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Monthly Archives: June 2015

A Brief History of Design thinking : Aesthetics beyond minimalism

21 Sunday Jun 2015

Posted by gokulbalex in Art, Critic, Design, Essays, Philosophy

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Ancient history, Anthropology, Design, design theorists, unified design

World around, their is huge attention given to design driven theories and movements. ‘Design Thinking’ is a collective making waves in the circles of business and technology.  Industrial Design, Instruction design, Product design, service design, interaction design, experience design etc are perceived as different functional facets of design driven perception of the world around us.  Industrial design may be somewhat older compared to other fields mentioned. It inherits some of the historic etches from the 20th century era of functional aesthetics and a modernist society fueled by industrial revolution.

A little bit of history is necessary here.

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During 1920’s we saw the revolt in the world of art and aesthetics through the movements of expressionism, impressionism, constructivism etc. This was largely inspired by the different experiences of industrial revolution and enlightened humanity.After the destructive period of world wars and resultant turbulence in imagination, we saw the emergence of cubism and surrealism. During the mid 1960’s, we saw the arrival of minimalism to the stage. When surrealism and cubism remained as the movements of revolting art, minimalism offered a curated and streamlined experience embraced by the world of market and product designers alike. It was so much in synchronicity with a simplified world view where experienced are reduced to the permutations and combinations around products and commodities.

From 1980’s, we are building an ecosystem of industrial design consistently around the brilliant combination of impressionism and minimalism. The behavioral and cognitive psychology has added a certain level of depth to this combination. Anthropology and semiotics has added dimensions to this combination. Yet this mix remains largely linear in nature. Why?

Even today, art movements of expressionism, surrealism and constructivism are beyond the purview of contemporary product and industrial design laboratories. Why?

When you study fractals and topological constructs of various kind, sometimes you are just flummoxed by the intriguing design and bewildering pattern and get lost in the mathematical models. What is your approach to derive inferences from these wonderful patterns of nature?

There is so much of experience and knowledge intrinsic to these non-linear forms of art and aesthetics that they appear chaotic and sometime meaningless to a product designer. At the same time, it does not mean that these forms of art are not functional in nature. They are able to influence human mind and user experience at higher scales.

In our times, there is so much stress on minimalism and reduction-ism that everything beyond the definitions of products and services appear random and non-linear. We are missing a lot of data and inferences here.

When we speak about design thinking and experience design today, our reaches are limited to the linear components alone. Non-linear functions of experiences and aesthetics is largely missing in the equations.

Hence design thinking in actuality should go beyond the reductionist approach and reach out to the nonlinear forms of knowledge generated by interactions between humanity, nature and their constructs. All forms of subjectivity are not entirely intuitive and irrational. There is so much of science out there in the philosophy of knowledge for us to unravel. A large ocean of knowledge and rationale is out their to decipher. It is not just fifty shades of grey. They are abundant spectral lines as vivid as our lives.

Twitter, Dick Costolo and Future : A few thoughts

13 Saturday Jun 2015

Posted by gokulbalex in Internet, Networking

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Business, Social Media, Society

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo has stepped down, inline with the market expectations and the rumors round the corner for some time now. This has been directly and visibly attributed mainly to the sluggish growth in the user base for a revolutionary communication, collaboration and content aggregation platform.

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Is Twitter Juggernaut slowing down?

Now that everyone is sharing their causal and critical analysis on the turn of events, let me also have the share of the pie. As an active consumer of Twitter wisdom, I find a few architectural flaws in the current state of Twitter.

  1. Accentuating information clutter: When I look at my twitter feed, lion share of the content is dis-interesting and disengaging. Sometimes it is flooded with the ‘so called marketing aphorisms’ and self promotion tweets. Many at times, I see the repetitive content marketing feeds. The user is left with the hard job of selectively un-following these kind of clutter creators.
  2. Skewed social graph: There is no way the consumer ‘feels at home’ with the platform. There is no community formation happening in Twitterati, unlike Facebook or Instagram. Some of us are followers and some of us are influencers. There is a huge disparity and ‘Network gap’ between them.
  3. Limited possibility for content curation: Even though I have created multiple lists of related twitter profiles, I have to manually go to those lists to see the curated content. There is no automated and organic approach to synthesizing my curated content with the twitter feeds on my profile page.

At the end of the day, I find it better to spend time in platforms like Klout or LinkedIn Pulse for interesting posts and hot trends, than surfing through the information clutter and marketing mess in Twitter. I am sure all these design flaws cannot be attributed to Dick Costolo. Still I believe this is a right opportunity to reflect on a great information broadcasting platform which still has untapped potentials for future.

Poem: Ignorance

11 Thursday Jun 2015

Posted by gokulbalex in Poetry

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Life, Poetry

What is a pang of poverty?

Is it a quest for bred, rotten in your dreams

Hidden in your stomach, found in your grave

What is the road away form slavery?

A hasty line will not suffice

To surface the shivering skin

Poem : A Lineage of Lizard Kind

08 Monday Jun 2015

Posted by gokulbalex in Anima, Imagery, Legend, Myth, Poetry

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Anthropology, Childhood, Life, People, Poetry

A long life before the dawn of the times

A lizard entered a lineage of wizards

The history of the predictions and trails

May not be a song, or even a rock of sand

Yet the legend unfolds through a vertigo

He had seen silver skinned lizards

On the dawn of his ecstatic moons

He vividly remembers his grandmother

Telling him about the wisdom of the lizards

He fell ill and naked like those livid species

Unable to bow to the brave acts of gravity

And their affinity to the prayer walls

It seems those wise wizards visited his grandfather

On the penultimate day of his conscience

Uncertain times, he went on to travel

Cliffs of a cold blood journey, unparalleled

Like a vertigo wizard from his lineage

A league of wise men

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