From the pages of my notebooks - Ideas that got the chop.

This is nothing new, that media commentators have not noticed, but within the interactive technology world there is a lot of talk of tailoring user experiences in terms of RFID and personalised web browsing.

Those of us unfortunate enough to sit through it saw this illustrated in Minority Report when Tom Cruise, or whatever his character was called, walked into a shop which immediately recommended purchases based on his previous transactions. We are all familiar with Amazon doing this for us when we log on and our iGoogle showing us something that tallies with our ‘interests’. StumbleUpon aims to show us new things we may not be familiar with but these are within our chosen spheres of interest.

Why do we want these narrowed options tailored to make us sit comfortably in nice neatly labeled consumer boxes? Why should our past purchases or browsing determine what we are exposed to in the future?

These technologies can ultimately present us with fewer options and narrow our frames of reference. They have the potential to make us even lazier than we already are as our entire human experience is handed to us on a plate. They are the stuff of anomie-fuelled science fiction. So why are they being developed? They are the stuff of dreams for marketing and population control. I’m not very excited by the prospects for this

I wanted to do this but never got around to it. It’s one of the stupidest and most obvious ideas I ever put my name to. A poster with a tshirt shape and a tshirt with a poster shape. All nicely screenprinted and packaged together.

Poor design abounds at every turn. This is why I wasn’t amazed to notice on my way home a wheelchair ramp up to a small green area in front of the homes near mine. This ramp was probably made somewhere between the 30s and the 50s. The ramp is short as the raised green area it leads to is not very high (maybe 40cm). But it has two problems.

Firstly the ramp goes straight down towards the road. Obviously people in wheelchairs can either stop their wheels rolling or deal with the consequences. It also suggests they should really have some one able-bodied with them at all times. Secondly the ramp had a transition down it to really help them gather momentum on the way down or make it really difficult on the way up.

Due to the age of the area and the prevailing attitudes toward disability when the ramp was built this isn’t that shocking. In fact it may have been quite forward thinking and philanthropic for its time.

Haven’t we just come so far since then? Maybe. We hear about accessibility all the time these days but do we really design things to accommodate or do we just label them later? There are two everyday items which are obsessed over to a ridiculous degree that suggest otherwise - paper money and ipods.

Apple prides itself on design. Is it form over or following function? Why do ipods feature such interfaces that are completely blank in purely tactile terms? The navigation is not only unintuitive to a blind person but is practically unworkable. But that said the name of this blog is Lost Causes and pertains to ideas that have been lost. It doesn’t refer to complaining about perceived lost causes. Apple mac software has speakable items software. How hard can it be to have a setting that allows your ipod to tell you what you are doing? Of course if Apple already have this then I look fairly foolish right now.

Paper money, while it is not news to point out its tactile blandness, could be easily improved by punching holes into it. Either adopt a braille symbol or put in a line for each denomination (one line of holes for a fiver, 2 for ten, 3 for 20 etc). The lines would be preferable as it crosses language barriers.

There you have it - a few more thoughts on an obscure webpage that next to no-one will ever see but that might change the world (albeit only a little bit). Not even a pretty picture to look either.

My wife has tasked me with applying my carpentry skills to the task of designing and building a laundry cabinet. Each set of laundry must be separated. I intend to make it in pine with hand painted doors on each segment. I will finally laquer the doors for a high gloss wipe-clean finish. Here is a preliminary drawing for the whites section.

I have long had an interest in purely geometric type. I enjoy taking straight lines and pure curves and forming letters from them. I get really irritated by the oft-repeated typographic catchphrase “A straight line is a dead line”. No its not. Its the shortest, most economical, logical distance from one point to another. This is an early example of a face I worked on based on this principle.

Since then I have been irked by this piece. It is only legible when used as a titling face and is strictly incoherent and unreadable in any form even nearly approaching body copy. I began to wonder could a font be created that is entirely logical in its construction? It would need to be usable in all sizes and in any situation. FF DIN is about as close to this idea as I could find. Yet it still has its “illogical” idiosyncracies that help it retain some humanity.

I now want to design a font that reflects our concerns as a race going into the future - it needs to be entirely logical, can appear in print from small print to poster headlines, on the side of children’s bicycles to the side of a space fleet that travels the galaxy. Most importantly it needs to be economically minded in its use of resources, which is to say it must have as few lines as possible so as to use as little ink as possible. Where to start? Well, by trying to figure out what the essence of our alphabet is. How much and what bits can a letter afford to lose?