Our very own Josh Alexander will unveil his most recent work at the Giacobetti Paul gallery in Brooklyn from February 2-29. In his exhibition, INWARD, Josh presents a visual narrative of human emotions through the use of color, texture and shapes. The show will include several series of work, including collections of emotions, scars, and abstract figures. In his new works, Alexander captures honesty in introspection ­­ and reveals his continual influence from human nature.

Exhibition: February 2 – 29, 2012

Gallery Hours: Tuesday – Sunday, 12-6

Giacobetti Paul Gallery is located in Dumbo at 111 Front Street on the second floor in Gallery #220.
The best way to get there is the F train to the York Street stop, down the hill a block and left a couple of blocks. The building is at the corner of Front and Washington.

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We came across a blog post discussing the dichotomy between the minimalist, industrial design of Apple products and the emotional, human design of the software found on those devices.  The writer seemed pretty annoyed by it all.  http://madebymany.com/blog/apples-aesthetic-dichotomy

Our design and user experience team had some strong opinions on the matter. This was our email thread today:

Max Z: This guys makes a couple of very good points (although I don’t agree with his overarching theme). I think the problem is simply one of consistency. Calendar on the iPad looks like its physical counterpart, while Calendar on the iPhone does not. However, Find My Friends is an app that maintains its look on both with leather stitching. Then there’s Game Center, which attempts to hit on a playful theme with a green felt background and serif fonts, while iBooks has fake pages that flick across the screen. This just needs to be fixed.

The part where I don’t agree with him is the tangent he goes on when addressing Apple’s advertising, or regarding Apple’s use of mainstream media in its keynote events. Simply put, people know they’re watching advertising because…. they’re watching a commercial. No one drops their jaw when they realize that Batman is not a documentary of a caped crusader. Same thing goes for using Winnie the Pooh as the first book in an iBooks app.

Ultimately, the author forgets one thing. Apple’s primary target audience is American, and the majority of Americans don’t live in New York or San Francisco. The majority of Americans live in the rest of the country, and they’re not “technorati”, nor do they want to be. They like things that ARE mainstream. At the same time they are also human, so they like things that are pretty, things that feel nice in their hand, and things that are intuitive. In other words, mixing mainstream with unique, beautiful aesthetic is the perfect business strategy. That might just be why they’ve been able to sell a few of their products.

Hams: Another design debate about something Apple is doing?! F yeah, my favorite!

I think another key thing here is something everyone seems to be skipping around, and it’s one of my new favorite big words d bags I mean designers use: Ephemeralization. Apple’s industrial design strategy is different from their product design/development strategy because they both have different challenges and different goals.

Aside from the inconsistency of apps between devices Max outlined so nicely, the author seems to have an issue with the inconsistency in an iPhone’s industrial design and one of the apps on it, iCal. Because we’re designing in a time where our one slick singular device handles our communication, calendar, entertainment, shopping, etc. we have to stick to conventions and maybe even aesthetic cues (for now) that the majority audience easily recognizes from past life versions of each function.

If Apple were designing iCal as a hardware device that served a singular purpose, maybe we’d see a “true-to-calendar” design approach instead of a skeuomorphic take on our multi-functional iPhone. But we are not, because that would involve a hardware case you need to change each time you switch apps.

The industrial designers aren’t designing a calendar device, or a boom box device, or a bookshelf device– they are designing a pocket sized little electronic that takes the place of all these things for you, which requires a totally different design strategy than the utilities named above.

The product designers are designing what the majority audience right now understands as some of these things transformed onto a little screen in their pocket. This will always change and this is the benefit of multi-functional devices being able to update relatively easily. It’s not inconsistent, they are two different things that work together now.

I think the most interesting piece of this whole conversation is what happens when the majority audience doesn’t recognize torn sheets from the calendar anymore but rather this skeuomorphic take on it as their point of reference.

Ivan: It already happened.  My friend teaches elementary school children, and he told me that there’s no succinct  way to describe what the Save button is. This indicates Microsoft’s slavishness to history and precedent to me, whereas Jobs made it a point to do away with the past. (The Icon Garden is a prime example.)

Toby: Actually, folks (Apple users) won’t soon recognize the digital concept of a folder soon, either.
Apple is making a pointed effort to erase the desktop metaphor from computing in order to reify the place these tools have in all parts of our lives. Rather than being misappropriated office tools, they’re lifestyle enablers. Or some shit.
The future is all groups vs folders on Apple platforms. Springboard is the new Finder (and just when Finder was finally sorta working… and written in Cocoa!)

On the tactile metaphors – even though they botch it (book metaphor + scrollbar = puke) – Apple has been telling designers at WWDC and via the HIG and design guides to replicate tactile, real-world, “physical” objects in their designs since the iPhone first came out.

They really push to make the point to designers that the iPhone and iPad (and with Lion, the Mac) don’t exist – they’re just pieces of glass that become different physical objects when an app is launched.

Why they chose to blanket Lion in what appears to be denim is beyond me, though.

Chris R: see what i just did there

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I’ll come right out and say it, I miss my first generation iPhone. You remember the one I mean right? The very first one, the one that lagged behind, the one that didn’t support exchange email, and the one that had a 2 megapixel camera. But most of all, the one that had that great metallic finish on the back. It was the only phone that I can think of that actually wore to become an even better one – perhaps not in technical function, but definitely in an experiential one. All those little bumps and scratches made it feel like your very own digital pebble.

These days it seems as if our commercial world is littered with products and interfaces that constantly push the uber clean, “just minted” look; and as an experience designer, this is something that’s begun to trouble me more and more.

As human beings, but more specifically, as Americans, we love things that are new. This year’s new car… hell, next year’s new car; the next MacBook Air that you just read about; we can’t get enough. And the same applies to the interfaces that we use. Design is constantly tweaked and sharpened to look not just better, but more polished than it did a few months ago. You can see this in any site redesign, or better yet, in the latest release of an operating system.

All of this got me thinking– what if we tried designing for the long term?  What if the interfaces we design could “wear in” the way our favorite pair of boots does, so that they feel intrinsically ours?

The first thing we need to consider is the kind of interface that can benefit from this type of visual effect. The place where this feels intuitive is in touch-based interactions. There’s something about the tactility of these types of devices that connects very deeply to our basic senses, and by extension, our humanity. We leave our imprint on everything we touch– from fingerprints on glass, to creases in that old pair of jeans. When things wear away it makes us love them, respect them even, because in a way it reflects some sort of effort and input on our part; so why not extend that to the interface they bear?

The second component to consider is the amount of wear that can be applied to an interface element before we hinder its intent and visual clarity. This inevitably brings in the aspect of time and the length over which the process should affect the element: Too long, and the overall effect will be lost. Too fast, and it will feel gimmicky.

So what would a realistic scenario of this type of interface look like? Let’s take everyone’s favorite mobile note-taking app, Evernote, as an example. Currently, note’s are broken up by notebook, and each notebook simply lists its contents in order of the time that they were entered. You can also tag your notes and create favorites. In applying the “worn interface” model to this app, we could register each “open” action of each note with a slight visual effect, a change in color of a note’s corner, a tear or crease in the margin, or slight gradation in background. Instantly, we’ve created a visual terminology that organically replaces the need for favorites, while at the same time, creating a mechanism that can be easily understood by anyone using the application, regardless of language. What this approach offers the user is an intuitive manner of passively customizing their context of use.

The same model can be applied to a reading application such as iBooks. Borrowing from its physical counterpart, each book icon would start out life as a beautifully designed image, complete with the symmetrical rounded edges and reflective sheens that are all the craze these days. However, as the user taps the icon daily to open the book, the edges can darken, the perfect sheen can smeer, and the text can fade ever so slightly. The effect can also be applied to the pages of the application, as their edges begin to curl in and turn yellow as the user approaches the end of the book. Extending the metaphor further, the effect could modulate in impact between a book that’s finished quickly, versus one that’s read for months.

I loved my first iPhone because every scratch and ding was made by me – whether intentional or not – and every time I felt it in my pocket, those imperfections registered some sort of emotional response. It’s the same thing that makes a 5 year old cry when his mother puts his dirty blanky in the washing machine after having been dragged through every corner of the house. Self imposed imperfections ultimately create a bond that brands objects as “ours,” and often, imposed an air of quality that exists only in our minds.

In the end, the worn interface model obviously requires iterations of testing to achieve a usable application. But what it attempts to accomplish is to create an interface that can be customized organically, based on its amount of use, while exploring a new methodology in visual communication.

– Max Zabramny, Senior User Experience Designer

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Autodesk has announced that AutoCAD will be released for OS X coming this fall. While it’s true that this is a return of sorts for Autodesk’s flagship product (AutoCAD was available for Mac OS in the ‘90s), the release represents a fresh start for Autodesk on the platform. Showing that Autodesk is treating this as a first class Mac application, AutoCAD will support core OS X technology such as the always-useful Quicklook and multi-touch gestures with an Apple laptop trackpad or Magic Trackpad for desktop computers. AutoCAD for OS X will also play nice in mixed environments with the ability to read and write the same drawing files that its Windows brethren can.

The excitement surrounding this news is understandable for architects. Familiar with OS X from home use, I’ve heard many of our clients lament not being able to run their preferred platform in the office as well. The benefits of doing so are certainly undeniable.

First and foremost, OS X enjoys a relatively malware-free existence. It’s no secret that cleaning viral infections from Windows machines constitutes a large portion of workstation downtime. Apple computers also tend to enjoy a longer lifecycle than their Windows counterparts. Complementary software suites and products for OS X, such as Adobe’s Creative Suite and Autodesk’s Maya, take the architecture workflow from design to pre-visualization. With the announcement of Outlook for Mac (Also a returning Mac product!), the technological reasons for avoiding OS X have all but evaporated.

As if the promised release of AutoCAD for OS X weren’t enough, Autodesk has also announced an upcoming application for Apple’s iOS devices. Not just a viewer, the new application will reportedly allow architects to annotate drawings, making site visits that much more productive. If it’s anything like Autodesk’s excellent iPad app SketchBook Pro, it’s sure to be a winner.

Being equal parts designer and engineer, architects are sure to love AutoCAD on OS X. I look forward to our first Mac-based rollout.

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Early sketch of 174 Grand Street, by Loadingdock5

In the summer of 2008, we worked with Sam Bargetz of Loadingdock5 Architecture to redesign a client’s office. Our work required a creative approach to every aspect of the technology integration to achieve the sleek, modern appearance that the office design called for. Sam and his team were great to work with and we’ve kept in touch.

This year we were excited to learn that Loadingdock5 is attempting to build NYC’s first new building which fulfills the strict German “Passive House” standard. Passive Houses are airtight buildings that use heat from common household appliances and even your human body (!) for warmth. Every effort is made to conserve thermal energy, state-of-the-art heat exchangers are used to provide lots of fresh air.

We’ve been passing notes back and forth to Sam about the technology and are excited to follow his blog updates on the project.

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