Edgemade
46 episodes - English - Latest episode: almost 8 years ago - ★★★★★ - 6 ratingsHomepage Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
Episodes
→ Well Made Podcast
May 10, 2016 13:54If you enjoyed the Edgemade podcast, my new podcast "Well Made" will be right up your alley. It's a continuation of my idea to share practical knowledge about what it takes to get something off the ground – through the lens of good design. I love these conversations and now that it's an official part of what I do at Lumi, I hope to record them much more regularly. Permalink
→ Gogoro: the Tesla of Scooters
April 24, 2015 16:43It's an inevitable product category. Gogoro seems to be approaching it the right way, with a very design-driven approach. Curious to see if they cross can over from Taiwan to Europe where scooters are also prevalent. Permalink
Battle for the Archetypal American Gothic
April 23, 2015 01:15If there’s one font that has defined the 21st century so far, it’s undoubtedly Gotham. Released in 2000 by (then partners) Hoefler & Frere Jones, Gotham quickly rose to popularity among designers—a phenomenon catalyzed by the design of Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. Soon, unbridled gothamania swept countless branding projects reaching a level of ubiquity not seen since the emergence of Helvetica in the 1960s. Strong geometric...
Every App is a Superpower
April 21, 2015 05:10When Google Maps first came out, it blew me away. It still seems like one of the most magical technologies we have today. I find myself wondering what Magellan would think if you presented him Google Maps running on a phone. The entire world mapped in detail, with photos of every building in every city. I sat in an airport listening to Tchaikovsky on Spotify, wondering what he’d think if he knew that anyone can listen to high-fid...
Design is Compromise
April 20, 2015 14:44When did the word “compromise” become vilified? Compromise is neither good nor bad, it’s just something we do every day. It’s decision making. Prioritizing. Deciding that one thing is more important than another. It’s finding the right balance between two competing desires. Which compromises you make—now that’s a different question. Companies (and often politicians) like to tout their decisions as “uncompromising” or having “no ...
→ Spark Electron
February 25, 2015 19:45Kickstarter campaign for a cellular module that helps create connected hardware. This is an idea we discussed on podcast episode 10 with Tile—I'm incredibly excited to see someone jump on this opportunity. So many devices need occasional polling but can't rely on Wi-Fi. If Spark can effectively manage the relationship with carriers, we're about to see some very exciting new things in IoT hardware. The next step is integrating this ...
11 Link It Up with Automatic's Ljuba Miljkovic
December 04, 2014 16:14 - 58 minutes - 26.6 MBLjuba Miljkovic of Automatic joins Stephan Ango to discuss how we can make cars smarter.
EP.11 Link It Up with Automatic's Ljuba Miljkovic
December 04, 2014 16:00iTunes • MP3 download A couple weeks ago I had the pleasure of visiting the offices of Automatic where I met co-founder Ljuba Miljkovic. They are the makers of a clever system for monitoring your car using an app and a small device that plugs into the OBD port. We get into its benefits and how they brought it to market. Ljuba and I also dig into the challenges of bringing tech products to retail, especially how to approach designing point-of-purchase disp...
10 Finding Simplicity with Tile's Nick Evans
November 21, 2014 02:24 - 46 minutes - 21.3 MBNick Evans of Tile joins Stephan Ango to discuss how we can all strive to design simple, useful products.
EP.10 Finding Simplicity with Tile's Nick Evans
November 21, 2014 00:37iTunes • MP3 download My guest on this episode is Nick Evans, the founder of Tile. Tile is making an elegant Bluetooth-powered tracker that helps you find lost items. While the idea is simple, executing it with this level of polish and minimalism is always a challenge. On the show we discuss some of the decisions that led to Tile's industrial design, as well as the challenges of crowd-funding the project via a self-hosted campaign. We compare some of the p...
EP.9 Always Be Learning with Brent Bushnell
September 23, 2014 06:17iTunes • MP3 download Brent Bushnell, co-founder and CEO of Two Bit Circus is my guest on this episode. One of the most prolific entrepreneurs and tinkerers I know, Brent has been creating interactive installations for years and has assembled them into a travelling carnival that kicks off next month in Los Angeles (tickets are still available). We retrace Brent’s childhood growing up with his father Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari and Chuck E. Cheese’s, ...
9 Always Be Learning with Brent Bushnell
September 23, 2014 06:02 - 48 minutes - 22.1 MBBrent Bushnell of Two Bit Circus joins Stephan Ango to reveal the power of interactive games and how we can all learn to become tinkerers.
The Unglowing, Continued
September 18, 2014 19:41Mere days after my post on the state of displays, Amazon launched their new Kindle Voyager line. It easily stands out as the best e-ink display available, with a retina-caliber resolution and improved contrast ratio—but we’re still in the realm of black and white, with obtrusive refresh rates. We can only hope that Amazon continues to push the boundaries of e-ink, chasing that elusive color display so they can sell the multitude of...
→ No, You Can’t Manufacture That Like Apple Does
September 18, 2014 16:07What happened when Apple wanted to CNC machine a million MacBook bodies a year? They bought 10k CNC machines to do it. How about when they wanted to laser drill holes in MacBook Pros for the sleep light but only one company made a machine that could drill those 20 µm holes in aluminum? It bought the company that made the machines and took all the inventory. And that time when they needed batteries to fit into a tiny machined housing but no manufacturer was willing to make batteries so thin?...
The Unglowing
September 17, 2014 04:11Retina displays march towards ubiquity, our computer interfaces are losing their skeuomorphic tendencies, custom web typography is ever more compatible—we live in an amazing world. My design process across printed materials, native UIs and websites has converged towards a unified design language that simply stretches horizontally and vertically to fit the physical dimensions of any given medium. The pixel is very nearly dead. If ...
EP.8 They're Features not Bugs with Exo
May 19, 2014 03:30iTunes • MP3 download Gabi Lewis and Greg Sewitz are the founders of Exo, a company that makes protein bars with cricket flour. While it might sound gross at first, eating insects is common practice for most people around the world. There are lots of good reasons why: they're more sustainably grown than livestock, they're high in protein and properly prepared they can truly be delicious. The idea came on my radar a couple of years ago with a spec pac...
8 They're Features not Bugs with Exo
May 19, 2014 03:23 - 47 minutes - 21.7 MBGabi Lewis and Greg Sewitz of Exo join Stephan Ango to discuss how edible insects fit in the Western diet, and their crowdfunded cricket flour protein bars.
→ OpenERP rebrands, now Odoo
May 15, 2014 19:30Not sure the rebrand is what will attract new customers to OpenERP. As I alluded to in my conversation with Adam Vollmer of Faraday Bikes, I evaluated ERPs for Lumi. OpenERP was one of the main contenders but ultimately the manufacturing module failed to meet our requirements and custom development would have been too costly. I was also shocked to get a glimpse at OpenERP's internal corporate structure. Despite the open source nature of the project, their business model puts them on tr...
7 Follow Your Nose with Commodity's Owen Gee
May 12, 2014 04:14 - 51 minutes - 23.8 MBOwen Gee of Commodity joins Stephan Ango to explore the world of fragrances, branding, and why bottling liquids can be a beautifully scalable business.
EP.7 Follow Your Nose with Commodity's Owen Gee
May 12, 2014 04:00iTunes • MP3 download This week I'm joined by Owen Gee, founder of Commodity. The company has developed a delightful collection of colognes and perfumes, available online through a home try-on process reminiscent of Warby Parker. Like myself and previous guest Andrew Kim, Owen came out of Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. Shortly after graduating, he joined Ferroconcrete, a lauded branding agency in Los Angeles. Founded by Yo Santo...
6 Make Something Intuitive with FiftyThree
April 07, 2014 02:39 - 1 hour - 30.7 MBJon Harris, John Ikeda and Hauke Gentzkow of FiftyThree join Stephan Ango to discuss their experiences designing hardware and intuitive creative tools.
EP.6 Make Something Intuitive with FiftyThree
April 06, 2014 07:00iTunes • MP3 download This week I'm joined by three of the designers on FiftyThree's hardware team: Jon Harris, John Ikeda and Hauke Gentzkow. FiftyThree is probably best known for Paper, an intuitive and beautifully designed sketching app for iPad. Many of the company's founding team members are ex-Microsofties who participated in developing the Xbox, Zune and the fatefully mothballed Courier tablet. Its latest product, the Pencil stylus, connects to the...
5 A Bicycle for the Bicycle with Faraday's Adam Vollmer
March 11, 2014 23:30 - 1 hour - 28.6 MBAdam Vollmer of Faraday Bikes joins Stephan Ango to explore the challenges of designing and manufacturing an electric bicycle.
EP.5 A Bicycle for the Bicycle with Faraday's Adam Vollmer
March 11, 2014 16:30iTunes • MP3 download I met Adam Vollmer, founder of Faraday Bikes a few months ago and was lucky enough to ride a prototype of their beautiful electric bicycle, the Faraday Porteur. On the show we discuss turning what started as a side-project at IDEO into a Kickstarter campaign, and finally a fully-fledged, shipping product. As you can imagine, it's a product that involves hundreds of parts, made all over the world. Adam and I dive deep into the c...
→ Working Backwards to the Technology
February 26, 2014 08:34Simple but powerful piece by John Gruber reviewing an important moment from Steve Jobs’ comeback at Apple: One of the things I’ve always found is that you’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You can’t start with the technology and try to figure out where you’re going to try to sell it. And I’ve made this mistake probably more than anybody else in this room. And I got the scar tissue to prove it. Of course, one must differentiate between s...
→ Google acquires Nest
January 13, 2014 08:00Well, that was unexpected. Not because it doesn’t fit perfectly with Google’s insatiable appetite for data and its recent forays in hardware, but because Nest’s design and business philosophy is far more aligned with Apple’s (no surprise considering CEO Tony Fadell ran the iPod division). I had hoped to see Nest remain fiercely independent, but we’re undoubtedly heading for a House of Whacks scenario within a few short years. Per...
→ Self-drifting cars at CES 2014
January 09, 2014 00:00This has me wondering, in what year will we see a self-driving car beat, say Sébastien Loeb, or a top rally driver, in a Kasparov vs. Deep Blue style duel? Permalink
4 One Thousand Ideas with Nomiku's Bam Suppipat
December 12, 2013 08:15 - 59 minutes - 27.1 MBBam Suppipat joins Stephan Ango to explore the intersection of food and technology, and the making of Nomiku – sous-vide cooking for home kitchen.
EP.4 One Thousand Ideas with Nomiku's Bam Suppipat
December 12, 2013 08:00iTunes • MP3 download This week we explore the intersection of food and technology with Bam Suppipat, co-founder of Nomiku. Nomiku are the makers of a radically simple immersion circulator, an easy way to precisely cook many of your favorite foods. The device makes sous-vide cooking accessible to anyone, bringing a staple of high-end cuisine into the home. Below is a peek at Nomiku’s safe and intuitive one-button design, compared to equipment once r...
→ Shopify Raises $100 Million
December 12, 2013 08:00Shopify has been on a roll recently. We use it to power Lumi’s store, and have done so for over two years. The pace at which they’ve been launching new features has dramatically increased in the past few months. I’m curious to see where this investment leads them. The announcement explicitly indicates a move into offline retail, presumably to support their efforts competing with Square on point-of-sale—but knowing Shopify I am cer...
3 Getting Metaphysical with Jesse Genet
November 30, 2013 20:10 - 1 hour - 29.4 MBJesse Genet joins Stephan Ango to discuss the joys of an entrepreneurial and creative life, and why it's important to make physical things.
EP.3 Getting Metaphysical with Jesse Genet
November 30, 2013 08:00iTunes • MP3 download Why is our show called You Can’t Eat Bits for Breakfast? On this episode I’m joined by Jesse Genet, my coconspirator at Lumi, and originator of the phrase. Together we discuss the early experiences that led Jesse towards an entrepreneurial and creative life, her penchant for classic cars, lessons on competition from Buffalo Bill and why it’s important to make physical things. We end by contemplating an article by Geoffrey Miller en...
→ What Every Hardware Startup Should Know About the Electronic Component Landscape
November 26, 2013 08:00Great advice from the Octopart folks. Their search engine is also worth bookmarking as a reference for any electronic project you might be sourcing. Permalink
2 Form Language with Andrew Kim
November 25, 2013 16:30 - 53 minutes - 24.5 MBAndrew Kim joins Stephan Ango to discuss the importance of harmony and attention to detail in design.
EP.2 Form Language with Andrew Kim
November 25, 2013 05:25iTunes • MP3 download I’m joined by Andrew Kim, a good friend and one of my favorite young designers. Together we discuss the importance of harmony and attention to detail in design. You might know Andrew from his branding exercise redesigning Microsoft. This 3-day project garnered remarkable traction online and eventually helped him land a job designing hardware at Xbox. Microsoft recently profiled Andrew shining a spotlight on some of his earliest work,...
→ Winamp shuts down
November 20, 2013 08:00Before I knew the words “industrial design” or “UI” even existed, I loved making skins for Winamp and various other applications (my 2004 skin, Impulse, still shows up on their site). It was a fun, approachable way to create functional pieces of art, and in retrospect taught me a lot about creating a product from start to finish. It was exciting to make something in my bedroom that hundreds of thousands of people around the world w...
→ FiftyThree Pencil Stylus
November 19, 2013 08:00There’s something wonderful about marrying natural materials and electronics. FiftyThree has beautifully translated its sense of intuitive design into hardware. I can’t wait to try this stylus, but until the response rate on tablet displays drastically improves I’ll continue reach for good old pen and paper. Permalink
→ J Mays retires
November 08, 2013 08:00A legend in the industrial design world, a fellow Art Center alum, retiring after a 33-year career in automotive design. My favorite design of his remains the New Beetle which I always found wonderfully geometric and a courageous update to one of the all-time classics. Permalink
→ Shipwire acquired by Ingram Micro
November 07, 2013 08:00Since my conversation with Studio Neat in which we discussed our experiences with it, Shipwire has been acquired by Ingram Micro. Shipwire powers fulfillment for numerous Kickstarter-backed projects, including Studio Neat’s and much of what we ship at Lumi. People have asked me how this will affect their service but I can’t give a firm answer. It’s too early to tell whether the founders see this as a well-deserved exit or an oppor...
→ Draft: From Zero to Kickstarter in $5K
October 30, 2013 10:00The folks behind Draft (a notebook subscription and digitizing service) explain the process of launching their first Kickstarter campaign. I thought the brief they created for their app provides particularly useful insight for anyone who hasn’t written that type of document before. Permalink
And now for something completely different.
October 30, 2013 09:30I’ve been kicking around ideas for a new blog for almost two years, never quite landing on something solid, and last week it finally dawned on me that I’d been working towards it all along. Over the past month I attended two fantastic events: the second edition of XOXO in Portland and my first experience at Brooklyn Beta. It was such a thrill to be in the presence of like-minded thinkers and creators. For the longest time Jesse an...
EP.1 Massive Spreadsheets with Studio Neat
October 30, 2013 02:39iTunes • MP3 download Today we talk to Tom Gerhardt and Dan Provost, founders of Studio Neat. We discuss the lessons learned after multiple Kickstarter campaigns, keeping your business simple, going to retail and fulfilling products with Shipwire. Tom and Dan have been pioneers in bringing physical goods to market through Kickstarter. Their first campaign, the Glif tripod mount, launched the first wave of Kickstarter hardware and Apple accessories back in...
1 Massive Spreadsheets with Studio Neat
October 28, 2013 03:00 - 59 minutes - 27.3 MBTom and Dan of Studio Neat join Stephan Ango to discuss lessons learned after multiple Kickstarter campaigns, keeping your business simple, going to retail and fulfilling products with Shipwire.
Always learning, always teaching
April 22, 2013 07:00A professor of mine used to often quote Bob Dylan: He not busy being born is busy dying It’s a philosophy of life. Some are comfortable making the same thing the same way their entire career. If you’re good enough, and the product you provide is timeless, say a great whiskey from a recipe honed by generations, you might make it. You’d be fragile, and susceptible to unexpected events, but you might make it through life, happy and...
The Vanilla Option
September 07, 2012 07:00Vanilla beans are the fruit of a rare orchid native to Mexico. Their aroma and flavor comes from a compound called vanillin. Most “vanilla” products are actually made with vanillin extracted from oak wood. Each vanilla flower blooms just one morning out of every year. The orchid can only be naturally pollinated by a small Mexican bee, and if it isn’t pollinated that morning, the flower will wilt. No bean. Commercially, vanilla is ...
Apple and Infinite Recyclability
September 13, 2011 07:00Glass and aluminum, fetish or feature? Apple goes whole hog. You gotta admire that. Few companies have the guts to embrace their own decisions fully, but Apple has consistently done so and consistently attracted criticism for that attitude (remember floppies? Blu-Ray? Flash?). Sometime in the mid-2000s Apple began embracing glass and aluminum as dominant materials across all product lines. Some speculate that it’s a Jobsian fetis...