Saturday, October 24 
My sketching skills have gone to heck as I don’t do it enough anymore, but I appreciate people who really do it well and fluidly. This article nicely categorizes different types of sketches, each of which have their own purpose.
Monday, May 11 San Jose State’s industrial design department is having its final show on Monday, May 18. If you’re in the area, check it out! It’s being held in the rotunda at San Jose City Hall, from 6 to 9:30pm.
Friday, August 22 
Underwhelming. That’s the word that comes to mind when I look at the new Palm Treo Pro. Yes, nicer looking for sure, with a strong influence from the lower-cost Centro model (and looking rather like the upcoming Blackberry Bold). And it has 3G and WiFi, which is great, and the newest version of Windows Mobile, and GPS, though these can also be found on existing competitors. So it’s got a decent package of features, but what’s so compelling about it that isn’t being offered elsewhere?
In this day and age, offering a screen that takes up less than 50% of the device, especially with as big borders around it as the Pro has, just doesn’t cut it. I’m not suggesting touchscreen only here, as I definitely prefer typing on a physical keyboard to tapping on a virtual one, but really, even a business-oriented device like this one is going to be used to show off photos, looking at web pages, etc. which all benefit from a large screen. 320x320 has been the Palm standard for years now. Heck, even the Palm Tungsten T3 I had 4 years ago had a 50% bigger screen, albeit without a physical keyboard. The Pro’s screen already looks small, and will look even more diminutive over its product lifecycle given how slowly Palm brings out new models.
Size-wise the Pro is almost identical to Blackberries, though longer. It’s fatter than the iPhone. So no real advantage in pocketability or bragging rights there.
The talk time and battery life are good, but the 2MP camera is ho-hum.
In this video Palm talks about how the Windows interface is great because it mimics what people are used to on their desktops. Ironically, as Rob Haitani, the software architect for Palm back in the day used to talk about, the whole philosophy of the original Palm OS was that you should not try to mimic a big-screen mouse/screen environment, because it was not optimized for small-screen direct touch interactions. Transferring desktop interaction patterns onto a handheld was just not efficient, and which is why the early versions of Windows Mobile were slow to use. Now they’ve adopted the Windows platform on this device, Palm has to sing the opposite song.
Palm got a lot right in their earliest models, but they’ve struggled to stay innovative and focused in the last few years.
In the video they also talk about how they wanted to take care of all the little details. It looks like they’ve done that, but by focusing on the small things Palm’s come up with a device that treads water in the market. There are no big things that really push the boat out further compared to other smartphones, no marquee features that really stand out from the increasingly large and diverse crowd. With the current state of the smartphone market, that’s just not good enough to move the needle on their dwindling market share and attract new customers to the Palm brand.
android, blackberry, design, handheld, interaction, iphone, mobile, palm, treo, treo pro, ux | IN CATEGORIES... Apple, Design, Innovation, User Experience Wednesday, August 13 
If you’ve been wondering about the design of the medals being presented at this year’s Olympics in Beijing, here is an interview with the man who led the design, Professor Xiao Yong. Like so much else at the Beijing games, from the Euro starchitects’ buildings combined with the massive traditional front gate, the medals are a combination of European and Chinese traditions. They combine the usual bronze, silver and gold metals with stone, specifically jade.
Their front side is traditional. There’s Nike, the Greek goddess of victory, and the Panathinaiko Stadium in Athens, where the first Modern Olympic Games was held in 1896 thanks to the tireless efforts of Baron Pierre de Coubertin. It’s the reverse side that makes it a perfect blend of the West and East, rather Chinese. A ring of elegance, nobility and virtue adds that essential touch of Chinese culture to the medals. And as any Chinese would tell you, the ring couldn’t be made of anything but jade for only jade can represent all the three qualities.
I love this quote by Professor Xiao Yong: “In fact, the process was quite sophisticated, while the result was quite simple.” As so often happens, the best simple things result from a complex process.
Tuesday, August 12 Sculpting clay on the 2009 BMW 7
Here’s an outstanding series of photos describing the design development for the new 2009 BMW 7-Series. It shows step by step from drawing to renderings and clay how the exterior and interior of the car have been refined. In particular there is a lot about the clay process, which is unique to automotive design. Even in this day and age of CAD and 3-D goggles, there’s nothing like seeing a car physically represented at full scale with masterfully crafted clay.
The BMW Group’s process of designing a new vehicle and finding the ideal shape is based on a concept of keen competition. In the development of each new model, several design teams compete with one another in their design of the exterior and interior in a truly creative contest. Made up of designers and modellers, the teams then, in the second phase of the design process, complete models in original, 1:1 size clearly showing the aesthetic harmony of the car’s proportions and surfaces. To do this they use a simple but very important material in the design process - clay.
I wasn’t a big fan of the last 7-Series (though the roof profile and side glass had great lines and proportion), but from the little you can see on this one it looks like the 2009 model could be very interesting and elegant.