Open up your mind and say, ahh...

Do you know why soap bubbles are covered in those beautiful iridescent patterns? Dutch artist Nicky Assmann does–in fact, she’s based an entire series, called Solace, on the phenomenon.

In Solace, the audience watches as a mechanical armature slowly rises in front of a black backdrop. Lit from one side, a wide soap membrane grows from the metal rod, while behind it a second armature forms a second membrane. The two arms rise and fall like lungs, pulling wide ribbons of soapy film between them.

Solace exploits the effect of gravity on soap films. Most soap bubbles are made up of a mixture of glycerol and water, which have different levels of viscosity. That means that water and soap are affected by gravity at different rates. The swirling patterns you see in the film, after a few seconds held in a vertical position, is light refracting off of the film as water is pulled down more quickly than the rest of the soap film.

Assmann thinks of Solace as cinematic. She even says the subtitle–“A soap film apparatus”–is meant to be a pun. “The soap film becomes a mirror,” she says, “it’s part of the confrontation between you and the spatial intervention of the film.”

Solace will come to the Wood Street Galleries in Pittsburgh beginning on July 13. Assmann’s website is here.

Dieter Rams is best-known for his work at Braun–where he revolutionized the design of electronics–and his indelible influence on Apple’s Jony Ive. But he has had a decisive hand in another, much smaller company: Vitsœ, a British manufacturer that has been producing Rams’s modular shelving system for 50 years. To mark his 80th birthday, the German master has allowed Vitsœ to release the transcript of the speech he delivered in New York in 1976, in which he articulates his ethos of user-centered design and some of his famous 10 commandments. In 2012, they feel as if they were written yesterday. Enjoy–Ed.

Here’s the historic speech in its entirety:

Ladies and gentlemen, design is a popular subject today. No wonder because, in the face of increasing competition, design is often the only product differentiation that is truly discernible to the buyer.

The introduction of good design is needed for a company to be successful. However, our definition of success may be different to yours. Striving for good design is of social importance, as it means, amongst other things, absolutely avoiding waste.

Unwavering emphasis on functionality

The ideas behind my work as a designer have to match with a company’s objectives. This principle applies to my work not only at Braun but also at Vitsœ. I have been working for these two companies for about 20 years and–I like to point out–only for these two companies.

I am convinced that design–at least in the terms I understand it–cannot be performed by someone outside the company. I am absolutely convinced that this is true if products are designed as part of a larger system, like we do at Vitsœ.

In 1957 I began to develop a storage system that formed the basis of the company Vitsœ, which was founded in 1959. Thus the ideology behind my design is engrained within the company.

Ladies and gentlemen, design is a popular subject today. No wonder because, in the face of increasing competition, design is often the only product differentiation that is truly discernible to the buyer.

Rams’s famed shelving system for Vitsœ. Good design is of social importance, as it means absolutely avoiding waste.

I am convinced that a well-thought-out design is decisive to the quality of a product. A poorly designed product is not only uglier than a well-designed one but it is of less value and use. Worst of all it might be intrusive. The development and changes that we have initiated with our work at Vitsœ are, I believe, positive for the development of good design as a whole.

The introduction of good design is needed for a company to be successful. However, our definition of success may be different to yours. Striving for good design is of social importance as it means, amongst other things, absolutely avoiding waste.

What is good design? Product design is the total configuration of a product: its form, color, material, and construction. The product must serve its intended purpose efficiently.

A designer who wants to achieve good design must not regard himself as an artist who, according to taste and aesthetics, is merely dressing up products with a last-minute garment. The designer must be the gestaltingenieur or creative engineer. They synthesize the completed product from the various elements that make up its design. Their work is largely rational, meaning that aesthetic decisions are justified by an understanding of the product’s purpose.

I am convinced that people have an interest in what we are doing at Vitsœ since our products are useful; I expect they also appreciate the aesthetic that follows. These qualities are the result of progressive and intelligent problem solving. Functionality must be at the center of good design.

You cannot understand good design if you do not understand people.

A product must be functional in itself but it also must function as part of a wider system: the home. Vitsœ’s 606 Universal Shelving System is successful due to its high functionality and its ability to adapt to any environment. Vitsœ’s furniture does not shout; it performs its function in relative anonymity alongside furniture from any designer and in homes from any era. We make the effort to produce products like this for the intelligent and responsible users–not consumers–who consciously select products that they can really use. Good design must be able to coexist.

You cannot understand good design if you do not understand people; design is made for people. It must be ergonomically correct, meaning it must harmonize with a human being’s strengths, dimensions, senses, and understanding.

Vitsœ’s direct contact with its customers has led to a deep understanding of people. Over the years, our understanding of how you use a shelf or an armchair has increased. We have educated and diligent people worldwide who understand how to plan systems in configurations that our customers may not necessarily have thought of at the beginning.

Order and proportion: Only orderliness makes a product useful

All objects that are to be used must be subject to a clear order. The remarkable order of design at Vitsœ has the purpose of communicating the function of the object to the user. The design of a Vitsœ product clearly points out its purpose and its use–and facilitates them. The order of the elements–their arrangement, their shape, their size, and their color–is based on a thoroughly planned system. This system is the language of Vitsœ design.

The majority of products try to impress us with their magnificence or miniscule size.

But this order is not self-serving; and I would not call it ideology because it is a practical necessity. For design to be understood by everyone–which good design should strive to do–it should be as simple as possible. Design at Vitsœ brings all individual elements into proportion. An often-cited feature of the Vitsœ collection is its balance, its harmony, its belonging together. All structures, components, and finishes coexist as a well-balanced and harmonious design that gives it usability.

The majority of products that we encounter in our day-to-day lives scream for attention or try to impress us with their magnificence or miniscule size. These objects try to dictate our relationships with them. Good design creates powerful long-lasting relationships with products as good design creates objects with balanced proportions; at Vitsœ we go further by trying to create objects in balanced proportion with people.

Good design means to me: as little design as possible

To use design to impress, to polish things up, to make them chic, is no design at all. This is packaging. When we concentrate on the essential elements in design, when we omit all superfluous elements, we find forms become: quiet, comfortable, understandable and, most importantly, long lasting.

Vitsœ products are in constant evolution. We do not limit our products to the manufacturing technologies available at the time of their design. Built into the language of Vitsœ products is adaptability–adaptability for the user in the home and adaptability in design and manufacture.
We are constantly looking for new and better technical solutions for our products. As technology and production processes are always advancing, innovations are not only possible but they are necessary for a product to continue to be considered good design.

We have experienced that people are more willing than ever to change their lifestyles; that they accept innovative solutions–not fake ones–and are able to rid themselves of old and cemented habits with our products. They expect such innovative solutions, particularly from Vitsœ.

***

Ladies and gentlemen, our environment is changing rapidly. How will these changes affect our design concepts? Can design that claims longer-range validity be reactive to current circumstances or must it be proactive for the future?

In a room where the proportions are noticed we feel better and we think differently. A neglected and uncared-for landscape will have a different effect on our lives than one that is natural and orderly. There is a lot of work to do on the topic of our physical surroundings affecting our psychological functions. This is the work we do at Vitsœ.

People are more willing than ever to accept innovative solutions. Not fake ones.

But Vitsœ only makes furniture today. There are larger questions that we need to answer about our urban environment and how it affects us as individuals and as a society. What effects do electricity pylons, skyscrapers, highways, street lighting and car parks, for example, have on our psyche and relationships? We know that the residents of anonymous concrete blocks can become depressed as a result of their surroundings. But who is researching these things systematically? Who takes all of this really seriously?

I imagine our current situation will cause future generations to shudder at the thoughtlessness in the way in which we today fill our homes, our cities, and our landscape with a chaos of assorted junk. What a fatalistic apathy we have towards the effect of such things. What atrocities we have to tolerate. Yet we are only half aware of them.

This complex situation is increasing and possibly irreversible: there are no discrete actions anymore. Everything interacts and is dependent on other things; we must think more thoroughly about what we are doing, how we are doing it and why we are doing it.

Indeed, the collapse of the entire system may be impending.

I have spoken of our surroundings but let us look at the wider environment: the world we live in. There is an increasing and irreversible shortage of natural resources: raw materials, energy, food, and land. This must compel us to rationalize, especially in design. The times of thoughtless design, which can only flourish in times of thoughtless production for thoughtless consumption, are over. We cannot afford any more thoughtlessness.

The complexity of systems and shortage of natural resources should compel a change of individual attitudes and attitudes as a society. We learn as individuals and we learn as a group. We are beginning to understand the changes that we are only just seeing. We must take notice with increasing soberness and, hopefully, with growing alertness and rationalism.

Ladies and gentlemen, if we at Vitsœ have contributed towards intelligent, responsible design and a higher quality of objects, I believe we owe our thanks to a great degree to the unselfish enthusiasm and the always-consequent attitude of one man: Niels Vitsœ. At the same time, thanks to all the members of staff, who sense that they have done a little more than just produce another short-lived consumer product.

Good design is a reality!

Via FastCoDesign: http://www.fastcodesign.com/

Do you know what augmented reality apps are really good at? Directing you to new things they don’t directly point at. It’s a whole new world of discovery.

Nokia’s just unleashed its City Lens app for Lumia smartphones. And while the new augmented reality app could easily be mistaken for a bloatware version of the many AR apps we’ve seen before, it’s really Nokia’s attempt to associate its Windows smartphones with an alluring sense of discovery.

While the app actually points you conveniently to a restaurant, a bar, a store or a tourist attraction, it’s actually likely to lead you to discover whole new areas of the city to investigate once you’ve finished your business with the first place you visit.

Look at it like this: Once you’ve used City Lens to take you to a post office to send a postcard home, wouldn’t you perhaps consider visiting a nearby cafe to grab a drink and a bite to eat–one you’d never otherwise have found? Or how about if you follow the app’s advice when you’re visiting Paris and instead of eating in your usual touristy haunts in the Left Bank it takes you to a place to eat in the Marais … where you discover a whole new nightlife you didn’t know about before.

It’s the same sort of magic that made Groupon such a hot commodity. Ad partners often use Groupon just once and don’t return to use it again. That’s because Groupon isn’t really a coupon service, it’s actually a discovery service. If the coupon helps many new clients “discover” a new place to get their fingernails painted, and some of them choose to stay with that business instead of using their habitual one then the “discovered” merchant wins … it’s an indirect benefit, just like the surprise discovery of nearby places offered by City Lens.

For now the emphasis with City Lens and it’s ilk is on the tech rather than the discovery. But as AR takes off into the mainstream (which may happen only after wearable AR systems like Google Glass become popular) it’s not going to be enough to sell gizmos on the strenght of a tech that’s becoming uqiquitous. Rather, the value lies in the discovery it helps enable–and monetize. Paid-for ads like “have you considered this nearby French restaurant?” may pop up after you’ve AR-navigated to a particular patisserie recommended to you somehow. And that’s just the very tip of the location-based AR iceberg–most of the delightul, freaky, clever ways this system will be used probably can’t be imagined yet, just as noone could’ve imagined Instagram’s existence at the dawn of the Net.

Image: Flickr user data_op

NASA astronauts and SpaceX engineers check out the seating inside the Dragon spacecraft. Photo: SpaceX

With the cargo version of the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft waiting patiently at Cape Canaveral for its scheduled launch on May 19, its astronaut-carrying sibling received a thumbs up from NASA.

“This milestone demonstrated the layout of the crew cabin supports critical tasks,” said SpaceX Commercial Crew Development Manager – and former astronaut – Garrett Reisman. “It also demonstrated the Dragon interior has been designed to maximize the ability of the seven-member crew to do their job as effectively as possible.”

The latest step for the manned Dragon spacecraft from SpaceX centered around the size and layout inside the capsule. The seven seat vehicle was deemed acceptable after NASA astronauts and engineers evaluated the Dragon, including entering and exiting under normal and emergency scenarios, as well as reach and visibility tests.

SpaceX’s achievement was reached as concerns at NASA grow regarding lawmakers efforts to stop the NASA sponsored competition to develop a replacement for the space shuttle program.

The evaluation is part of the second round of NASA’s Commercial Crew Development (CCDev). The prototype of the Dragon had a functioning interior including seats, lights and life support systems as well as cargo racks and controls.

SpaceX is working closely with NASA on the development of the Dragon, something reflected in comments from the agency’s commercial crew program manager Ed Mango, “as an anchor customer for commercial transportation services, we are happy to provide SpaceX with knowledge and lessons learned from our 50 years of human spaceflight.”

Mango was one of the NASA managers who spoke out last week regarding the future of the CCDev program and its cargo equivalent, the Commercial Orbital Transportation System (COTS). Both programs include multiple private companies receiving hundreds of millions of dollars in development funding from NASA to design, build and test spacecraft capable of carrying astronauts and cargo to low earth orbit.

The goal of the competition has been to reduce the cost of delivering supplies and people to the International Space Station. With the retirement of the space shuttle orbiters, NASA currently pays more than $60 million a seat to hitch a ride on a Russian Soyuz rocket.

The current plan calls for NASA to continue the competition between several different private companies, each receiving between $300 million and $500 million during the next phase. SpaceX, along with Orbital Sciences are the two remaining companies working on the COTS cargo program, and SpaceX, Sierra Nevada Corporation, Blue Origin and Boeing are currently funded through the CCDev program.

A budget bill currently working its way through the House of Representatives would direct NASA to instead immediately choose a single commercial provider for the CCDev program while reducing the overall funding level according to Spaceflightnow.com.

Mango said going with a single company now dramatically increase the cost of the program in the long run.

“We need competition as long as possible. The price to go with one starting today, and then all the way through certification and into services, is at least twice what it would be if you had competition at least as long as possible,” Mango told a NASA committee last week.

Other NASA officials emphasized the need for continued competition saying it has already fostered innovative new approaches for space travel.

SpaceX’s next CCDev milestones for the Dragon include the further development of its pusher launch abort system. Compared with the traditional “tractor” type launch abort system that uses a small rocket to pull the crew to safety in the event of a launch or ascent emergency, SpaceX’s unique approach is to use the small rockets built into the Dragon for orbital maneuvering to push the vehicle clear of the rocket in an emergency. Assuming no emergency occurs, these rocket engines can also be used for a controlled, pinpoint landing in the future.

NEW ORLEANS – Speaking during a keynote session at CTIA Wireless on Tuesday, AT&T CEO Ralph de la Vega said Facebook is good for his company’s business.

“I think that social networking is going to be a major force in this industry for years to come,” says Vega. “I think it helps people communicate. That’s what we do.”

T-Mobile CEO Philipp Humm agreed, adding that Facebook’s social networking app was his company’s “number one app right now” and has customers “picking up their phone 150 times a day.”

When asked if Facebook was worth the same as Verizon, Verizon CEO Dan Mead said “our market value is very solid,” and that he would leave commenting on Facebook to the experts.

The CEOs of all four major carriers participated in a keynote session at CTIA entitled “Beyond LTE – Carrier Innovations.” Each CEO was given the opportunity to talk on a topic of their choice. Mead spoke on the need for spectrum.

Sprint CEO Dan Hesse said “it has never been more important for the industry to gain the public’s trust, ” adding that even cable and oil companies currently rate higher with consumers than mobile carriers.

Hunn talked about the need for intelligent unlimited data plans, while Vega showed off some of AT&T’s plans for home automation. He demonstrated how your smartphone can lock your doors, let you know what your kids are doing at home, and monitor energy use.

What effect do you think social networking has on mobile carriers? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana – The XTS is arguably the most important vehicle launch from Cadillac in the last few years, and to help owners get acclimated to its features – including the all-new CUE infotainment system – Caddy is providing owners of the 2013 model with an Apple iPad.

The inclusion of the iPad is part of a larger launch strategy by Cadillac to reassert itself as the world leader in luxury, and part of that is getting owners familiar with the range of new technologies incorporated into its largest sedan.

Speaking with Wired at the CTIA Wireless show in New Orleans, Mark Harland, Cadillac’s head of customer experience sets a lofty goal for the all-American luxury brand, saying, “We want to be the leader in customer experience.”

To that end, Cadillac is rolling out a series of online and dealership-based educational initiatives to help new XTS owners learn the ins and outs of their new sedan.

“The moment you pull away from the dealership,” says Harland, “there’s this kind of black hole for 90 days,” during which the owner has little to no contact with the dealer.

Cadillac’s new owner-education program aims to change that, beginning with 25 new “connected consumer specialists” Cadillac parent General Motors is hiring to get dealers up to speed on the XTS’ range of infotainment and safety systems. Each of the 700 or so Cadillac dealerships in the United States are required to have two “certified technology experts” on hand and trained by the XTS tech pros. Additionally, Cadillac is setting up a call center dedicated to CUE education and if customers still have issues, rather than trekking to the dealer, a specialist will come directly to their home.

“We need to think about helping owners with the learning curve,” Harland tells Wired. “Even if you get a walk-through at the dealership, you’re going to forget about a lot of the features. And we want the customer to learn about CUE on their own time.”

That’s where the iPad comes in.

Each Apple tablet given to XTS owners will come preloaded with OnStar RemoteLink, MyCadillac and an app that simulates the CUE user experience, allowing owners to familiarize themselves with all the functionality of the new infotainment system from the comfort of their couch.

Going even further, the CUE team will be scouring Cadillac forums, social media and other community sites to answer questions, solve issues and provide a level of support heretofore unheard of in the luxury automotive space.

“We always said that the customer is important,” Harland admits, “but there was no real strategy.” This is that new strategy and expect it to filter down throughout the ranks of Cadillac products in the very near future.

Bing has been reinvented, offering enhanced search results that tap into the power of social media. Microsoft has done this by pulling people out of search results and putting them in their place: A right-hand social column that will eventually include Facebook, Twitter, Google+ Quora and LinkedIn integration, as well as people who may know something about your most recent Bing query. It even offers a way to ask questions on your favorite social network, directly through Bing.

It’s something of an about-face for the Number 2 search engine, which up until earlier this year has been slowly but surely integrating Facebook information (like “Likes”) directly into Bing Search results. This update is actually Phase 2 of a major overhaul. Bing quietly rolled out the first part last week. It stripped away the right column of results information (leaving a large white well) and moved a more concise “Related Searches” to a small middle column. Facebook Likes results integration remained, but appeared as a more subtle, gray thumbs-up next to the result, and there was a lot of white space on the right.

Starting today, some of Bing’s reported network of 100 million users will see a new column filling that space: The “What Your Friends May Know” social sidebar. For now, the sidebar only works with Facebook, but even with just that one network, the level of integration is quite intense. To see the new pane at work, you have to sign into Facebook and install the Bing App in Facebook. With that done, your social pane will be filled with recent Bing activity that’s also been shared on Facebook. When you enter a search query in the Bing interface on the left, the pane will also display a list of Facebook friends, and topic experts who might be able to assist with your query.

Bing Exec Derrick Connell told me the goal of the new Bing is to “surface people, not web pages.”

In the social pane, there’s also an “Ask friends…” with a small Facebook icon next to it. Here, you type a question possibly related to your search. When you click within the field, a link icon appears next to your search results on the left; click any of them to add them to your Facebook posts. You can also ask those experts and friends to assist in your search. A tiny person-plus icon appears next to each of them. Click one (or more) and they will get a notification about your query.

How does Bing build these “Friends Who Might Know” lists? Microsoft execs explained they’re leveraging as much publicly available data as possible from Facebook (for now) and soon Twitter and other networks. Inclusion in the list is not necessarily based on something you posted about the topic. The sidebar includes people you know through your social networks that have, say, posted a photo about the topic, liked a certain relevant topic or searched for a similar topic in Bing, and people you don’t know, who are, for example, known Topic Experts and Enthusiasts (identified by Bing). All of them could be considered helpful in your quest for knowledge. Conversations revolving around a query topic are viewable through the social pane — you just hover over the activity and a small box will slide out to the left with the original post. You can add comments in any conversation in the activity pane or see the conversation in the slideout.

Not all public posts on these social networks can be scrapped in, so Microsoft turned, first, to its close friend Facebook. Thanks to that close relationship, Microsoft gets “a set of public data that’s part of the fire hose deal with Facebook,” Microsoft’s Connell told me. In fact, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was, according to Microsoft, shown the project and liked it. He was even happy to see the other social networks in the mix.

Eventually the Social Sidebar will add Twitter data. Microsoft says it has access to at least 6 months of publicly-available posts.

Google+ content should make an appearance, too, though it will only be what Microsoft can scrap in. It’s unlikely Google will ever agree to share its private network data with Microsoft. Google is heavily invested in deep integration between Google+ and its own search engine, having launched Search plus Your World earlier this year.

Despite all the new guidance from friends and experts, Bing still wants to help search users with more-targeted results. So it’s taking that somewhat sparse second column and introducing “What Bing Knows” or snapshot (Get it? The first column is “What the Web Knows,” The second column is “What Bing Knows” and the third is “What Your Friends Know”). This well won’t fill up for every search — instead, Microsoft identified four key areas of where it can help: Restaurants, Hotels, Movies and Events and People. The results in this area will include action items like restaurant and hotel reservations. In People, Bing will search across multiple social networks help you find the right person. These features were not available to test at press time.

Microsoft’s goal with all these changes? One, to clean up Bing. The company admits the page was getting too cluttered — it had assumed Web pages would be getting taller and thinner, when in fact, everything is getting shorter and wider. However, one of the key reasons for the change was to “stop corrupting the search experience with people,” said a Bing exec. That might also be a subtle dig at Google and its people-populated Search plus Your World. Bing execs also repeatedly said they think users want people — not Web pages — to help them.

There was also some direct criticism of Google. Microsoft execs said the difference between Bing and Google is Microsoft’s product is open while Google’s is closed. When Google’s “Search Plus Your World” Launched, Google faced some criticism for not surfacing Twitter and Facebook results. Bolstered by Bing’s 300 million entities in its database, Microsoft execs contend that its approach is more valuable than Google’s “pure semantic-based model” because it offers pure search information, letting users get info from topic experts. Additionally, Microsoft includes structured data around core topics that are of interest to the broadest set of people.

I’ve been running the new Bing for a few days now and can report that it more or less works as advertised. First of all, the search results interface is the cleanest I’ve seen it in years. Yes, it looks almost Google-like. I tried a bunch of searches like “Barcelona,” “Tesla,” and “Broadway.” In each case, my “Friends Who Might Know” field in the Social pane filled up with people who had, for instance, posted photos of Nicola Tesla, or “Liked” the “Broadway League.” I was able to blend links and questions in the open field above and then post directly to my Facebook page, along with notifications to my individual friends and experts. No one has answered yet, but those seeing these queries were part of a fairly small beta group.

I noticed, by the way, that when I put in multi-word queries, I got few, if any, “Friends Who Might Know” results.

In Facebook, I did have to install the Bing App. It defaults to sharing your posts with Everyone. If you do a lot of searching, you may want to dial that down a bit.

If you’re usually logged into Facebook and often turn to friends for, say, travel or buying advice, this could be a useful tool for you. Microsoft contends that this is a natural way to find answers. They do not want to reinvent the web, Bing execs explained, “We don’t have to own it to surface it. The beauty of the Internet is you don’t have to be a social network to surface people, you don’t have to be a hotel to surface reservations.”

You may not see the What Your Friends Know or Social Sidebar in Bing for a while — Microsoft said it’ll be rolling this out slowly — but starting today you can visit http://www.bing.com/new to sign up for availability notification.

With this update, the competing search philosophies are clearer than ever. Google sees the world as a deep blend of data, people and activities, all of which can be mined simultaneously for a rich and useful experience. Bing sees a more structured world, where social interactions, while extremely helpful, are kept a safe distance from the core results you desire. Which approach is right? Let us know what you think in the comments.

For more details, check out the video where Microsoft explains the Bing update.

Super-syncing smart watches are so hot right now, but Bradley Price is banking on the appeal of an entirely different kind of timepiece. The industrial designer (and avid auto enthusiast) launched Autodromo last November, and the company’s growing collection of driving watches is meant to evoke cloudless days hugging curves on Italian roadways with the wind blowing in your hair. No, they won’t remind you to pick up milk at the grocery store–but that’s also kind of the point.

“They’re emotional touchstones that remind you of driving, even when you are doing something mundane, like sitting in a meeting,” Price tells Co.Design. “The same can be said of aviation or diving watches. Most people are not pilots or deep-sea divers, yet they wear these watches because it speaks to their inner fantasies. For some of us, spirited motoring is just as potent a thrill as either of those more exotic pursuits.”

The only thing dying is the watch as commodity item. The watch as talisman object is thriving.

Price, who has previously worked on the award-winning HomeHero Fire Extinguisher and Skiff Reader, named the latest series Vallelunga after a particularly tough road circuit in Italy, and actually creating the chronographs came along with its own set of challenges. “The subdials and calendar wheel are in fixed locations, so you have to design the rest of the dial around those constraints and make the proportions work,” Price explains. While most mass-produced watches are made with an aesthetic eye to the face alone, Price approached his pieces with equal attention to all sides. “Our proprietary stainless steel case is a smooth, pebble-like form with flush caseback: no sharp edges that can dig into you, and no crevices where lint and stuff can collect. I think it looks just as good from the back as from the front,” he says. As an added bonus for easy upkeep, a small screwdriver can change the battery without the need for a specialized watchmaker tool.

Not quite sure if the look will suit? Print out the clever to-scale PDF on Autodromo’s Try One On page, cut out your favorite, and wrap it around your wrist. “You can even see how the watch will look under the cuff of your favorite shirts,” Price notes. And while chances are slim–sadly–that after you close up your laptop today you’ll pull on some leather gloves, slip into the front seat of a sweet roadster, and speed off for a super-stylish commute home, that needn’t stop you from making a fashion statement. “The ubiquity of technology in our lives has freed the wristwatch from its basic functional purpose, so it’s become a vessel for personal expression,” Price says. “Even very sophisticated watches, at the end of the day, are collected and worn for emotional reasons. People talk about the death of the wristwatch, but I’d say it’s alive and well. The only thing dying is the watch as commodity item. The watch as talisman object is thriving.”

The media, forever a navel-gazing industry, worked itself into a fever earlier this week after evidence emerged that usage of Facebook’s social reader apps is declining.

In an article designed to further dramatize The Washington Post‘s recent tension between its editorial and financial divisions, Jeff Bercovici at Forbes pulled up a chart from AppData illustrating a falloff in the number of monthly average users of the Washington Post Social Reader app.

John Hermann at Buzzfeed quickly pointed out that usage of social reader apps was down for many news publications, not just The Washington Post.

Why the dropoff? Herrman blames the apps themselves, which he calls annoying. He writes:

“Social Readers always seemed a little too share-y, even for Facebook; they felt more like the kind of cold, descriptive, invisible and yet mandatory services we’re used to seeing from Google rather than genuinely new and useful tools for spreading information. And they feel, I don’t know, kind of broken right now? My brain already associates those little blocks of auto-fed stories with second-class content. I mean, I know my friends didn’t really mean to show to it to me. Why would I click? And god, why would I sign up for the thing that seems to have tricked its way into my timeline? It’s an app that broadcasts Internet illiteracy for everyone to see.”

I see his point — but Facebook doesn’t. A spokesperson tells me that although the number of people using social reader apps has fallen at some publications, engagement levels are up as the company introduces new tools and adjusts its algorithms to display more relevant content to users.

“We’re trying to get the right content in front of people, to up the signal to noise ratio,” the spokesperson explained.

The Facebook representative added that although some apps have seen “short-term traffic swings,” which is typical in the ongoing development of any online product, Facebook is committed to the long-term evolution of these apps “to create a good social news experience.”

User numbers are also up for The Huffington Post‘s, MTV’s and ESPN’s apps, the spokesperson noted.

Social reader apps were first introduced in September. Through the apps, which are built on Facebook’s Open Graph, publications like The Washington Post and The Guardian are able to serve users a mix of content based on the information they’ve shared with Facebook, including their interests, “likes” and stories that are trending among their friends. Those stories are displayed in the apps and make frequent appearances in the Newsfeed.

The numbers may be up for debate, but there was some surprising consensus among media critics — like Herrman, above — about the poor user experience offered by social reader apps. We’re curious: Do you use any of these apps? What do you like or dislike about them?

Front page thumbnail courtesy of iStockphoto, -Oxford-