Design by Deconstruction

This blog is officially on-line.

When I access Blogger now, I always think of Twitter and of the development process that the creator of Blogger is now espousing in Silicon Valley: design by deconstruction. This spartan design revolution is evident even in the Asus Eee (for more insight on the Asus Eee, visit this excellent Blog http://omnium4hongkong.blogspot.com/2008/03/disruptive-technology.html)that we talked about yesterday. Asus has scaled the laptop back to its essential core and, in so doing, has created a new, disruptive technology. The drive to low-bandwith, low-power-consumption applications is forcing designers and innovators to really think about their trade-offs in th edesign process. This is a radical departure from the "cram-it-all-in-and-amp-up-the-power" development processes that the traditional firms still cling to.

The interesting thing about imposing restrictions like bandwidth and power consumtion on design is that it it forces designers to stray from the mainstream of design and that the end products become more accessible ot a larger group of people who otherwise wouldn't be able to contribute to the generation of information (people in transit using mobile devices, people in remote areas of the world with limited access to power sources, etc). Enabling these people to draw from and to contribute to the collective intelligence with the same efficiency that (until now) only some of the world's population has had access to will continue to accelerate the pace of collaboration, immitation, globalization, idea generation and innovation.