Tag: Design

A tool to ease birth. Designed by a car mechanic [Article]

The idea came to Jorge Odón, an Argentine car mechanic, as he slept. Somehow, he said, his unconscious made the leap from a YouTube video he had just seen on extracting a lost cork from a wine bottle to the realization that the same parlor trick could save a baby stuck in the birth canal.

As one of the comments on this article says, it is a good reminder that  truly revolutionary breakthroughs rarely, if ever, come from someone immersed in the field and practicing the discipline. It’s always an outsider, unfettered by the beliefs and paradigms of the present state that can think clearly and see what is really needed.

Designing around little minds [Article]

Joi Ito has an interesting blog post around design. This sentence caught my attention:

Why is it then that we seem to insist on building and assessing our systems based on what our little mind thinks? Think about the testing in schools that only measures local knowledge and logical skills, or designing user interfaces around what the user is focused on like pull-down menus and the mouse pointer.

Nothing new, but worth remembering that the “mind” is not as powerful as we consider it to be. Most response are inbuilt, unconscious  & far less under our control, even when we assume it to be.

Creative typographic science posters [Designs]

Kapil Bhagat is a Mumbai, India based designer whose creative typographic science posters are catching the  design world’s attention

 Newton drops an “O” to illustrate gravity, a massive “C” in Copernicus reminds us that he figured the Earth wasn’t the center of the universe and placed the Sun, rather than the Earth, at the center. Not only do the posters look great, but they also allow you to memorize who did what.

The origins of the design of the modern chess pieces [Article]

Jimmy Stamp takes us through the design of the modern chess set:

Prior to 1849, there was no such thing as a “normal chess set.” At least not like we think of it today. Over the centuries that chess had been played, innumerable varieties of sets of pieces were created, with regional differences in designation and appearance. As the game proliferated throughout southern Europe in the early 11th century, the rules began to evolve, the movement of the pieces were formalized, and the pieces themselves were drastically transformed from their origins in 6th century India.