The Dashblog

Our new friends at Fabbo gave the Dashboard a write up. Check out their site for an insight into the brave new fabricated world.

The Danish Design Center in Copenhagen has commissioned an exhibition of the Dashboard for Danish Design Week next summer. We’re super excited by this and will keep you updated on our progress.

Don’t forget you can download the Dashboard pdf and print it out on paper if you don’t happen to have a 3D printer handy. This one shows an idea for labeling buildings that was suggested by a couple of students at the Institute Without Boundaries this year.

We’ve had a lot of very interesting comments on the Dashboard, so much so that a new iteration is in the offing. Right now we’re trying to work out how to add some more specificity to the concept without being overly prescriptive. So version 1.0.6 is going to turn into the cliched 2.0 at some point in the future with the hope that we can skip to 3.0.1 soon after. Keep the comments coming.

I gave a very informal presentation of the Dashboard over lunch to the delightful Alie Rose from the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design. This is a brand new design school in Denmark that starts its pilot year in September. It’s very cool, very exciting and you can read all about it here.

Apparently some of the work done by the  Institute Without Boundaries is going to be preserved by the Canadian Center for Architecture. Included in this collection will be another plastic dashboard (the plans for which you can download from our website).  

It’s exciting that the Dashboard will be preserved for future, uninterested generations, but it also sets the stage for at least part of my weekend — 20 hours of printing and peeling and assembling.

In the Dashboard User Guide, we make a case for the the role of the designer at each position on our Interaction Slider: Prescribed, Menu, Co-creation, Assist and DIY. Yes even DIY. There the designer has a role, if only to observe. If only ‘only observe’ were so easy. Being open to DIY design means being able to continually see the world with fresh eyes. This kind of continual environment amnesia is brilliantly demonstrated in Jane Fulton Suri’s little book from IDEO called ‘Thoughtless Acts?’.

As the book tells us: “Thoughtless acts are all those intiuitive ways we adapt, explaint and react ot things in our environment; things we do without really thinking.” She’s captured a lot of them, all photographed and categorized. The fact that seeing this way isn’t so easy is born out by the necessity of staring at some of the photos for a while before the ‘thoughtless act’ makes itself apparent.

So I’m wondering whether the default position for designers shouldn’t be Prescribe or the increasingly trendy Co-create but DIY. In the User Guide we write for the DIY position: “Observe! DIY design rewards attention. Careful study enriches your own practice and enables one to become an informed participant, take another position on the Slider and actively design. So hands off, eyes open and enjoy.”

I wonder whether Jane Fulton Suri would agree? Check out: http://www.thoughtlessacts.com/

If you’re interested to hear what others are saying about the Dashboard, take a look at this blog which seems to compare it to some kind of military design weapon. Charge!

http://kunik-workbench.blogspot.com/

We’ve given the User Guide an update. We encourage you to download it and have a look because that’s where the meat of this project is. There are jokes too. Mostly the changes are writerly things and typos, so, if you’ve already downloaded it, skip it this time.

Ok, so it’s one day after the launch and were already getting some really interesting comments back. There are some really smart people out there and it’s nice when they take the time to write. Perhaps we’ll do a blog post summarizing some of their thinking in the near future. We’re still on Dashboard 1.0.6 but we’re already wondering about a system upgrade. Keep the comments coming!

The Dashboard website went properly live today. We’ve got a press release and everything. So now it’s over to you. We’re wondering what you make of it. Go on, we can take it…