But what if you could go on a race track and drive around cones, challenging terrain and spin cars. That’s what BMW is offering with their new BMW Performance Driving School. You get to choose which BMW you want to drive, what kind of class you want to attend and with instructors assigned to you, you are on your way to enjoy some cool driving. Check out the videos at the performance center to see some first class driving.

However, thats not all. The best part about this is the way they have promoted it. Check out the RelearnToDrive site and see the cool videos which may bring back some memories of how driving entered your life. It’s a wonderful marketing technique and I believe will soon become viral.

For the first one he argues that as surface elements are easier to observe and experience, its likely to associate design with it. I thought of elaborating a little on this hypothesis. We see a lot of print/video ads and most of them are about glossy pictures and hot models showing off some product. There would be terms like “sleek design” thrown in and hopefully we will find some list of “features” etc. But that is the gist of how most products are introduced to customers. Few companies give sufficient weight to ,among other things, usability and simplicity in the initial ads. The immediate motive is to capture user attention with cool videos and pictures to make them look at the product and hopefully think about it.

Even when we browse websites , especially e-commerce websites, its the big product picture on the page that catches your attention and features are somewhere below or worse a link away. I think, we as designers, should pay attention as to how the customer gets educated about design? How do they build the perception of design as Jess describes it? Why is it that when they want to work on their products, revise them, modify them…they think more about “eye candy” and less about the other aspects of a mature design. Of course not all of us can be designers but its really important as a company to decide what kind of a perception of design are we building for our customers. Much has been said about the Ipod but the point I want to highlight is it was after Ipod that people started talking about “simple clean design”. Apple brought that vocabulary to a huge audience and over a period of time people were striving to have that ideology in their product design as well as tout it in their ads.

This kind of leads to the second hypothesis that yes there are lots of work for styling etc… as thats what the customer’s perception has been. Even if we as designers try to convince them otherwise and propose better ways to solve the same problem, without a good understanding of “What is good design” companies won’t be motivated to go beyond the styling.

I think as designers we need to educate our customers while we work with them as they come to us for the simple reason that they believe we know more about design than them. It’s this gentle touch of coaching your client that can make a great difference and help them better understand the idea of good design. Of course we should ourselves be sufficiently “design mature” in the first place but I think its such designers that companies would stick to once they see the benefits over time of well designed products instead of prettied up tools.

What do you think about these issues? Feel free to leave your comments

Here’s on from the top 20:

Client: Can you design the site so that people that don’t have internet access can view it?

me: Sure; it’s called a brochure

Well that led me to another search. I user IE7 at home and Firefox at work. (I guess most people do the other way around ) IE7 does not support applying a custom style for a particular website. You can go to the Accessibility options to fix a single stylesheet for all the websites you visit but they cannot be customized for each site. So I was thinking maybe I should install Firefox at home for just this one feature…see how far as a user I am willing to go to use the product I immediately fell in love with. It’s just that the memory hogging of Firefox pisses me off.

Apple to my rescue!!!…they just release Beta 3 of Safari for Windows. So I will try that out tonight and lets see how things go. Joel complained about it being terribly slow but later on posted an update that maybe it was just the first few times when he launched Safari. Jeff complains about the font rendering in Safari… lets hope they find a way to fix it at least for Windows.

Update: A Mac user says “Safari sucks”…should I still give it a try???

YouTube DirektLink

Apple just released 3 ads of the iPhone… looks like its coming on June 29…too bad I am not getting one

Watch the videos and listen to the two guys who pretty much shaped the complete software industry. I wanted to post the videos here but AllthingsD removed it from Brightcove and have only a partial list at Youtube.

Not any more!!! Microsoft just released a new piece of technology “Microsoft Surface” which allows you to play with computers using your bare hands, pointers and actual devices like cell phones and cameras. This is way more than what we have seen a touchscreen can do but instead of explaining what it is about I might as well show it to you. Check out the video below:

brightcove DirektLink

Check out the videos on the Microsoft site as well. Jeff Hann featured in the above video gave a multi touch demo at TED. Check that out here:

YouTube DirektLink

P.S.: I was so excited about this and wanted to blog it that I found a plugin to embed video just for this post

She’s too busy… has a lot of meetings, there is no fixed schedule…no we don’t make any appointments for the manager. These are some tit-bits of the conversation a friend of mine had with his apartment office when he and his roommate went to talk about renewing the lease for 6 months instead of the standard 1 year and wanted to talk to the apartment manager.

The receptionist talked all about how this year they are doing no short term renewals, new policies are in place and they are very “strict” about them, the manager is making no exceptions whatsoever. Then came suggestions like renew for a year but sublease when you need to leave (so make it your problem not ours), switch to another small apartment in the same complex but with almost the same rent (we still make money but you adjust to the new cramped living conditions). Btw, this is happening the third time after 1 phone conversation and 1 personal meeting with the apartment office. They have been explained that being students who don’t own vehicles, finding a new apartment close to grocery stores, bus stops and other basic amenities is so difficult and time consuming. I guess hence the mentality that the customer really needs us so why bend and solve a problem..let them figure out. Additionally they have been in the apartment for 1 year already.

Btw, this is happening the third time after 1 phone conversation and 1 personal meeting with the apartment office. They have been explained that being students who don’t own vehicles, finding a new apartment close to grocery stores, bus stops and other basic amenities is so difficult and time consuming. I guess hence the mentality that the customer really needs us so why bend and solve a problem..let them figure out. Additionally they have been in the apartment for 1 year already.

Persistence paid as the customers said no matter what they want to meet the manager. She did not meet them but the receptionist talked to her and these guys got a 6 month lease renewal approval.

It’s a pity that for new customers the managers are ready to show apartments anytime, sign and finalize leases but when existing customers come with issues everyone seems to run away and leaves the customer to deal with on their own. Suddenly receptionists turn from welcoming and polite staff to mere policy translators. How many more case studies and market researches do they need to know that treating existing customers well is equally, if not more, important and thats what will keep your business running better.

There are millions of species we have discovered over so many years but there still so many out there we don’t know about. The idea of EOL is to as all of us travel around the world and explore the planet and find new things, we can contribute to EOL via photos, links, text, maps etc…. That way we will have an extensive catalog which a single scientific or research community could not setup all by itself.

A noble mission indeed and something I hope we can all contribute to.

This week I have been listening to the world reknown biologist and atheist Richard Dawkins. There are a number of his talks and conversations on YT that are so eye opening and intriguing. One of the concerns I share with him is that of labelling children. Its a practice to label a Hindu’s child as “a hindu child” at such a young age when they don’t even know what religion means. And they don’t have any chance to look at other religions and take their pick of discard all of them and say..” well I don’t need a God”.

He also shows that statistical data suggests a large number of people believe Jesus is coming back in their lifetime, that the universe is just some thousand years old and everyone who does not believe in Jesus is mistaken. But the most interesting part of his talks are where he questions the need of religion, of God and the consequences of it in today’s world. He talks like a true scientist demanding evidence instead of being asked to have blind faith.

His latest book “The God Delusion”, a New York Times Bestseller, has this and much more. You can view his talks on YT

1) Lynchburg, VA Part 1

2) Lynchburg, VA Part 2 

3) Interview with William Crawley

4) Presentations at TED a) The Universe is queerer than we can suppose b) The Design of Life

Another speaker/author Sam Harris also caught my attention especially because of the name of his 2 books: Letter to a Christian Nation and The End of Faith. It was a pleasure to listen to his talk at the LongNow Foundation where he lays down all the issues he has with religion. His talk at IdeaCity is a good jist of what it means to “believe” something.

I will end this post with a link to a healthy debate between Sam Harris and Reza Aslan. I will leave it to you to find out who Reza is.

UPDATE: 3 Presidential Candidates DON’T believe in Evolution. God Bless America!!

The first time I showed some interest in economics was when I saw “A Beautiful Mind”. I was obviously impressed by the sheer genius of John Nash and wanted to find more about the Nash Equation, Game Theory and Economics in general.

That was in 2002 or so. It’s been a long time I read anything on economics. I saw on Ted talks a presentation by Steven Levitt and his talk about how drug dealers manage their money was absolutely fascinating. I looked up his book Freakonomics on amazon and wasn’t surprised to find it among the top sellers. The most interesting aspect about the book are the questions the author asks. Whats common between school teachers and sumo wrestlers? If drug dealers make so much money why do they still stay with their moms? Not the typical questions you hear from an economist. They are busy discussing global economy and outsourcing while here is an economist trying to understand the very basic relationships in our lives.

He shows that we are all driven by incentives and the power incentives have over us, thus reminding us that if presented incorrectly an incentive can backfire hugely. Its an entertaining book coupled with strong results driven from real world data. I really appreciate the author for questioning a lot of “conventional wisdom” by analyzing a lot of data and putting forth some really eye-opening results. I love when he says in the book that no matter what someone has told you… this is what the data tells us. Its a really powerful statement and make you a believer in numbers.

Strongly recommended for a weekend reading for those who like some out of the box thinking.