A few months back I excitedly ordered a Slimfold Wallet ($20) by designer Dave Zuverink who curiously (and quite awesomely) branched out from UI design to the world of physical goods. So it’s a great idea and a seemingly good execution – let’s see how it holds up in real life.

First off, it hasn’t been long enough. Wallets are one of the few things that we seem to keep forever. There are probably more fingers on one hand than the number of wallets I’ve owned in my life and my most recent, a Kenneth Cole leather trifold will probably wait patiently on a shelf just in case this new kid doesn’t stand up to time.

The product itself is very professionally presented for an Etsy buy. It’s plastic packaged and comes with brief instructions for those who have never, I guess, carried money in any form before? A touch, though, that adds credibility. It’s made of Tyvek which is a high density polyethylene fiber that they use for packaging and house wraps since it’s highly breathable but resistant to water. It’s light weight and has a sort of matte sheen with an expected fibrous texture. There’s something in us that equates lightweight with cheapness – titanium rings an example – it just feels fragile and papery. Everyone who I’ve shown this to has that same reaction of “You’re going to use this to protect money?” with the raised eyebrow subtext of “Wow. How brave.” to their credit, I thought the same thing for the first few days.

It’s a material that, if you’ve tried to open a package made from it you’ve come to know, cuts a lot easier than it rips. On that front, it seems pretty sturdy for the in and out of pocket stress it’ll experience. As long as I don’t leave it anywhere near scissors or knives it should be alright. It’s stitched with a thin thread that seems sufficient and the fold line could be described as reinforced though I doubt it’s required. While we’re focused on the fold I will say it’s not exactly a perfect angle, and not by design. Whoever folded it was a tad off, so when closed the two far edges don’t exactly line up. A minor thing found negligible in use, but tweaked my designer OCD as soon as got it. The slots for cards have held up surprisingly well – I thought for sure those would be the first to go. So far, so good. They are a little stiff in the beginning but relax with use and are perfectly fine after a week or two.

It looks good, I think, though I’ve heard the opposite from friends. In a sudden flash of uncharacteristic boldness I clicked ‘buy’ on the orange one. Since my wardrobe is almost exclusively greyscale it’s a pretty nice pop of colour. For people who actually wear coloured clothes, the charcoal options would be quite handsome too, and will cover the tragic dirtiness factor I’ll get into later. There’s a small printed logo and recycle sign on the front and inside corners respectively which appeals to my minimalism. It’d be cool, I think, to have a Spinnaker style design-your-own graphic option. Customize them a bit with pre-existing graphics or submit your own monotone vectors for print.

There is a qualm that I have here: it’s a different shape than I’d like. Or! Perhaps more accurately: than I’m used to. With a trifold you align the cards vertically and the whole wallet is vertical in your pocket creating a taller profile at the expense of being thicker in depth. This being a simple fold means the vertical cards end up being horizontal in the pocket which was, at first, an awkward extra width. Honestly, I’m not sure I like that. If they made a trifold out of this same material I’d probably spring for that. Of course, this main idea is to take down that depth which brings me to my next point:

It’s frightening to carry around. I say this with an all due tongue-in-cheek nod to it’s brilliance. I don’t notice it. It bends and flexes enough to stay stealthy in my back pocket and being virtually weightless means there’s no reassuring tug when walking. It’s a nervous thing, though, because now I’m paranoid and constantly checking. Will I get used to this? Probably. I’ve already gotten better over the past weeks. I can be sitting directly on it and have that quick pang of “oh no! where’s my wallet?!” worry. Part of me calls that an annoyance or a problem, but that’s sort of why people would buy the product in the first place, isn’t it?

There is an actual problem with the fibrous texture: it gets dirty. Really dirty. I work in a clean office, I drive a fairly clean car. My jean pockets aren’t lined with ink rollers. How does it get this grimy?

Which becomes my only real suggestion: maybe get the charcoal or black version. The orange, for obvious reasons, isn’t really great at hiding that dirt patina.

TL;DR The build has held up remarkably well after the brief months and I don’t see it going downhill anytime soon. I wish it would stay clean, is all. For $20, I say try it. Why not?

This idea has been developing in the back of my mind for a few months now and I’ve briefly alluded to it before. Nonetheless, it seems to warrant further exploration.

What if we measured design’s goodness in smiles brought to users – a concept I called “delight” in previous columns – instead of, say, profit or ownership. Ultimately, this is one side to the overarching question of “What should we design?” and it’s basis “What deserves to be in existence?”

Throughout school and my early career I was a very utilitarian designer, very minimal and very essential. There wasn’t much room for whimsy or self-possession in the design, it should be quiet and unobtrusive. In a perfect world there wouldn’t be anything but we would be able to complete any task we wanted. Since this was impossible, it was design’s job to get as close as possible. It was a Rams world moreso than an Eames one, and I say this in the philosophical sense more than the aesthetic one. The Eames couple made toys and had colourful windmills and fun, whereas Dieter was German and stark. It was a Japanese zen approach: the space should not be filled with things but people, and those people will mold the neutral space to their own preference. I still believe these things and will continue to fill my own world with these things, but my argument here is on behalf of the rest of the world.

Unlike physical sales where something is either sold or isn’t we have to extend the metaphor for smiles as a currency. We can think of debt as the opposite of money but anti-smiles are a more complex absence. There are three states: delight, neutral and frustration. The best designed things we marvel at, we delight in, the rest either elicits no response or actively gets in our way. Ideally, of course, we should be designing for the first, but a large majority of objects are the second: they exist and they serve – often well – our needs but we probably don’t really notice them in the positive sense either.

The reason I love this abstraction is it’s broad moral questions that relate humans to design. Questions that bring up, for only one example, things like guns. Not inherently bad and in fact smile granting when used in a range but when used against other people definitely rack up the anti-smile cost pretty quickly. Should they, then, exist as objects? There’d have to be a net balance of smiles gained v. smiles destroyed in every object that either justifies or damns it’s being. Granted, for most things it’d be obviously skewed: the existence of ice cream cones is something that – I’m assuming, at least – would be far closer to the delight end of the spectrum. A water bottle might not be an actively exciting thing, but nor are they actively destroying delight either. So then, there must be other, external factors to finally decide.

Usefulness has always been weighted heavily for me, as mentioned above, I’m an inherently practical person and an inherently practical designer. Water bottles, we can easily agree, are useful. The reductio ad absurdum being holding water in your cupped hands until you need a drink. This would be annoying at best and tragically difficult in reality. Driving and typing become impossible, as would basically everything else we do throughout the day. How many smiles do water bottles destroy? We could point to the life cycle analysis – the energy used to make them, the shipping costs, the stores that sell them, the re-usability, the recycling efficiency / landfill cost and so forth, but in the end we need a metric that correlates those things with humans’ actual lives and their delight level.

Now, this is all good in hypothetical thought. It’s good for imaginative philosophy in both design and humanist circles but in practice becomes impossibly complex to work out. Who’s to say there aren’t families living in landfills who’d delight in finding a good thrown out water bottle? What about the people in the town next to the landfill who anti-delight in seeing it grow closer to their house? Where do those things stack up and cancel out?

But maybe, just maybe, it’s another thing to think about when designing something. Not just cost analysis or profit margins, marketability or sustainability, something so simple as “Will this thing make more smiles than it breaks?”

They don’t allow permalinks to comments, but allow me to quote “disqusplaya” via The Atlantic:

…who cares if you can “only” bring in a couple hundred K a year. It keeps you and your 4 friends out of a “real job”, thrills 10s of millions of customers… not a bad gig.

The scale doesn’t really matter – it doesn’t have to be 10s of millions of people. I’m thrilled just to write to you readers, my mere 10s of thousands. It’s a non-money payment: delight. I get paid in the cool comments I get to read of yours and the conversations we have.

I’ve had the thought myself: why not start companies with the express goal of simply breaking even and just doing it because your idea is awesome or because you want to make cool stuff for others? Of course, there’s time and effort involved but if you truly love your product you’d probably already be working on it anyway and entirely willing and happy to share it. I would, anyway. I do, in a sense. It’s a bizarre thing I never would have guessed or planned to happen, but somehow there are people directly and indirectly giving me money for things I made one evening just for fun. You could look at it as loss if you assign a numeric value for my time spent as dollars per hour but if I did it for myself anyway, it’s sort of literally free money.

So we stand way back and think larger: what’s the point of existence? How do we live? Is this whole bitter 9-5 job economy actually the only way?

And we see people who argue for the collection of things. Massive tangible riches via long hours and hard work. That’s “success” – the American Dream.

Maybe I’m just more of the altruist artist than I’d like to admit, but I look at that and wonder why? As long as I have enough to live, why wouldn’t I start collecting in the currency of delight?

But it works in both directions (and this is more of a change in me personally) – paying for delight. I’m famously frugal because I measure things in purely time terms. $50 concert? That’s way too much. I could see a $14 movie for those same two hours. Or, I could get a $5 game and play it for 50 hours. I’ve written about this before. Something that needs to be learned is that $50 for a 30 second bungee jump can be worth it based on the experience itself, not the time taken to experience it. The delight currency, coming full circle.

Let’s face it, hard work =/= money. If that were true there’s a lot of single mothers working two jobs who want their cheques, please. But even without money we can make their lives better. It’s not about the rich or poor, though, if I started a t-shirt line I don’t really care who buys or wears them; I just want to know that whoever does enjoys what I’ve created. It’s a selfish act with a selfless result, I suppose, but I’m still not sure how I feel about Ayn Rand.

The desk I’ve been promising to post since mid summer when I built it.

Basically two 10″ deep by 4′ wide by 2″ thick cedar slabs make up the surface, stained dark brown and glazed with epoxy resin in such a way that it follows the wood’s natural texture, creating a reflection surface like that of a deck outside in the rain. Since it’s not a writing desk (really, it just holds two monitors, a Wacom pen and the occasional glass of cider) it didn’t have to be very deep nor smooth and since everything I found on the market was quite massive, I opted for the DIY method.

Shown above are the flanges and the 1″ galvanized steel piping I used. Of course this is overkill hardware but the store I was at didn’t have the grey iron I originally wanted, so I paid slightly more and simply sprayed it all matte black with my ever present rattle can (I spray almost everything I can matte black).

It’s a cantilever design so the left side is completely open and free for my legs when getting up (my chair is on carpet and while it rotates, it doesn’t move) and the right side is where my computer sits (acting as armrest and mousepad) and where the wall is (the desk itself situated in the middle of the room front-back and against the wall on my right). So it’s a nice solution, just sort of floating there to stand screens upon since I don’t need much else.

Seems stable enough, even with the cantilever design. The two supports from the back forward actually go past the half way point, so the moment arm isn’t as bad as you might think from looking at it. Of course, the steel itself is fairly weighty on that side and I have no problems placing things on the floating edge. My heavy monitor sits pretty much directly over the middle leg sweeping back, so the forces are reasonably dealt with there.

The full parts list, if you want to make your own (although honestly one could definitely design it better): 2x 2′ threaded 1″ pipe (assume all pipe is this from now on), 3x 1′ pipe, 1x 4′ pipe, 2x T connectors, 3x 45 angle connectors, 3x flanges (and maybe an extra brace for the cantilevered side for extra support. Ideally, bowtie dovetail the wood together – I just used a fourth flange empty) and 3x threaded connector pieces to go between the 45 and flanges. Screws to fit (4x per flange, maybe 2 more for that brace).

Since there is the sharp edge of threaded steel pipe as legs you might want to look at those sticky foam feet for use on hardwood or whatever. I’m on carpet so it’s not too big a deal.

Two thoughts flash before my mind. The first: a childish sense of wonderment and the grandiose delusion of “someday, that’ll be my garage”. The second: a colder, almost bitterness towards whoever owns them and keeps them behind velvet rope.

Cars, by design and intention are made to move people around. Some cars are designed and lovingly made to move a single person around really fast and with remarkable grace – these latter are like majestic cheetahs or sharks. And, like cheetahs and sharks, tend to pace aimlessly when encaged. It’s sad to see them behind bars, trapped so we can parade by and admire them for mere and petty external appearances. It’s almost Damien Hirst of them. The point of a cheetah to run and a shark to swim; the point of a car is to drive.

Should we preserve legacy? Yes. But we have models and photos for that. If the vehicle functions, it should live out it’s days doing what it loves to do. Otherwise the design was for naught. Otherwise the people who hand riveted hundreds if not thousands of pops across the hand bent bodywork were in vain. These works of math and engineering and passion and vision and love. Trapped.

I often wonder / complain about why they don’t just design cheap things better. It’s really not that different from a manufacturing standpoint. I mean, the obvious answer is cost for designers and most manufacturers simply don’t care. Cheap stuff is cheap. Still, given the choice between this and the others on the shelf it was an easy choice – and for $4.49, I really couldn’t go wrong.

It’s just lovely. It’s made of the same cheap stamped plastic as every other calculator, but it doesn’t feel quite as cheap. The sheen is nice. It’s light and creaks slightly when twisted, as to be expected. Buttons are buttons and work well, the LCD screen is actually more dot-matrix than the traditional fair, which… doesn’t really effect much of anything. I don’t have any particular point to make except that it’s less than five dollars and I’m proud to keep it on my desk next to $1000+ milled aluminum computing hardware. It’s an accomplishment.

The only thing I would notice is that the viewing angle is pretty dismal. It’s not an issue for me since I keep it fairly close to me on my desk (so I look down on it more perpendicular), but I can see how the sharper angled screen found on other models would be an advantage for the long-reachers out there. That’s doing pretty good for such a cheap item.

Bought from Superstore, and while the J+- logo didn’t show up anything terribly useful on the internet, I suspect it’s some offshoot of the President’s Choice / No Name Brand since it was surrounded by the iconic yellow on other desk items. They’re doing really well for themselves – they also sell lovely black pencils in cardboard tubes and I really ought to buy some just to share the brilliant packaging.

I’m a big fan of Errant Signal because it’s such a transcendent platform – game reviews are there, yes, but even those are so much more than about just the game itself. Then, there are works like the above, which tackle the bigger topics without the immediate proxy that the specific game would provide.

It’s a cool topic, gamification, and one that I always meant to write about myself. Honestly, though, I’m not sure I have any further commentary to provide – he nails it dead on. I could put the industrial design spin on it and talk about the psychology of using a physical product instead of a virtual one, but when it boils down the metaphors stand: using something for the sake of itself is different than using it for some arbitrary reward. I might add, actually, that the physical product market does add another logically pointless reward: this concept of coolness.

While you could argue for and against the coolness of using Foursquare, the virtual gamification doesn’t immediately care about what others think. You’re getting rewarded for the things you do. Sometimes it’s a public thing – you want others to see your achievements or point score or whatever, but it’s not nearly as open as, say, driving a nice car or wearing that expensive watch. The reward mechanism for physical product usage is available much more directly to strangers on the street. As such, choices are made to maximize that, often in spite of more practical and reasonable concerns. This would be a prime example for using a system (or product) more for the reward than for the inherent joy of the product itself. This would the real-life equivalent of grinding for GP.

Coolness – if I may go off now on a complete tangent – is a bizarre thing. It’s only acceptable if it’s seemingly effortless. People who try too hard to be cool are even less cool than where they started because true coolness would be apathetic to being cool. The truly cool people are those who just are, while the people who want to be seen as cool cannot be. It’s actually one of the few status related actions in humanity that I really appreciate. It’s hilarious and ironic and much like golf rewards those who are able to relax and let it be. If you try too hard to be good at golf you will tend to do miserably. Then there’s the downward spiral: if you slice a ball terribly the mulligan has to be better, so you try harder, and it gets worse. Repeat. The more you fail trying to be cool the more you want to be cool and the harder you try, the more you’ll fail.

In summation, golf and coolness are Chinese finger traps, and both Chris Hecker and Chris Franklin are awesome.

I feel the need to elaborate a few more practical outcomes of the previously mentioned East / West divide.

The West will see the East’s idea of accepted transience as a sort of bum’s life. In accepting what is instead of striving for what could be, you are in effect making excuses for your laziness and  therefor aren’t a contributing part of society. This is partially true – if we were all 100% happy with simply what is, we would really never invent anything new or solve any problem with the famous “this could be better” inspiration we designers think so often. On the other hand, if we were all 100% strivers (and I think this is more true to our reality now) we would run into each other and counteract a lot of innovation with this silly notion of fame or overwhelming financial success.

The immediate example that comes to mind is patent trolling.

I use the word “silly” which implies my feeling for a thing. I’ve received outraged emails before that I’m biased. Well, yes. I am not a journalist and as such under no such obligation to unbias ‘truth’ (as if such a thing were to exist, anyway). With that said, my bias will often change and occasionally flip to the opposite completely over time.

But I do think it’s silly that someone or a company will have an awesome idea, spend all the money and time and effort to patent and… not do anything after. No attempt to actually make it or implement it. They wait instead for someone else to have the idea and make that awesome thing real, and then sue them for “infringement” walking away with money. It’s just, counter productive to society in favour of personal profit.

Does this make me anti-capitalist? Debatable. I would say in this example it shows that I value  the greater advancement of design (both as a physical and an ideal outcome) over mere personal gain, yes. I think a truly capitalist person would look at this as the ultimate way to make money without having to do anything besides predict future inventions and get there first. If money is the measure of success, then yes, this is a very successful practice.

Full circle: if that’s the West’s true pantheon, I would argue it’s corrupt. Is infamy the same as fame? Depends who you ask. The funny thing – the fickle thing – about fame is it inherently cannot be available to everyone. While everyone can learn to be content, not everyone can make themselves famous. As the number of famous people increases, the disparity between ‘fame’ and ‘non-fame’ lessens. Essentially, we could all say we’re all famous right now, but because everyone is, it’s not special at all. Now, you can re-read that entire paragraph and substitute the word ‘wealth’ for ‘fame’ and it’s the same thing. The pantheon of the West, it seems, is inherently unavailable. That is the point – you could be the person who rises over everyone around you.

Call me socialist if you want, but doesn’t that goal seem pretty messed up?

But it’s not about me, this is about design with me as an author-proxy.

Should design be socialist? And by that I mean, available for everyone? I’d say so. The Eames definitely would say so. Rams, given his economic time, would say so. The ultimate irony is the remnants of their legacy is the exact opposite: their works are inflated and expensive now because someone more recent decided that rarity implied disparity. Obviously I can’t point to Herman Miller as evil, but I do think the Eames would be disappointed if they were alive now.

Full circle #2: the pursuit of money is not evil in itself, but to put it before the greater good of design is selfish in the bad way. If it were not a status symbol thing as the West insists it should be, it would happen less. If there was some compromise in the middle that took the West’s ability to create new and awesome things and the East’s ability to allow it to be nameless and freely available, we’d be better off.

Next week: the Scandinavians do just that.

As I was saying.

It’s here! And gorgeous.

Quick and dirty audio test / mini review:

HERE

I’m so sorry it’s not embedded. I’m still not sure how to deal with that sort of thing short of adding yet another plugin. The podcasts proper will probably be using Youtube or some such service for streaming and then links to the .MP3 for downloading. In the meantime: horrendous workarounds.

Recorded with Quicktime on “meh” settings to keep the filesize reasonable. Compared to the old Nexxtech I’m very pleased. The other advantage is USB input doesn’t have the same sorts of line noise issues I was running into with the 3.5mm input – so, good to note.

I’m running out of excuses to avoid doing a proper show. I wonder if everyone hates the sound of their own voice played back…

By now you’ve probably all seen this: the new $70 Kinect-like interface for your computer.

And by now you’ve probably already figured out what I’m going to say.

The problem with spacial interfaces isn’t accuracy, it’s the fact you’re going to have to hold one or both of your hands up for extended periods of time. This is why touchscreens, when presented as direct replacements for monitors, are almost never used after the initial gee-whiz factor wears off. Mice are actually pretty fantastic. I can very accurately point to anything on my screen quickly and by moving maybe a few centimeters at most. Muscles used: just whatever’s required for my first two fingers and thumb. You want to sell your product on the basis of efficiency when you have to move an entire arm (or two) (which are slower appendages in that context) farther and then move the wrists and fingers to work the interface? I just, it doesn’t make any sense.

Now, are they inherently useless? For now, maybe, but I look at the touchscreen example: would I ever want a touchscreen monitor? Nope. Never. Would I want a mouse to control my iPad when I’m curled around it reading emails / ebooks or browsing Flipboard in bed? That’s just silly. Or when using your phone on the train: your thumb’s scrolling up and down is ideal for that size and position (unless you have the Mammoth LTE X4 G6 911 Slim Xtreme Android Envy Prime, in which case your thumb can’t actually reach that far).

We changed our posture to fit the technology better and it works.

Can I think of any posture where a spacial interface would be ideal? Not at the moment, but hey, that’s where the touchscreen started too.

So with the technology becoming smaller, cheaper and more accurate (and hopefully non-laggy, which even Wacom struggles with) I am excited to see where this goes. Until then, I won’t be buying one.

Via every blog in the world right now.