FLOW experiences I

What really makes me happy and fill me with warmth of joy is to watch the male Rockers in the Yoyogi Park at weekends. They dance hour after hour with passion and are highly skilled. Sometimes one of them dance a solo with the others clapping. Other times they performed a more choreographic act in group. Regardless if the temperature is around zero or 40+ they will be there, in the same outfits. It is tank top, leather trouser and jacket and – best of all – worn out boots wrapped with sticky tape. Feel free to join the dance; just take some step and they will give you an encouraging smile, welcoming you to join.

FLOW experiences II

Another source to well-being is FLOW cafe. It is located just outside my office and the coffee making takes place is a very small and (very) brown mini van. You get the best coffee in town and as an extra bonus it is a true joy to contemplate the coffee maker. He is highly professional and he provides an extensive coffee menu. It is truly amazing to see how he handles several orders simultaneously while he - also simultaneously – handles the payments and gives change back. Here we are talking about multitasking ‘en masse’. If I didn’t know better I could swear he has 6 arms, at least. Days he doesn’t show up certainly gets more grey and dull.

Inspiration

Some things that are similar between Swedes and Japanese are that they like to eat raw fish and in both countries people have strong feelings for the nature. Furthermore what unties is the strong preference for an interior and industrial design, that are stylish, beautiful and functional. Scandinavian design is truly very popular in Japan, as Japanese design in Sweden. This weekend an extensive Design event took place http://www.designtide.jp/. Participating companies and designers are presented and linked to. You will guarantee find inspiring things!

However, as far as I could spot I didn't find any work from the Interaction design area. Unfortunately, since Tokyo would certainly be the right place to exhibit interesting, irresistible work from that area.

Interaction design is about designing within the digital and interactive area. The scope is to fulfil the intended target group’s needs. As best it should (could) even exceed user expectation by providing solutions and fulfil needs that the end users did not even now they had.

You are precious

A very appealing application named Post Pet™ was developed by Sony some years ago. It is an email application that was developed with focus on real peoples needs. “Real” people, as opposed to having only businessmen’s as target, and opposed to having engineers finding design solutiona fulfilling mainly other engineers wishes.

One purpose with the design of Post Pet™ was to consider that the essence of one-to-one communication is often an intimate activity. This is neglected by other email applications. For example business letters and love letter have no differences when you send an email, except (hopefully) for the written word.

The creators of Post Pet™ wanted to make an email application where the sender and receiver could express and strengthen their close relation. The program consists of a set of different pets, all with unique personalities and temperaments. The user interface of the program is warm and fuzzy with bright colours and cartoon graphics. The pet you chose to adopt as yours will live in a nicely furnished room and must be carefully taken care of.

When you write a letter you can choose to let the pet or the postman to deliver. Pets can only deliver to others who use Post Pet™ and when you send a email the pet ‘physically’ travels to the recipient’s house leaving the e-mail. If the receiver is online the pet can stay for a while to play around a bit. As a mean to strengthen the intimate correspondence between friends, the pet cannot deliver more than one at the time. Another feature is that the pet has a limited lifetime. The more you use it, the shorter life is has. This further stress the importance you give to a friend that you chose to let the pet deliver to.

Functions which are rarely used in an ordinary email program, e.g. blind carbon copy (Bcc) or filtering are taken away. The emphasis in the design was to create an interface that is appealing and easy to use. The email client became enormously popular (still are!) and can be used for both PC and Ketai (mobile phone).

/Post Pet™ was developed by Kazuhiko Hachiya (media artist), Namie Manabe (graphic designer), and Takashi Kohki (programmer).