Skip to main content

Design for tight times

Jeff Bezoz is a legendary figure in the history of the Internet. Along with Yahoo and eBay founders he is one of the commercial web's pioneers. I still love Amazon.com and seem to have a steady stream of books arriving. I get a kick out of the Amazon brown box sitting on my doorstep (a strange habit of couriers - drop and run).

Sure Amazon has its critics, I am not sure if it ever gave its shareholders a dividend? But they are innovative and customer focused. I saw this quote from Bezos on the MetaCool blog

"I think frugality drives innovation, just like other constraints do. One of the only ways to get out of a tight box is to invent your way out."


That's worth thinking about - it is certainly within the sphere of my little project Less Magazine. Some of the answers to the questions of sustainability is the idea of doing more with less. I suppose a corollary would be the old saws of 'Necessity is the mother of invention' or 'Needs must when the Devil drives.'

Having abundance tends to lead to waste. When the abundance of waste become the problem we need to turn our minds to elegantly simply solutions.

What interests me from a design perspective is the the baroque, ornate maximalism that was the genre of choice in the most recent era will, surely, be replaced by a more spartan approach that will probably transcend the vagaries of fashion and stylised design.

I certainly hope so.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Go figure

Took my daughter shopping tonight. We had dinner out. Got back home late. She laid her new clothes out in neat rows so she could choose what to wear for tomorrow. She's 5. I see her just every second weekend. How can such incredible errors of judgement (marrying my daughter's mother) result in such a wonderful little human being? Go figure

Sexist Advertising and stereotypes

Advertising lives in the short-form world. Because mass media is so expensive the 30 second commercial is conventional and because there is so much clutter simplified signals are essential to 'cut through'. One form of communication short-hand used as a default is the stereotype - "A stereotype can be a conventional and oversimplified conception, opinion, or image, based on the assumption that there are attributes that members of the "other group" have in common. Stereotypes are sometimes formed by a previous illusory correlation, a false association between two variables that are loosely correlated if correlated at all. Though generally viewed as negative perceptions, stereotypes may be either positive or negative in tone." In the 1950's and 60's when men dominated advertising stereotypical impressions of women as inferior or subservient were not only commonplace but usual. It was normal to show women as housekeepers, largely because most wer...

Mac Air Music

I love the idea of the Mac Air but, call me old fashioned, …no disk drive? How will I watch Ratatouille, Toy Story, The Incredibles, Finding Nemo, Cars and A Bug's Life on DVD? The music on the MacAir launch commercial is terrific. I tracked the artiste Yael Naim's video for you. What is the name for this genre (Regina Spectre et al)? Apparently Steve Jobs chose the track personally for the TVC. Order from Amazon: Splash out: