high art.. low tech.

i've always believed that great products are not necessarily born out of high technology. they're a factor of creative thought. it's a frame of mind which allows you to obsess as much on the color of the product as on the choice of processor.(i know a lot of people think this is stupid, but i can't explain it any other way - it comes with the package).

some of the most notable consumer tech. products in the last 3 years were - the iphone, the olpc-XO, the nintendo wii and none of them broke new ground in terms of technology. In the crudest terms, all these products were configured with the right features based on existing technologies. of course, the trick is to figure out what constitutes "right".

i was just reading through a post in ars technica on the Wii - "Even though the Wii is the most advanced motion-controlled gaming console ever released, the technology inside the remote is surprisingly basic and already dated." Of course, the Wii blew away the PS3 and the XBox360 and is a cultural phenomenon that an entire generation of kids and their grannys' are growing up on..

reminds me of Alan Kay's - "Appreciate mundanity: after all, a pencil is high technology".

Heatmaps

This is a heatmap based on wifi signal strength.. "the tool allocates a 2D grid that overlaps the geographical sample area, working out the average signal strength based on nearby sample points."

the beauty about heat maps is that they hold a lot of information in a single frame. Hemang's been creating a heat map for mapping shopper movement, dwell times etc. for retail stores. instead of going through heaps of analytical data in the form of excel sheets, a heat map is a simple visual tool which can be used across a retail organization - right from category managers to operations, marketing and even store employees to understand the impact of store layout and merchandising.

of course, when one starts co-relating the hot and cold zones in a store with the shopper demographics (through a loyalty card) and their buying preferences (through purchase history databases) the heat map can turn into a retail gold mine..

discovered kafka while waiting for a friend at a bookstore..
- "a cage went in search of a bird" - caustic, strange, thought provoking, idealistic, biased, and totally addictive.

and it was the cover which caught my eye..
that's Alfred A. Knopf, New York.

What makes a happy product?

A great question on linkedin by Karen Vu
One simple happy question: How do you make a 'happy' product ?

my answer: maybe it's fuzziness.. quirkiness.. asymmetry.. simplicity.?. an unexpected response to a stimuli.. fragrance.. color.. taste.. sound. temperature? lack there of?music? a clean slate? dark chocolate? vermillion? white? stars? fading light? is it R2D2? i dont know? deviant is a prerequisite.. triggers of memory.. metaphors that take you to another world. that make you fall in love. that bring inanimate objects to life.

humanity in unexpected places/things.. makes a happy product.