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Modine Bar
The Modine Bar is a great example of a beautifully executed fold-out bar. From the product description at Pottery Barn: Equipped for effortless entertaining, this versatile bar promises to be the center of every party. When guests arrive, open the doors and unfold the top to double your surface space. A wooden insert removes to reveal a stainless-steel ice bucket; a plastic drip tray below protects the piece from moisture. Inside each door, three fixed shelves with gallery rails hold an assortment of barware, from highballs and stemless wineglasses on the top to bottles and oversized glasses on the bottom. The left door has a functioning lock. The divided center compartment has a removable 16-bottle wine rack that’s topped by a drawer with a removable barware tray and a single fixed shelf. To its left, a fixed shelf suspends stem-ware on four racks, and an adjustable and fixed shelf below hold bottles of wine, spirits and mixers. Framed in mahogany with richly grained mahogany veneers, the bar is finished on a…
Silver Aluminum 20" Posterhanger
Whatever happened to the Art in Design
Slides from my talk at the Future of Web Design. 4th November 2008. Roseland Ballroom, New York.
Journey To The Center Of Design
Keynote: Journey to the Center of Design
(I gave this at the IA Summit in 2008 and SxSW in 2009. The recording is from the IA Summit.)
Jared Spool
Saturday April 12 2008, 8:30 – 10:00AM
User-centered design was born in the 1980s, amidst a world filled with frustration with blinking VCR clocks and computer command lines. Up until this time, developers focused on making the devices work, giving little heed to how they’d be used. Terms like "user friendly" and "easy to use," buzzwords for the UCD movement, soon became as common as "new and improved" on laundry soap.
Fast forward 25 years and it now seems the foundations of user- centered design are now disintegrating. Notable community members are suggesting UCD practice is burdensome and returns little value. There’s a growing sentiment that spending limited resources on user research takes away from essential design activities. Previously fundamental techniques, such as usability testing and persona development, are now regularly under attack. And let’s not forget that today’s shining stars, such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, and the iPod, came to their success without UCD practices.
Is it time for user-centered design to evolve into something else? Or is there something else happening in our world of experience design that makes UCD obsolete? Should something else occupy the center of design?
These are just the questions that this year’s keynote presenter, Jared Spool, likes to answer. Especially after a few drinks. And while a Saturday morning keynote may seem early for the kind of heavy drinking these particular questions demand, Jared will have just arrived from Italy, a nation with a long tradition of philosophical intoxication. This will set the perfect stage for an entertaining and insightful presentation to open our conference.
We guarantee a journey that shouldn’t be missed.
Death by PowerPoint
Fighting death by PowerPoint… How to make a presentation and not to bore your audience to death.