I noticed a small white car with Google branding and a massive collection of cameras on it’s roof driving in front of a bus I was on the other week. It seems Google are photographing the whole world with fish eye cameras to enable you to bring up images of streets within Google maps. You’ll notice the street view button if you’re viewing a map where the system has been enabled. So far they’ve got big chunks of Australia, France, Japan and the USA online — and obviously the UK is on it’s way. It’s been very time consuming visiting familiar places in Australia, America and Japan — be warned! There are some bugs with the path finder, sometimes I ended up going through buildings, and the images are quite low in resolution too. I imagine it’s all still quite beta at the moment though.

Amsterdam based advertising/branding agency, Strawberry Frog, have created a very pretty 2008 campaign for my favourite shoe company Onitsuka Tiger using model making, motion graphics, video and photography. The campaign is based on the brand’s Japanese heritage (with the theme being made of Japan, similar to their previous campaign) and uses elements from modern day Japan such as vending machines, Narita airport and specifically neon signage. They’ve also published this making-of video, which shows the process of making the model shoe. Onitsuka Tiger are also doing a number of collaborative projects this year, one of their latest with Italian, but Japanese inspired, designers Tokidoki — I might have to get myself a pair!

Something else that has inspired me recently (again) is the aesthetics of letterpress printing. It actually now seems feasible to purchase some equipment to try a few short runs. There are two websites that guide you through the process of setting up letterpress printing; British Letterpress and Briar Press. This video from 1947 will then teach you how to make a book using all your ‘new’ equipment!

The differences between designers from different disciplines is not one of process or evaluation, or even the specific interests and abilities of the designer, but of constraints. Product designers work with the constraints offered by every day objects, graphic designers with 2D mediums and typography, interior designers with the relationship between people and space while architects with the built environment. These constraints are not just limited to the medium, they gather complexity and borrow from other disciplines to varying extents depending on the context of the design outcome and discipline in which the designer works. Fields such as: anthropometrics — the size of people for the use of physical objects; physiology — the way bodies work for the design of man-machine systems; psychology — how the mind works for when interacting with computer systems; sociology — how people relate to each other for the design of social systems; anthropology — how people from different cultures interpret meaning for global design; ecology — how the living world works to ensure sustainable design. Once a designer is trained and has worked within one discipline it feels normal and natural to continue working within those constraints. So while designers will usually follow a similar process and evaluate against a similar criteria the variety of their experience within constraints is the key to generating innovation and that’s why using a multidisciplinary team can create a better outcome.