This year I explored the newly-developed area down toward the Grand Canal Docks: here are a few images (iPhone 4S).

The new Convention Centre and the Beckett Bridge seen from Sir John Rogerson’s Quay. In the background, and below, evidence of the financial crisis is all too visible:

All the way down City Quay and along Sir John Rogerson’s Quay there’s plenty of slick modernist architecture, mostly housing financial institution:

…which ends abruptly as you reach where the Liffey, Dodder, and the Grand Canal meet. The graffiti-strewn wasteland at the point is the site of a proposed bridge across to York Road, much needed but apparently a victim of the Recession:

After circling back via Hanover Quay - did I really walk past U2’s studio? - we’re back into the high-modernist island of Grand Canal Square:

Which brings us back onto Pearse Street and directly back to the hotel:

Just recorded onto an iPhone 4S, topped and tailed, original audio track.

Indifference towards people and the reality in which they live is actually the one and only cardinal sin in design. Function-oriented design is the fruit of intense, comprehensive, patient and contemplative reflection on reality, on life, on the needs, desires, and feelings of people.

What the text also brings out is a very clear line of descent originating with Peter Behrens, via the Bauhaus, on to Rams and then on to Jonathan Ives at Apple. This design philosophy is user-focused, minimalistic, and quality-driven. In his foreword to the book, Ives openly confesses the inspiration he has derived from Braun products. The extent of this debt can perhaps best be gauged by comparing Rams’ T3 radio of 1958 with the iPod: very similar in form, and just look at that rotary controller:

Following up on ideas expressed in my earlier post on Steve Jobs, in the final section of the book Michael Di Tullo (design director at Converse) says:

We are taught that material things cannot make us happy, that the stuff of this world is trivial and temporary. Rams work proves that wrong. It shows that material things do matter and that we should respect what we make, what we buy and what we use. It reveals that a simple functional object can do its job while conveying joy, optimism and democracy.

An excellent book.

[Via Procurement Insights]

By Milton Glaser of all people: a designer who I like more as a person than for their work. This is no exception.

Top geezer.