Ripple Project by Pearl Studios (Mladen Barbaric, Bo Gillespie, and Dr. Dusty Johnstone)
What were Dr. Johnstone’s critiques of the original concept for Ripple?
Describe the user interaction details of the Ripple device.
“Ripple was ingenious insofar as it showed how you might solve a problem hiding in plain sight—and useful insofar as it illustrated how obvious problems aren't obvious at all once they're scrutinized” (pg. 54).
How did Dreyfuss conduct user research, and what was the insight that he developed in response to the market failure of the RKO Theater in Sioux City, Iowa?
“By understanding someone else’s life—abashed, prideful, confused, curious—you could make their life better. By understanding how he or she thought, you could reach past the obvious problem and into the problem that they couldn’t quite articulate, the one that they might not even think to solve” (pg. 56).
“If all products were hand-made few of us could afford them. Therefore it is left for us to give the machine its proper place. If good designs are not available for the man in the street, the system which produces these designs must be undemocratic and wrong.” – Richard Bach, curator of industrial art at MoMA (pgs. 60-61).
Does bad design follow from bad government systems?
This seems to be an argument for design (or designed things) as a fundamental human right; Do you agree with that viewpoint?
Peter Behrens, graphic and industrial designer, architect (–)
“There was a time when our best things were hand-made, our poorest made in mass production. Cheap, nasty poor-taste things were turned out by the machine. The reverse seems to be beginning to be true.” (pg. 64) – American Management Association,
Do you think that the above argument is still true today?
What specific products and features would you cite to support either side of the argument?
What was Henry Ford’s eighteen-year “myopia”? (pg. 65)
How did the Model A address this “myopia”? (pg. 65)
Why did Dreyfuss turn-down the design job offer from Macy’s? (pg. 66)
“[Dreyfuss] was perhaps the first American designer to articulate and then act on the idea that design wasn't just styling—it sprang from a knowledge about how things were made and what was possible.” (pgs. 66–67)
Doris Marks, industrial designer
“This is the spine of the user-friendly world, unchanged whether you're talking about smartphones or toothbrushes or driverless cars: a deference to the complexity of understanding people as they live.” (pg. 68)
“Dreyfuss was sketching a vision of life as the sum of innumerable details, irritations, and fixes—arguing that leisure, gained by a few seconds here and there, contributed to social progress” (pg. 68).
Do you think that peanut butter jars and stove handles substantially “contribute to social progress”?
“He had fully internalized the tenets articulated by home economists, in which the products people bought were the link between the individual pursuit of happiness and the steady growth of industry” (pg. 68).
How does this vision of “Consumption as Social Progress” sit with you?
“… the only way to make people buy was to make things better than they’d ever been.” (pg. 69)
Does this argument ever reach an endpoint? Does design ever reach a stopping point?
What values or aspirations was the Streamline Aesthetic communicating? (pg. 70)