1. Is Humanitarian Design the New Imperialism?

A thought-provoking essay from Bruce Nussbaum over at Fast Company Design:

Do designers need to better see themselves through the eyes of the local professional and business classes who believe their countries are rising as the U.S. and Europe fall and wonder who, in the end, has the right answers? Might Indian, Brazilian and African designers have important design lessons to teach Western designers?

And finally, one last question: why are we only doing humanitarian design in Asia and Africa and not Native American reservations or rural areas, where standards of education, water and health match the very worst overseas?

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1. Old-Fashioned Color Wheels

Imprint is running a history of color wheels. Part one is out, featuring the 18th and 19th century. The contrast between the Victorian layouts and bright colors is almost too much. To my eye, they don't look 200-plus years old.

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1. The Power of the Pause

One for the Less is Better file, Bobulate asks us to consider the effect of pauses within design:

Walter Benjamin reminds us “architecture is experienced habitually in the state of distraction.” So when a structure that’s always been present on your daily walk suddenly becomes an empty lot, your definition of space and flow changes — there is a pause. And the surrounding environment takes a new form.

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2. More Evidence that 3D May be Harmful

Revisiting an old story, Slashdot has a few links that suggest 3D television might have adverse affects on people, particularly children.

Sega uncovered serious health risks involved with children consuming 3D and quickly buried the reports, and the project. Unfortunately, the same dangers exist in today's 3D, and the electronics, movie, and gaming industries seem to be ignoring the issue.

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3. Stupid Is As Stupid Does

Another client post, this time from Andy Rutledge. I tend to agree with his take; designers should own up to more responsibility for a good or bad client experience:

There’s an easy test for evaluating design professionalism. The quality of your client experiences is directly proportional to the quality of your professionalism. If you have “stupid clients” it’s because you’re behaving stupidly to begin with, for we attract what we project. If you’ll stop being stupid, your clients’ IQs will increase dramatically.

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4. Dude, You're Getting a (Broken) Dell

Some bad ethics-related press for Dell. It seems they tried to cover up a hardware problem with some shady behavior and got written up in the NYT:

Documents recently unsealed in a three-year-old lawsuit against Dell show that the company’s employees were actually aware that the computers were likely to break. Still, the employees tried to play down the problem to customers and allowed customers to rely on trouble-prone machines, putting their businesses at risk. Even the firm defending Dell in the lawsuit was affected when Dell balked at fixing 1,000 suspect computers, according to e-mail messages revealed in the dispute.

The broken components had an estimated 97% failure rate, and they're not even going to fix their own lawyers computers? I'll say this: they stayed committed to their own story. To fix the computers would be to admit there was something wrong with them.

1. Design Thinking: A Useful Myth

Core77 has an essay from none other than Donald Norman, who criticizes the idea that "design thinking" is unique to designers but considers it a necessary evil if they are to be taken seriously for more than "making things pretty".

2. Death by Gadget

No phone or tablet computer can be considered “cool” if it may be helping perpetuate one of the most brutal wars on the planet.

From the Design Ethics desk: a NYT Op-Ed that asks us to consider the human cost of electronics made with conflict minerals.

3. Strength in naughty or nice

We've often said that if you want your business to do well, you should be morally good. Now you have another reason: Harvard researchers claim that trying to do good may give you super powers.

4. Gizmodo launches Apple iPhone petition

Gizmodo argues that Apple should either fix the iPhone 4 reception problem or give free cases to users (which fix the problem).

It does seem shady that the phones are broken and Apple's best suggestion (other than holding it unnaturally) is to buy a new $30 case from them. Even if that wasn't their strategy (and I doubt it was), they can't afford the perception.

1. So you want to be a (freelance designer)?

In one of the best articles I read this week, Steve Friedl shares his experience as a technology consultant. But I think there is much to learn here for anyone who runs a very small business dealing directly with clients (i.e. freelance designers like ourselves).

I'll share one maxim of Friedl's -- of the ethical variety, in keeping with our theme:

Never, ever lie or fudge on an invoice

If you are ever caught — or even suspected — of funny business on the financial front, you will not be trusted anywhere else. It is impossible to give a customer The Warm Fuzzy Feeling™ if they are wondering about the legitimacy of your invoices, and this is fatal to a customer relationship and to ever getting a good reference.

This is not to say that mistakes on an invoice won't happen, but how you deal with them will tell a customer a lot about how you do business. Your goal should be to overwhelm them with integrity.

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1. How Steve Jobs beats presentation panic

Image from Penny Arcade

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1. How BP is fighting back

Interesting story on Grist about the many ways BP is attempting to control more than the oil spill. It's reaching out to tame lawsuits, legislators, and even Google.

2. Lessons learned from 13 failed software products

Failure is the best teacher, as they say. I found a lot of this advice useful.

3. The State of Web Fonts, June 2010

A List Apart has a great comprehensive review of Web Fonts -- browsers, tools, and other information. If you're interested in learning more or possibly taking the plunge, this is a helpful resource.

4. Design Fiction

Bruce Sterling finally organized his sprawling Wired blog. Of interest to BlogLESS readers: the new Design Fiction tag. It's like science fiction for the creative set. A speculative glimpse of our design future punctuated by Sterling's entertaining rants and snark.

1. The Revelation

We've been thinking recently about our business practices here at Design Less Better, so this recent speech by John Thackara really hit home for me.

It meanders a bit, but excluding the environmental stuff early on, I can appreciate at least three points he made about the business of being a thinker:

1. There is a need for deep thinking Folks will pay for strategy, futurism, ethical frameworks, etc. because most of them don't have time to come up with it themselves. It's a simple assertion, but creative types might take it for granted. We tend to think other people are like us.
2. A lot of well-known designers and thinkers don't have it as great as it might look. Like you, most of them have boring work they have to do to keep the lights on, but it's not the kind of thing that makes for a good lecture.
3. The monetary rewards of those "good" jobs you see in the lecture are also less than one might expect. Thackara claims that he only gets paid for about 25% of the hours he works. The other 75% of his time is writing, thinking, and hustling so he can land those paid hours.

This is not at all the point of Thackara's speech, but it's something I appreciate nonetheless as an insight into the process of how such a person works and an indicator of how important passion is in being successful at it.

2. Meet Mr. W

Love this wonderful German (yet English-speaking?) ad. Clever!

3. Dropbox – The Power of a “Value Based” Startup

We're huge fans of Dropbox, so this writeup on the company's strategy was of interest.

Essentially, it boils down to design less better.

Rather than follow the mantra of "release early, release often", the Dropbox team focused on a set of limited, but useful features that worked beautifully out of the gate. This high level of polish for a free product helped retain and gratify users who then went on to market the software to their friends.

Speaking as a user, that's exactly what happened to me. Dropbox is limited compared to the many other file-sharing sites out there, but this also makes it simple to use. And Dropbox does it so well that I can't help but recommend it.

4. This is not content

A recent post from 37 signals had this nugget, which is not an original observation, but bears repeating nonetheless:

[People don't want "content"] What people want is opinions, analysis, techniques, experiences, and insights. The best of all these come as a by-product from actually doing stuff.

One might rephrase this as: make things, not content.

Time to follow that advice...