Silly IDEO…
Saw Scoble’s post on the IDEO display at the Palo Alto Art Center last month and so one day last week Joseph and I went to check it out during Lunch. Overall, there was some cool stuff, but we were kind of underwhelmed :S We thought we’d be blown away by awesome designs and concepts, but save a few cool trinkets here and there, most things were… well… strange and impractical. Kinda like manifestations of all those random ideas you have when you’re just sitting around – except this time someone is actually getting paid to build those ideas. I still admire IDEO, but not so much for the work they do; I now admire them for the fact that they’re able to get paid ridiculous amounts of money to make random ideas a reality :-P
Don’t believe me? Judge for yourself! Here’s a future work station for Herman Miller:

And here’s a new DJ mixing table:

A nice shelter made out of recyclable materials (not sure who’ll live there or where :D )

Random trinkets

A CD player that looks like a tablesaw… sweet! (who uses CDs anymore :P )

Cool sunglasses

I’ll have to assume this is old…

Maybe a best-seller in Japan (I wouldn’t mind having one though):

And of course the required pictures of the next generation shopping cart!


I did like the design of the exhibit and the explanation of the IDEO brainstorming process though.




Sounds like a great place to work (if you don’t mind that most of the stuff you create never makes it to production) – I’m definitely jealous :)
Check out my Flickr set for more pictures of the exhibit :)
This entry was posted on Thursday, August 10th, 2006 at 9:22 am and is filed under pictures, technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
August 11th, 2006 at 11:19 am
Maybe they’d be more motivated if people could buy some of those — or take home a kit to make one @ home. I wouldn’t mind emptying my pocket for one of those sunglasses. :-)