Design Prophecy & Occasional Reflections
A Design Genetic Perspective on...everything.
Palm on a new path
Palm Pre is an interesting development on the mobile market. The new phone from Palm is a new bold step to protect Palm's position as a market player. It has a new OS called Palm Web OS, based on Linux but relaying on web standard technologies such as html and javascript. Precisely where I believe Apple is going with iPhone and Safari using HTML 5 for animations and web applications. It communicates a moving, warm and emotional personality with its rounded shape, also in the GUI, leaving linear, harsh compositions, and rigid user interface behind. Despite the resemblance with the iPhone it has integrity.
Sony Vaio P, like a Color Pencil Box.
Sony's new 8'' notebook Sony Vaio P is really beautiful. Besides Apple, maybe Samsung, and a few others in the same industry, Sony has a distinct design and identity in its products. Vaio P signals the Free Personality compared to competitors, breaking up traditional beliefs on how laptops should look like with its rectangular and wide shape. Also in a semiotic way, looking like a Color Pencil Box. And as Apple their products radiate quality. The logo Vaio is definitely pulling the product towards a emotional, free, artistic, and spiritual personality. I wonder if it runs on Ubuntu?
Black
For many black is a negative thing, and it can be. At the same time black is where you will find true light if you enter it. This is what happens when you go inwards. You will encounter yourself, the “dangers" lying in emotional blockings and be able to confront them and resolve them. Black stands for nothingness, meaning it has all the potentials in the world. Black denotes seriousness, silence, and thoughtfulness of the inward looking personality. However, it can also mean deception and other bad things, all depending on the intentions and potentials the inner world.
Bauhaus.
Bauhaus was not only the seed of functionality and design as we know it today. They also conducted a serious search for spirituality in design, trying to understand the intangible reality and how to combine that with a functional meaning. Notably it was Johannes Itten, Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee, that was behind this search.
Talking about Kandinsky, I can recommend his books Concerning the Spiritual in Art and Point and Line to Plane. His work has been an inspiration for me in my work with DesignGenetics and Gepio
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A leader is a designer
How come Leadership Philosophies has been so focused on the left brain when that's not the whole truth? We have one rational part of our brain but also another that is visual and symbolic, the "design area" of the brain. This is one of the realizations behind Gepio which is a webapp for mirroring Corporate Personality. It helps organizations to create one person from many by summarizing the personalities of employees in a visual language.
The same thing is stated in the article "Strategy by Design" in Fast Company. Hopefully more and more leaders will discover that they indeed are like a designer using the exact same tools, creating strategies that are symmetrical or asymetrical, small or big, red or blue, linear or organic. It will prepare them for the future.