Archived posts from March 2007

Monday 26 March 2007 | Posted by Tom Williams

More Associates feature in Future London exhibition

Future London is a GLA project that helps Londoners to make their city sustainable, and shows how design and planning can help. The project was launched with a large exhibition in East London designed to show the public that sustainable living is both easy and affordable. The exhibition goes beyond describing the sustainable lifestyle choices that people can make by showing the consequences of these choices, making it easy to see the link between individual actions and local, national and global impacts.

Producer vs. User Centred design?

Interesting article by Eric von Hippel writing in the Harvard Business Review (subscription only so no link to the actual piece I'm afraid).

He outlines some clear shortcomings in the way that large companies and governments fail to respond to user needs in the products they develop, and the way in which innovation in these companies is still 'producer-centred' rather than 'user-centred' i.e driven by what the company thinks is right as opposed to what users know is right. Taking up the 'open source' aesthetic, people are now prepared to adapt, play with and improve products when they doesn't meet their needs.