As I’m finishing up Verganti’s Design-Driven Innovation, a door wins Architectural Review’s Emerging Architecture Award. I’m completely enamored with the idea and the aesthetics of this door: the meaning of a door as a static object that interrupts a space has been totally upended.

Could a focus group have given an architect enough insight to lead to such a door? If you’ve also been thinking about the issues of democratic design vs. monarchical design, I highly recommend Verganti’s book. His work is a result of soaking himself in the Italian design system—the one that birthed Kartell’s Bookworm bookcase and Alessi’s range of Family Follows Fiction kitchen tools—which has a design process that is significantly different from the user-centered design thinking process. Even if you’ve sworn your designerly life to be an advocate of user-centered design, this is a provocative book.

A more reflective piece on the issue of democratic design vs. monarchical design is underway (but it is December and the holiday season will undoubtedly get in the way). In the meantime, you’ll have to believe me that Verganti wants you to know that the future belongs to those who can innovate meaning.

Image credit: The Architectural Review

What are the limits of modifying a shared object or a rental product? Besides thinking about the value of common property as directly proportionate to its newness (Take that Vélo! It looks new!), under what circumstances can preceding uses add value for the next user?

Digital price labels can be updated quickly, but the speed of information change is sometimes less important than drawing attention to the comparison. Given the constantly shifting grounds of nutrition science and food safety, to what extent can this combination of mixed media be stretched? Can real-time web-based/social-media information be fed into the system? If this were a fixed-price store, what other information could digital labels carry?

Conventional sale labels tacked onto the new medium provide a comforting transition for grocery shoppers. The opposite—price jack-ups—will probably still remain quiet affairs.

A year after blogging about the usefulness of honks in India, the quietest of motor vehicles may soon come with an added safety feature. (I’m in no way inferring causality here. These are just two blobs on my event calendar.) This piece of news fascinates me in that it reflects our dependency on the sounds around us—we have grown reliant on the purring of a car motor as a gauge of its distance to us.

I remember that as a kid, one of my daily games was to guess who was coming through the front door by listening to the way the keys jingled and the manner in which the door was opened. My dad, a hurried person by nature, would usually open the gate with great fanfare. Against our stainless steel gate, his bunch of keys made loud clanking noises. My mother, on the contrary, was careful to control her key-turning movements. Much like the slamming of a door, the footsteps along a corridor, the chopping in the kitchen, the rhythm of each movement has its unique owner. Analog sounds as these, to use the term loosely, express a warmth and a context. They embed information within themselves, and they can evolve in complexity.

For the man crossing the street, does it matter if the sound of the on-coming vehicle is a digital or analog, so long as he successfully avoids it? If the digitally-enhanced vroom mimicked the purring of a motor vehicle, it would be reasonable to assume that the familiarity of the sound would allow the pedestrian to associate it with motor vehicles. But at what point will digital sounds convey the contextual information that analogue sounds transmit? Given the changing soundscape of our environment—when was the last time you heard a phone ring, and not sing a song—how does this change the way we understand and interact with our daily objects?

Edit: In my earlier posting of this entry, I used an image of a door stabbed by a bunch of keys. Alas, in the tranposition of the site to a new theme, I realized I no longer had that image file. Well, here you go. This is Samsung’s Anycall experience store in South Korea instead.

How do you determine if your food is fresh? Our expectations of fresh food seem to have extended beyond live animals to expiration dates, and now, see-through packaging of dried food. In the home of instant noodles, cup noodles with clear caps are not yet the norm. But with the option of looking into a cup of dried noodles, what exactly would you be looking out for? Freshness? The correct number of condiment packets?