Lipstick – the Devil’s Work

In 1770, the British Parliament passed a law condemning lipstick for inciting lust ; women found guilty of  ”seducing men into matrimony by a cosmetic means” could be tried for witchcraft. In the previous century, Thomas Hall, an English Pastor and author of  ’The Loathsomeness of Long Haire’ (1653), called lipstick “the Devil’s work” becuase it “ignited the flame of lust”. Maybe that is why the names for early lipsticks were so off-putting ; popular shades from 1580-1620 included ‘Smoked Ox’, ‘Chimney Sweep’ and ‘Dying Monkey’. Even today some lipsticks contain fish scales for the pearly shine and crushed insects (Kermes ilicis) for the red colouring.

(taken from a column called ‘Quite Interesting’ in a recent copy of  ‘The Saturday Telegraph’ newspaper)

I was intrigued by this cocktail of legislation, religion, public opinion, (anti-)marketing, human nature and animal instinct that have fought publically over the last 400 years to give us the products we know so well today…

balance

I use to use an image of a tightrope walker to express the nature of design, the image juggled budget, manufacturing, time-scale and all the things that design projects take on board.

That image has stayed with me as an expression of the design process, and over time some simple words have been added to this attempt at understanding design and its place, not many words; understanding, negotiation and, often now and in different contexts, balance.

Without balance things get out of shape, without balance things fall, one side prevails for a time then the balance swings.
The ‘balance’ between work and life, between economy and environment and the difficulty of finding a ‘balanced’ view.
A balanced view takes time to consider, needs to resist the pressure for speed and may need to express an out of step, longer term view.

I caught part of a radio programme as I was being driven into town on Christmas Eve, the line ‘’so we bought a mountain” I caught as I left the car.
Google would be needed but the pub called !

In a world oddly obsessed with youth and speed you might find the approach of ‘The Long Now’ interesting, personally and as a design future ?

“http://www.longnow.org”

Beads of Courage

Seeing Justin’s post reminded me of this. I literally stumbled upon it whilst doing some desk research recently on a client project in the area of dementia care. Really great use of simple but powerful thinking to try to lessen the fear and ’sting’ of serious medical procedures on young children. Very touching and inspiring too……

Draw on your users

Children draw their experiences of airline travel

Since my days at Crayola, this has always been one of my favourite design research tools, Drawing the Experience. It works particularly well with children who often resort to single word answers to questions. Armed with a box of crayons, they’ll give you some pretty deep insights into how they feel about anything. While working with an airport in Ireland, we asked passenger’s children to draw what they liked and didn’t like about airports, and what would their perfect airport would have in it. All of this was geared toward helping to create a more family-friendly user experience.

Armed with some simple tools you can better understand the needs of the people you’re trying to create better products and services for.

Related: See how children created their own paper laptops. Are any computer manufacturers listening?