s books are very true to the way he talks.

Here are some quotes and notes form my sketchbook:

Eventually we put “engineering” and “art” on opposite ends of a spectrum and decided design falls somewhere in the middle. Going towards the art end on that spectrum, once we are past design, things get really hard for me to grasp and apparently for Kate same is true going in the opposite direction.

I promised I would post definitions (from Webster Dictionary) of both on my blog so here they are:

ART: the conscious use of skill and creative imagination especially in the production of aesthetic objects

DESIGN: the arrangement of elements or details in a product or work of art

I don’t think I agree with either of these definitions but I am a lot more likely to challenge the definition of design than the definition of art.

Defne’s Notes from the talk :

“A lot of times design is just cleaning of the edges and corners.” – Even though it sounds like an easy task, it can be very challenging to “just” clean the edges and corners.

“Japanese toilets are different. They are life changing!”

“People often say my design is like something that already exists. But it doesn’t.” – What does it take to get to that point where you can design products that are so simple and straight forward that it seems like they should already exist. Being capable of such design is one thing but it seems like not having to justify such a simple design requires being at a whole another level. It seems like you have to earn the right to design simple things for them to not to fall into the “insignificant” category.

“The act of sitting exists even without the existence of chairs”.

Extracting inspiration from the “peeled potato edge”.

Things that were still floating in my mind after the talk:

I should go attend to a lot more local events like this one.

I miss having a studio (like at school) with a whole bunch of people I can bounce ideas off of.

At some point someone mentioned that “whatever you are doing in your free time should be what you are doing all the time” and it made me wonder if that’s why I have no hobbies. Maybe I am doing what I should be doing? Not so bad! =)

Japan – The Strange Country (Japanese ver.) from Kenichi on Vimeo.

for english version follow the link:

http://www.tudou.com/programs/view/t1BQBJnvEIQ/