Tag: design
When food meets tech…
Food and beverage – nourishing, hydrating, stimulating and refreshing. But what happens when you throw a bit of science and technology into the mix? In our blog this week we’ll be taking a look at how the food and beverage industry has been shaped and influenced by technology from other sectors; and where science, technology and art cross over to create whole new experiences…
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For the love of knit!
Well it’s official, the summer wardrobe has been packaged away, and the long boots and thick tights have made their wintery appearance! I can think of nothing better than snuggling up on the sofa with my knitting and a massive mug of hot chocolate at the end of a cold commute home! So what better time to take a look at some of the wonderful ways the world of knit and hand craft had been translated at London Design Festival last year!
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3D Printing – Hype or Ripe?
It seems you can’t open a tech magazine these days without some mention of 3D printing. But is it all hype or has the technology really developed into something that will transform the lives of designers, manufacturers and consumers?
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Surgical Innovation – Pioneering doctors and devices
Surgery is a fascinating branch of medicine; rooted in science, yet still very much a craft and (whether we like it or not as a patient) frequently dependent on the skills of improvisation by the surgeon and their team. Surgery has come a long way since its early days but the pace of innovation has anything but slowed down. On the contrary, new technologies are creating new possibilities to improve safety and efficacy of procedures, and cost pressures are creating an imperative to achieve more with less.
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Keeping it local: PDD at the London Design Festival 2013
The Creative Matrix is filled with brightly-coloured sticky notes as the PDD LDF team furiously sketched ideas for what we could do with the impressive 1,200 square feet of gallery space on Redchurch street. At last year’s LDF, over three days, we ran 2-hour Human-Centred Design (HCD) taster sessions in a small gallery space on Redchurch Street. This year, we secured a gallery three times the size for seven days-and we wanted to make the most of it.
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Kitchen Futures: Sustainable Kitchen
Kitchen Futures is a series of posts over the past few weeks, taking a glimpse into the future of home cooking through five trends spanning from short term to long term. Our fourth post in the series focuses on how the sustainable kitchen of the future may take shape, from sleek and sophisticated surfaces to efficiency reflected in form as well as function.
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Kitchen Futures: Digital Chef
Kitchen Futures is a series of posts over the past few weeks, taking a glimpse into the future of home cooking through five trends spanning from short term to long term. In the fifth and final post of the series we fast-forward in time, taking a look at how technology will shape the way people cook and interact in the home kitchen.
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Design for China: Western Brands
‘What is Design for China?’ is a series of three blogs where we will be taking a look at design targeted at the mainland Chinese market. In our first instalment in the series we focus on how some Western brands are creating designs specifically for this increasingly discerning market.
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Progress By Playing
It’s not often artists are allowed to experiment with expensive processes, probably because artists play, and playing doesn’t give a good a return on investment as say rapid prototyping for mass production would. But a research and development consultancy based in Cardiff have shown that allowing people to ‘play’ with these technologies can help open up new processes even for designers who have been using these tools for years.
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Kitchen Futures: Home Heston
Kitchen Futures is a series of posts over the coming weeks, taking a glimpse into the future of home cooking through five trends spanning from short term to long term. Home Heston, the third post in the series, explores the curious world of molecular gastronomy where science meets theatre and where food becomes an artistic statement.
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Kitchen Futures: Compact Cook
Kitchen Futures is a series of posts over the coming weeks, taking a glimpse into the future of home cooking through five trends spanning from short term to long term. In our second post of the series we will be focusing on the impact of increased urbanisation and growing populations on home cooking, as consumers seek out smart lifestyle solutions without compromise to quality or quantity.
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Reimagining Education
Last month I had the pleasure of going to see Salman Khan, Founder of the Khan Academy, talk at London School of Economics. In this article I take a look at the principles of this new teaching phenomenon and what it might mean for the future of the classroom.
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Kitchen Futures: Time starved, health hungry
Kitchen Futures is a series of posts over the coming weeks, taking a glimpse into the future of home cooking through five trends spanning from short term to long term. Join us on a journey through the culinary landscape where we look at; how social and cultural changes are affecting the way we cook, what newly inspiring techniques will shape the future of cookware and what impact technology will have as it becomes more integrated and ambient in the future kitchen.
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English is Pink
I’ve never been very good at languages: At school, I preferred the absolute nature of the physical sciences to remembering irregular verbs and sometimes-illogical pronunciations that the linguists thrived on. Later on I went to evening classes to learn German and found to my dismay this language has an apparently-random assignment of masculine, feminine and neuter nouns. English, in comparison seems simple – for those of us who were brought up with it as their mother tongue!
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Planes to Pains: Human factors taking off in healthcare
When I graduated with a BSc in Ergonomics (Human Factors Design) in 2011, it was clear that the subject is neither widely known nor greatly recognised, in fact I am constantly corrected that I did Economics at University. However, it was also apparent that certain industries placed great value in the area I had studied for three years; these were mainly energy, rail, aviation and defence – all big industries with a lot to lose if something were to go catastrophically wrong. It is therefore baffling to think the same attention to human factors isn’t apparent in healthcare.
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Is safety regulation stopping us from designing easy-to-use medical devices?
Whilst perusing the web to stay abreast of current affairs in the medical device usability world, I came across an interesting topic with regards to the regulated and unregulated components of usability work in the sector. We have on the one hand the regulatory requirement to develop devices that are safe and effective, free from potentially harmful use errors. Whilst on the other hand, we have the desire to create great user and patient experiences through devices that are appealing and easy-to-use. However, the tension between the two components can mean that we, as usability practitioners, get so distracted with regulatory issues that other characteristics of usability become neglected within the device user interface.
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Survival of the fittest: The future of retail spaces
According to a survey by Mintel, 92% of internet users in the UK have shopped online. This has increased by 16% in the last year and since the recession in 2008 high street retailers have had a tough time competing with cheaper and more convenient online shopping. As a result, 1 in 7 shops on the UK high-street are now empty. In this blog post I will be talking about how online shopping could become more dominant and what will replace these retail spaces.
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Designing the fashion retail space for store employees
We often hear and talk about the need for retail spaces to be designed to create the best shopping experience for consumers, but what about designing retail spaces for the store employees? Having briefly had a taste of what it is like to work in a high street fashion retailer, I have to admit I was struck by the poor back-store layout and how it affects the employees’ work.
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