design milk has a great article on the evolution of black & blum’s new eau good water bottle. this includes several drawings and pictures illustrating their design process for everything from the bottle shape, over the cork stopper, to the packaging.
may need a bit more content, but some areas (like the timeline) look pretty promising: http://www.industrialdesignhistory.com, a website that "celebrates the determination, audacity and ingenuity of the industrial design profession".
gadi amit, president of new deal design in san francisco, has a high-level overview of the tasks of industrial designers, and what separates the good from the bad. the first part has a very good overview of product design related tasks and challenges that go beyond the pure visual. find part 1 and part 2 at the fast company design blog.
wired magazine has several photos of early prototypes of now classic technology products. included are an early push button phone from 1948, the first atari video game from 1976, an apple I computer from 1975, and the worlds first cellphone from 1973. interesting both on a visual and prototyping level, as well as for the background stories.
Apple I, 1975
opening on friday july 9th at the yerba buena center for the arts in san francisco, TechnoCRAFT explores the changing boundaries between designer and consumer. curated by yves behar, it investigates the current trend of open design around the six subthemes of crowdsourcing, platforms, blueprints, hacks, incompletes, and modules.
included in the show is my shaded lamp, part of the un-readymades series, my own exploration in the area of design democracy and personalization in 2007.
some additional info can be found at dexigner.
vitra’s online design magazine features an article on egon bräuning, a toolmaker and trained mechanical engineer, who for decades was in charge of the furniture companies product development section.
a new website from the people at behance, the99percent.com provides articles, tips & interviews as well as video & events "to help push ideas forward".
the concept behind the site: "as creatives, we don’t need more ideas. what we need is better follow-through."
the idea behind the name: thomas edison’s famous quote that genius is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration.
includes several interesting (but a bit too short) industrial design related articles.
nathan shedroff, who i mentioned before on this blog, has made available a ‘series of free syllabi and teaching materials to help instructors teach students key topics for the future’. these seem to be based on his popular books design is the problem, experience design 1.1 and making meaning, and are released under a creative common license.
