The Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 was set up by Prince Albert to run the ‘The Great Exhibition’. The event turned out to be a great success, so afterwards instead of being disbanded, The Commission was charged with administering the hefty profits for ‘increasing the means of industrial education and extending the influence of science and art upon productive industry’.
The Commission subsequently purchased the land that now houses the Royal Albert Hall, Imperial College and the Royal (more…)
A major point that came from the Human Factors in Medical Devices event we spoke at last Wednesday, was how do you ensure you are solving the right problem? It is typical that companies, charities, NGO’s and government departments all come at a problem with their own agenda and resources to offer the solution. In the case of medical devices, this often means a company will respond to what the sales department has garnered, based on the product range or technology they can offer. They may have only touched on a tiny corner of the real problem, but be unwilling to delve deeper. Perhaps they don’t know how, or perhaps they sense a risk of revealing a much deeper people based system problem, centred outside the “area of product expertise” that they offer. What is the incentive for them to do that? Well, if they avoid studying the real needs of users and patients, they can find a huge investment in development results in a half solution, which causes further problems itself.
I just got an email from “100 Months”. We’re down to month 67, which spurred me on to follow one of their links to a wonderful speech by Sir David Attenborough. I am very glad I did. In this speech he’s urging us to break the taboos around the environment and population control. Everyone knows that humans are putting massive pressure on the environment. Even with our current 7 billion, only 1 billion of whom are living the developed world’s high carbon life style, we’re trashing our planet. It is entirely mad to imagine we can keep on growing the population ad infinitum. Even with the best technology push we can muster, sooner or later our human population will have to be controlled. We can choose to do this ourselves, for example through educating and empowering women, which is proven to dramatically reduce birth rate. Or we can let natural events take their course, which will be nasty.
With such a big problem… “strong the temptation is to bury our heads in the sand”. Even those who face up to the path of destruction we’re on, find it hard to consider the real cause of all this. Instead we focus on treating the symptoms of having too many people on the planet. We join interest groups, become experts in fields such as recycling, solar power etc. This is great – it all helps, but it’s like trying to improve the comfort of slave ships. Keeping humans as slaves went from being an accepted system, to an outlawed and reviled idea within the space of 5 years, through honest discussion and debate. We can do the same for the crazy notion that it’s OK to keep producing as many children as we want.
It’s actually quite simple, through discussion and education, we can generate an understanding of personal responsibility around the world, like they have done in Thailand for example. Otherwise in years to come more countries could end up with Chinese style state imposed quotas, lunatic acts or genocide, terrible wars or perhaps worst of all – Mother Nature herself putting the breaks on.
So what can you do?
1. I urge you watch Sir David Attenborough’s speech, in which we find the chairman is surprisingly funny:
4. Do as Sir David asks and just talk about this openly with everyone you know. Blog, facebook and twitter about it and engage wherever you can. Green technology can buy us time, but we need to STOP the growth as soon as we can! It’s so easy because it’s a human sized problem!
Did you watch the London Marathon this year? You may have noticed some really great shots from Vortex – which was positioned at the end of The Mall, in front of Buckingham Palace. Vortex was capturing shots of the runners approaching the corner and then it dropped down as it followed them round the corner and filmed them from ground level looking straight down The Mall. With the lovely sunny weather it really shows what great shots Vortex can produce.
Here’s the view from the top:
You can WATCH IT HERE for the next few days at least… iPlayer will nuke this pretty soon I am sure so I appologise for the loss of link when this happens…
For those of you who don’t know Vortex is a 30m carbon composite TV camera mast that can do ground to 30m tracking shots in 15 seconds. It is compact and trailer-able behind a Land Rover. It rigs in under 10 minutes, which is unheard of for most broadcast TV camera masts or towers. Realise were the CAD designers and helped Matthew from Cammotion put together the technical team that carried out all the engineering product development and prototyping on the award winning Vortex.
Ahead of our seminar with the Centre For Usability in May, at Realise we’ve been thinking a lot about human factors in Medical Design. One Medical product worthy of a design surgery entry is the Powerheart AED G3, one of the Automatic External Defibrillators (AED) available on the market. We’ve chosen to talk about this model in particular as Rebecca has been lucky enough to have used one of their training machines.
The Powerheart AED as you'll never see it- in its brand new packaging!
You may have seen these AED machines appearing in public places, shopping centres, stadiums, sports centres, supermarkets, libraries to name a few. Perhaps you have wondered (more…)
A good friend of mine Andy Jones deserves some big up for his work modelling the “heart engine” in the latest animated BP advert. He sketched this out and then modelled it all as a working assembly in Solidworks. They could have just animated from there, but I believe they also built a working rapid prototyped version as well. Nice. Goes to show how flexible us product designers are!
Last year Realise had a lot of fun helping design the Diorshow 360 rotating mascara brush, working alongside our electronics partners MLE and packaging geniuses (genii?) Albea.
It was actually quite a tricky design challenge to satisfy Dior’s desire for compactness and luxury feel. The rotating brush part was relatively easy – the tricky bit was getting the nice twist-click cap switch (which you can see in the video) to feel smooth, be totally reliable and to achieve the target cost. It took three sets of prototypes, lots of testing and many discussions with design and manufacturing engineers around the world to get it right. It never ceases to amaze me how much creative thought and good engineering it takes to create a high quality result for what seems like such a simple consumer product.
So with that in mind, enjoy the spin with it all “glammed up” in the video:
Ok I can understand people wanting to remember the Royal Wedding. I’ve still got a massively cheesy mug from Charles and Di’s wedding which I am strangely attached to. But this… OMG!
…Does the world really need an un-cool fridge? Surely this must be a marketing gimmick by GE? I can’t believe that anyone in their right mind would want to walk into their kitchen EVERY morning to be greeted by a HUGE William and Kate cuddling away with cheesy grins. The sad thing is they probably will sell a few, as believe it or not, this design got the most votes from UK fans on the GE website. Oh dear. Of course we don’t know how many people voted, or their state of mind. Interesting market sector to go for: People not in their right minds.
There is an important lesson here. Whilst we’re massive evangelists for researching what people really need and want, we know that ultimately you have to use designer’s judgement and skill to edit and translate those needs into good products that benefit humankind. You don’t just just take what consumers say and give them that, because they’re not designers… This kind of bizarre thinking is totally anti the good design thinking we bring our projects, it certainly isn’t going to make it into any Halls of Praise for Good Design. Still, I’ll give it this, it is amusing.
Cammotion’s Vortex Camera Mast were used for the opening tower block shots in a new film “Attack the Block”. The film by the producers of Shaun of the Dead, is based in a London housing Estate invaded by really nasty aliens. And somehow it falls to the local teen gang to sort them out. It has just been screened at the US Film Festival, South By Southwest and went down a storm. UK release date is 17th May. Here’s the preview trailer:
Did you spend hours at school paying attention to the English teacher? Have you been feeling lately it’s all been a waste of time as you face a rising tide of terrible spelling and grammar (particularly from the younger generations)? Well, I can recommend a little movie to cheer you up. But first…
Can I just ask, why has the younger job seeker apparently decided there’s no need to bother with good quality writing? We employers don’t mind do we? “Hey, yeah we’re all like totally cool people, we’ll look through that surface nonsense to the deeper dude below right?” WRONG! I am swamped with applications from young people asking me for a job. Given that I receive at least 5 of these a day now, the first thing I do is check the spelling and grammar. Anyone who can’t be bothered about the quality of their output goes straight to the BIN. The trouble is, this test is beginning to eliminate 99% of the applications, which is starting to scare me a little. I’ve just this morning received an enquiry for a student placement been, addressed to me as “Hey there…”. What is going on?
My theory is this is not a massive failure of the teaching system, but bad habits being formed through texting, gaming and the internet, where writing skills are not exactly the most highly prised input. I can imagine that these young job applicants think they’re really trying hard compared with what they are normally used to typing. I guess this is one of the classic unexpected consequences of technology. No one foresaw that all this over use of the language would rub all the intricate and meaningful corners off it.
What do you think? Are you seeing the same trend? Does it matter and if so how do we make a stand? DO let us know your thoughts in the comments.
And now back to the movie. If you’re annoyed by all this mIss Pelling, then CLICK HERE to see a film that will cheer you up. Enjoy.
There’s an inevitable trend in Rapid Prototyping towards cheaper parts and better quality. Resins and processes are improving all the time meaning the plastics are getting closer to production versions. Metal sintering machines are more common place (meaning metal parts can be produced directly or mould tools made cheaply).
Thanks to Develop 3D for Picture
And interesting open source movements are growing where they’re looking to make very low cost machines suitable for home use. They’re even planning on the revolution building itself – the RP machines that can (more…)
