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Their incentive is to make it look cool, wow an audience, and bring more grant money to the MIT Media Lab. Contrast this with a company that puts the pieces tog
by hop 16y ago
Their incentive is to make it look cool, wow an audience, and bring more grant money to the MIT Media Lab. Contrast this with a company that puts the pieces together and ships a useful product - like the iPad UI...
I always thought crazy concept cars were a waste of time and resources for car companies. If they instead focused on massive in-house iteration (like Apple's 10-3-1 prototyping process), better cars would be brought to market.
- MikeCapone 16y ago> I always thought crazy concept cars were a waste of time and resources for car companies. If they instead focused on massive in-house iteration (like Apple's 10-3-1 prototyping process), better cars would be brought to market. Definitely. I've been watching the car industry for a few years now, and I'm still waiting for an "Apple" to emerge.
- riffer 16y agoI've been watching the car industry for a few years now, and I'm still waiting for an "Apple" to emerge. Give Tesla a few years
- watmough 16y agoA great point, but car companies do iterate. The iteration just occurs over model years. Take the widely acclaimed Chevy Malibu as an example. This started off as a pretty cruddy GM, but now it's reputedly competitive with Japanese models. I'm sure that hard deadlines for production, very strict cost controls etc., conspire to impose a more rigid than agile process. Perhaps, take a look at UK car companies in the 50's for a looser approach to car design. http://www.aronline.co.uk/index.htm?ado15story1f.htm http://www.aronline.co.uk/index.htm?ado15story1f.htm [Development of the Austin-Morris Mini]
- elblanco 16y agoThey iterate even more out of the public eye. There are endless reams of concept art that never even made it to scale model clay. All of the major manufacturers have design houses staffed with people who's sole job is to draw neat looking car ideas. Eventually a few float to the top and they make scale models out of clay (or in this day and age on rapid prototype machines). And then those design studies may end up as full sized, half-car (lengthwise) mock-ups made out of clay. If they survive that, they may even get made into a pure, non-functional concept car like we see at trade shows. It the public reception is positive, they turn manufacturing engineers loose on the design and they cut out all the artistic junk that would cause the car to cost 4 times as much to make, and introduce safety devices and such that change the styling.....it might make it to a functional prototype at that point where they show it at next year's auto-show, if reception is still good, it'll probably make it into to production.
- stcredzero 16y agoI thought Toyota had 10 parallel teams working on the hybrid power train, of which they picked 1.
- watmough 16y agoPhilip Greenspun had some pretty choice words on MIT Media Lab. http://philip.greenspun.com/panda/suck http://philip.greenspun.com/panda/suck Scroll down to Example 3. It sure looks like Greenspun's page, using simple formatting, has aged very very many times better than anything the MIT Media Lab would have been doing.
- jacobolus 16y agoThe Media Lab does all kinds of neat research. The point of Greenspun’s argument is that the purely promotional website structure designed by generic managers, even ones who manage a lab that does neat stuff, is much less useful to its intended audience (potential grad students) than a website designed for some concrete purpose like explaining the first-person history of computer science. You shouldn’t misrepresent his words to be an all-purpose indictment of the Media Lab.
- andreyf 16y agolike the iPad UI Imagine a 60 inch iPad hanging on the wall of your kitchen. Imagine being able to point and gesture instead of touching. Want to watch a movie while cooking? Switch back to the cook-"book" app when it's time to add the next ingredient, then go back to your film.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- angrycoder 16y agoA 60 inch iPad I could see. But multitasking? Thats just crazy talk.
- ahoyhere 16y agoYour arms would either be very fit, or very painful, after not long at all.
- joelhaus 16y agoWasn't sure what "Apple's 10-3-1 prototyping process" involves; it ends up that the title is pretty self-explanatory: Apple designers come up with 10 entirely different mock ups of any new feature. Not, Lopp said, "seven in order to make three look good", which seems to be a fairly standard practice elsewhere. They'll take ten, and give themselves room to design without restriction. Later they whittle that number to three, spend more months on those three and then finally end up with one strong decision. [Source: http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/techbeat/archives/2008/03/apples_design_process.html http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/techbeat/archives/200...]
- tomlin 16y agoExcept mock-ups != prototype.
- joelhaus 16y agoPicky, picky. Semantics: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prototype#Semantics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prototype#Semantics
- tomlin 16y agoI'm picky because, as a coder, I have to personally deal with different variations of what people think "prototype" means. One client thinks prototype means "mock-up", another thinks it means "ready to go" after a round of QA. Surely you can see how this might effect a project overall?
- joelhaus 16y agoNo doubt. That's why specifying project requirements and writing proposals is usually so important for both client and coder. Managing expectations is key.
- tomlin 16y agoManaging is a waste of time. Working smart is better. It's simple. We have a word for mock-up or comp. We have a word for prototype which is...prototype.