This is an automatic sanitizing toilet in a public washroom located near the Hankyu Arashiyama Station (阪急嵐山駅).

Official description at the facility:

• The toilet seat, toilet bowl, and floor are automatically cleansed after each use.
• Fully equipped with heating and air conditioning, background music, baby seat, handrails, mirror hand soap, toilet paper, hanger, dust bin, sanitary napkin disposal etc.
• In case of need, there is a direct line to our administration center so you can call us 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

The tag line of this poster is「思わずびっくりかえる、お得です。」(before your realizing, [time] changes suddenly and great deal comes)

Despite of my bad translation, there are two things that I think are clever in this poster design:

1. In the tag line, the word かえる (KAERU) has two meanings:
(a) 「変える」Changing from one state to another
(b) 「蛙」Frog

2. Along with the “frog / change” word play, the illustration above resembles a sitting frog. If you flip it upside down tho, it appears to be a dragon head. The illustration combines three themes into one presentation: frog (KAERU), change (KAERU), and the symbol of dragon.

I wish everybody a happy 2012. I will continue my journey to discover and document beautiful designs in everyday things.

This is a sketch book from a Dyson engineer showing the thinking process when designing the company’s revolutionary vacuum cleaner. The notebook is part of the exhibitions in Tokyo Designers Week 2011.

It’s very intriguing to see that how the designer used the sketch book to gather ideas and visual thinking with simple doodles. No worries about structure, fidelity, quality; all it matters is quick and free drawing, or even putting your coffee mug on the notebook and leave a mark. So analog, so beautifully human.

Treadmills are becoming more than just a surface for your to run on and exercise. With loads of functions and program controls, it’s getting more and more complex to operate. The picture above is a typical treadmill with buttons and screens that almost resemble a cockpit of a jet fighter. But what if you just want to get started right away? One solution designers came up with is a “Quick Start Button”. It’s purpose is to bypass the setup process and start rolling the treadmill right away.

On the other hand, a treadmill needs to have an emergency “Quick Stop” button, which allow user to stop the machine immediately in case of emergency. Both the “Quick Start” and “Quick Stop” has the same functional priority, only opposite purposes.

Question is, in order to make it easy recognizable and operable, the buttons has to be physically bigger than other controls, and very easy to understand at a quick glance without reading the text label on the button. So they need an intuitive icon.

The “Stop” button icon is relatively easy since there is an international standard “red stroke in a circle” symbol to follow. But it is trickier for the quick start button.

Back to the example treadmill in the photo, there’re two design decisions I find puzzling:

(1) Instead of the standard red colour, the Stop button is in orange.

(2) For the “Quick Start” button, it make sense to use green to imply a positive message of “go ahead”. But the icon is a 90° rotation of the stop button. It’s creative, but not very easy to understand especially for first time users.

Suggestions:

• green circle with a solid dot inside
• the standard “Power On” icon (Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_symbol)
• an illustration of a running man

LED light is becoming more and more commonly used in household and public area, replacing the traditional florescent and sodium vapor based lighting systems. LED is energy efficient, bright and long lasting. With these many advantages, many cities are trying to promote this technology for a wider adoption. The picture above is a street light installed near Kawasaki JR station.

However, there is currently no international standard logo for the LED lighting technology. The most commonly seen logo so far is the 3 English alphabet “LED”. It is still a new territory for designers to come up with something that can communicate the concept and technology. For this street lamp near Kawasaki station, the designer attempt to do so by using 7 circles in a radial arrangement. Can you get the idea from the logo?

Here are some thoughts on elevator door buttons and design inspirations I got from the observation.

Common issues:

1. Language – there’re thousands of words in different languages to communicate the “open” and “close” functions. English is [open/close], Chinese is [開／關] or [开／关] (simplified Chinese), Japanese is [開／閉],…etc.
2. Icon – to solve the language problems stated above, it’d be better to use icons that is universally understandable regardless of the language barrier.
3. Button location – Some elevators has the open/close buttons located at the top of the button panel. While one person is pressing the [open] button to keep the door open, other people sometimes has to squeeze under his/her armpit to press the floor buttons. That’s quite inconvenient and could be embarrassing.
4. Mutual exclusive states – “open” and “close” are two mutually exclusive states of one object: the door. Logically, you only need one control to operate the door. Think about a light switch: one switch is connected to one lightbulb to turn it ON or OFF. However, perhaps when the engineer first designed the elevator, the two functions was identified as two separate tasks where each has to be implemented and engineered separately. Thus, the two buttons are mapped to control the two functions.
5. Accessibility – what if the user is colour blind or unable to see? What if the light goes out and you can only rely on touch?

A good solution

1. Language independence.
2. Every control should have at least two or more ways to communicate its function.
• Colour (green is open / black is close)
• Icon (outside pointing arrows is open / inside pointing arrows is close)
• Physical dimension (wider button is open / narrower button is close)

Real world example

What message to you perceive when you see a person bowing at you?

The meaning of bowing is quite significant in eastern culture, and especially important in Japanese daily life. Depending on the context, bowing could mean apology (when you bump into someone), appreciation (after you made a purchase from a store), and greeting (equivalent to saying hello and good morning). In the company I work that, for example, we often have meetings with guests and clients. When the meeting is done, our team would walk the guests to the elevator door and wait for the elevator with them. Once they stepped into the elevator, all team members will make a bow at the guests until the door closed. That is to show deep appreciation and good business manner.

But here is a challenging scenario I encountered one day when having lunch in a Japanese beef bowl restaurant YOSHINOYA. Near the cash register, there was a sign with an illustration of a staff bowing with a smile, some Japanese text and then logos of two popular NFC payment card “WAON” and “Suica”. Let me explain why I think the signage design could be confusing, especially to foreigners who cannot understand Japanese:

Full Body Gesture — it is pretty clear that the illustrated character is doing a bow at person who’s reading the sign, there’s no ambiguity about it. However as mentioned before, bowing could mean appreciation or apology.

Facial Cue — this one is subtle to pick up but important nonetheless: on the face of the character we could easily identify the eyes in the upper part of the face; however what is that curved line below it? It is a smile, or is it a nose where the character is now bowing with his/her head down?
(a) If the line is a smile, then the character could be making a pleased facial expression, indicating that the the subject of sign is to thank you for using the indicated payment methods.
(b) If this line is the nose otherwise, then the character is making a large head dip which ressemble a deeper bow. That can be interpreted as a big apology and further understood as “we do not accept the payement methods”.

Japanese text — obviously, to those who cannot understand Japanese, this instruction would have no use in explaining the message.

Logos at the lower right corner of the sign there are two logos of the payment systems. The logos are neutral and don’t convey any information of the acceptance of the payment methods.

Answer: 「当店ではWAON、Suicaはご利用いただけません。ご了承こださい」(meaning: this store does not accept WAON and Suica cards. We appreciate your understanding.)

My Suggestion: stick to international standard to indicating “No”. It’s boring but it works.

Panasonic recently released it’s new iteration of the compact SLR-equivalent camera, which targets the average consumers rather than professional SLR photographers. The compactness of this camera is archived by eliminating the mirror box, hotshoe socket and optical viewfinder unit, while keeping most of the SLR goodness in a convenient and small housing. But most importantly, the camera comes with a 3-inch big touchscreen LCD and a secondary dial control, eliminating the need of many feature-specific buttons that are commonly seen in professional SLR cameras. In spite of the revolutionary mirrorless SLR technology, what interests me most is its touchscreen user interface.

The first time I learned about this camera and it’s touchscreen control was from it’s TV ad in Japan. In this ad series, the photographer is trying to capture the cute moments of a cat, which highlights its high-speed auto focus, touch-controlled focal point and shutter, and easiness to take pictures with blurry background (shallow depth of field).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZi-l_QYzf4

Touchscreen as a camera interface

Touchscreen is one of the main selling point of this camera. At a first glance, it feels like a gimmick that rides on the popularity of multi-touch powered smartphones. After reading its product catalog, however, it seems that the designer did carefully design the UI to take advantage of the touch hardware. Moreover, in the manual creative mode called iA Plus, there are three controls that user can easily adjust: defocus (depth of field), brightness (exposure compensation), and colour control (colour temperature).

I think the selection of these three specific controls is a careful observation of users and their most desired results that were only archivable with traditional SLR camera and some training. Take defocus for example: many people really like the effect of sharp main object with blurry background; but in order to archive such effect of shallow depth of view, one must know how to deal with shutter speed + aperture + sensor ISO. However, the GF3 camera does all the hard work for you, leaving you only one control of the background blurriness.

In terms of user experience design, by simplifying the traditional SLR controls into one defocus control, user can still feel in control to the creative process while greatly reducing the learning time and difficulty to operate the camera. Novice and post-novice users can enjoy the result of a reasonably professional looking picture. That will satisfy their emotional goal:

“Enjoy professional-looking photography casually without the headache of learning about F-stop and stuff” and ”play a role in the creative process and get a sense of achievement”

A similar experience design that result in “getting a sense of achievement” can be observed from Betty Crocker’s famous “Just add an egg” cake mix tale.

You can learn more about the touchscreen interface from this product detail page:
http://panasonic.net/avc/lumix/systemcamera/gms/gf3/ia.html#leadtitle

Pictures from official site: main UI

Soft focus creative mode

Ad poster in JR train

This minimalistic remote control caught my attention one day when I went to a mid-high class furniture store near Omotesando. This remote stick was placed near a comfortable looking couch. Its simplistic icons and the absence of text label kept me wondering for a good minute. My first guess was that it has something to do with the couch, but there were no item description tag whatsoever to verify my assumption.

Now that became an interesting little experiment. Without a clear description of what a remote control is associated with, can one still be able to correctly identify the features just by looking at the icons, buttons, and labels? I immediately think of the Apple Remote, Nintendo Wiimote, and a typical universal remote that easily has 40+ buttons. No doubt it’s pretty challenging to design a good user interface for a remote. Also some thoughts:

• Complexity depends on the purpose of the machine. Gaming console needs player’s immediate and simultaneous input for direction (sometimes direction + perspective control), weapon control (fire), inventory management, and voice communication. A game controller is definitely different from a TV remote.
• Remote control design also depends on how much control you have to the hardware & software of the main unit. For example, Apple TV is, in both hardware and software, designed with the TV screen as the main information and interaction medium, therefore the remote is merely a 6-direction navigation tool (up,down,left,right,back,forth). However, a self-assembled home theatre system with TV + DVD + Sound system from different makers will come with 3 different controls, each was designed without considering the interaction with the other units.

This talk from Simon Sinek is about inspirational leadership. He explains the difference between a typical leadership and a truly inspiring leadership, with three concentric circles labelled “What”, “How” and “Why” from the outside to the inside. Those are the three qualities of a leadership:

1. Almost all individuals and organizes know what they are doing. All companies know what they’re making and selling for profit, be it a computer manufacturer, software development company or a furniture store.
2. Some of them know how to to it well.
3. Only a few among all know why they do it. What’s your purpose, your cause, your believe. Why do we exist. Profit is not the reason, it’s just the end result of the process.

Simon gave an example of a marketing message that’s from the outside in (what > how > why):

Apple makes great computers > they’re beautifully design, simple to use, and user-friendly > Wanna buy one?

But this is what Apple communicates it’s value from the inside out (why > how > what):

Everything we do we believe in challenging the conventions, we believe in thinking differently > the way to archive that is to make our products beautifully designed, simple to use, and user-friendly > which we happen to make great computers. Wanna buy one?

“People don’t why what you do, they buy why you do it.” That’s the main point of being inspirational. Believe in purpose, believe in meaning.

TED Link: http://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_inspire_action.html