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I saw this the other day on Core77 and although I find most of the picture frames pretty goofy, their use of the ZPrinter is very cool. As I watched the YouTube video, I had the same feeling that I did about 15 years ago when I first saw what you could do with Photoshop – that’s magic! I want it.

Granted, the ZPrinter’s price range of $19-50K will surely keep it off most folk’s Christmas list, but that’s what makes a company like Jujups so smart. It’s going to be a while before these are priced to a place where consumers can by them. In the mean time, I think there’s a tremendous market for companies to offer the production services for interested and creative people.

But please, put some thought into the user experience. The Jujup site doesn’t even begin to represent the power of what they have to offer and I’d hate to see them fail for that reason.

Our users have a lot to tell us. This is nothing new. User research, needfinding, and ethnography are all rooted in the idea that users can tell us a lot about how to design more effective products and services. Why? Users get us (designers) outside of our own viewpoints, they help us see the world from their point of view and they help us to develop empathy which we can then use to develop more effective products. Users have a lot to tell us. We should be listening.

And for the most part, we are. Most design firms have incorporated some sort of user research into their processes. I see some intersections of this sort of user-centered design with the growing movement of crowd sourcing. For clarity’s sake, I’m thinking of crowdsourcing as an open source model applied to products and services. The nature of a product is shifting from a static thing to one which can be manipulated, hacked and altered by users.

As users participate more in the creation of their products and services designers will face considerable challenges, but we’ll also have the opportunity to get a deeper understanding of our users. Read the rest of this post >

Hi there. My name is Thomas Maiorana and I thought it’d be a good idea to introduce myself since I’ll be posting here regularly. I promise, there won’t be this much of “me” in any of the following posts.

My educational background spans the humanities, creative writing, anthropology and American culture, but professionally I’ve found a way to bring all this together as a visual designer. For the past 10 years, I’ve developed websites, user interfaces, stories and interactive experiences.

Last June I finished up an MFA in Design at Stanford University. The program is technically called the Joint Program in Design. Joint, because the program brings together folks from the Art Department and the Department of Mechanical Engineering. Since I’d always felt comfortable bridging disciplines, this type of setting quickly became a home. And although I’d been creating solutions which addressed user needs for some time, at Stanford I was able to get a deeper understanding of how to connect with users and address their latent needs.

Which is where my interest in crowd sourcing or participatory design comes in. I’m fascinated by the ways in which co-authorship offers us new ways to understand and communicate with users. I’m interested in how large corporations outsource innovation, but also the systems which must be put in place to allow for efficient collaboration across distances and disciplines. I’m interested in the ways that a more collaborative model will challenge designers’ sense of control, the ways corporations define their relationships to consumers and the ways co-creation will offer users a new way to describe their needs. These relationships are shifting, and I’m thrilled to explore the ramifications as they unfold.

A final note: I come to this as a designer. I hope to be able to lend that perspective to these questions and I look forward to learning from the other disciplines as well. I’ll be posting soon. Take care.

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