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Dreams and Obsessions on Shelf and Screen

Tue, 15 Jan 2008 12:50:00 GMT

An essay by Huib van Opstal with an analysis of the groundbreaking innovations made over a century ago in the strip series ‘Dream of the Rarebit Fiend’. Designing may include dreams or obsessions. A century ago, hundreds of visualized dreams appeared as stories in strip form, in American newspapers, titled ‘Dream of the Rarebit Fiend’. Strips made by an author who called himself SILAS. On the stunning 2007 reissue of these dreams, in the form of a book + DVD by German collector Ulrich Merkl, Dutch pictureanalyst and designer Huib van Opstal now gives the following analysis.

Cabinet

Wed, 04 Feb 2004 18:26:00 GMT

Cabinet is a tool that helps designers collect and organize the visual material for inspiration. It does this by making the interaction with digital material more physical (designers can drag digital images on a table as if they are real objects) and by offering a fluent way to add physical material to the digital collection (anything placed on the table is digitized and projected in place, and can be added to the collection). For more information see this demo or visit the Cabinet website at the ID-StudioLab.

Public internet poles

Thu, 11 Jul 1996 18:27:00 GMT

The development of the public information and communication poles in 1996. Rotterdam design agency Landmark was best known by the triangular public telephone booth. With the rise of the Internet and mobile telecommunication the KPN started thinking about offering different products in these interesting public spaces. Landmark realized this early on and started designing telephone booths that could offer more than just telecommunication. The final result was this family of public monofunctional poles that offered services like hotel, travel information and in the end: Internet.

Pregnancy test

Wed, 01 May 1996 09:33:00 GMT

The original Predictor pregnancy test was designed by Landmark back in 1992. For a new version of the test, Organon had decided to replace the chemical readout with a digital display. This gave us a chance to design the 120 second waiting time. The product never made it to production, mainly because both Organon and we found the environmental impact of the sultion to be too big.

Apple Interface Design Project

Mon, 25 Jul 1994 18:27:00 GMT

A design concept developed in 1994 for the Apple Interface Design Project that allows hospitalized patients to communicate with their caretakers and other patients. Nightingale was a portable device using the Internet, allowing both browsing through messages and sending and receiving messages. Because of the patients condition it aimed at asynchronous communication. The concept was presented to the Advanced Technology Group at the Apple HQ July 2004, winning the interaction design award.