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Here's a picture of a car. Don't worry about what type it is. I happen to really like how these ones look, but don't worry about it. As much as I hate to say it sometimes, car companies really know how to run a good business and you can learn a lot from them. One of the things they do well: "The art is to conceal art". Back in the day, sticking as many weird looking things to a car was the best way to make it look attractive. Some people still make that mistake when modifying their car. But now car companies have learned better, the style is to make it sleek and simple. They all do it now, and the style will probably last till cars are gone. They put a lot of hard work into designing the exterior and interior and even how it works into something that instantly feels attractive. You don't have to stare at it for a long time, look at all the doodads, look under the hood and analyze all the components and so on. Lots of people justify buying their car with that stuff, but the reason people buy the car they do is because of the art of concealing the art of a car.

This is an odd example of "utility trumps ornament". Here's a picture of a scan I made using a scanning electron microscope. Pretty, huh? SEM images usually are. I work at a laboratory and I run this machine, it's probably one of the coolest and most high-tech things you can find at the University that it's in. But it's also old, I don't don't know exactly how old, a couple decades old. It's run off Windows NT, the computer has 100 MBytes of RAM (very small compared to now). And important people and companies do important work on it. This is pretty common with scientific equipment, it's built to the extreme of utility, not ornamentation. You can make the interfaces look nice if you want, the machine looks cool, it makes cool images, but importantly the 20 year old equipment is still pretty state of the art. Many electronic companies lose track of that, perusing the opposite and making attractive gadgets that only last a year. This is often seen as being clever, but those companies don't last long and they make little worthwhile impact on society. Ornamentation over utility is the path to some quick money, utility over ornamentation is the path to making things that people care about for more than a year.

I'm not exactly the biggest fan of Utah's climate, it hurts me, but it exists nevertheless. The prevailing attitude among people that live here though is to pretend that it doesn't exist. Keeping in mind the principle of respecting the genius of a place, the new Utah Museum of Natural History breaks that attitude. Besides looking generally nice in my opinion, the building fits into the environment around it. No depressing dying grass lawn, it doesn't look like it was originally designed to be built in Connecticut or Hawaii or whatever, it's very Utah looking. It was placed up on the mountain, away from the normal fake climate of Salt Lake City, where it seems like a product of nature itself. It's sometimes nice to just sit outside the museum and remember what Utah looks like.

Wicked Science

Phew, what a confusing paper "Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning" was. I hate it when I both strongly agree and strongly disagree with an academic paper, and it usually means the author was wandering horribly. The author was somewhat harsh in the application of science to social problems, but let me make an analogy. If you find 2+2 easy to solve, but an integral hard to solve, it's not because math sucks but because people are naturally bad at math. In fact, calculus is often so complicated that we often resolve solutions as simply being "good enough". This points to the distinction between these benign problems and wicked problems, but we aren't talking about social problems. Whether a problem is from physics or sociology doesn't matter, as you can see with the math analogy. The real problem is the misconception of what science is. I have to stop there because I could write a whole paper trying to correct the author, but I'll just leave saying that I think he could have made his point a lot better than he did.

Observation

I liked the "How To Increase Your Powers Of Observation" article, it reminds me of why I wish k-12 schools should have classes on basic scientific philosophy instead of specific scientific fields. Science wasn't made for performing chemistry and physics, it was formed to be a constructive view of the universe around us. So I would say that observation isn't simply something scientists do, it's the core application of the philosophy. And isn't just useful for solving problems, it's a basis for preventing inaccurate views and assumptions that people make so naturally with simple viewing.

http://www.afcsushi.com/

Sushi. Yes, sushi. I love cooking and I don't want anybody saying design isn't a part of cooking. But I admit, it's usually lacking in most meals people make. Most meals don't go beyond "It tastes good", which is usually accomplished with lots of salt. I dominantly make Japanese food. And real Japanese food, not just teriyaki chicken and sushi. But there's a special place in my heart sushi. The goal of well designed food is to stimulate all five senses, and sushi does that well (I mean the good stuff, not those refrigerated things at the union). The taste is unique and keeps you interested. The plate is a work of art from beginning to end. The aroma draws you in, and it isn't just garlic. The texture switches back and forth from crunchy seaweed and vegetables to perfectly soft rice. It makes a pleasing sound as you chew it. Why eat in front of a TV when the food itself is the perfect entertainment for dinner.

Unless you don't like sushi, but you get the point.

This is a picture of a set of electronic drums. I play the drums, I'm pretty average at it. I got this and I thought it would be fun. It's utterly pointless. You hit the pads with sticks, but you might as well be hitting the keys on your keyboard. I have an electric piano that I love, but this? There's hardly anything resembling drums here, just buttons. I'm convinced that somebody who doesn't even play drums made these. I don't know if the design could be modified, I just think it's a dead idea.

This is a MOSHI clock. They tend to be used for blind people because it's basically a clock that talks to you and that you can talk to it. Sounds pretty gimmicky and I admit I talk to it rarely, just when the power goes off and I have to reset it or when I change alarm times. But it's actually very nice. It looks attractive, and it's friendly. It's also easy to use, you just talk to it. I wish there were more things in my house I could describe as "friendly". It's definitely my favorite clock I've ever had or seen.

Bikes are a bit of a paradox for me. People are always saying that the more complex a machine is, the more likely it is to break down. I know a great deal about bikes, and that doesn't seem to be the case. Bikes are as simple as you can get, they're elegant in a way, but there'salwayssomething wrong with them no matter who makes them or how expensive it is. If you drive a car and a bike equal amounts of time, it's the bike that you spend the most time fixing. I don't get it, they seem to meet the criteria for being a good design, but there's something very wrong with them. Somebody needs to reconsider the entire design of the bike and make something that's reliable. The bike shown is one of mine that looks perfectly fine but just doesn't work anymore.

Square bottles. They're so simple, but most most drink companies don't get it. Why are they good? Because circles don't stack well. With how cans and bottles are usually stacked 21.5% is dead air, actually more in practice. With billions of bottles, that's a lot of air. With square bottles, all the space is used and more bottles can be stacked. It's simply geometry. As a bonus on the consumer's end, they're easier to hold, and they look cool.

Well, I'm just going to assume that people can see my posts in this, um, whatever part of the website I'm currently in.

For this post I think I'll talk about this tumblr website. Not the whole website, that would take too long. I'll just mention the sign up page. The two pictures above are not duplicates, but two different pictures! Amazing! The one on the left is the the log-in page for the site, the right one is the sign-up. The only difference is an extra white bar. I spent an embarrassingly long time trying to figure out how to sign-up when I was starring at the answer the entire time! I thought I was still in the log-in page. Even when I figured it out, I didn't know if it would work. There's not even anything saying "This is the sign-up page". When designing, please make things usable BEFORE making it compelling.

Feels good to get that off my chest.

This is just a test because I have no idea what's going on.

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